Douglas Kennedy - Five Days

‘Now I have to say that I am flattered to be having my own Tetron Azure Blue accompanying you to Berlin. And if you need a refill while there.?’

‘I can always pay for it,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Ben said.

‘Here’s my email address,’ I said, writing it down for Norm.

‘And here’s my card,’ he said, all smiles. ‘Drop in any time you’re next in Boston.’

I smiled tightly.

Once back in the car, Ben noted:

‘My mother has an admirer.’

To which Sally added:

‘And even though the shop’s a little too deliberately weird and I’d get rid of that goatee if I was him, he’s kind of cool.’

‘I’m not in the market,’ I said.

‘You will be,’ Sally said.

‘Oh, please,’ I said.

‘All right, live the life of a nun then,’ Sally said. ‘All pure and sad.’

‘Haven’t you noticed,’ Ben said, ‘Mom doesn’t do sad much anymore.’

But an hour later I was very much alone. We got Ben to Logan just seventy minutes before his flight. As rushed as it was to get him checked in and over to the security checkpoint, one good thing about the lack of time was the fact that it made saying goodbye less tortured (for me anyway). Ben hugged his sister. He hugged me and promised to email as soon as he was settled in and online tomorrow. Seeing the tears in my eyes he hugged me again and said:

‘I guess you could say this is a rite of passage for us all.’

Then he headed off, turning back once after he cleared the boarding-pass check to give us a fast wave. A moment later he headed into the security maze. Other passengers crowded in behind him. And I had to cope with the realization that I would not be seeing my son until Easter of next year.

Sally had prearranged to meet a group of friends that night in Boston. I’d offered to drop her off at the cafй on Newbury Street where she was due to hook up with them, but was relieved when she insisted on taking public transport into the city. Newbury Street still had too many shadows for me.

‘You going to be OK?’ she asked as we parted in front of the international terminal.

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘And anytime you want to escape Orono for the bright lights of Portland. ’

‘You’ll be seeing me often, Mom. Especially because of your cool apartment.’

Then, with a final hug, she jumped the bus to the nearby T-station. She waved again as the vehicle headed out into the early-evening traffic. Then she too was gone.

A few hours later I walked back into my apartment. All the way north I was dreading the moment when I first stepped inside, shutting the door behind me, thinking: I am very much by myself. Though I had no desire whatsoever to be back in the place once called ‘our house’, returning to this empty apartment tonight was more than a little hard. Ben was correct: this was another rite of passage. And life is, verily, like this. The ties that bind are inevitably picked apart — by biology, by change, by disaffection, by the inexorable forward momentum within which we all travel. With the result that, at some juncture, you do come home to an empty home. And its silence is as huge as it is chilling.

The next morning I awoke late (by which I mean nine a.m.) to a text from Ben:

I’m here. Jet-lagged and weirded out. Sharing a room with a crazy sculptor from Sarajevo. Hey, it’s not Kansas, Toto. Love — Ben

There was also, surprisingly, an email from the famous Norm of Norm’s Art Supplies; a rather witty missive in which he hoped I wouldn’t consider him a stalker for dispatching this communiquй to me, and that he isn’t in the habit of hitting on customers (let alone mothers of customers), but he was wondering out loud now if we might be able to meet up for dinner the next time I found myself in Boston. Or I could meet him somewhere between Portland and Boston like Portsmouth (‘the only non-fascist town in New Hampshire’). He went on to explain that he was divorced with a sixteen-year-old daughter named Iris, and ‘an ex-wife who married a mutual funds guy as a way of refuting all those bohemian years with yours truly’, and that he wasn’t going to tell me that his favorite color was black, his favorite Beatle was John, the person in history he identified with wasn’t Jackson Pollock (‘I don’t drive drunk’), and this was the offer of a dinner, no more. ‘Or maybe movie and a dinner, if there’s something interesting playing at the Brattle Street. the last great revival house holdout.’

I smiled a bit while reading the email. He did have a nice, self-deprecating comic touch. But the mention of the Brattle Street Cinema was like the mention of Newbury Street yesterday: a remembrance which triggered a flash of sadness that, though dissipated, still had, all these months later, the ability to unsettle me; to remind me that, as much as I felt myself ever freer from the bonds of despair, the grief could still reassert itself out of nowhere.

There was only one solution to such an unsettling moment: a run. I squinted out my window at the day outside. Overcast, dark, but the impending rain had yet to fall. Five minutes later I was in my running clothes and shoes, pounding the pavement, each stride an attempt to distance myself further from the heartache that, like a stubborn stain, simply would not wash clean.

When I returned home from my five-mile cascade I sent a brief note to Norm:

I’m flattered. but am not in a place to even entertain the idea of a nice dinner with a clearly nice and interesting man. When and if that changes, I’ll send you an email. though, by that time, some smart woman will have snapped you up.

Was I flirting with him? Of course. But I also knew that, for the foreseeable, all I could do was keep running.

I was running when I saw him. Running down a corridor of the radiography unit, having just X-rayed a fifty-nine-year-old construction worker whose left leg had been trapped under a falling steel beam (it was a mess). I had an ultrasound to do on a young mother (seventeen years old) with a suspected ectopic pregnancy. That was three minutes from now. Life in our unit is very much a time-and-motion study, an endless attempt to keep to the very tight schedule we work under, punctuated by emergency cases like the poor man who’d just arrived with a limb that had been virtually pulverized. But three minutes meant time for a much-needed coffee, though not enough time to run back to the staff room and use the very decent Nespresso machine that the six of us in radiography all chipped in $35 each to buy. So I stopped at the vending machine in the hallway that runs between the X-ray, ultrasound, and scanning suites. The public waiting room is also just off this corridor, which means you often run into patients and their families in front of the vending machines. Given how little time I had — and how slow that coffee machine was — I sighed an inward groan when I saw a man putting money in its slot. From a distance I could see he was in his fifties, gray-haired, old-style glasses, a zip-up golf jacket in a mid-blue fabric. Hearing my hurried footsteps he looked up. And that’s when I caught sight of Richard Copeland.

He blanched at first sight of me. Looking beyond shocked. Mortified. I too was stopped in my tracks. I immediately took in just how much he had returned to looking like the man I first met that Friday at the hotel check-in. Only now the chatty charm he had displayed from the outset had been replaced by an aura of world-weariness, of resignation. As befits a man who had lost so much. Most especially his son. He met my stunned gaze for a moment, then turned away.

‘Hello, Richard,’ I said.

He said nothing.

‘What brings you to my corner of the world?’ I asked.