CHAPTER FIVE

RICHARD

I watched him head down the cobbled walk to the street, briefly passing under the willow; I saw him backlit by the streetlamps across the street, and as he lingered in the shelter of the tree he seemed to breathe for the first time since we met, taking in the wet night air like a man released from long captivity. Or perhaps that’s just what I wanted to see. He left the willow and struck up Schuyler Street, hands in his pockets, head tilted up slightly; and as he walked the rain seemed to wrap around him like a cloak, taking him in, bearing him away. I couldn’t tell if it was simply the storm obscuring his figure, or if I was witnessing some brief moment of eclipse—a shadow cast by the occlusion of two worlds. But almost as soon as I lost sight of him, the skies began to clear and, by the time I turned toward the house, the downpour was little more than a drizzle. On the porch I glanced back down the street, now slick and shining with reflected light. I could see all the way to Montcalm, and there was no one in sight for blocks.

I took the few steps to the door, then hesitated—feeling, understandably enough, like an intruder. I took a set of keys from my pocket: two house keys, as he’d showed me, one for the back and one for the front; a key to the Mutual office; another for the Nissan and one for the Volvo parked out front. I hefted them in my hand; they didn’t make me feel any less like a burglar, but I took a deep breath, put the larger of the two house keys in the lock—

As the heavy oak door snicked shut behind me, I entered the two-story Colonial … and realized that I’d come home.

It was the home I’d never consciously envisioned, but the framework of which must have always existed somewhere in my unconscious, because everything I saw seemed right: nothing in the house, at least at first glance, seemed as though it might have been built or purchased by a stranger. It was after eleven, most of the lights were off but the few that were on—a small lamp in the living room, one in the kitchen—spilled a warm amber light over the rooms. I hung my overcoat in the closet, no longer feeling like an intruder, and wandered from room to room as though it were only right and natural.

Unlike my parents’ home, which had been furnished in antique Colonial—overstuffed sofas in busy prints, Queen Anne chairs and overly ornate beds with crocheted coverlets, all of it unspeakably stifling—this house was furnished in rustic modern, at once Colonial and contemporary. Golden oak beams and rafters in the living room, with matching trim around the windows; hardwood floors in the foyer and the kitchen, a cerulean-blue carpet in the living room; modern but slightly rustic furniture with the accent on woods and brass, in contrast to the glass and chrome of my New York co-op. It was partly my taste, and partly, I assumed, Debra’s; very New England without being too atavistic, modern without being trendy. I felt so comfortable that I sat down in one of the armchairs for a few minutes, listening to the tick of the brass clock on the wall, feeling very much at peace. The walls were decorated with limited-edition serigraphs and prints—a snowscape by Anita Jones Stanton; one of Joel Meyerowitz’ Cape Cod photographs—again, Debra’s taste, but mine as well.

After several minutes I was feeling so much at home that I decided to go upstairs and take a peek at my new life, my new family. But the door to one bedroom was closed and I was reluctant to open it and go poking my head inside just yet; the other was open, and I stood in the doorway, just able to make out Debra in the dimness, sleeping on her side as she always used to, a bunched-up pillow under her head. I had an almost overwhelming urge to step inside, to study her more closely, to see how much this Debra resembled my own; I almost entered, but a sudden fear took hold of me. What would I say if she woke up? What if I said the wrong thing, did something unnatural, something that might make her suspicious? What if she could tell?

I backed away, now very conscious of the sound of my footsteps and the creaking of the floorboards as I headed back downstairs. And as I stood in the dining room, looking out at the street where just a few hours ago I had been standing—as I stood here where he had stood, living in his home, his world—I felt what I should have felt the minute I proposed this whole crazy scheme: mortal terror. Good God, what had I done? What had I gotten myself into? Yes, we’d been the same man for the first twenty-two years of our existence, but that was thirteen years ago. Thirteen years of shared private moments with Debra, of murmurs in the dark after making love; thirteen years of making love, of those particular kinds of verbal and sexual shorthand which evolve between husband and wife over the course of a marriage. What if I touched her in the wrong places, what if my kiss was different from his? What if he always took his coffee black, and I asked for sugar and cream? And the daughter—Paige. Bringing her home from the hospital, all the funny, silly little things a baby does that only a parent remembers; her first tooth, her first report card, her first boyfriend … All this I had to fake, somehow? I sank into a straight-backed dining room chair, my pulse pounding, my palms sweaty. The potential for disaster stretched limitlessly before me, from the intimate to the trivial. How in God’s name was I ever going to pull this off?

And even if I could manage all that, how would I repair the damage Rick had done to his marriage? It occurred to me that I might not have to worry about what to say to Debra or Paige—because neither one of them might even want to speak to me. After what my other self had done and said tonight, how did I knit together the enormous breach in this family?

I had a sudden urge to run—until I realized I had nowhere to run to. My life, my career, my home, all my friends and lovers, past and present—they all lived in a different world entirely. Even if I ran to New York, their counterparts on this earth wouldn’t know me from a hole in the ground. Strangely enough, realizing this—that I had nowhere to go, that I had to make this work, somehow—quelled my panic a bit. Of course I couldn’t run. I didn’t want to run; I wanted to make this work. But how?

I went back to the living room but its warmth and coziness had pretty well evaporated. I sat in the same comfortable armchair and fought my way back to calm and deliberation using breathing exercises I’d learned at the Actors Studio. Yes; that was it. Think of it, I told myself, as an acting assignment; a role, like any other. Rick Cochrane, not Richard but Rick: thirty-five years old, lived all his life in this small town, married, two children, claims adjuster for State Mutual. Whenever I began a part, I wrote myself a biography of the character, imagining where he grew up, his hobbies, his taste in books, music, art—background detail that would never come out explicitly in the performance, but which anchored the character in my own mind, gave me a broader base from which to tap emotions. But I’d never played an actual, living person before; the closest I’d ever come was John Adams in a summer-stock production of 1776. Still, I reminded myself, I did do research, consuming two biographies of him in an effort to get a sense of the man. This was no different. (Well, not much different. All right, very different, but I couldn’t let myself think so or I’d panic and blow it.) I needed research to draw upon. The manual Rick mentioned would help with the job—after you’ve waited tables and learned to balance three different orders, first in your head and then on your tray, you can do just about anything—but for the home life I’d need photos, home movies, something to fill in the blank spaces … and Lord, were there ever blank spaces.

As quietly as I could manage I began looking through closets and drawers, praying I didn’t wake Debra or Paige. In the hall closet I finally hit pay dirt: photo albums, at least half a dozen of them. I opened one at random and saw a fading print of a middle-aged man, beer belly spilling over a baggy swimsuit, with his arm around a cellulite-laden woman with bright orange hair; beneath it was written, in my own handwriting, Uncle Henry and Aunt Mo at Weirs Beach, summer of ’79. Debra’s relatives? Must be. Good; very good. All this would help me connect names to faces. I flipped the page and had to smile at the shot of Paige—couldn’t have been more than six years old—rocketing off a giant water slide, limbs askew, looking as though she truly hated this. In Debra’s handwriting beneath it: Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning … I nearly laughed out loud.

I searched some more, hoping perhaps for a diary, but found none; Rick would have it easier than I, thanks to my acting journals. There were a couple of carousels of slides—vacations, birthday parties—and that was about it. Still, the albums would be invaluable. I shut the door, feeling better but hardly confident. There were still too many gaps, too many potential pitfalls; I couldn’t hope to avoid them all. I told myself not to worry—that even if I were to slip up, stare blankly when she mentioned a date I should have known or call someone by the wrong name, her first thought would hardly be that her husband had been replaced by an impostor from an alternate reality, but that her husband, for some reason, was acting strangely. But why? Why would he—I—be acting that strangely? What excuse could I come up with, should the situation arise?

I returned to the armchair and sat, surrounded by pools of amber light and by warm, golden oak; did my breathing exercises again, feeling calmer, hearing the tick of minutes creep by as noted by the big brass clock; and then, all at once, it came to me. My eyes snapped open. It couldn’t be this easy, could it? But it was the perfect solution; the ideal catch-all. Carefully, I thought the whole thing through, trying to punch as many holes in it as I could; and when I couldn’t, when I was convinced that it was possible I might actually pull it off, I got up a little past midnight, took the Volvo, and drove off down Schuyler Street to the center of town. It was all very simple, really.

*   *   *

As kids we used to say that Appleton was the kind of town where they didn’t just roll up the sidewalks after dark, they sank ’em twelve feet under. Now, driving through the commercial district well past midnight, I saw that little had changed: even the Sunoco station was closed; passing travelers who ran out of gas here were left strictly to themselves, God, and the Auto Club. I turned left off the main drag and began the snaking ascent up Manchester Avenue to the high school, located on a high hill at the edge of town.

Years before, I remembered, the only thing moving in Appleton after eleven o’clock—aside from the occasional snowy owl, migrated from colder climes—was one of the sheriff’s department’s two patrol cars, slowly making the rounds of residential and business districts, rarely finding anything more insidious than a bunch of kids smoking dope in the village green. These dangerous miscreants were usually busted, with uncommon relish, by a sour, officious old fart known to us all, not so affectionately, as Mister Death: the sort of tall, bony, humorless bastard who was born to wear black robes and a cowl, but settled instead for a sheriff’s uniform.

I’d heard Mister Death went on to meet his mentor some years back, but if his successors followed his patrol patterns there wouldn’t be a police car anywhere near the high school before dawn; they usually swung by around eleven, then concentrated on the lowlands for the rest of the night. I parked the Volvo in the school parking lot, just below the crest of the hill—low enough so it couldn’t be spotted easily from town, but high enough so I could see down from the front seat—then got out and looked down at the sleeping village.

Most houses were dark; only the streets were lit, some painted a smoky ochre by sodium-vapor lamps, others a fluorescent white. Moonlight reflected off the glassy surface of Goffle Brook, winding its way from east to west, through the center of town and out again, to join, some miles north, with the Merrimack River. The only sounds for miles were the chirp of crickets and the distant trill of an owl. I breathed in the cold night air; it tasted of spruce and white pine and a hint of impending snow. I smiled, feeling more at peace than I had for years. New York seemed a lifetime away already. Finally, after several minutes, I returned to the car; time to begin what I came here to accomplish.

I slipped in behind the wheel, the engine idling to permit the heater to work, and repeated my breathing exercises, focusing on the task ahead of me. I was already exhausted from the events of a long and very bizarre day, but as the hours crept past I did not allow myself to fall asleep; every time I began nodding off I woke myself with a start, turned on the radio to keep myself awake or got out of the car and let the chill brace me. Finally, about three a.m., I shut off the heater. By dawn I felt wasted, drained; I looked in the rearview mirror at veined and shadowed eyes. It was colder than hell, and I was sniffling and shivering—probably gave myself a cold—but if that was the only price I had to pay, it would be worth it. Down below the town began to awaken, lights snapping on, people braving the early morning cold to warm up iced-over engines; and at the bottom of the hill, a VW bug began the long ascent up Manchester Avenue. I was shivering, exhausted, and red-eyed, but the chill I felt was less from cold than from anticipation.

The VW was in the parking lot within minutes; a man in a custodian’s uniform got out, started toward the school, then saw my car and began walking, puzzled, toward it. I saw all this in my rearview, but as soon as he drew abreast of me, my gaze snapped forward again. I fixed on a spot in the air about three inches in front of me, and the windshield, the dash, the town, all went out of focus.

I heard a knocking on my left, a rap of knuckles against glass. I fought the reflex to turn, kept staring straight ahead.

“Hey,” came a muffled voice outside, “fella. You okay?”

I didn’t answer. The voice became background noise, white sound, no more to be responded to than the drone of a radio.

“Hey! I said, are you all right?”

More white noise: the rattle of a lock as someone tried to force open the car door. In front of me the world was still unfocused. I blinked only when the sun bounced off the rolling currents of the brook, making bright wheeling spikes of light in the distance.

After a while the voice went away, but I didn’t move, looking neither right nor left. When I heard the distant whine of a siren, I had to fight from smiling; moments later, a red and white ambulance sang all the way up the hill, orange lights flashing like one of the foil pinwheels I played with as a kid. By the sound of its siren I could tell it had pulled up beside me, but I kept my gaze resolutely forward, even as the side door lock was forced open. I may have blinked, but I know I didn’t move. I felt so far removed from it, it might as well have been the sound of a television in another room.

“Sir? Can you hear me?”

I ignored them. I must have looked pretty ripe, eyes bagged and bloodshot, my body shuddering every few moments from the cold. I felt hands on me now, pulling me out of the car, and I relaxed my body, thinking of Michael Chekhov’s first requirement for actors: Ease. Unless you are at ease, even the lightest moves or gestures will look heavy, artificial. I let them manipulate me as though I were no more animate than a sack of flour.

“Hypothermia?” someone said. I kept my eyes unfocused, saw a blurred sky swing past as I was lowered onto a stretcher—

“Get his temp,” someone replied, and a thermometer was forced between my lips. The stretcher was lifted and a thermal blanket thrown over me; in moments I was inside the ambulance, now shrieking downhill again. At the periphery of my vision I could tell that the paramedic to my left was flipping through my—Rick’s—wallet; he leaned forward, his face looming over me, concern in his voice. “Mr. Cochrane? Can you hear me?”

I suddenly felt like a turd, exploiting this good man’s concern for my own ends, but there was no turning back now. I made no reply.

He took the thermometer from my mouth. “95.2. He’ll be fine. But he’s sure not responding like any hypothermic I’ve ever seen.” He unscrewed a thermos, forced some hot coffee through my lips. “Call ahead and tell them to have a shrink on hand when we arrive.”

“Ahead” turned out to be the Parkland Medical Center in Derry. I was shunted from the E.R. to a thermal bath, where I began to allow myself to focus again, my eyes moving from side to side as I took in my surroundings. By the time they got me into a bed I was responding to outside stimuli once more. A doctor in his late fifties, passing through the E.R., seemed to recognize and hurried over to my side. “My God,” he said. “Rick? Rick, what happened?”

I just stared at him.

“I’m sorry,” I said with absolute honesty. “Do I—?”

I didn’t finish, but it had its effect; alarmed, the doctor hurried away. After they took a full range of blood tests and other exams, just to nail down that there wasn’t anything terribly wrong with me physically, another doctor came back and said, “Mr. Cochrane? Can you tell me your name? Your full name?”

Tentatively, I said, “Rick. Rick Cochrane.”

“And where do you live, Mr. Cochrane?”

“Appleton. 488 Schuyler Street.”

“And how long have you lived there?”

I looked momentarily disoriented; confused. “I don’t know,” I said. The doctor exchanged grim looks with a nurse, then patted me reassuringly on the arm. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “Your wife’s been notified, she’s on the way. I’m going to send in Dr. Sklar now.”

Dr. Sklar was a shrink. Nice man, big, crew cut, glasses, bad taste in sport coats. He continued in the vein of the previous doctor, asking me simple questions about my life. I answered each one of them perfectly truthfully, which was of course the beauty of it. I told him my wife’s name, but I couldn’t tell him our anniversary date. I told him what company I worked for, but I couldn’t give him the street address. I knew how old my daughter was, but not where she was born. I told him my age, but didn’t have the vaguest idea of the last time I was under a doctor’s care. The last thing I remember? That was easy. The argument. The argument with Debra. How often did you have such arguments, Mr. Cochrane? “I can’t remember,” I said apologetically.

He left after half an hour, and if he wasn’t totally convinced that the man in this room had suffered a complete breakdown, I was willing to turn in my Equity card.

I was feeling pretty smug and satisfied about it, too, though I didn’t allow it to show; the face I presented to the world was that of a broken, disoriented, emotionally shattered man. It wasn’t until just after that, that the smugness vanished.

A nurse pulled open the curtains surrounding my bed—and Debra stepped up to my bedside. I stared at her, genuinely shaken; it was the first close-up look I’d gotten of her, of this Debra, and my heart nearly skipped a beat with the wonder of it. My God, it was her, the same woman I’d talked to in Finney’s kitchen a world away from here; and yet she wasn’t the same, couldn’t be the same. I guess she took the astonishment on my face for confusion, because suddenly her composure cracked and she looked hurt and distraught and frightened.

“Rick?” she said softly. “Do you … know who I am?”

I nodded quickly. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

She looked relieved; too relieved. I reminded myself why I was here, how necessary this was. So when she said, “Roger Peale called me when he saw you here,” I just looked at her blankly and said, “Who?”

The relief on her face crumbled and I instantly regretted it; I hated putting her through this, but told myself I had no choice. It was scant comfort. “My obstetrician, Rick,” she said, her voice very quiet. “He … he delivered Jeffrey. Don’t you remember?”

Forgive me, Deb. “No,” I said tonelessly. “I’m sorry.”

But the worst was yet to come. The curtain parted again as the nurse showed in a young girl—tall, blonde hair, braces—and though I’d glimpsed her briefly the night before, it was from a distance, and I genuinely didn’t recognize her at first.

Paige saw it in an instant; and if Rick thought that there was nothing worse than the contempt and disdain on her face when he struck her, he was wrong. She saw my blank look and tears sprang to her eyes; she started to open her mouth, then stopped, her lower lip trembling; she looked wounded beyond words, not wanting to believe this could be—her own father and he didn’t know her. I recognized her an instant too late, and even though it helped make my act believable, even though it would ultimately help all of us, I was immediately overcome with guilt. I’d been so caught up in my little acting tricks, smugly congratulating myself on my finest performance, that I’d forgotten this wasn’t a play, those weren’t stage tears, and—hardest of all to accept, but I knew it now—I wasn’t an actor anymore. I was Rick Cochrane, and I was part of these people’s lives.

I felt tears coming to my own eyes. “I’m sorry,” I found myself whispering, sorry for reasons I couldn’t tell them. “I’m sorry…”

And with that, Paige ran to me, threw her arms around me, and hugged me tight—tighter, I think, than anyone had ever held me in my life. “It’s all right, Daddy,” she said, mistaking my apology for Rick’s, for last night. “It doesn’t matter, I didn’t mean it, just—” The tears started to flow again; she bit her lip. “Just get well, Daddy. Please get well…”

They left soon after, leaving me alone with my regret over this complex charade. God—wasn’t this always the way? Put me in an ideal world, a world I’d only ever dreamed of, and I was already finding something to feel guilty about. No, I couldn’t let that eat at me, not if I wanted to pull this off … and I had to pull it off, because really, I had no other choice. This was my world, now. The pretense was a necessary evil, an expedience which, with luck, would soon no longer be pretense, as I fell into the role—dammit, stop thinking of “roles” and “parts”—as I lived this life and it became mine. And it was mine, in a sense; I had lived it without even being conscious of it, but now I was aware of it, that’s all. Think of it, I told myself, as though you were awakening from a coma: thirteen lost years, which you will now set about rediscovering, reclaiming.

Then I got my second shock of the day, one that made it easier to accept the pretense and the half-truths. I’d been transferred to a private room and I was just settling in to watch the noon news on WNEV, when I heard a voice outside and down the hall say:

“Is that it? 2311?”

And another voice replying, “Right through there, we just moved him in,” but it was the first voice I was still fixated on, a woman’s voice, with a familiar New England twang, the words clipped and short—

I sat bolt upright in bed.

My mother bustled into the room, purse slung over one arm, her free hand clutching a box of chocolates. She saw me, saw the dreadful state I was in—I still hadn’t slept, my eyes were more veins than pupil—and stopped short. Reflexively she put a hand to her mouth.

“Oh God,” she said. “Rick? Are you—?”

My heart was pounding; I was having trouble breathing. I felt everything you could feel, under the circumstances: astonishment, disbelief, joy, relief. I wondered if perhaps I was crazy, if the act hadn’t been an act—and then she was at my bedside and before she could do anything I was out of bed, I was embracing her, I was crying, we were both crying. Oh God, I thought, thank you, thank you, it was more than I could’ve hoped, more than I’d allowed myself to dream. Rick hadn’t told me; he’d wanted me to find out for myself. Sweet Jesus, I had a second chance—a chance to be there when she needed me, to make up for all the lost days and lonely years, to be the son I should have been, but never was. I held her and cried with the joy and the wonder of it, and I suppose she was crying for joy, too—joy that I knew her, that I wasn’t as far gone as she’d feared I’d be. “It’s going to be all right,” she kept saying, trying to comfort me. “It’s all going to be fine.” I stroked her back, nodded, and blinked back my tears. “I know, Mom,” I said softly, almost laughing. “I know it will.”

*   *   *

The consensus among my doctors was that I’d suffered a disassociative reaction to severe emotional stress: a fugue state, during which time I had driven off and isolated myself in my car, with attendant psychogenic, or hysterical, amnesia. Hypnosis was a standard course of treatment in such cases, but it seemed to have no effect on me—how could it?—and was quickly abandoned in favor of more conventional therapy. For the next week or so I spent at least six hours a day with a psychiatrist, getting at the source of “my” problems. I was savvy enough not to try and seemingly resolve them in one or two sessions, but by the end of the week my shrink was greatly encouraged by my progress, enough to authorize my discharge from the hospital.

He didn’t suspect it, of course, but those sessions were valuable to me in ways he could never guess. In an attempt to restore the lapses in my memory he showed me pictures—slides and prints brought in by Debra, culled from the same carousels and scrapbooks I’d found days before—spanning ten years and more. Paige’s baby pictures, snapshots taken on vacations to Colorado and Aruba, birthday shots of me, of Debra, of Paige, videos of Jeffrey at two weeks, five weeks, three months … Watching them, I practiced a kind of sense-memory exercise—looking at a slide of a picnic, for example, I would try to summon up the smell of new-mown grass, the buzz of insects, the taste of potato salad and pastrami, the drone of an airplane passing overhead, anything to give the image a texture in my own mind, to make it real, to make it mine. And in all those photos was a man who looked just like me, a man I couldn’t distinguish from the one I saw in the mirror; a man I could easily have been. Toward the end of the week, one of my last sessions, I showed up in Dr. Sklar’s office, idly walking back and forth while he finished up rounds, and happened to see a photo of me on his desk. I picked it up—and didn’t realize till half a beat later that I had seen not a man with my face, but me. That’s all; just me.

My third day in the hospital, Hunt—Bailey, was it?—stopped by; he seemed like a decent sort, very troubled and concerned for me, assuring me my job was secure and I could take all the time off I needed to get well. So when I finally checked out and returned home, I had several weeks to get my bearings, to acclimatize myself to my new surroundings, my new family, and not the least of it, my new job. The manual on workers’ comp was slow going, boring beyond belief—but if I could memorize a three-act play I could damn well get this down, and would.

The tension that had prevailed between Rick and his family was replaced by a different sort—a walking-on-eggshell tension in which neither Debra nor Paige wanted to do anything, say anything, that might trigger a reemergence of hostilities. It felt awkward and strained and after two or three days of it I think we all were about ready to claw our way up the walls; something had to be done to break the ice, to convince them that “I” had indeed changed. So one Sunday night after supper, as I sat reading the Arts section of the New Hampshire Sunday News, I suddenly looked up and said, “Hey, there’s a production of A Chorus Line at the Hampton Playhouse. Anybody want to go?”

They both looked up, Paige from her homework, Debra from feeding Jeffrey, and stared at me with astonishment and trepidation. As though maybe I hadn’t really spoken at all; as though maybe they were hallucinating.

“A Chorus Line?” Debra repeated nervously. Paige cleared her throat: “When I wanted to go see it in New York you said—” Then she stopped, not wanting to dredge bad times up again, but I just laughed and waved a hand.

“I know what I said,” I lied, “and I was wrong. C’mon, let’s go, I could use some diversion after a week in the Snake Pit.” They laughed at the characterization, and from that point on, the hospital was no longer the H word, but the S.P. The ice had been, if not broken, then at least chipped.

That weekend we went over to Hampton to see the musical. I’d seen it before, of course, in New York, at least three times; this was a local production, and it showed—clumsy staging, spotty casting, the girl playing Cassie couldn’t sing as well as she could dance—but I enjoyed it as I always enjoyed it. A Chorus Line can’t help but touch you in a special way if you’re any kind of creative person, and it hit all the right chords again, from the sassy confidence of “Nothing” to the bittersweet goodbye of “What I Did for Love.” And as I sat there, the latter song affected me in a way it never had before, the words telling of a time when you had to give up your art, without regret, without rancor, because the time had come; as it had, I realized, for me.

Debra and Paige stole nervous glances at me throughout, relieved when I laughed and cried and applauded at all the same spots as everyone else; and afterward, when in great good cheer I packed us all off to Carvel’s and sprang for ice cream, they looked at one another with mounting amazement and cautious delight, as though to say, Could it be? Could it really be? We drove back to Appleton, I popped a CD I’d bought of the show in the CD player, and we sang all the way back, laughing at how far off-key we wandered. Drained and happy, we staggered into the house, I kissed Paige good night, and Debra and I turned in for the night.

We stood close in the darkened bedroom, and for the first time since I had returned home, we came together. Oddly, at this pivotal moment, this ultimate risk of exposure—what if I did something too different? what if she could tell?—I felt only passion and excitement and confidence. When I kissed her, I was kissing the woman I’d loved so many years before, the one I’d let get away; it all came back, all the ways in which we’d touched one another, the things we whispered, the cries and the pauses. I was eager, hungry, determined to recapture everything we’d shared—so determined that I didn’t even care if I was found out. And that was probably the wisest thing I could have done. We made love for hours, and when I finally drifted off to sleep it was to the sound of her breathing beside me, the feel of her hand on my chest; a soft, feathery comforter covered us, a pillow of warm air lay atop that, a wedge of moonlight fell across our feet, and I no longer had any doubts or regrets. I was Rick Cochrane of Appleton, New Hampshire, husband to Debra, father to Paige and Jeffrey, and I was happy.