Last summer, the day after Labor Day, they had returned to Buffalo, and the next morning began preparing for the new school year. The girls tried on their old school uniforms, prancing proudly in their cotton underwear in Orlanna’s room. Aster’s arms had become muscular from paddling after Esme when she swam her laps in the lake. And Orlanna had budding mounds she showed off. When Esme had sprouted at fourteen, a full year and a half older than Orlanna, it had been awkwardness and humiliation, a disgust with the way her mother’s “friends” would comment about what was suddenly beneath Esme’s blouses. When the girls were dressed again in their ratty summer shorts and T-shirts stained from dripping Bomb-Pops, they had helped Esme stow away what no longer fit and planned the next day’s itinerary—uniform shop, sporting-goods store, dance shop, the Paper Barn out on the highway for school supplies. Later, the girls had washed faces, brushed teeth, donned nightgowns, read books, and bookmarked their places without their pre-summer bickering. Aster still reached for Esme, nuzzling against her mother’s cheek, calling out, “Mommy, I love you,” when Esme turned off the lamp. But Orlanna had yielded too, slinging her arms around Esme’s neck and kissing her back. Turning twelve had inexplicably returned Orlanna to her cuddlier self, cooing into Esme’s neck, saying, “I love you so much, Mommy.” Esme had known this version of her older daughter would soon disappear in the push-pull of the next years, but right then, when the future was completely irrelevant, Esme had thanked the stars up in the sky that held off the coming world. It had been a glorious summer at the lake and her children loved their mother still. Everything was as imperfectly perfect as she could ever want.
The hallway was filled with family pictures: the promise of Howard’s handsomeness becoming less theoretical; her own beauty settling over her cheekbones, illuminating her skin; the girls as smiling infants in paddle wings, then toddlers in sundresses. First-day-of-school pictures. Soccer pictures in which Aster looked ferocious, even at five. Orlanna’s body lengthening over yearly ballet recitals. Pictures from the newly finished summer would end up on the walls: Howard and the girls splashing in the lake; Orlanna’s birthday party dinner on the lawn, the candelabra flickering in the dark as if they had thrown a party for a noble Russian child; the homeless cat Aster named Friendless licking a plate of frosting with Aster’s smile lighting up in the flash; she and Howard on their fourteenth wedding anniversary, underneath the flowering arch, posing for the girls who traded the camera back and forth. Howard had bent down to kiss her while the girls called out, “Smile now!” and Howard had whispered in her ear, “My bride still.”
During the final weekends at the lake, their usual intimacy had fallen away. Esme had not taken the initiative, and Howard had been unfocused, elsewhere, and when they arrived back home, they had been exhausted from packing and driving and unpacking and feeding hungry, tired children. It was time they picked up where they had left off. In their bedroom, she had found Howard at the window, staring into their backyard, still dressed. She stopped in her tracks and heard him say, “It has absolutely nothing to do with you, but I can’t be married anymore.”
I heard the gunning rain over Howard’s words. Words that must have struck Esme like bullets, the shrapnel sundering her heart, cracking open their life, revealing layers of unstable sediment, and yet, to me, his words evidenced a strength of character. He didn’t say he had fallen in love with someone else, or discovered he was dying, or gay, only that he couldn’t be married anymore. I thought it brave to cease living a particular life, to slam the brakes on the known, to want something else in its place. How strong his need must have been to so drastically change course. Ashby had not written him as a man eager to do damage, and I understood that as something Ashby herself might believe in—that there was a purity in searching for one’s true life, no matter what might need discarding, the explicit, if unintentional, pain inflicted on others by such an act. Howard was much older than me, a father to two young girls, and still he was going to do what his spirit required.
I could change course without answering to anyone, without altering anyone’s expectations, there was no one relying on me, and the thought that I could follow Howard’s lead heated me up from the inside out. I rose from the couch and opened one of the vertical panes. Cold windy air rushed through the room and cleared out the warmth. Raindrops hit my face.
Howard had said to Esme he never imagined this, and I wondered how he had found the vitality hiding inside of him to create the life he needed to be living.
I needed some sign of my own internal life force and I dropped to the floor, did five push-ups, did five more, remembered when I could do fifty, did do fifty every morning. I hoisted myself back up and the couch sunk under my sudden weight. I picked up the book and continued on to the last page of the story.
On a snowy afternoon when they were dating, Howard had said to Esme, “Read me the names from the phone book in that mellifluous voice of yours.” She found the directory in his kitchen and stretched her long legs out on his couch. “Abbott, Abelard, Acer,” she began. At the start of the B’s, Howard said, “If you’re willing, I’d like to give you mine.”
Now she avoids using the last name he gave her during their intimate wedding, no longer calls him Howard. To say either aloud makes her feel she has agreed to his decision. He calls her love, darling, sweetheart on the summer weekends, endearments devoid of all meaning, and when he says Esme, she can’t imagine who that might be. When he plays games with their girls in the lake, she recoils from the knowledge that this is the last of us, we, our family.
In the cottage bedroom they share as if nothing has changed, she says, “Everything you do this summer will end up as memories the girls will examine microscopically. Filling in the blurred edges of what was happening precisely when those memories solidified into photographic truth.” She says, “In the years to come, our daughters will try to work out the end of our marriage with the men who enter their lives, their bedrooms, their bodies.”
“Please,” Howard says, palming his ears. “Please don’t paint any pictures.” But she ignores him, wants him hurt. “To be clear, you are forming their suspicion of love, allowing the reality of being left and abandoned into their lives.”
His eyes are blurry when he says, “There’s no abandonment here. I’ll always do right by the three of you. But I have to go before it’s too late.”
She’s given up trying to figure out what he means. She does not know what would have kept them intact. She fears the coming search for something she will never discover. She hates that she will miss him forever.
The summer clouds skid through the sky and Esme knows that after Labor Day, Howard will not return home. He will go somewhere else, somewhere unknown. She wonders if he will ever appear for the girls’ birthdays, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, when wrapping paper and bows flower the carpet.
Sometimes against her wishes, her heart turns tender, and she nearly hopes Howard finds what he is after. She thinks it likely they may never see him again, that in order to move on he will need to forget he once had a hand in creating a world he didn’t want. She thinks destiny will always win out over second-best, that it’s an impossible burden on those left behind.
My own eyes were glassy when I reached the end. I thought Esme was right about destiny: how those compelled to find it will follow it anywhere. And I wondered how I might apply such a valorous philosophy myself. Howard’s words made me understand that I no longer wanted to wish that I was living an alternative life, I wanted to be living it, no longer stuck in some state of suspension. I closed my eyes and tried to picture what my real life might look like, but all I saw were red spots behind my eyelids that crackled into fine lines that turned black. I thought then that I had never missed anyone as Esme knew she would miss Howard, and no one had ever missed me that way either. I asked myself—didn’t I want to be missed? And then I asked myself the antecedent question—didn’t I want to be loved? I believed that I did, but I did not grasp that to attain such, meant first finding a version of myself that I could love.