Дуглас Кеннеди: Five Days

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.

‘My wife. She needs a scan. Some spinal thing. Nothing life threatening. More a curvature thing. They had a space here before Midcoast in Brunswick. So. ’

I glanced down at the chart I held in my hand. A chart listing my next five appointments before lunch break. Muriel Copeland was not listed there. Sometimes there is a God.

Richard saw me check my chart.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘she’s having the scan done now.’

‘I hope she’ll be OK. How are you?’

He gave me the most cursory of shrugs, then looked up at me again, taking me in this time.

‘You look wonderful,’ he finally said.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I was so horrified and saddened to hear about Billy.’

He bit down on his lower lip and bent his head again. Then, in a near whisper:

‘Thank you.’

‘I don’t know how you cope with such a terrible—’

‘I don’t talk about that anymore.’

His tone was abrupt, like a door slammed shut.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘I heard you’re no longer living in Damariscotta.’

‘And where did you hear that?’

‘It’s a small state.’

Silence. Then he said:

‘I made a mistake. A big mistake.’

‘So it goes.’

‘I think about it all the time.’

‘So do I.’

Silence.

His coffee finished dispensing. He let the cup sit there.

‘So you live in Portland now?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘Happier.’

Silence. I checked my watch. I said:

‘My next patient awaits me. So. ’

‘I’ve never stopped—’

I held up my hand.

‘That’s the past tense.’

Silence. He hung his head.

‘I wish you well, Richard.’

And I walked away.

I ran when I got home that night. I ran the next morning. I ran and ran and ran. Six days a week, five miles a day. Rarely heading out in the evening — unless the old distress was creeping in. Always up before dawn. Always heading across Casco Bay, careening my way through assorted neighborhoods, encircling the Portland lighthouse, saluting that septuagenarian fellow jogger with a quick wave, then pushing my way towards home.

Home.

The realtor called me last week, informing me the owners of the apartment — a retired couple who now live most of the time in Florida — needed to sell the place. And they needed a fast sale. As in, they would be willing to accept $190,000 if I was willing to close on the sale within two months.