The One Who Got Away: A Novel (18 page)

She felt Henry’s body behind her,
strong and solid. She had pushed in so close to him that she could feel his
breath rising and falling behind her, along her spine, and her breath began to
match his. She wondered then how long it had been since someone had listened to
her tell a story, without interrupting.  

“So what did you do?” Henry
asked.

“I started to pack, to gather the
few items I had left on the front porch, in the kitchen, in the library. And
that’s when Rodney had returned to the house, from his morning walk. Hank’s
ex-wife took him by the arm, as well. And she sat him on the sofa and she began
to speak, and no sooner had she begun talking to him that he sort of collapsed in
on himself. It was a grief unlike any I’ve ever witnessed. First, he sort of
faded and then he combusted inward, like a dying star. He began to shake and he
became very, very small, just shrinking there on the couch. And I went back up
to my room, trying to give him space. I began organizing my things, preparing
to leave. And eventually I went to bed, but at about eleven that same night, I
felt him over me. Rodney. I smelled him. His breath. Whiskey. Cigarettes.”

Henry’s body tensed beneath her.

“No, no, he didn't do anything.
But he was so drunk. And he was so slurred and he kept telling me he loved me
and needed me as his friend and so I did what any twenty-two-year old could
think to do.”

“What was that?”

“I left. Fast. In the middle of
the night. Before he could stop me.”

“Good girl.”

“But first, I walked with Rodney
back to his room, which was spotless and bare, save for the day’s newspaper, a
carton of cigarettes and a tidy chest of drawers. And I talked to him, about
the same things, over and over, and once he had passed out, I pulled the yellow
coverlet up to his chin, and I tiptoed to my room, where I packed all of my
belongings. I knew that the fifth stair creaked and groaned and so I skipped
it. I packed everything in my car. By the time I was finished, the sun had
begun to rise. I left a note for Lydia, Hank’s ex-wife, on the shiny dining
room table with my condolences and my gratitude, but I didn’t leave one for
Rodney…Because I couldn’t think of anything to say. I abandoned him right in
his hour of need. Because it was too scary and would require too much of a
commitment for me to stay. And I moved on.” She leaned in to him harder. “Just
like you did.”  

Olivine continued, after a beat. “I
think about it sometimes. I figure I'll have to answer for that one day. My
leaving that boarding house that night. But I drove straight home. I hadn’t
even meant to, but I turned that way on the interstate and once I realized I
was heading home, I didn’t stop. I drove right on through the night and into
the next day.

“But the short time I was out
there, I enjoyed myself so much. I wrote so much. I visited the childhood homes
of all kinds of writers. The rolling quiet hills of these ancient mountains,
with the mist, like shrouds of secrets. The land felt sacred. And they live by
a different pace. Slower. More reverent. They were mountain people like me, and
seeing them, meeting them, having this experience of getting to live among them
just because I woke up one day and decided to do so…It made me realize that I
can live however I want to live. I can choose to live chained to a desk or I
could do anything I wanted to do. All on my own. So long as I kept my life
simple. My needs simple. My monthly expenses simple. I could do anything. I
could write or I could not. I could do small jobs here and there. I could pick
up and take off. Whatever. And I didn’t need anyone. Of course, I knew that
choosing this lifestyle also meant that I would most likely be poor as hell,
but somehow that was okay, too. My needs were simple, and, so, I was free.”

She let the last word hang there,
among the trees, where it felt right. At home. Round.

Henry was silent for a long while.
And Olivine remembered how she had started to tell this same story to Paul once
and he had said, “You shouldn’t have done that. Your parents shouldn’t have let
you do that.”

“I was twenty-two,” she had
answered.

“Still. You shouldn’t have done
that. Anything could have happened to you.” And Paul had stopped her from
telling the rest, telling instead the story of the European river cruise he had
taken one spring break, by himself. “Now that is the way to travel,” he had
said.

And when she hadn’t replied, Paul
had said, “It sounds like you have this romantic idea of living like that. But
traveling is not enjoyable when you don’t have money to do it. Wouldn’t it have
been better if you could have stayed at a nice resort in that town? Instead of
some alcoholic’s cheap boarding house?”

“But I want to see the world.
That has always been my dream.”

“Then you should start by getting
a good job. Eventually you can earn enough money, and enough vacation days, and
you can save up enough to see the world, in style. It’s all about patience,”
Paul had said.  

“When would I write?”

“There’s always time to write,”
Paul had said. “Just get up a little earlier or something. It’s not hard.
Olivine. You make things too hard. You work, you earn. You enjoy. It’s especially
simple for you. With me around, there’s no stress in your life.”

But now she was telling the story
to Henry, and he had allowed her to tell the entire thing, from beginning to
end. And he was still quiet, and she wondered if he, like she, was thinking
about a brand of freedom she had found for herself that did not involve him.
And did not involve Paul. But one that required only one. Olivine herself.

Henry could feel the heat of his
body behind her. She felt the freedom once again that came with leaving that
North Carolina boarding house, the sun beginning to rise in her rear view
mirror. Knowing she could go on, or she could return home, and that she could
rely on herself, and that she was free. And with him sitting right behind her,
she felt suddenly that she could give herself to him—to Henry—without having
him consume her. That she could be with Henry while maintaining her freedom.
She would be one entity and yet two distinct ones, made better by the union.

She felt his breath against her
neck: slow, rhythmic, hushed. She willed him to plant his soft, fleshy lips on
her skin, right there. She pushed against him, ever so slightly. She nestled in
a little tighter against his groin.

He said, softly, “When I was with
Clara, we had money. We made all kinds of money. And now, working here, I have
nothing. I can honestly say it doesn’t mean that much to me. It’s never been
that big of an issue for me. I’ve come to understand that everything has a
cost. For everything you choose, you have to give up something. Whether it’s your
money or your integrity or your passion or your time.”

“I’ve been thinking about time
lately. A lot.”

“Have you?” he asked.

“The truth is: I want to be a
mother,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “It's just…I'm not getting any younger.
I see the legacy of love that my grandparents have left and, for the first
time, I want that. I crave that.”

“But if you have children with
Paul, then you’re stuck there. You know that, right? Children complicate
things. More than you can imagine. You just need to avoid buying in.”

“Buying in to what?”

“Buying in to someone else’s
dream of what the good life is. I can see that Paul has his definition of what
the good life is. But yours can look different. Hell, yours can look different
and
you can raise a family. You don’t have to do it by being a PTA mom. No one
has any expectations of you whatsoever.”

“Ah, but they do.”

“But you get to decide if those
expectations matter, Olivine. You have an inner light unlike anything I’ve ever
seen. Don’t buy in.” He whispered those last words, and his lips grazed the
skin on her neck and there was a fluttering inside her, and a tingling in her
limbs and in her chest and she felt his lips, soft and full, on her neck and he
pressed them gently on her skin and his breath moved up along her neck.  

She closed her eyes and she
turned now to meet his lips and they grazed against hers, and then a blur of
yellow flashed beneath her closed lids. Her eyes blinked open and she was
staring into a pair of high beam headlights, The Audi was coming up the driveway
fast.

“Paul,” she warned, and she
pushed away the cocoon of blanket, and she stood. Her heart raced. She went
cold, and her arms and legs prickled. She began walking toward the steps of the
porch. Toward Paul and whatever was going to happen next.

Paul stopped the car and leapt
out. “Henry?” His headlights shone directly on the porch where they had been
sitting a moment before. The moon had not yet risen and the rest of the
driveway was shrouded in darkness. She stood just outside the puddle of light
from Paul’s car, but he couldn’t see her, focusing as he was, only on the
porch. On the porch and the quilt they had left moments before. “Have you seen
Olivine? It’s an emergency.”

“I’m right here,” she said, walking
toward him but fighting an urge to run, to run through the forest, away from
them both. Paul looked from Olivine to Henry, to the blanket on the floor of
the porch, illuminated still by his headlights. “It’s your dad,” Paul barked. “Heart
attack. Get in.”

Olivine’s heart pounded hard. And
then she found herself in Paul’s car, and the door had slammed shut. And she
was looking back at Henry where he stood on the porch, his mouth open. His arms
hanging by his sides, palms exposed.

*****

“Since when don’t you bring your
phone when you run?” Paul demanded as they sped down the gravel road.

“I forgot it today.”

“Or maybe you didn’t want to be
disturbed.”

“We were just having a chat,
Paul.”

“Cuddled in a blanket? Looking at
the stars?”

“Paul... It isn’t what you think.
Tell me about my dad. What’s going on with my dad?”

“I don’t know much. I would have
been at the hospital, but it has taken me a while to find you.” Paul tossed his
cell phone into her lap. “Call your mother.”

Her mind went blank and she
suddenly couldn’t remember the number. Her hands shook as she scrolled through
his contacts. She couldn’t find it on his phone. What would he have listed it
under? She took a deep breath. How could she forget her own mother’s number? Of
course, she knew what it was. She began to dial.

He slammed both hands on the
steering wheel.

“Paul! Take it easy.”

“Shit, Olivine. What am I
supposed to think or say or do right now?”

“I told you it’s not what you
think. I’ll explain,” she said, holding the cell phone to her ear. “She’s not
picking up.”

“Try your sister.”

“Do you think he’s…he’s…. Do you
think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know Olivine. Maybe you
should have been there. Maybe you should have been
home
. Then you’d be
at the hospital right now. With everyone else.”

Henry’s mother had died when she
and Henry had last been together. Oh God. What if. Oh God. Yarrow, pick up.

“Ollie! Thank God,” came the
voice on the other end of the line. “Get here.”

“How is he?”

“He’s stable, honey. He’s going
to be okay.” As she spoke, her words bubbled in her throat. Her voice cracked and
she made a soft mewing sound. “He’s going to be okay, Ollie. But get here.”

Olivine was careful not to look
at Paul. His face had new edges to it, all of a sudden. His eyes were narrow, a
burning green. Hard.  

He whipped into the circular
drive at the entrance to the emergency room and slammed on the brakes, lurching
her forward against her seatbelt. “Get out,” he said.

She didn’t look back at him. She
couldn’t look at his face this way, and then there was a blur of opening glass
doors. The woman at the reception desk gave her a sad smile and pointed down a
corridor, through a set of double doors. And at the end of the hall, in a bank
of mauve vinyl built-in couches, sat Yarrow and Christine and when they saw her,
they stood and threw their arms around her, and Olivine stood inside their
embrace, and she willed her body to stop shaking, and when Christine and Yarrow
finally let go, Christine said, “The doctor is in with him right now, and when
he comes out, we can go back in.”  

“What happened?” Olivine asked.

“We’re not completely sure. I
thought he was going to die, Olivine,” Christine said. Her eyes lost focus for
a moment, as though she were staring at something far, far away. And then they became
glassy. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Yarrow answered.  “It was a
myocardial infarction. A heart attack. But a mild one.”

“We had some baby aspirin,”
Christine interrupted. “because we’ve always had it there for Mom and Dad. You
should always have some on hand. I mean, even young people can have heart
attacks. Even Artie. The paramedics said it might have saved his life….He came
in to the house. And he was sweating and he said he was having a funny pain,
and I asked him what kind of pain, and he just slumped to the floor, and he
went kind of gray. I thought he was going to die, Olivine.” Christine threw her
arms around Olivine again. Her breath rattled in her chest. She squeezed
Olivine hard, and then she grabbed her by the wrists and held her out, arms outstretched.