Surviving Goodbye Page 2

  She glared at me, her eyes, caked in dark-eyeliner, narrowing into the same hatred I should’ve harbored for the woman that had betrayed me. And lately, that seemed to feel more inevitable than ever—the hatred. Pure fucking hatred for what she had done, for dying, and then leaving me with this angry, hormonal monster that didn’t know the truth.

  “Forget it,” she huffed, nearly tipping her chair over as she stormed away from the table.

  I tried to forget it, I really did.

  Once she left for school, I walked upstairs and stood in the doorway to the guest room, which had been converted into something of a storage space for all of Karen’s things.

  A little more than a year ago, after she had died, I had moved it all into this space so that I could clear mine. There had been some kind of madness-inspired reason for it, and it went something like this: I only wanted to deal with the cheating, lying, and betraying memory of my wife on my terms, not hers. My terms were every Tuesday, which sounded easy enough, but it was still fifty-two times per year.

  At last, I heaved a deep breath and entered, closing the door behind me. I stepped over to a pile of boxes next to the bed that remained covered in clothes—her wedding dress was buried closer to the bottom of the pile, I knew—and located the right box almost immediately. I flipped the lid open and rummaged through letters and cassette tapes from our dating days, and then I found it. One of two VHS cassettes from our wedding day. When I pulled it out of the box, I collapsed against the wall and closed my eyes, wondering why today, of all days, needed to be the day for me to watch this video proof of the day it had begun. Karen’s big lie, the bullshit about love and all of those things that I had believed would last until the end of time.

  “Whore,” I muttered under my breath, and that word ignited my determination to start the process that I should’ve begun the moment she was buried.

  I left the guest room and all of its evidence and memories, with this single cassette in my hand, and I headed downstairs, all the way to the basement where Lena now lived. There was a bedroom and a large rec room. She would usually only rise to the main level for the bathroom, food and other necessities.

  Despite all of the furniture being old and worn out, and the television being one of those old-fashioned square-shaped projection flat-screens, Lena didn’t complain. She seemed to like her mini-apartment, and the privacy and freedom it afforded her meant she could have friends and boyfriends over without risk of interruption. For me, it meant being able to keep a closer eye on the young woman I had raised, the one who wasn’t my biological daughter but still meant enough to me that I would severely injure anyone who tried to harm her.

  I came down the worn-carpet stairs to the rec room, which consisted of a brown-fabric sofa and matching loveseat, a square faux-wood coffee table from my college apartment that had seen better days. Clothes, books, Lena’s tablet computer, and a potpourri of random papers littered the space.

  I remembered the basement being larger for some reason, which made me think that maybe I afforded Lena a little too much space, since I couldn’t remember the last time I had come down for a visit.

  The projection television was against the far wall with an entertainment unit built around it. Back when Karen and I had first moved in together, this unit had been a thing of beauty, something our friends had marveled at and expressed envy that we could find such a beautiful piece of art. Now it gathered dust.

  I found the VCR (another piece of state-of-the-art technology from several decades ago) on one of the lower shelves and fed the VHS cassette into its wide opening. I pressed Play then retreated to the brown sofa, laying across its cushions despite something rigid poking into my lower back.

  On the screen, the camera panned across the attendees at our wedding as the bridesmaids began their march down the aisle. Our guests had filled a moderately large church; most of those same people had attended Karen’s funeral. In my flawed memory, I imagined they had taken a similar seating plan the second time they had gathered. The eerie thought caused me to shift my position on the sofa, and that rigid annoyance that poked at me from between the cushions rubbed against me again, only worse.

  “Fuck,” I groaned, reaching back and wrapping my fingers around what surely had to be one of those LED flashlights. I tossed it on the table with everything else without looking at it, too focused on the bride that had entered through the big wooden doors and was now walking toward the camera. The crowd rose to its feet. I heard gasps, even on the poor quality VHS tape, and felt the muscles tighten in my jaw. The crowd was right to gasp; Karen embodied everything beautiful.

  I watched the video several times, always starting with the most professional of intentions. I wanted to find a face, a clue, something in the crowd that could point me in the right direction, start my search for Lena’s biological father with a great lead. Although I had no reason to think the man who had impregnated my wife had come to the wedding, I—

  The doorbell interrupted my fourth or fifth pass through the forty-five minutes of wedding footage. Placing the VCR on pause, I ran upstairs as the doorbell chimed a second time. On the other side of that front door, I found a delivery person—a woman, a young one, with brown eyes and light-colored hair tucked up into a company branded baseball hat. She was wearing a blue and orange uniform and holding an iPad encased in protective rubber.

  “Delivery for Elena Fitch,” she said, scrolling through her tablet.

  “I can sign for it,” I said, eager to return to the wedding video. A thought had crept into my head, but I couldn’t manage to identify it.

  “I need to see some ID,” the delivery woman said, raising an interested and curious eyebrow.

  My eyes moved up the orange stripe that ran the length of her sleeve then veered off her arm once I reached her chest. I read the stitching on her breast—Veronica. Odd name for such a young woman, but one you’d never forget.

  “Sir?” she asked, and of course she had decided to stop paying so much attention to that damn iPad while I read and re-read her stitch.

  I looked up, fully aware that she probably assumed I was staring at her breasts, still perfect with their late-twenties firmness and size.

  “I need the ID.” She pointed over her shoulder with her thumb, indicating her blue and orange delivery van. “You get your ID, I’ll get your wife’s package.”

  I shook my head. “Elena’s my daughter.”

  Veronica allowed her stare to linger, then forced a grin. “Of course.”

  She walked to the delivery van, and I headed into the kitchen for my wallet. I noticed that Lena hadn’t tidied up after this morning’s breakfast exchange, but I didn’t let that bother me so much as the fact that I had forgotten to call in sick at work. Again.

  “Shit.”

  I returned to the front door with my wallet as Veronica hauled over a package roughly half the size of a carry-on suitcase. On one side, it said: Liberator.

  “Here’s my ID,” I said, wondering what was inside that compact box.

  Veronica placed it on the front porch, then grabbed my ID and started swiping and tapping on her iPad. My eyes remained low, crawling over to the plain package. The other side read: Wedge/Ramp Combo: Greatest invention for sex since the bed.

  “Fuck me,” I whispered, wondering what kind of impression this sex toy delivery was leaving on this pretty young delivery woman.

  “Uh, pardon me, Mr… Fitch?”

  I shook my head, aware of the car driving down the street. It belonged to Paul, one of my neighbors. He managed one of the bank branches, the Wayne County Credit Union on Woodward. He was also nosy and annoying. I wondered if he knew what Liberator.com was, or if he could read the smaller writing about the wedge combo’s accolades.

  “Can I sign?” I asked, hoping to speed up the process here. “I’ve got some, uh, stuff to get back to.”

  Veronica smirked, then glanced elaborately at the package by our feet. “I’m sure you do.” She handed me the iPad. “Sign
in the box.”

  “Pen?”

  She frowned. “It’s an iPad, Mr. Fitch. Use your finger, stay within the lines.”

  I scribbled my name with my fingertip, handed the iPad back to her and reached for the Liberator box.

  “Sir, your ID,” she said, extending my driver’s license as I hurried the box inside the house, in case Paul decided to make another pass down the street. And then I snatched my driver’s license back. “Enjoy that thing.”

  “It’s not mine,” I reminded her.

  Veronica smiled, turned, and walked away. I watched her for a bit, but just as I started to close the door, she glanced back at me and caught me staring. So I shut the door once and for all, locking it and wondering if I could expect the police—between ogling her breasts and that long stare just now.

  The video.

  Abandoning the Liberator delivery, I hurried back into the basement and hit Play again. It didn’t talk long for a face to stand out, reminding me of the scattered thought that had crossed my mind earlier. One particular conversation was jumping out at me—the day Karen had passed away, the day she confessed her infidelity.

  “…Ask Jamie… my letter…”

  Her brother was Jamie, the Best Man at the wedding (Karen had asked, I had obliged). In the video, he had tears in his red, puffy eyes. He loved his sister almost as much as I had, which justified having him next to me that day. My friends understood that decision because they knew what Karen had meant to me.

  “Jamie,” I said, smacking the table and noticing for the first time that the LED flashlight I had pulled from the sofa hadn’t been a light at all, but an, um, er, vibrator.

  “Ugh.” I thought I might vomit.

  Chapter 2

  That final day in the hospital, the day Karen experienced a brief half-hour or so of extreme lucidity. I remembered it now, but that half-hour or so had been buried deep down in the mud of my past for the last year. Now, standing at the kitchen counter, the phone pressed to my ear, line ringing, I closed my eyes and tried to bring that day back to the surface. All I remembered was, “Elena’s not yours.”

  Or something like that. And there had obviously been more to that conversation, but the little bits and pieces were becoming clearer. And just as that conversation had killed me back then, its memory killed me now.

  “Tom Preston here,” the voice announced on the phone.

  My eyes snapped open. “Oh, hey, Tom, it’s Elliot.”

  “Elliot,” he breathed. “Where in the heck are you?”

  “Not feeling well, Tom. I…” I sighed.

  “Listen, this is getting to be a little much. I mean, I understand that you’ve gone through a lot with…” Now it was Tom’s turn to sigh. “Elliot, have you given much thought to whether you should continue with full-time employment here?”

  I massaged my temples, a little disappointed in myself for not remembering to make the call into the office. These days—the days where I woke up on some kind of personal mission to hate Karen, or find the truth, or both—were always bad, and they seemed to be getting worse, more frequent lately.

  “Elliot, you’re a good guy. But you’ve become something of a liability to the team. When you come in tomorrow, you should really prepare for some bad news as far as your career with us is concerned.”

  All I could say was, “Thank you, Tom.” And then I hung up and sprinted for the front door, my keys clanging like I had a pocket full of change.

  At this point, I didn’t care very much about whether Tom disciplined me or fired me tomorrow. Today, I needed to track down Elena’s biological father, the man who had destroyed my marriage and my image of my dead wife.

  The drive to Jamie’s West Bloomfield lakeside estate took a little more than twenty-five minutes. I enjoyed the traffic, too. Enjoyed the time it gave me to think about how I would approach Jamie, how I would go about asking my awkward question. His love for Karen had been overshadowed only by mine. And despite my current rage toward his sister and her infidelity, I really didn’t want to tarnish his memories like she had done to mine. This was my secret.

  Shore Drive was one of the more-exclusive little streets in the area. It stretched along the shore of Upper Straits Lake, and all of these houses (maybe half a dozen in total) were brand new, gorgeous, and proof that even in a dying town like Detroit, an abundance of wealth remained.

  Jamie’s place—the one he shared with his wife and two perfect teenage kids who enjoyed private schools, private music lessons, and their own private ponies at some private ranch a few miles north—was definitely the nicest, with its stone facing and stamped concrete half-moon driveway. At least in my opinion it was. The triple-car garage had cable and air-conditioning; the master bedroom consisted of more square-footage than my entire house.

  As I stepped up to the front door and poked at the doorbell, it struck me that Jamie may not even be home. It took a minute or so before the footsteps on the other side of the door reached me. They sounded heavy, but that didn’t mean anything.

  As the door opened, I held my breath like I always did. Jamie was the dude-version of my wife, complete with facial hair, Adam’s apple, and a deep voice… in many ways he was a pretty boy (he had her eye lashes) but his aggressive business sense meant he would make an ugly woman.

  “Elliot,” Jamie said, his sad smile pitying me and welcoming me at the same time. He opened his arms to me, and we embraced. He was still my one and only brother.

  We entered the house and retreated to his office, a large two-story room at the front of the house that overlooked the tall, mature trees lining his exclusive street. We sat in opposite leather armchairs, a table between us as we faced the impotent fireplace (early September in this part of Michigan was still summer-warm). I wondered if maybe the big oak desk at the big window might have offered a better view than this. Even when I shifted my attention to him, the view wasn’t much better; now I stared at his vulnerable, half-sad face.

  After the small talk that always accompanied our visits, he asked me what brought me out to this end of town, the nice end where I didn’t really belong, just as I hadn’t really “belonged” with Karen.

  I took a deep breath, glanced desperately at that desk again, then let the words slip right out in one massive, run-on sentence. “The day Karen died I was in her hospital room with Elena and she was incredibly lucid and strong and talkative and she said something to me about a letter and a few other things and mentioned your name, she said ‘Ask Jamie’ or something like that, and I buried that conversation so deep down because I haven’t been able to breathe or function or live during the past year without her but today it struck me that maybe I should’ve mentioned this to you, maybe I should’ve come sooner and asked about that letter or about something and I don’t know, Jamie, I don’t fucking know, does this make any sense to you?”

  Deep breath. My lips felt cold and starved. I imagined they were blue.

  Jamie and I stared at each other for a long time, minutes at least. And as my heart rate slowed, returning to its normal, steady beat, I recognized that he had either not heard a word I had just spoken, or he was clueless as to what I was trying to say in the first place. So I took a deep breath and tried again.

  “Jamie, the day she died, she mentioned that I needed to see you. For a letter.” I closed my eyes, disappointed that I hadn’t thought of all this sooner, like fourteen months ago sooner. The stone-cold look on Jamie’s face suggested I had lost my mind, and maybe I had. Maybe Karen had meant something else entirely. Or maybe in those last hours of her life, the medication and stress of her impending death had caused her to make shit up. Lucidity was a matter of perception, and mine would have been vulnerable to the illusion of hope.

  “Maybe it’s all in my head. I’m sorry.” I rubbed my hands down my face, aware that losing my job, risking my relationship with Lena this past year, the depression, hatred, and everything else that followed Karen’s goodbye had probably been for nothing.

  At
last, Jamie blinked and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said in a long, drawn out breath. He looked a little deflated.

  I shrugged, swallowing my disappointment. I felt like someone might feel after a favorite team lost in overtime—the buildup of testosterone culminating with a shot of sudden, world-ending emotional devastation. The air in the room felt heavier with each breath, dead in my lungs, weighing down on my chest.

  Jamie and I talked about setting up a dinner, a barbecue once the kids were settled into their new school-year routines, but soon enough that the Lake water remained warm enough for a quick dip. I agreed, then I stood up and apologized for taking up so much of his time.

  As he walked me out to my Chrysler, he asked, “What were you looking for, exactly? I mean, what good were you expecting to find in a letter that Karen would’ve written in those final weeks before she checked in at the Seasons?”

  The way he asked his question, I knew the letter existed and I knew he remembered it. Maybe it was the way his jaw seemed slack, heavy with its own guilt. And maybe compulsive lying was a hereditary problem with his side of the family.

  I opened my car door and glanced at him for dramatic effect before sliding into the driver’s seat. “It’s not for me, Jamie. This is all for Lena. Something Karen said.”

  If his question hadn’t offered enough confirmation by itself, his wide-eyed stare certainly did. He gave an eventual nod, sending me on my way. I offered a wave through the windshield as I drove off, then got lost in the unanswered questions left by my visit. His refusal to admit to the letter’s existence had only one explanation: Jamie had read whatever it was that Karen had written for me. And for some unknown reason, he didn’t want me to read those final words.

  Since all my activities this morning had only led to more questions, I drove to the office instead of my house. I parked out front in one of the Visitor spaces because I didn’t expect Tom to keep me any longer than what was absolutely recommended by Human Resources. I gave our receptionist a quick nod, then proceeded straight to Tom’s office.