Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

I can’t.

There it was, in all its plain, unadorned truth.

I can’t.

As that distressing hour drew to a close — and I finally stopped pacing the floor, and bursting into tears, and telling myself repeatedly that if he’d just turn his phone back on we could solve this (solve — as if this was a problem with a simple solution) — those two words kept tolling in my head like a funeral dirge.

I can’t.

I so wanted answers, so wanted to know how he could, in just a few short hours, go from proclaiming I was the love of his life to ‘I can’t.’ But why look for answers when there is such a painfully evident one in front of you?

I can’t.

No explanations, no entreaties for understanding, not even an attempt to offer me the slightest possibility of hope, a sliver of light behind this wall of resistance.

I can’t.

The door had been slammed shut. Conclusively. Permanently. Try as I could to negotiate with this, the truth was non-negotiable.

I can’t.

My head was reeling. So this is what it must have felt like when that truck slammed into Eric and he was sent into free-fall. The trauma of losing all control of your immediate destiny; of having everything you believed was solid, true, there, pulled away from you. With the result that you are now heading, with great velocity, towards the hardest surface you’ve ever encountered. Eric. My love. How I had wondered, in my darkest moments, if, in those terrible seconds between the initial impact and the landing that twisted his neck and flattened the entire left side of his head, he had the horrible nanosecond realization that he was going to die. That’s the thing about free-fall. Even someone deliberately jumping out of a window must not think that there will be that horrendous impact. Until it actually happens.

I moved away from the hotel window — this jumble of free-fall thoughts spooking me.

But this was free-fall. And the landing would be a hard, despairing one: the return to my old life. The re-entry into a marriage that was lifeless, devoid of love.

The death of hope.

A living death. Based upon the recognition that the prospect of happiness had just been extinguished again.

Could I race to my car, race up to Bath, run to his front door, pound on it until he answered, fling myself in his arms, tell him we had to act upon all that we knew and felt for each other, fend off his angry wife, and convince him to drive off into the night with me?

I can’t.

Now that was me talking.

I can’t. I want to make a scene. I want to beg him to reconsider. I can’t. Not just because I know it wouldn’t change anything. But also because, quite simply, I can’t.

With this realization came more tears. I had not cried like this since the police told me about Eric. But now the anguish was underscored by twenty years of life, in which real love had been absent.

The death of hope.

I moved over to the sofa, oblivious to the fact that there were no lights on in this room; that I was alone in the dark. I replayed everything that had happened since Friday. Every remembered conversation, every story we told each other, the first time he touched my arm, that moment in the Public Gardens when he first took my hand, the nervous delight he showed when he cast off the dull insurance-man clothes, my confession about Eric, his confession about Sarah, the dawning shared realization that we were falling in love, that extraordinary first kiss, the taxi ride to this hotel, the way he promised me to be mine forever when he first entered me, all the proclamations of love and excited future plans.

And then.

The death of hope.

I can’t.

I wish I could dismiss it all as a fever, a virus, to which I briefly succumbed. But I knew it to be so concrete, so authentic, so rooted in reality. That made it even more unbearable. If it had been just some gushing, crazed romance. But this was it. The connection that I so privately longed for; the great love story I so wanted to have in the time remaining for me. To have been given a passionate glimpse of this new life — to have been told this was my future reality — and then to have had the whole magnificent edifice decimated only moments after it seemed so secure.

I now wanted to be furious, to turn my grief into pure undistilled rage. But I’ve never been able to do anger at such a vehement level. More tellingly, this was a man I was certain that I loved — and who’d shown me, in turn, the most extraordinary love. So there was just the most profound sense of loss. And of hurt.

The room seemed to grow darker. I felt completely immobile. The fact that he had also left his new jacket and glasses behind — he couldn’t have been more absolute about divesting himself of the man he had decided to transform himself into, and return to the self and the life he didn’t want. A stunned rationality had taken hold of me — which I knew would soon be overtaken by even more acute grief as the reality of what had just happened truly gained purchase.

Bing.

Oh my God. A text! He’s texting me. Telling me he’s made the mistake of his life, and is en route back to me right now.

I scrambled for the phone. There was a text. It was from Lucy. I felt myself get shaky again. Tears welling up in my eyes. A cry working its way up my throat. So much for that alleged moment of clinical calm. I wiped my eyes and peered at the screen.

Just wanted to check in and get an update. You have me guessing! The apartment is yours when you want it. See you tomorrow. I am so envious. And that’s from only surmising what your news is! Love — Lucy

Before I could break down again I dialed her number. Lucy answered on the second ring.

‘Hey there!’ she said, her tone intimating that she knew romance — that commodity we both lacked — had come into my life. ‘So can you tell all now?’

‘I need a friend,’ I said, my voice lifeless, flat.

‘Oh God, I thought—’

‘That the news was good? It was. But—’

I broke off, forcing myself not to break down.

‘Oh, Laura. ’ she said, sounding so sad.

‘I’m still in Boston. I have to go get my car, which is over by the airport. But I could be with you in about three and a half hours.’

‘You get here whenever. I’ll be up and waiting.’

I went into the bathroom and threw some water in my face, managing to avoid looking at myself in the mirror. Then I went into the bedroom and quickly folded up the leather jacket — dealing with it the way I had dealt with a leather jacket that belonged to Eric, which he’d bought in a Cambridge Army and Navy shop and which I had to fold up after he died. Though I gave away most of his other clothes I kept his jacket. Because he so loved it and wore it all seasons except for the sticky height of summer. Because it too was an old Air Force jacket. Like the one which I was now folding and stuffing into my little suitcase as quickly as I could. Then, pocketing his glasses, I pulled up the telescopic handle of my suitcase and headed to the door, not wanting to look back in case the tears were triggered again.

I headed out the hotel entrance and to the street. There were a couple of cabs outside. I asked one of the drivers how much it would cost to get me to the Fairfield Inn Airport Hotel. He said around thirty bucks, plus three-seventy-five for the tunnel and, of course, there was the tip. Forty dollars. I don’t spend that sort of money on luxuries like taxis. So I crossed the street, entered Park Station, and at a cost of two dollars I made it to the airport half an hour later. Then I had to wait twenty minutes for the hotel courtesy coach — which stopped at all the terminals and didn’t deposit me at the hotel until around seven-thirty p.m.

My car was in the lot, exactly where I parked it just two days ago. Loading my suitcase in the trunk I thought: I am a different person than the one who got out of that vehicle just over forty-eight hours ago. But another part of me simultaneously reasoned: The only thing that has changed in your life is that you now have a huge sorrow to carry forth with you.