Chapter Ten
Ten
Helen and I walk for a while in companionable silence. My boots, which are rubbing against all the sorest parts of my feet, occasionally snap twigs along the path and the wind blows through the trees above. But other than that, it’s perfectly quiet until Helen asks, “What did your mom have?”
“ALS,” I answer, stepping over a shallow puddle left over from yesterday’s rain. Where the trees are thick along the edge of our path and cast a heavy shadow from the sun, the ground is still wet. But for the most part, we’ve been out in the open, under a calm and white-wisped blue sky with dry earth below us.
“Brutal disease,” she responds, and I nod, breathing deeply and then exhaling a word that’s meant to sound like yeah, but doesn’t quite make it. Silent moments pass as we make our way toward a split in the trail. The tree to the left has a small patch of blue paint as a trail marker and a tree to the right has a dot of yellow. Helen looks over her shoulder toward the approaching other members of our party and points toward the blue tree before we continue toward the left.
“Tell me about Caleb,” she says, ducking under a low-hanging branch.
I laugh, uneasy in the vagueness of her demand. “What about him? Him as a person? Him as my husband? What I like about him or—”
“You love books, right?” I guess she did read the questionnaire. “Describe him as if he was a character from your latest read.”
My throat tightens. “I am no writer,” I say quickly, narrowly avoiding stepping into a patch of mud. “I tried to be, way back when, but—”
“Just give it a go,” she says in a tone akin to Humor me.
“Well, he, er, he’s…” I stop walking and brace myself with one hand grasped around the trunk of a smooth birch tree, then rest my hip on it as I fix the positioning of my foot inside of my boot.
Flashing images of Caleb play in my mind’s eye, as if I’ve unconsciously created a dead-wife montage that you’d find at the beginning of a sad indie film. You know the ones… Lens flare, she’s running in between sheets hung on the laundry line. Lens flare, she’s smiling at the beach as she splashes in the water. Lens flare, she winks at the camera playfully…Lens flare…Oh no—her tombstone—she’s dead!
“Sarah?”
“Sorry, uh…just thinking…” I answer, staring off into space.
Reality around me blurs and in its place, I see Caleb’s subtle smile from across a crowded room. I see every time he has locked eyes with me instinctively when we both unexplainably look for each other at the same time when mingling with different groups of friends. Then, his lips trilling on the pillow next to mine as he snores. The immediate look of panic on his face when he distractedly rested his forearm on our flat stovetop and set his sleeve on fire a few months back. The moment he asked, “Can I kiss you?” for the first time, sitting on a park bench after dark with a streetlamp casting half of his face in a warm glow. His laughter with an undercurrent of annoyance as he chased me through the house, trying to get his briefcase back from me after I ran off with it before his first day at the new office. The first Halloween party we threw at our place when we dressed up as Elton John and Freddie Mercury. The tears I watched him wipe as we said our final goodbyes to Mom. His slack jaw and owl-eyes when Win told him she was pregnant. The tie around his head as he danced at Bo and Win’s wedding reception, screaming the lyrics of Dancing Queen louder than anyone else. The hardened edge of his jaw when I confronted him at the fundraiser. The exhaustion on his face during the drive home that night.
“He is,” I start slowly. “Intelligent, driven, nerdy, a bit of a workaholic…he’s…” the right word is on the tip of my tongue, but it escapes me. “Soft” is what I land on. “He cares deeply. He protects out of love, not dominance. He’s grumpy in the mornings. He talks in his sleep, and he also snores. He grew up well-off and it made him a little too laid back, in my opinion. He’s great in bed,” I add, for good measure as I continue to blankly look ahead.
Helen chuckles softly from ahead of me on the path, and I move to follow her.
“The day we met, before I learned his name, I called him wonder boy, ” I recall fondly. “I’d spent the morning trying to find the new kid but failed. Then, later on, he strolled into my math class with this outfit that I’m certain his mother had picked out. A maroon-and-navy-striped sweater with a white collared shirt poking out of the top and spilling out the bottom and a pair of classic blue jeans. He was different from every other guy my age. He had a carefree lightness about him that set him apart, but it was also the way he didn’t have that prey or predator look in his eye that the rest of us did. He just sort of…floated above it all with this confidence that can’t be faked. It made him seem so much older. It took me less than a day of shared classes to realize he was smart too. And only a week to toss a paper airplane at his head with my number on it.”
“A paper airplane.” Helen turns over her shoulder, smiling. “That’s cute,” she says, looking at the horizon as she sidesteps a burrow of some kind.
“Well, everyone was vying for the new kid’s attention,” I recall fondly. “I had to stand out.”
“And? Did it work? Did he call?”
“No,” I say, punctuated by a short laugh. “I didn’t sign my name on the paper, and he had no clue who’d thrown it at him. Two days later I cornered him and asked if he wanted to eat lunch with me. We didn’t talk about the airplane thing until a month later. Then, he asked me to be his girlfriend by leaving a paper airplane note on my locker.”
Helen laughs, the sound fading to a contented sigh. “Oh, to be young and in love.”
“Amen,” I say, struggling to keep pace as we begin walking up a steep hill.
“You seem to really love him,” she says, voice slightly strained. “That’s a good place to start.”
“No, yeah, he’s great,” I say between panted breaths.
“ So… ” Helen says, grabbing her hips as she stops, reaching the top of the hill. “Why are you here?”
“What?” I ask, bending at the waist to catch my breath.
“If you love him,” she pauses to take a sip of water, “if you’re happy with him…What made you decide to come? Your questionnaire was fairly…vague. Is this more of an adventure for you two or…?”
Did you not hear my matinee monologue earlier? There’ll be another show at seven. “I don’t know if I’m happy,” I answer, my tone defensive. “I don’t feel happy.”
“Well, why not?”
Isn’t that your job, lady? “I…I don’t know.”
“You said earlier that you resent Caleb.”
Did I? “I—”
“Why’s that?”
“I—” I look around, then wipe sweat off my brow before dropping my hand to my hip. “I…because I— well, I never learned to survive on my own. I never had to provide for myself.”
“So, you resent him looking after you?”
Well, when you word it like that. “No but…” God—I think I might. I am a proficient asshole. “I just wish that I’d met Caleb at twenty-five, you know?” Helen nods, waiting for me to go on, as we begin walking side by side. “Sometimes I fantasize about it. What it would’ve been like to meet him at a bar, or through a friend, or at some party…” I block the sun from my eyes with my hand until we’re hidden under the shady canopy of the trees again.
“So even in your fantasies, it’s still Caleb you end up with? Just, later on?”
“Yeah…Of course.”
Helen smiles to herself, face pointed toward the ground. “In that case, you’re better off than most of my married clients, I’ll tell you that.”
“It’s Caleb,” I say as justification. Who could not love Caleb?
“So, in this hypothetical where you meet later on, how do you think it would have all played out?”
“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully. “I’ve never really followed the thought that far.”
“Do you think it would have been easier without him? Your early twenties?”
I instinctively shake my head no, then once I give it some thought, do so again. “I’ll always be grateful that I had him through that time of my life. Losing my mom was the most painful experience I could ever imagine, and he supported me through it. But I went from someone’s daughter to caretaker to someone’s wife. I never got the chance to exist on my own. That was my decision too, so I don’t think I resent Caleb as much as I just resent the circumstances in which we chose to get married. Still, I’ll never regret marrying Caleb—I don’t ever want to not be married to him—but I wish the timing was different, is all.”
“I can see that,” Helen says assuredly. “I think that makes a lot of sense.”
My shoulders relax with those words. I hadn’t realized I’d needed that validation, but it feels great to receive it. “I don’t even know what I would have done if we’d not met when we did. I just know I would have had to do something with my life before he came along.”
“Probably, yes,” Helen says. “But then again, maybe not. Plenty of people who’ve had to pave their own way still consider themselves unsuccessful. Feeling inadequate tends to be a relatively common experience when we struggle with our self-esteem. You could have been miserable all the same, even if the timing were different or with a degree or career you felt proud of.”
I snort. “Maybe.” I’d actually not really considered that before.
“Often, we can find ourselves playing what-if instead of recognizing what we can do now to build the life we want. The truth is the past is one of the only things as stubborn as us humans. Unfortunately, it won’t change no matter how much you ask it to.”
She gives that wisdom space to breathe, and I appreciate it. I feel the weight of her words settle under my skin.
“I want you and Caleb to find some time together away from everyone else and write out a list of what you want your life to look like ten years from now. Tomorrow evening we’ll start discussing ways to get you both there, together.”
I nod. “Okay,” I say, my voice quiet yet determined. “Yeah, that actually sounds really great.”
“Until then,” Helen says, looking over her shoulder toward the group behind us. “Go jump back in with them. I think you have an interesting perspective that they may need to hear.”
—
When I rejoined the group, Nina had already concluded that she wants to confront Jai. From the sound of it, she’s willing to move past this with him but needs to know if there’s any other skeletons in his closet and to clarify that she is in a stage of her life where her career goals come first. Maggie and Phil are somewhat less interesting. They come up every year as a sort of maintenance check, like getting the oil changed on your car, she’d said, and had no real issues to discuss. Though she does feel like they need to have more sex. Rock on, sister.
Kieran and Henry came for the first time last year after opening a retail store together and hitting a bump in their marriage. Kieran is a talker and Henry, apparently, is more of a dweller, ruminating on his feelings until they eventually bubble up and come out with anger. He’s not violent, but he’s got a nasty habit of slamming doors and raising his voice that makes Kieran uncomfortable. Kieran also expressed that he is guilty of trying to get a rise out of Henry sometimes too, which I thought was brave of him to admit.
Afterward, I understood why Helen would want us to have this time as a group. There’s something very humbling about it. Putting your ego aside to talk about the most difficult aspects of your relationship and where growth can happen, as couples and individuals, was a painful yet necessary exercise.
Before I had the chance to share, the sky opened and rain began to pour, making the final hour of our hike less enjoyable. We all walked with our heads down, trying our best not to slip, and the conversation was forced to end when the rain got so loud, we couldn’t hear one another.
That is when my thoughts grew impossible to ignore.
I spent the last portion of our hike imagining what Caleb’s group may have discussed. The flip side to these problems. Then, I mostly wondered what Caleb could have said about our relationship. About me. From there, I listed each of my greatest insecurities and imagined them pouring from Caleb’s lips.
I drink too much. I tease too much. I spend too much. I’m clingy, ungrateful, lazy, dependent, judgmental, harsh, critical, brash, needy, unaccomplished…all the ways I don’t measure up to my potential. The potential he saw in me before I saw it in myself. That he has, no doubt, painfully watched go to waste over the years.
By the time we reach camp, my self-esteem is at an all-time low.