CHAPTER 17

Walking through my house and flicking on lights, I felt as if I were returning home after a long absence. This is my life, I thought, and maybe it wasn’t as joyous as the life I’d hoped for with Erik, but it was mine. I felt oddly comforted by the most ordinary things: my orange teakettle, the bag of Epsom salts by the tub, the clip-on reading light on my night table. I’d bought the light so I wouldn’t wake Erik when I woke early to read. Heaviness settled over me. I wouldn’t need it anymore.

I picked up the phone to call my mom, then set it down. Her well-meant questions would undo me: Was I sure about this? No. What if Erik just needed more time?

By then he was already at Annabelle’s. I wanted to be there, wanted to be folded into the warmth of their chaos and affection. Abruptly I sat at the dining room table. I’d lose Annabelle too, wouldn’t I? And then I pictured Spencer clapping with delight yesterday when he realized we were all wearing the same T-shirt: “Everyone’s wearing the color of Thursday?” he’d shouted. “Everyone?” That wild bright giggle that was his happy laugh. It took my breath away, the realization that I wouldn’t see him or the girls again, wouldn’t be spending Christmas with Erik. What would I do on Christmas? Where would I go?

On the table were leaves ironed between sheets of wax paper that the twins had decorated our Thanksgiving table with. Annabelle had given them to me to use in a collage. I’d dropped them off last night on our way to Erik’s. The leaves looked frozen in ice, submerged beneath water. Idly, I began moving them around, ideas for a collage coalescing. This was often how I began, starting with an item and juxtaposing this and that, until a title popped into mind. It usually took weeks, but that night, the title rose up immediately: Leavings. I pictured doorways and goodbyes, things left behind.

I worked on it all night. My table spread with photos, magazine articles, scraps of fabric, and ribbon. This is my life, I kept thinking. The smell of gesso and the howl of wind outside, the creak of the floors as I walked around the table. This is my life. It felt so still; I felt so still. I promised myself I’d get back to my routines; maybe I’d meet my parents in Chicago for Christmas. Or I could go somewhere new, somewhere warm, near the ocean. The thought surprised me. I wasn’t a traveler. I’d been on an airplane only once, a trip to Disney when I was ten, and until I moved here, I’d never been farther west than Pittsburgh.

But I liked the image of myself wheeling a suitcase through a vast terminal, boarding an airplane, checking into a hotel, sitting on a minuscule balcony with my coffee, watching the sunrise. St. Augustine, maybe? Tybee Island? I’d run on the beach, eat on patios surrounded by palm trees. I wasn’t brave enough to go to another country—I didn’t even have a passport—but I could do this, I thought, and felt a tiny beat of excitement.

Even as I imagined this, though, another part of me wondered what they were doing at Annabelle’s, what Erik had told them. I glanced at the answering machine, hoping Annabelle or Eva would call. Of course they didn’t, and I thought of how Erik would eventually meet someone else and she would become the new woman the girls idolized and Annabelle confided in. Someone athletic and smart: the curly-haired spin instructor at the Y or the drama teacher from Waukesha West who’d flirted with him at a donor dinner. My stomach clenched, and though I had chosen this, I realized how much I’d wanted him to talk me out of it.

I kept telling myself, You deserve better, but the words were hollow, and as the hours passed, all I thought about were the good moments: The two of us racing at the end of a run—first one to reach my driveway! His nodding to the farmers at Kopp’s and saying, That’ll be us in twenty years. My opening his silverware drawer and finding two long-handled iced tea spoons to eat my yogurt with. “You bought these for me?”

“I figure if you have everything you need here, you’ll never go home.”


On Saturday morning, I drove to the lake to run. The water was choppy, the wind gusting so hard it made my eyes water. My face felt windburned and raw, but I kept going, not wanting to return to my empty house. The minute I pulled into the drive, I saw the red canvas bag I’d kept at Erik’s house on the porch, and I felt as if it were my heart he’d left there. I sat in my car and thought of how Spencer hated the color red. He said it was too “speedy,” meaning, Annabelle thought, that the intensity made it feel as if the color were moving. He cried if we wore red. “Red is goodbye,” he would sob. “Why are you wearing goodbye?”

The weekend passed. I grocery shopped, went to the Y, and scoured thrift stores, looking for things to use in the collage. Leavings. At home, I paced around the dining room table, adding things in, taking things out—blueprints of beach houses torn from an architectural magazine, a Post-it from Erik: I miss you. A xeroxed photo of the house I’d grown up in; a map of Czechoslovakia from 1990, the year Lucy was born; three years later, the country no longer existed. (How does an entire country disappear?) I added a pencil sketch of a little girl that I quickly erased, only faint lines remaining—leavings, traces. A strip of film negatives, the button from Erik’s shirt, the manifest of the SS Carl D. Bradley, which broke in two during a storm on Lake Michigan in November 1958.

I finished the collage on Sunday night after tucking into the layers tiny things that were red: a feather, beads, Christmas wrapping paper, yarn from a child’s sweater. The color of goodbye. I’d never completed a collage this quickly, and I wanted to tell Erik. I loved how he’d asked about my work: Why did you include…? What made you decide…? He’d note even the smallest changes. He’d been like that about my whole life. On the mornings we weren’t together, he’d ask me on the phone how many miles I ran, what I ate for breakfast. Once he asked if my hair was in a ponytail, and when I laughed and said, “Seriously?” he said, “Yes, seriously. I want to picture you.” That attention, that care with the minutiae of someone’s days, what else was that but love? And what if I’d squandered it?


I finished three more collages that December. I stood at the dining room table as my coffee brewed, the windows dark and glazed with ice. After work, I hurried home, loving that moment when I flipped on the chandelier and instantly saw where I needed more color or text or layers. I thought about the collages as I ran during my lunch hour, miles disappearing without my noticing. Sky, road, lake, trees. I’d look up and be at my turnaround point. I thought of the collages as I drove to and from work. As I fell asleep.

Beneath my focus, the grief was right there, a swollen and rising river against which I was piling sandbags as fast as I could. What I had feared most had happened: I’d told Erik about Lucy and he’d walked away. And no matter what he had said about my deserving love, he clearly didn’t think I deserved his. There wasn’t a single hour when I didn’t feel the blow of that truth.

I missed talking to him, missed seeing him. I missed the fact of him in my life. Driving by Annabelle’s one Saturday night—it was stupid; of course, their cars were all there—I was devastated. “It’s like I was never part of their lives,” I told my mom. I knew I was being ridiculous: Erik was the father of Annabelle’s children, he’d been friends with Gabe and Eva for twenty years, and I’d known him for, what? Four months? But I’d hoped Annabelle would at least reach out, tell me she was sorry it hadn’t worked. We’d been friends.

Unless he’d told her about Lucy.

And why wouldn’t he? He had no allegiance to me. It would have explained our breakup, how hard he’d tried. Would anyone blame him? She harmed her own child, then gave her away. Who does that?


As soon as my mom picked up the phone, my voice broke. “I’m pretty sure he told Annabelle.” It was past midnight in Delaware.

“Hold on.” She sounded groggy. “I’m walking to the kitchen.”

“I’m sorry to call so late,” I said.

“What happened? How do you know?”

“I just do. It’s been three weeks and not a word.” I closed my eyes against the glare of my lighted bedroom. “We were becoming friends, Mom.”

“You’re assuming, Claire. For all you know, Annabelle feels hurt that you haven’t called. Maybe she feels betrayed. You’re the one who just disappeared.”

I laid my head on my knees, feeling stupid. This hadn’t occurred to me. “Do you really think that?”

“I think it’s as likely as anything else.”

“I hate this,” I said. “I just want to be normal.” I tried to steady my voice. “I’m sorry I woke you.” I felt like a teenager. I didn’t want to be this way.

“You’re hurt, sweetie,” my mom said, “and that’s very normal. For what it’s worth, though, I don’t think this is just about Annabelle.”

“I liked having friends, Mom. She was fun, and kind, and…we talked about stuff that matters.” I sighed. “What do you mean it’s not just about—” But my mother was right about this too.

She waited, giving me that silence, then said, “Sometimes I think Kelly hurt you far more than Nick ever did.”

“Sometimes?” I said bitterly. “Nick didn’t…I’ve never blamed him.” I shook my head vehemently, then added, “And I can’t blame Kelly either.”

“I’m not saying you should. But that doesn’t mean you weren’t terribly hurt by her, and getting close to Annabelle probably triggered that.”

I squeezed shut my eyes, head still on my upraised knees. “I liked who I was with them, Mom, not just Erik, but all of them.”

“Which is huge, Claire: That you know this now; that you want friends in your life again. And children. That’s wonderful. It’s more than wonderful.”


The next afternoon I bought an artificial Christmas tree for my bedroom. I hadn’t had one in ten years. Later, in bed, I kept glancing up from my novel to stare at the lights and the shimmer of ornaments, and for the first time in a decade I let myself remember that last Christmas with Nick. We couldn’t stop talking about how the next year we’d have a child, and she was going to be the most loved child in the world!

For a while, she was.

Other memories crept in, things I hadn’t thought of in years, hadn’t let myself think of: The solid weight of her on my hip as I moved around the kitchen, getting coffee, pouring cereal. How when the sunlight streamed in the window, she’d reach out and try to grab the beam of light, then look at me with a baffled expression. “Who knew babies could furrow their brows?” I’d laughed to Nick. Or Nick balancing her on his palm high overhead and the way she’d kick her arms and legs like she was paddling a surfboard.

Talking about her to Erik had somehow given her back to me, given me back to myself. For ten years my heart had felt like an island on the other side of the world from where I lived, a remote and impossible-to-reach place. And then I told Erik the story of what had happened, and as awful as that had been, it had healed some small part of me. I wasn’t ready to travel alone yet and I couldn’t bear the idea of dating anyone else, but for the first time in years, I felt what it was like for my heart and my life to live in the same time zone, share the same weather.