Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

The second woman is in the car next to mine at a traffic light. She’s dark-skinned, with long black hair and eyes the color of coal, and she’s drumming on her steering wheel and singing along to whatever’s on her radio. When she sees me watching, her sheepish grin is warm and direct, and I can tell that she’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, fun and approachable and never a bad word to say about anyone. In fact, the only times we’ll argue is when I’m trying to convince her that someone is a real asshole and she just won’t see it. It will frustrate me, but then she’ll smile and I’ll remember why I’m with her, what a good and generous soul she has, and how she makes me a better person and how all of my friends are in love with her, and how good she is to my child, how she sings off-key in the shower, making up silly lyrics when she doesn’t know the real ones, and how, when I’m feeling down, she wraps her arms around me from behind in bed and runs her lips over my shoulders, humming lightly into my skin until I’ve decompressed.

Then the light changes and she’s gone, just like the dog-loving graphic artist before her, both of them headed back to sexy, softly lit, uncomplicated lives. And me? I’m mourning my father and having sex with my sister-in-law and falling in love with strangers on the way to see the wife who slept with my boss and is now simultaneously divorcing me and having my baby. I feel like the driver who spends that extra second fussing with his cell phone and looks up just in time to see the front of his car crash through the guardrail and drive off the cliff.

THERE ARE DARK shadows under Jen’s bloodshot eyes, and she nervously stirs her glass of ginger ale in the Clubhouse Grille, situated in a recessed portion of the hotel lobby. The only other patrons are a group of flight attendants a few tables over, laughing and drinking in their blue uniforms, their little suitcases lined up like sentries. There is a wedding this evening at the Marriott, and the lobby hums with industry as vendors scurry around in a state of controlled chaos. Party planners streak past, speaking urgently into headsets; flowers are carried through on trays; skinny kids dressed all in black tear silently across the floor in their sneakers like slacker ninjas, carrying bulky photographic equipment. Jen is nauseous and exhausted and wants to talk about our marriage.

“Yesterday was the first time you’ve asked me anything related to us,” she says.

“We don’t talk very often.”

“I know. But we’re going to be parents, Judd, and I think we’re going to have to get better at talking to each other.”

“So this baby is your free pass, is that it?”

She offers a wan grin. “I know it sucks, but yes. You’re going to have to come to some kind of terms with me so that we can work together here.”

“Maybe I don’t want to work with you.”

She puts down her glass and looks at me. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“I didn’t want this baby. I once wanted a baby with you, but that was before I knew who you really were. Our dead baby was the one I wanted. This baby . . . doesn’t feel real to me. It doesn’t feel like mine any more than you do.”

Jen studies her drink for a long time, and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are filled with tears. For an instant I flash to Alice’s tears, dripping down her face and onto my belly, but I banish the memory before it can make me too queasy. One train wreck at a time, I always say.

“I think that may be the ugliest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“You wanted me to talk about it. I’m talking.”

I don’t remember what I just said, and I have no idea if I even meant it. I just know I wanted it to hurt. In the day or so I’ve known the baby is mine, I have managed to avoid doing any concrete thinking about it. It’s still completely unreal to me, but if I said that to Jen, she would nod sympathetically and keep talking about being parents together, and I’ve got a splitting headache as it is. The fragments of my fractured life are spinning in my head like a buzz saw, and I feel moments away from coming apart in a very real and permanent way.

“Do you want to know why I started seeing Wade?” Jen says softly.

I consider it for a moment. “Not really, no.”

“When our baby died, I was grieving. I needed to mourn him. You acted like everything was fine. Well, maybe not fine, but not so far from it. No big deal, Jen, we’ll just make another one.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Not by a lot.”

“So you worked through your grief by having sex with Wade.”

One of the ninjas drops a steel pole, which rolls thunderously across the marble floor. Jen jumps. The kid curses and picks up the pole. A party planner materializes to admonish him, somewhat severely, I think.

Jen looks intently at me. “You had stopped looking at me, stopped touching me. It was like I had failed you, failed to keep our baby safe, and until we had a new baby, I had nothing to offer you. You lost sight of me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You wouldn’t hold me, or cry with me. You just looked away and talked about how it would all be fine, how we’d try again when I was ready.”

“I was trying to reassure you. I knew how much having a baby meant to you.”

“You may not have meant to make me feel that way, but it was how I felt. And I guess, as wrong as it was—and I know it was wrong—Wade was someone I hadn’t disappointed. He wanted me, and it had nothing to do with a baby. And that made him appealing.”

I consider what she’s saying, try to place myself back there, in those days after she’d delivered our strangled baby, but that time has become a dark blur, and I can’t recall very much about it. “You never said anything to me.”

“We were in such different places. I was grieving our dead child.”

“So was I.”

“You were looking at the calendar, asking the doctors when we could try again. You say you were trying to reassure me, and that’s probably true. But to me, right then, it felt like you were moving on, leaving me behind. And somewhere along the way, you stopped seeing me as your wife; you just saw me as the mother of your dead and maybe future child.” She clasps her hands together, shakes her head, and offers up a sad little smile. “It’s tragic, really, when you think about it. I needed you to see me as your wife and all you could see was the failed mother. And now I need you to see me as the mother of your child, and all you can see is the failed wife.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot.”

“I don’t get out much.”

“You should have told me.”

“I did. You didn’t hear me.”

“You should have kept telling me until I did. I would have eventually.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“We could have fixed this!” I am suddenly, violently furious. “We could have fixed it. But you gave up. You found someone else before I even knew anything was wrong. This could have been our baby.”

“It’s still our baby. You and me.”

“There is no you and me,” I say, getting up to leave. “We are strangers. And I don’t see how I can raise a child with a stranger.”

“Judd,” she says, beseeching. “We’re finally talking. Please sit down.”

I can sense the flight attendants shutting up to tune in to the little drama playing out in their midst. I take a long, last look at Jen, at her tired eyes, her desperate expression.

“I can’t do this.”

“Please don’t leave,” she says, but I’m already moving, weaving through the tables to get out of there. The last thing I hear her say is “This isn’t going to go away.” And it’s that very fact, obvious though it may be, that squeezes the air from my lungs and makes me run. Because, more than anything, what I want is for it to go away. I am not ready to be a father. I have nothing to offer: no wisdom, no expertise, no home, no job, no wife. If I wanted to adopt a child, I wouldn’t even qualify. What I’ve got is a great big bag of nothing, and no kid will respect a father like that. This was my chance to start over, to find someone who would defy the odds and love me, to figure out the rest of my life. Now any chance of a clean break is gone, and as a single father I have become, by default, even more pathetic.