Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

This morning there were just two other runners out by the lighthouse, including a man of around seventy whom I seem to inevitably pass every morning. He’s highly fit, his face as taut as piano wire, always dressed in the same gray sweat pants and a Harvard sweatshirt. As he jogged by me today he gave me his usual brief wave of the hand (which I always reciprocate with a smile). I have no idea who this man is. Nor have I made any attempt to find out, as he, in turn, has never chosen to discover my name and particulars. I sense that, like me, he prefers to keep it that way. Just as I also appreciate the fact that, for a few seconds every morning, I have this silent greeting with this individual about whom I know absolutely nothing. As he knows nothing about me. We are passing objects with no knowledge of each other’s story; of the accumulated complexities of our respective lives; of whether we are with someone or alone; of the way we will individually negotiate the trajectory of the day ahead; of whether we think life is treating us well or harshly at this given moment in recorded time.

Or, in my case, the fact that, ninety minutes from now, I will be in a lawyer’s office, signing the legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.

The legal agreement that will trigger the end of my marriage.

Yes, it’s legal — in that two lawyers have negotiated it, and once it is signed by both parties it will be legally binding. And the split of the shared assets we have has not been contentious. But the word ‘agreement’ hints at a reasonable parting of the ways. Sadly this has been anything but an amicable parting — as Dan, all these months later, still cannot get his head around the fact that I ended the marriage; that I left him because I was unhappy and felt our relationship was terminal, dead; that, as he put it during one of the many moments when he pleaded for a second chance, ‘If you were actually leaving me for someone else at least I could understand. But to leave me because you just want to leave me. ’

He never found out about how I was going to leave him for someone else, or how broken I was in the wake of all that suddenly not happening. The very fact that he never registered the emotional slide I had slipped into thereafter. well, that was our marriage. And one which I continued to accept in the initial months afterwards, largely because I was still carrying so much injurious sadness. Going through the motions of life, but coping with the most aching sort of loss.

My children, on the other hand, quickly registered the distress I was in. On the morning that I arrived back home before dawn to see Dan off to his new job — and found myself in tears at the realization, I should not be back here with this man — I was found three hours later by Sally, passed out in the porch chair in which I had parked myself; sleep overtaking me as I gazed upwards into the limitlessness of space.

‘Mom, Mom?’

Sally nudged me back into consciousness. I woke, feeling stiff and unwell. When she asked me what I was doing out in the cold, all I could do was bury my head in my daughter’s shoulder and tell her I loved her. Usually Sally would have reacted with adolescent horror at such a show of parental emotion — especially as I had to fight to maintain my composure when hugging her. But instead of displaying sixteen-year-old disdain, she put her arms around me and said:

‘You OK?’

‘Trying to be.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, nothing.’

‘Then why are you out here in the cold?’

‘That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for years.’

Sally pulled back and looked at me long and hard, and finally asked:

‘Are you going to leave him?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘And I’m not stupid. Are you going to leave him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t stay for me.’

Hugging me again tightly she then left for school.

An hour or so later I had to head back south to Portland and get Ben’s paints into the hands of his professor. Heading south meant passing through the town of Bath. I still had Richard’s business card, and had earlier unpacked his leather jacket from my suitcase and put it in the trunk of my car. I also still had his glasses in my shoulder bag. No, I wasn’t going to do anything dramatic like drop them both off personally at his office. Though I also toyed with the idea of putting them both in a box and mailing it to him with a simple one-line note, ‘I wish you well’, I instinctually knew that the best thing to do now was to do nothing. So I got to Portland and dropped the paints in with the receptionist at the Museum of Art, who assured me that she’d get them to Professor Lathrop. En route back to the car I texted Ben, telling him the Tetron Azure Blue had been delivered to the museum and should be with him tonight. Then I passed one of the many homeless men who always seem to line Congress Street in Portland and always ask for a handout so they can eat that day. The guy I saw just a few steps from the museum looked around fifty. Though he was unshaven and clearly downcast I could see from the soft way he asked if I could help him out that he was someone whom life had banged up badly. The morning had turned cold and gray. He was just wearing a light nylon jacket that wasn’t providing much in the way of insulation. Walking on to my car, I retrieved the leather jacket from my trunk, then returned to where the man was crouching by a lamppost and handed it to him.

‘This might keep you warmer,’ I said.

He looked at me, bemused.

‘You’re giving me this?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘But why?’

‘Because you need it.’

He took the jacket, and immediately tried it on.

‘Hey, it fits,’ he said, even though it actually swam a bit on his lanky frame.

‘Good luck,’ I said.

‘Any chance I could hit you for a couple of bucks as well?’

I reached into my bag and handed him a $10 bill.

‘You’re my angel of mercy,’ he said.

‘That’s quite the compliment.’

‘And you deserve it. Hope you get happier, ma’am.’

That comment gave me pause for thought all the way back home. Was I that transparent? Did I look that crushed? Though the man’s observation got me anxious, it made me force myself to present a cheerful face to my hospital colleagues when I returned to work the next morning. By the end of the week Dr Harrild also discreetly asked if there was ‘something wrong’.

‘Have I done anything wrong?’ I asked.

‘Hardly, hardly,’ he said, slightly taken aback by my tone. ‘But you’ve seemed a bit preoccupied recently. And I’m just a little concerned.’

So was I, as I hadn’t slept more than three hours a night since returning from Boston, and was beginning to feel the instability that accompanies several nights of insomnia. But I also understood the message behind Dr Harrild’s voice of concern: Whatever is going on in your life that is so clearly vexing you, you can’t start letting it affect your work.

I called my primary physician that evening — a local woman named Dr Jane Bancroft who is very much an old-school local doctor: straight talking, no nonsense. When I phoned her office and told her receptionist it was a matter of some urgency — and could she ring my cellphone, and not the land line — I got a message back five minutes later, saying the doctor could see me the next morning if that would work.

I changed plans and decided to drive over to Farmington and spend the day with Ben there. Texting my son and saying I would now arrive around one p.m., I made it to Dr Bancroft’s office, as arranged, at nine a.m. — after another night where sleep only overtook me around five. Dr Bancroft — a woman of about sixty, petite, wiry, formidable — took one look at me and asked: