Susan Wiggs - Just Breathe

“I guess not. What are we going to talk about?”

“I need the whole story. Everything from the beginning.”

Sarah glanced at the old-fashioned clock on the wall. “Do you have other appointments this afternoon?”

“I have all the time you need.”

“He’s in Chicago,” she said. “Can I be here and, um, divorce him if he’s in Chicago?”

“Yes.”

Divorce him. It was the first time she’d actually said it aloud. The words came out of her yet she didn’t understand them. It sounded like a foreign phrase. She was mimicking random syllables in a strange tongue. Div Orsim. Divor Sim.

“Yes,” she repeated, “I do want a divorce.” Then she felt sick. “That’s like saying I want to disembowel myself. That’s how it feels right now.”

“I’m sorry,” Birdie said. “It’s never easy. But one thing I can tell you is that even though the loss hurts, it also creates new space in your life, new possibilities.”

Sarah fixed her gaze on a spot out the window, where the waters of Tomales Bay flowed past. “I never meant to stay in Chicago,” she said. “Never could get used to the god-awful weather there. After graduation, I planned to live in San Francisco or L.A., work for a paper while trying to get a comic strip into syndication.

“Then I met Jack.” She swallowed, took a deep breath. “His whole family is in the construction business. He got a contract from the university to build a new wing for the commercial-art studio, and I was on the student advisory committee, with the job of supplying input for the designers.”

She felt a smile turn her lips, but only briefly. “The students would feed them our pie-in-the-sky ideas and Jack would tell us why our plans wouldn’t work. I drew a series of satirical cartoons for the student paper about the situation. When Jack saw them, I thought he’d be furious. Instead, he asked me out.” She shut her eyes, wishing the memories were not so painful. But God, he’d been charming. Handsome and funny and kind. She had adored him from the start. Often, she’d wondered what he saw in her, but she didn’t dare ask. Maybe she should have asked. She opened her eyes and stared at her knotted-together fingers.

“The family welcomed me with open arms. They treated me like their newest daughter.” She still remembered her sense of wonder at the historic mansions in the shady neighborhood where Jack’s family had lived for generations. “You have to understand, this was huge for me. After losing my mother, my dad and brother and I unraveled. It just felt so good to be with a real family once again. Jack grew up in the same place and had friends he’d known from nursery school. So I just…stepped in to this ready-made world. It seemed effortless. I suppose I was in love with him from the beginning and was changing my plans for the future by the third date.”

From where she was now, she could look back and see that, for her, the process of falling in love had been an act of survival. She had lost her mother and was drifting out to sea. Jack—and all he stood for—was a solid object to cling to, something she could grasp with all her might and pull herself to safety.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren sounded, the throaty blast of a fire engine. Sarah’s mouth was dry. She got up and went to the water cooler and poured herself two cups of water. When she turned back to Birdie, she felt momentarily disoriented. She sat back down and sipped the water.

“It’s all right to cry,” Birdie said.

Sarah pictured herself floating out to sea alone again, like Alice in Wonderland drowning in her own uncontrollable tears. “I don’t want to cry.”

“You will.”

Sarah took a deep breath and another sip of water. She didn’t feel like crying, yet her sense of loss was intense. She was coming to realize that she had lost so much more than a husband. Her ready-made community of family and friends. Her house and all her things. Her own identity as Jack’s wife.

“We got married in Chicago,” she reported to Birdie. Their wedding had been lopsided, the friends of the groom outnumbering the friends of the bride by ten to one, but Sarah hadn’t minded. People adored Jack and she was proud of that. She had counted herself lucky to find a ready-made group of friends and a warmhearted family. “No assembly required,” she had told him with a grateful smile. “We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon. I never did like Hawaii, but Jack just assumed I did.”

She hadn’t seen the truth then. She barely caught a glimmer of it now, but she was starting to understand. From the moment she met Jack, she was a satellite to his sun, reflecting his light but possessing none of her own. Her wants and needs were eclipsed by his, and it all felt perfectly fine to her. They lived in his world, did the things he wanted and became a couple according to his vision, not hers.

Every once in a while, she would make a suggestion: What about Mackinac Island instead of Hawaii? Or the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City? He would pull her into his arms and say, “Yeah, right. It’s Hawaii, babe. Cow-abunga.” And so it went. She found herself listening to country-western music that made her cringe, and learned to stay awake during White Sox and Cubs games.

“And the thing was,” she told Birdie, “I was happy. I loved our life together. Which is probably crazy, because it was nothing like the life I would’ve chosen.”

“It was the life you had,” Birdie reminded her. “The fact that you liked it is a blessing. How many people endure a life they hate, every day?”

Sarah looked at her sharply. She suspected the rhetorical question was more about Birdie than about rhetoric.

“So here’s the big irony about what happened next,” Sarah said. “After our fairy-tale wedding and dream honeymoon, he wanted to start a family right away. For once, I asserted myself. I insisted on waiting a year or two, at least. I planned to focus on my career, so I lobbied hard to keep up the birth control a while longer.”

“This is the twenty-first century,” Birdie reminded her. “I don’t think you’re going to raise any eyebrows with that.”

“Not at the time. I think it was the one decision in our marriage I truly owned. The one choice that belonged to me and me alone.”

“Why do you say it’s ironic?”

“Because that one decision almost killed Jack.”

Forty minutes before the end of Will Bonner’s duty shift, the quick-call went off—“Battalion! Fire and Ambulance StandBy!”—followed by two tones, signaling an alarm. Will acknowledged immediately, summoned Gloria on the loud-speaker, then yanked the ticket from the printer. After years of following routine, he had the exit down to a bare minimum number of moves. He donned gear as he strode from the office, snatching HTs up off the charger. Then he was off, out the door in less than a minute, shifting seamlessly from where he was a moment ago to the place he was headed. That was the life of a firefighter; one minute, watching reruns of Peyton Place on the SOAP channel, the next, checking the area map, putting on his bunker gear, jamming his feet into boots.

The town of Glenmuir boasted a Seagrave rescue pumper, circa 1992, and a crew of captain, engineer and a rotating stable of volunteers. While Gloria Martinez, the engineer, cranked up the engine and the volunteer crew went to their on-board stations, Will and Rick McClure, one of the on-call volunteers, jumped into separate patrol vehicles and sped ahead to find the fire. That was the trouble with nonspecific reports, like the one that had just come in. Someone would call, reporting that smoke was visible. In these parts, the term “yonder” was considered a cardinal direction.