But now, in the early morning after a night when my stitched-together life feels like it’s falling back apart, it seems like the right time to look under corners and reach to the back of drawers to see if I can find the monster after all and slay it.
Instead, all I find are remnants of our life together. Old bills, the to-do lists he’d make, packs of photographs that never made it into albums or frames. Tom was old-fashioned about his photographs; he didn’t want them to be only digital, so he’d dutifully take his camera chip into the pharmacy and return with an envelope full of carefully curated memories. The ones I find today are an amalgam from the year before he died—our last ski trip, the house we rented in Cape Cod with the Rings, Kaitlyn and I with our arms slung around each other after our first successful foray on the stand-up paddleboards we rented.
Kaitlyn’s wearing the wide-brimmed hat she always wore to protect her delicate skin from the sun. I was more reckless and have the wrinkles to prove it. Kaitlyn looks happy that day, strong and smiling, halfway between the broken woman I’d befriended and the one she was in the months before she died. I didn’t notice it so much then, as it was happening, like the changes in my own face that caught me up short when I finally looked at myself for the first time in a while. But examining this picture now, I recall clearly what she looked like the last time I saw her, when I met her for coffee before she went to work and we talked—I talked—about Tom.
She had dark circles under her eyes, and though she said all the right things, the things I needed, her eyes were downcast, and she kept stirring her coffee without drinking it. When she’d said she had to go, I’d stood up and hugged her. I’d asked her, finally, if she was okay. What was wrong?
“It’s nothing. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Any reason in particular?”
She’d shaken her head. She had more than a few gray hairs mixed in with the honey brown she’d adopted as a hair color a few years before. I wondered if she’d noticed them the way I’d noticed my own, evident to me despite their being close enough to my natural blonde to be invisible to most people.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not . . . It’s not happening again.”
“I wasn’t thinking that. But it would be okay if it did. You can tell me. I want you to.”
“I know . . . I just don’t know how to talk about it.”
“About what?”
She shook her head again. “Not today, okay? You have enough on your plate.”
“Then when?”
“How about next week? When things have settled down.”
We’d hugged again, and then she was gone, running to her car with her purse over her head to block the worst of a sudden pelt of rain.
Franny. It must’ve been Franny she was thinking about. She must’ve known the day was coming when she had to fess up to Joshua, to her kids, to us, and how that was probably going to rip her life to shreds, when she’d just gotten finished building it back up.
How I wish I’d known. How I wish I could’ve told her there was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear in telling me, that it was keeping the secret that was painful.
Was it ever.
Chapter 18
The Gordian Knot
Kate
In Montreal, Kate looked with curiosity at the photo of Cecily Grayson kissing a strange man. The photo was on TMZ, a site she was embarrassed to say she spent too much time on in the last year. There was something about the voyeurism of it all; she found it strangely soothing. That people who had everything anyone could want were caught in unflattering positions. Drunk after dinner. Or “canoodling”—such a ridiculous word—with someone they shouldn’t be. It was an escape. Something she knew more than enough about.
It had started during that interminable wait in the bus station. She’d spent two days there once her bus’s departure was canceled. Waiting for the all clear. For her bus’s departure to be rescheduled. She couldn’t leave the building because if she did, she might miss her bus. And she couldn’t leave for real because it was too dangerous. She might be recognized. Run into someone who thought she was dead. And even though she knew that was a possibility in the bus station, too, it seemed lower. She was pretty certain she didn’t know anyone who still traveled by Greyhound. Which was awful, because what was wrong with traveling that way? But the people she knew now, the person she was, they drove to things or flew if it was too far away.
So she stayed inside and read the trashy magazine equivalents to TMZ that littered the building. When she ran out of reading material, she fed quarters into the arcade games, worrying she was wasting her precious stash of cash. But she had to do something other than watch the horrible images on the television. Especially when the commentators started talking about people she knew, and then her and her family. She kept the hood of her sweatshirt up at all times, her face in shadow. When the TV trucks had camped outside her house and her husband had come out to read a statement looking pale and drawn with the kids behind him holding her blown-up picture, she’d run to the bathroom and thrown up.
When she’d come back, she felt the stares of several of her fellow travelers. As if they could see through her hood. Like she was wearing a big red A on her breast. A for Abandonment. Despite her best efforts, she knew she’d be recognizable to them now. There was no helping it. The half dozen people in the bus station who had nowhere else to go were all becoming familiar to one another.
By the second day, Kate felt as if she were unraveling. Being pulled apart thread by thread. She thought again about leaving, but she didn’t know where she could go. She couldn’t book into a hotel, both for the money it would take and the ID they’d demand. It was one thing using her Canadian passport once at this poky bus station, and then again at the border crossing far from here. But she couldn’t take up life as a new person in Chicago. Though she’d been lucky up until then, at some point she was sure to run into someone she knew. Despite the vastness of the city, it happened all the time. And as for going somewhere else in America, that, too, was impossible. Working would require her social security number. And given the attention this tragedy was getting, more chances to be recognized.
The only option was Canada. Nothing connected to her life now. Leaving without a trace.
She stayed put. The TV moved on to other families, other grief. She limited herself to two meals a day. Five dollars for a banana and a granola bar in the morning. Another five for a cheeseburger with as many condiments as she could get on it in the evening. Her dress pants already felt looser. The Runaway Diet, she thought. Perhaps she could market it someday. And then she hated herself even more for having the thought.
She’d spent a few more precious dollars on a travel pillow. Then a garish shawl that was the closest thing to a blanket the store sold. Soap, deodorant, and aspirin for the near-constant headache she couldn’t seem to shake. The store didn’t sell shoes or underwear—the two things she needed most. So she walked around in her socks and washed out her underwear in the sink, drying it with the hand dryer as best as she could.
On the afternoon of the third day, she shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she looked around from within the folds of her hood. Each of the permanent travelers, as she’d come to think of them, had their own section of the station. A space that was respected as if it had curtains around it. As night crept in, she placed her backpack on the floor with the pillow on top and wrapped herself in the shawl. The floor was uncomfortable and cold. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand it, but eventually, she fell asleep.
She dreamed of her family. Not the way it was but the way it could’ve been if she hadn’t screwed so many things up.
And then someone shook her awake.
“You’re on that Montreal bus, right?” It was one of the older women who’d been there the whole time. She was missing a few teeth, and her hair was thinned out like a man’s.
Kate sat up. “That’s right. Why?”