Chapter 30
Chapter 30
Whether seconds have passed or minutes, Jane doesn’t know, but she is somehow on her back, looking at the cold, dark sky full of blinking stars. She thinks of Sissy first. Always. Is she OK? Did she make it over the cliff, floating gently like a feather to the water below, or did she plummet like a stone? She rolls onto her side and expels her anxiety onto the ground in the form of bile and vomit.
That’s when she sees him. Dan. The small balding pate of his head gleaming in the moonlight and staring at her like a third eye. Is he OK? Is he hurt?
“Dan,” she says, but it comes out low, hoarse. She clears her throat and tries again. “Dan!”
He doesn’t move.
Jane’s brain flashes on the few but fervent times in their married life that she fantasized about Dan dying—after one particularly tense blowup over breastfeeding, of all things (Jane was hormonal!), when she found the text messages with Becca (being a widow would be infinitely easier than being a divorcée; so much less hate involved), and every time she sat on the cold hard top of the toilet seat in the middle of the night (her rage at his inability to leave the seat up was nothing short of murderous)—and she now knows that’s all it was: a fantasy. Fiction.
She slowly sits up, mentally checking for injuries. When nothing apparent jumps out at her, she puts one foot on the ground and pushes herself to standing. The wind shifts and smoke and debris billow into the air between her and Dan, stinging her eyes, making it hard to breathe. She drops to her knees again, coughing. And then, though she can no longer see him, she starts crawling toward where she thinks he is. The gravel digs into her knees and palms, but she barely feels it, her determination to get to him making every other sensation pale in comparison.
Finally, she reaches him. “Dan,” she says again, and presses her palm to his chest. Is he breathing? Please let him be breathing. Is that a heartbeat? She can’t tell. And then her eyes travel down the length of him and she sees the blood on his pants. Was that there already? From before? But as she looks closer she sees it’s a huge gash.
Tears roll down her face, and not just from the smoke. “Dan!” she wails. “Ohmygod, Dan.” She scoots closer on her knees and presses the hem of her skirt to his leg to stem the blood.
Suddenly Dan coughs, and Jane’s eyes fly up to his face. “Dan?”
He blinks, looks at her. “Yeah?”
“Are you OK?”
“I think so,” he says. “My leg hurts like the dickens, but I think I’ll live.”
Instantly her anxiety morphs into full-body relief that he is alive, and then just as quickly into complete irritation, and she swats him on the shoulder with her open palm. Hard. “What the hell were you doing? I thought you were right behind me. You could have died!”
“Ow!” he says, grabbing his shoulder. “I told you—I was getting the car!”
“The Subaru ?” It’s official. She is married to the cheapest man on the planet. “Dan, that thing isn’t even worth a thousand dollars.” Jane knows because she looks it up on Kelley Blue Book every couple of months hoping she can convince Dan it’s time to sell it, but he never budges.
“I know,” he says. “But I’ve had it for twenty years.”
“Exactly! It’s time to move on.”
Dan stares at her. “I don’t want to move on,” he says, and Jane wonders if he’s still talking about the car. “Remember when the alternator died at that red light on Sullivan and you were so mad you just left it in the middle of the road and walked home?”
Oh. Apparently he is still talking about the car. “Yes. I was furious,” Jane says.
“And that time we were driving to Colorado and the kids had been watching that god-awful Peppa Pig DVD over and over and over until you finally took the DVD and threw it out the window. On I-70! And the kids’ faces! Like you had thrown out the family dog!”
Jane frowns. She does remember. It wasn’t her finest moment of parenting.
“And that fight! When the kids were in bed asleep that time and we were having that terrible argument and you made us go out to the car so we wouldn’t wake them up and we were just screaming at each other. I have no idea what in the hell we were fighting about. Something about snacks, I think.” Dan’s body is shaking now, and it takes Jane a beat to realize he’s laughing. She wonders if he’s suffering from a head injury from the blast. She leans closer, looking for wounds. He’s laughing so hard now, tears are streaming down his cheeks.
“Oh God, and remember…remember when Josh threw up that entire cherry milkshake?”
“It was an Icee.”
“It went everywhere! And you tried to catch it in your hands. Your hands!”
“Dan!” Jane says. “These are awful, terrible memories.”
“I know,” he says through guffaws. “Oh, they’re awful. But they’re our awful, terrible memories.”
Jane stares at her husband. She had forgotten so many of these incidents—for good reason. And he had, too, apparently. That huge argument in the car was about McDonald’s, of all things. Well, it started out about McDonald’s, and then, as married arguments tend to do, it ballooned into the built-up resentments they’d each been holding in for weeks or months. But just now, she can’t quite remember what any of those resentments were.
“That’s why you’ve never wanted to get rid of it? I thought it was because cars depreciate the minute you drive them off the lot and this one gets us from point A to point B just fine, doesn’t it? ”
“Well,” Dan says. “That, too.”
She starts chuckling and then it grows, thinking about the Peppa Pig DVD and the kids’ faces, and Josh vomiting like something out of The Exorcist , until she’s laughing as hard as Dan was moments earlier.
“Anyway, they’re not all bad memories,” Dan says, grinning at her. “We made up in that car, too, after the snacks fight, if I recall.”
Jane doesn’t remember, but the way Dan’s smiling, she thinks it best for his ego to let him believe she does.
“And I proposed to you in that car!”
At this, Jane rounds on him. “You did not! You never proposed to me.”
“I know.” His face grows serious. “But only because I was afraid you wouldn’t say yes.”
“Oh, Dan,” she breathes.
“Did I push you into it?” he says. “Did you really never want to get married?”
“What?”
“The first night we met, you told me you never wanted to get married.”
“I did?”
“You did.”
“Oh Lord. That was something I said back then to everyone, so guys would think I was breezy and casual.”
The truth is, Jane had been twenty-six. A child! What did she know what she wanted out of life? What does anybody really know about life—about marriage —until they live it? She loved Dan when she married him, of course, but it was all a crapshoot, wasn’t it? How do you know what you’ll need out of a partner? Who you’ll be ten years, twenty years down the road? You just hitch your wagon to someone and hope you both keep heading in the same direction, through all the bumps and detours and peaks and valleys. And for better or for worse, Dan had proven a formidable and dependable partner. Unwavering. Steadfast. Even while Jane was off looking for something else.
She groans. Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have. God dammit, maybe those influencers were right after all. Jane has so much.
“I’ve been wrong. I’ve been so wrong, Dan. I don’t want anything else, anything more…exciting. I don’t even know what that is! I want to be home with you. In our boring house. In our boring life.”
Dan frowns. He tries to take a deep breath and wheezes on the exhale.
“Dan?”
“I’m OK…it’s…hard to breathe…with all this smoke.”
“Don’t talk. Just rest.”
He shakes his head. “No, you were…right. I’ve been stuck in a rut. You’ve tried to tell me so…many times. I should have listened. I could have…done more. I could do more! We can try…We should try the…honey.”
“The honey?” Jane asks.
“Yeah, the sex thing. I should have…”
Jane laughs. Her sweet Dan. She shakes her head. How can she make him understand? “You’re not my arm.”
“I’m on your arm?” He tries to move.
“No, no. Don’t move. You’re not my arm.”
“What? Jane, are you—”
“You’re my lungs, too.”
Dan stares at his wife. To anyone else, it would be gibberish, nonsense, what Jane is saying. But he’s not anyone else. He’s Jane’s husband. He’s her lungs. And she knows he understands.
“I’m so happy…” Dan says, and then falters.
Jane smiles at him, her eyes filling with water once again from the smoke in the air and from the heady emotions of the night. “Oh, Dan.” Jane’s happy, too. That Sissy got away and is hopefully OK, and she’s happy to go back to their boring life. Why did she ever think she wanted exciting? Let the young people have their cliff jumping and honeyed sex and sticky sheets. Jane likes boring! She likes safe. She likes Dan, which she realizes is more important than loving him. To love the man you’ve been married to for nearly half your life is easy, but to like him? Jane thinks it’s a rare thing indeed.
“I’m so happy…” he tries again, and Jane can see his chest rising with the difficulty of his breathing, and she stares in his greige-blue eyes, and her tears threaten to spill down her cheeks as she waits with bated breath to bask in her husband’s reciprocal declarations of love.
“I’m so happy…we didn’t have to pay for that meal,” he says, and then he closes his eyes, a small grin of contentment on his face.