“You’ve lived here five years and never been to the state fair?” he asked me over the phone two days later. “That’s unacceptable! Where else can you see a thousand-pound pig?”
“Exaggerating, are we?” I’d just come in from a run and was lying on my living room carpet in front of the window AC. I felt like a giddy teenager.
“Scout’s honor,” Erik said.
“You were a Boy Scout?”
“Hell no.”
I closed my eyes. His laughter swirled through me.
And he wasn’t exaggerating. We strolled through the 4-H barns filled with Holsteins and Clydesdales and, yes, a thousand-pound pig. We breathed through our mouths, the air pungent with the smell of manure, thick with dust. When he casually laced his fingers through mine, I felt as if silver coins were falling through my insides.
“So, what’s next?” he asked when we exited Agriculture Hall, squinting into white sunlight. “We could get a bite to eat or…There’s always monkeys racing on greyhounds.”
I laughed. “You’re joking.”
“Come on.” He grinned. “They’re my daughters’ favorite.”
Daughters.
A feeling of ice in my lungs.
“What?” he asked. And then, “Oh, crap. You didn’t know I had kids. Three. They’re amazing. Exhausting, sometimes terrifying, but amazing.” Everything about him—his eyes, face, voice—lit up with love for those kids. Nick used to look like that.
I glanced away, trying to compose my face. I’d never seen him with kids at the Y, and when he hadn’t mentioned them the other night, I had thought…had let myself think…My face burned. I couldn’t go out with him again. It would be unbearable to be around children, and even if I could let myself love a child again…
“Hey.” He stooped to meet my gaze. “You okay?”
“Just surprised. Three, wow!” My voice sounded cartoonlike and as fake as my smile. “What about their mom? Is she…Are you…” I wasn’t sure why I was asking, especially when I had already decided I couldn’t see him after this.
“Are we divorced? Yes. Thoroughly. Completely. Happily. Well, I don’t mean I’m happy that we—actually, I am. We were a mess; the marriage was a mess.” He looked at me helplessly. “And now this conversation is a mess. Were you ever married?”
I’d always said no to this question because it shut down the other question, which was unanswerable: Do you have kids? But this time, the lie I’d told a dozen times before, that tiny inconsequential no, dissolved in my throat, and a sad flickering yes came out instead, the neon green of Nick’s name flashing meteor-like across my thoughts. I didn’t know what else to say, though, how to joke or indicate with a rueful smile that it no longer hurt. It did. It always would.
Whatever Erik saw in my face, he abruptly, thankfully, switched gears. “Come on, let’s get a drink. I’ll show you a picture of my kids.”
We found a table in a German-themed beer garden beneath a blue-and-white-striped umbrella. He handed me his wallet, the plastic picture sleeve open to a photo of three children, dark-haired like Erik. “The best things in my life.” He pointed. “Spencer, Hazel, and Phoebe.”
“Your daughters are twins?”
He nodded.
It was a studio portrait. The girls, infants in red velvet dresses, chubby legs in white lace tights, sat together in a plush armchair. The boy, Spencer, stood beside them. A Christmas tree in the background. “They’re beautiful,” I said. My face felt rubbery. After a moment, I handed the wallet back.
He stared at the picture before folding the wallet shut and sticking it in his pocket. I think I asked how old the kids were, but my voice was polite and as faraway as the silver speck of an airplane moving across the sky. I didn’t hear what he said. And then we were quiet, but it wasn’t the comfortable silence we’d shared at the custard stand. Everything felt wrong.
“I guess the kids were part of my wanting a moratorium the other night,” Erik finally said. “It’s not that I don’t love talking about them, but things are…complicated.” He stared off toward the fairgrounds. The Ferris wheel turned against the endless blue sky. “I just wanted simple for one night, you know?” He raked his hand through his unruly hair. “You must think I’m a lousy dad.”
“I don’t think that at all.”
“Really?” Relief flooded his eyes. “I’m glad.” And then, “So, what about you? Any kids you accidentally forgot to mention?”
Accident.
A word from another life.
It took most of my thirteen months in the hospital to say that word, accident, without faltering. I wanted more than anything in my life for that afternoon to have been an accident, but I wasn’t sure. Once I’d looked up the word, as if my confusion were a matter of definition. Accident: sudden and unexpected event.
The definition had stopped me. Hadn’t there been warnings?
Could it be an accident if it wasn’t unexpected?
I couldn’t meet Erik’s eyes, gluing mine instead to the bright circle of the Ferris wheel. It had stopped, the small carts swaying against the sky.
The night before the accident, Nick and I had gone to the boardwalk and ridden the Ferris wheel. The boardwalk was packed, and it was impossible to maneuver the stroller through the crowds. All I did was apologize and say “Excuse me” until I wanted to scream. Mostly what I remembered, though, was how I had stared at the ocean from atop that Ferris wheel, the waves endlessly rushing forward, then retreating.
It was how motherhood felt.
Something I both longed for and wanted to run from.
I didn’t know that that view, from atop the Ferris wheel, would be the last view I’d have of the ocean for months. The last view of my life as it had been. I still see it sometimes when I think of home. Not the house a block from the ocean where I grew up or Kelly’s house near the country club, her bedroom plastered with posters—Cats, The Phantom of the Opera; Nick’s bedroom down the hall. Nor was it the little bungalow Nick and I had on Fourth Street near the bay or even my parents’ restaurant on the main avenue in town. It was the view from atop the Ferris wheel my last night with Lucy and Nick. As if I somehow knew I needed to see as much as possible. That the view would have to last me for years.
“Hey, where’d you go?” Erik said. From the arcades lining the midway came the bells and buzzers and the rat-a-tat-tat of fake machine-gun fire.
“I was thinking about the town where I grew up,” I said. “It was a resort, so we had all this….” I nodded toward the midway. “A boardwalk, arcades, a Ferris wheel.”
“Seriously?” He looked at me curiously. “We used to vacation at a resort up in Door County, and we’d drive by a high school or…I don’t know, a Jiffy Lube, something non-resort-like, and it would surprise me to realize regular people who went to school and got their oil changed actually lived there. I always wondered what that would be like.”
“To live in a place people dream about visiting all year? It’s magical.”
“Do you get back there much?”
“I wish, but…” I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “It’s complicated.”
“Ahh, yes. Complicated.” He smiled knowingly, and I felt how already the word had become ours. Complicated—an IOU, a promise: I’ll tell you, just not yet. I’d forgotten about this shorthand between couples, ordinary words packed with layers and history. I wanted that again.
For a moment we were quiet, and then, because I needed to say something, I said, “I’m surprised your girls are so young.”
He nodded. “Two years on Sunday.”
“So, you and your wife…How long have you been divorced?”
“Is there a limit on how many complicateds we get?”
“Bad question?”
“More like bad answer.” He sighed. “We’ve been divorced two years. We were separated when the twins were conceived.”
I felt my stomach knot with jealousy at the red flag of his ex-wife and their perhaps unfinished relationship. For a moment I forgot: After today, I wouldn’t be seeing Erik again unless it was in passing at the Y.
“Yeah, I know how it sounds,” he was saying. “I was at the house helping her with Spencer, and it got late….”
“So, did you try to work things out?”
“We were done. Had been.” He glanced at me. “We became very different people after Spencer was…I’m not sure diagnosed is the right word because there have been half a dozen diagnoses.”
“For what?”
He didn’t answer, just shifted his arm on the small plastic table so that his knuckles grazed mine. He stared at our hands for a long moment, then said, “Spencer’s got a lot of learning and behavioral issues. And like I said, a lot of diagnoses, which aren’t necessarily wrong, but I’m not always convinced they’re right either. Maybe I just don’t like the labels or…maybe I don’t like the assumptions people make about the labels.”
“Is this why you didn’t mention your kids?”
“Because of Spencer? Jesus. I hope not….” His eyes met mine. “But maybe.” Something forlorn crossed his expression. “I don’t want to scare you off, Claire. At least not before you get to know us.” He moved his hand from mine. “Though I guess if you’re going to be scared, I might as well get it over with.”
A breath of sadness swept through me. No matter what I said, he would assume this was why I didn’t want to see him again. “You’re not going to scare me off,” I said quietly. “Believe me.” Him scare me off? It was more like the other way around: I would scare him away. “So, what kind of issues?” I said.
He explained that even as an infant Spencer hadn’t liked to be touched or held, that he hadn’t spoken until he was four. “Annabelle and I learned sign language for basic words—mama and daddy and the most important word of all.” He grinned. “More.” He showed me the sign, then said, “Spencer’s still ‘delayed’ with speech”—he put air quotes around the word delayed—“although that’s one of those things I don’t always trust. He’s such a watcher and a thinker—why isn’t that enough? Plus, he’s smart as hell. He’s fascinated by science and the weather—God, just ask him about the types of clouds or what causes storms….” He exhaled slowly. “I just think the world comes at him too fast.”
“Ha! I feel like that myself some days.”
“Exactly, right? Only for Spence, that too-muchness is exaggerated exponentially, and it’s not just some days. It’s constant. The most ordinary stimuli—lights, sounds, colors, textures—ambush him in ways I imagine feel threatening. Any change in routine, anything unpredictable…it’s a struggle for him.”
I know, I wanted to say, though of course I didn’t. But I thought of the years since I’d left the hospital, years when I craved routine and certainty, years when I confided in no one, years when I found my own ways to push the too-muchness of the world away. It was exhausting, though, and sitting there in that hot sun, our arms leaving lines of sweat where our skin lay against the plastic table, it seemed impossible that I could keep being this alone.
I liked Erik. A lot. He was kind and fun and good-looking and smart. But he had children. There was nothing beyond this. And yet when his knee grazed mine as we sat on makeshift bleachers watching a cream puff–eating contest; when he brushed my hair from my eyes as we waited in line for beer, his fingers callused against my cheek; when we aimed only for each other on the bumper cars, laughing and ruthless as we rammed into each other, I kept forgetting that I had to walk away from him. He has children. Each time I remembered, I felt a splintering of panic in my chest and then anger: I didn’t want to walk away. And why, why, did I have to? It had been ten years. Ten.
We were strolling down the midway, Erik’s fingers laced through mine. The sky was russet with sunset, heat unraveling from the day. I was silent, my grief and guilt and love for Lucy pushing against my ridiculous hope that maybe one day I could tell Erik the whole story and maybe once he’d gotten to know me, he’d understand. I pulled in a deep breath as a dozen more maybes scattered themselves through me: Maybe he was the reason I’d moved here; maybe he was my second chance. Because why meet him at all, why go on this date, why feel everything I was feeling, unless…Maybe, I thought again, the word a kind of prayer tattooed on the night, hundreds of pricks of pain that could maybe maybe maybe turn into something beautiful.
I tasted my first bratwurst that day. Another thing he was appalled I’d lived here six years and never tried. I wanted to dislike it, find a thousand differences I could stack like bricks between this man and the way my heart was pounding. But even as I was thinking this, he was cupping his hand beneath my chin as I leaned forward and took a bite, and in the next instant, he was straining across the little table to kiss me, tasting of mustard and beer, and I was half laughing, butter dripping on my hands from the corn on the cob I’d just set down. We kept kissing, soft quick kisses, as if we couldn’t bear to have our mouths apart, and everything went quiet around us.
“Wow,” he said thickly when we pulled away from each other finally. He took a sip of beer, then handed the plastic cup to me. My hands were shaking.
Until that moment, I’d thought I’d made peace with the fact that I probably wouldn’t feel this way again.
Of course, we had frozen custard that night. Already it was our thing. We got cones and walked, the air cooler, the sky the color of roses, a smoky pink that reminded me of the color Nick and I had painted her bedroom.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Erik said.
“The sky is so amazing here.” I was staring up. “It’s not like this back east.”
“Do you miss it?”
“No.”
The answer came out too sharply, and I saw a flicker of something in his eyes. But he just put his arm around me and said, “You and I have a bunch of complications, don’t we?” Before I could answer, he said, “Wait, come here,” and when I turned to him, he wiped a dot of custard from the tip of my nose. The gesture made me ache; it was so simple and so tender. Longing and happiness and something else—hope maybe, gratitude?—moved against the edges of my lungs, then expanded.
“I like that,” Erik said gently.
“What?”
“The look in your eyes.”
And I liked the look in his. I thought of those missiles projected from across an ocean to explode in one specific spot, an exact target, and I thought of how his gaze ignited into mine that night, obliterating everything that came before.