Chapter 5 The First Suitcase
Lesley
I packed slowly. There was no reason to hurry.
I started with the practical things. Toiletries.
My prenatal vitamins. The folder from my obstetrician with the first ultrasound picture tucked into the front pocket.
My laptop and chargers. Then clothes, enough for two weeks, chosen with the specific, calm attention I brought to packing for a work trip.
Leggings and loose sweaters, because nothing with a waistband felt good anymore.
My running shoes. The navy dress I’d need for the client presentation on the twenty-second.
I didn’t pack photographs or jewelry or anything sentimental. I wasn’t performing a leaving. I was leaving.
On the wall across from the bed hung a photograph from Tuscany, the two of us at a long wooden table under a pergola outside Montepulciano, sunburned and laughing at something the cook had said.
I stood and looked at it for a while with a folded sweater in my hands.
It was a good photograph. It had been a good two weeks.
I thought about taking it down and packing it, and then I thought about what it would mean to hang it on a wall in LoHi, and what it would mean to leave a blank space where it had been.
I left it where it was. It belonged to this house, and to that marriage. I didn’t know yet whether either one belonged to me.
While I packed, I made a list in my head of what came next.
I owned a two-bedroom condo in LoHi, a narrow unit on the third floor of a converted brick warehouse that I’d bought when I was twenty-six and never sold after I married Hank.
It had been rented for six years. The last tenant had moved out at the end of October, and I’d been meaning to decide whether to sell it or rent it again.
It was empty and clean and had a working furnace and a bed with a decent mattress, because I’d left it furnished.
It was mine. It had been mine before Hank, and it was mine now.
I called Heather while I folded sweaters and told her what I was doing. She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked if I wanted her and Jo to come help me move in the morning.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Tonight I just need the bed.”
“Do you want me to be there when he gets home?”
“No,” I said. “This is between me and him.”
“Okay.” A pause. “I’m proud of you. I know that’s a weird thing to say.”
“It’s not weird,” I said, and I had to stop folding for a second because my eyes had filled. “Thank you.”
At ten fifty-two, I heard the garage door.
I zipped the suitcase closed, set it upright beside the bed, and sat down on the edge of the mattress to wait for him, which struck me as funny in a way I couldn’t have explained to anyone.
He came up the stairs two at a time, calling my name. “Les? I’m so sorry. The adjuster didn’t show until almost nine, and then the structural engineer wanted to...” He stopped in the bedroom doorway.
He saw the suitcase. He saw me. He saw my face.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m going to stay at my condo for a while.”
He stared at the suitcase as though it might explain itself. “Your condo? The one in LoHi?”
“The tenant moved out last month. It’s empty.”
“Lesley.” He came into the room slowly, the way you approach an animal you’re afraid will bolt. “You nearly died last night. You shouldn’t be alone right now. The doctor said to rest.”
“I’m going to rest. At my condo.”
“You’re upset.” He crouched down in front of me, bringing his face level with mine.
He looked exhausted. There was still a smudge of soot behind his left ear that he’d missed in the shower.
“I get it. I’d be upset too. I was late again tonight, and I know the timing is awful.
But you have to understand, the insurance people... ”
“I do understand. I told you to stay.”
“Then why...”
“Because you said you’d be home by nine,” I said, “and then you said you’d be home by eleven, and both times you said I promise. And I sat downstairs and read those texts, and I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t even feel angry, Hank. I just knew I was done waiting for you to come home.”
He sat back on his heels. For a moment he didn’t say anything.
“Is this about last night?” he asked finally. “Because I explained what happened. You said you believed me.”
“I do believe you.”
“Priscilla told me you were out. She told me she saw you. I’d never have left that building without you if I’d known you were still inside, and you know that. You said you know that.”
“I know that.”
“Then I don’t understand.” His voice cracked. “Help me understand, Les. Please.”
I looked at him. I loved him. That was the hardest part, and it was the part nobody would believe if I tried to explain it.
I loved this man. I loved his big, capable hands and his terrible jokes and the way he sang Motown badly in the shower.
I loved how fiercely he took care of the people who depended on him.
I had loved him for seven years, and I still did, sitting on the edge of our bed with my suitcase packed.
“I don’t think you left me in that building, Hank,” I said. “I think you’ve been leaving me for years.”
He went very still.
“Every time you promised to be home and weren’t,” I said.
“Every time something else needed you first and you decided I’d understand.
Every dinner. Every event. Every time Priscilla called or your mother called or Neil called or a pipe burst in Montana.
I understood, every single time. I was reasonable.
I was the easy one. And every time, I told you how it made me feel.
I told you in the kitchen and in the car and in that counselor’s office. You never once didn’t know.”
“I know you did. I know. And I tried...”
“You did try. You tried for a few weeks, or a few months, and then you stopped.” I kept my voice gentle.
There was no point in cruelty. “Last night I was on a balcony waving a bathrobe at a fire truck because the one person who should have been looking for me was holding someone else. I don’t blame you for that.
Somebody lied to you. But when I was standing in that stairwell, watching you walk across the drive, the thing I felt wasn’t surprise.
That’s what I can’t get past. It wasn’t surprise. ”
He put his face in his hands.
I waited. I didn’t reach for him. After a long moment he lifted his head, and his eyes were wet.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Please. I’ll sleep in the guest room. I’ll take the week off. I’ll call Dr. Morrow and set up the counseling again. We’ll go every week, I swear. Just don’t go tonight.”
“I’m not asking you for anything,” I said. “That’s the point. I’ve asked you for things for seven years. I’m not asking anymore.”
“So that’s it?” His voice rose for the first time, then broke. “You’re just leaving? We’re having a baby, Lesley.”
“We are,” I said. “And you’re going to be part of that baby’s life.
I’m not taking the baby away from you. I would never do that.
I’ll tell you about every appointment. My follow-up with Dr. Kessler is next week, and I’ll text you the time as soon as I’ve scheduled it. If you want to come, you can come.”
“And us?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I need to be somewhere I’m not waiting for you. I need to find out what that feels like.”
He stood up. For a second he looked lost in his own bedroom, a big man in a borrowed fleece with nothing to do with his hands. Then he reached for the suitcase.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
“It’s heavy. You shouldn’t...”
“It has wheels, Hank. I packed it. I can carry it.”
He let go.
I rolled the suitcase to the top of the stairs and carried it down one step at a time, and he followed me without speaking.
In the front hall I put on my coat and wound a scarf around my neck and picked up my keys from the dish by the door, the ceramic one I’d made at a pottery class Hank was supposed to take with me.
He’d missed the second week and then the third, and I’d finished the class alone.
“You’re not driving yourself,” he said. “It’s almost midnight.”
“It’s fifteen minutes.”
“Let me drive you. Please. I’ll drop you off and come straight back. I just need to know you got there.”
I thought about it. Then I shook my head. “I’ll text you when I’m inside.”
He looked at me as if I’d struck him, and I understood, then, that he had no idea how many nights I had spent waiting for a text just like that.
I opened the front door. The cold rushed in, clean and bitter.
“Lesley,” he said.
I turned.
“I love you,” he said. “I’ve always loved you. You know that, right?”
“I know,” I said. “Love was never the problem.”
I closed the door behind me and walked to my car, and I didn’t look back at the house until I’d loaded the suitcase into the trunk and slid behind the wheel.
When I finally did, he was standing in the lit doorway, one hand braced against the frame, watching me the way I had watched him through the stairwell window.
As if the person he was looking at might never come back.
I backed out of the driveway and drove to LoHi. The streets were empty and the traffic lights blinked yellow over the intersections.
The building was a hundred-year-old brick warehouse that had once stored seed and feed for the farms north of the city, and somewhere in the nineties a developer had carved it into eighteen condos with exposed beams and tall factory windows.
I’d bought my unit at twenty-six, with every dollar I’d saved since college and a loan officer who’d looked at me across his desk as though he couldn’t quite believe I was serious.
The freight elevator still worked, if you pulled the gate hard.
I pulled it hard. It groaned its way up to the third floor, and I rolled my suitcase down the hallway and stood at my own door with the key in my hand.
The lock stuck, the way it always had. I jiggled it the way I used to, lifting slightly on the handle, and it gave.
Inside, the condo smelled faintly of fresh paint and cold radiators.
The last tenant had left it spotless. I turned on the lights and walked through it slowly, room by room, touching things.
The long wall of exposed brick in the living room.
The kitchen with the butcher-block counters I’d oiled myself every spring for three years.
The narrow second bedroom I’d used as an office when I was twenty-six, with my old drafting stool still pushed into the corner, the vinyl seat cracked in the same place.
In the refrigerator there was nothing but an open box of baking soda.
In the bathroom there was a single roll of toilet paper and a note taped to the mirror in the tenant’s handwriting: Thanks for everything.
The radiator in the bedroom clanks at 3 a.m. It’s harmless.
I stood at the living room window for a long time.
The city spread out below me, downtown lit up across the highway and the river, the red lights on top of the tallest towers blinking slowly.
I’d stood at this exact window at twenty-six with a glass of cheap wine the night I got the keys, feeling like the whole world was about to begin.
I didn’t feel that now. I felt tired and scraped raw and very much alone. But underneath the tiredness there was something else, small and steady, that I hadn’t felt in a long time. This was mine. Every square foot of it. Nobody had given it to me. Nobody could move it.
I turned up the heat. I found the spare sheets in the hall closet where I’d left them six years ago and made the bed, tucking the corners tight the way my mother had taught me. Then I sat down on the edge of it in my coat.
Then I texted him.
I’m inside. Good night.
The reply came in less than three seconds.
Thank you. Good night. I love you.
I turned off the lamp and lay down with my hand on my stomach, in my own bed, in my own home, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn’t waiting for anyone.