Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

When I got up and returned to where we had first gathered, they were gone — all of them. I crossed the meadow back and forth calling out to Jason in a stage whisper, as if I might wake someone. But they had departed, he and his friends, off to drink at someone’s house.

It was as I walked home alone through the warm darkness of that summer night, in the nearly perfect quiet of our neighborhood, that I vowed never to let that happen again. Never to put myself in a position to be left by a man. It was one of those youthful promises you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.

That’s what kept coming back to me in the numbness of the afternoon after Alec’s call: how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control.

A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.

The radio station at BC, where Michael had DJ’d, aired a tribute show, playing the music he had championed. Alec, my mother, Caleigh, and I listened to it together in the living room in Walcott. Caleigh had come to stay with us at the house for a couple of days before the memorial. There were a hundred things to do, and Alec and I did more or less all of them, working together like the well-honed team we sometimes were. My mother, who never got sick, came down with a heavy cold. Her friends Suzanne and Dorothy brought meals to the house for us, and arranged the food for after the service.

It seemed to me the wrong time to announce my own news that Paul and I had decided to get married, which I’d been waiting to tell my mother in person at Christmas, but Paul disagreed and said she would want to know, which once I reflected on it seemed right — to give her that. The morning before we flew back to California, I found her upstairs in her bedroom, writing thank-you notes to the people who had sent their condolences. She cried again when I told her — for me, and for Michael — but I was glad that I had done it.

I gave myself a few days back at home before going in to see my clients again. It was hard at first. And it stayed hard for months. To sit there quietly, hands folded in my lap, listening to them elaborate on their troubles. An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That’s what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn’t offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients’ lives weren’t works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgotten, and then repeated — distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.

It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn’t do her much good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.

I never did that for Michael. I never gave up my belief in a secret, a truth lodged in the past, which if he could only experience and accept would release him. I thought of it as that moment of his in the woods with my father and Kelsey and me. An awkward teenager living in a town he loathed, on a walk he didn’t want to take, trudging through his unhappiness as adolescents do. And then through no will of his own, as we came to that clearing and paused, sensing all around him a malignancy he couldn’t name, a violence he had to escape. A vision of evil.

When Alec told me what Michael had said to him on their last night, about feeling guilty for going back to England without somehow warning us, I thought to myself: Yes, that was it, the moment he needed to confess and let go of. As if it were that simple.

He’d sounded so desperate on the phone from Maine. And yet I hadn’t said what I should have to Alec — that it had gone too far, too quickly, and that he had to stop it. I’d kept believing in the one catharsis. As Alec did, and my mother, in her own manner, and even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead. I believed that before. But now I know it’s true. It’s what he kept trying to tell us.

Seth’s sister, Valerie, picked us up at the airport. I greeted her from the backseat as the two of us piled in with our luggage.

“So you exist,” she said. “Welcome.” She had the same fine black hair as her brother, only longer and with a slight wave to it, and the same dark green eyes. “Don’t worry about Luke there,” she said, “he’s out cold.” The head of the toddler strapped into the safety seat beside me rested back and away from his little body, a clear streak of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth.

Beyond the terminal and the car-rental lots, the view opened onto a flat and nearly empty plain, an expanse of scrub brush stretching either side of the highway. The low clouds of a winter sky met the outline of foothills on the far horizon. Valerie sped down the passing lane, cruising by trucks and utility vans as she and Seth chatted over the sound of hit radio turned low. After a while billboards appeared, followed by gasworks and factories, and mile after mile of single-story warehouses built along empty access roads. Eventually I could see trees and the beginnings of neighborhoods, the Denver skyscrapers still off in the distance.

Seth’s parents lived in a large ranch house on a street of ranch houses set back on one-acre lots lined with cottonwoods. His mother met us at the door wearing a white blouse and a necklace of braided pink coral.

“There now,” she said, placing her hand gently on my arm. “I finally get to lay eyes on you.”

I’d expected a friendly reception from her, in particular, given what Seth had told me, but the warmth of it came as a surprise. She led us onto the sunporch, where she’d put out cookies and iced tea. In the yard beyond, a blue tarpaulin sagging with unmelted snow covered a swimming pool rimmed in white concrete. There were well-tended juniper hedges and a flagstone path leading down the middle of the lawn to a creek. All of it appeared to me as most everything had for the last many weeks, as a still photograph of a place now vanished.

Seth’s mother and sister asked me anodyne questions about what parts of Colorado I had visited, and about the winter weather in New York, any topic other than my family. I answered politely, watching Luke roll on the floor with his grandmother’s terrier.

Since Seth and I had met, I had wanted to come here and meet his family, but for the last two months it had been hard to want anything. It will be good for us, Seth had said, encouraging me. It’s time. And so I had come.

After our snack, I went to nap in the room we’d been given on the opposite end of the house from his parents’ room. It wasn’t Seth’s. He hadn’t grown up in the house. It was a room meant for guests. Plush beige carpet, a chaise longue under the window, two sinks at a double vanity between two sets of louvered closet doors. I fell asleep as soon as I laid my head on the pillow.

An hour or more later, Seth woke me with a kiss on the forehead. He rubbed my chest and kissed me again on the lips.