Chapter 46 Lindy
Lindy
Lindy drove slowly along the winding road through the wooded campsites, every so often glancing down at a little map of the
campground the ranger had given her after circling the site where David, according to the ranger, had been staying for the
last five days. The park had more than a hundred sites spread across nearly nine hundred acres, and the speed limit on the
one-way lane was ten miles per hour, so it was taking Lindy a few minutes to get there. She was glad for the time. She needed
to adjust, to try to get her thoughts together.
Hailey had been eager to see her dad, but Lindy had asked her and Jack to wait back at the park entrance. She needed to talk
to David alone first.
She still didn’t believe he was really here. She was livid, aching with hurt. What would she even say to him? How would she
explain what it had been like to spend these last several days in fear he was injured in the woods somewhere, or dead, or
that he’d run off to start a new life? How would she make him understand the gravity of what he’d done and how the bottom
had fallen out of their entire life?
How soon till she could mention the word divorce?
Words felt insufficient. She imagined herself simply screaming at the sight of him, shattering the quiet of these woods.
Just as the ranger had promised, there, at site 65, was David’s Subaru. After all the time Lindy had spent looking for it—the
hundreds, if not thousands, of miles she’d traveled in search of it—to actually see it, parked peacefully in the woods, felt
disorienting. She pulled in behind it and turned off the Volvo’s engine. She took a deep breath, clutching the wheel. The
large site was shaded in tall pines and had a view of the shimmering bay. David’s blue-and-gray nylon tent was set up fifteen
yards ahead of where her car was parked, near a stone fire ring surrounded by log benches. She didn’t see David anywhere.
She got out of the car and slammed the door shut. The noise was jarring in the silence. Her sandals made no sound on the pine
needles that carpeted the ground. She heard a loon call in the distance, the chirping of songbirds above.
“David?” she said, approaching the tent. It was a different one from the canvas one he’d had all those years ago, but she
felt fifteen again, her heart in her throat; she saw the fear in his eyes, the knife in his hand, the blood streaming from
his wrist. I love you, she wanted to cry out. Where are you? “David?”
He appeared at the water’s edge, rising from where he’d been sitting on a rock, it seemed. His beard had grown in, and to
her surprise it was mostly gray. His curly salt-and-pepper hair was shaggy, and his white T-shirt and khaki shorts were smeared
with dirt. He smiled at the sight of her. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
She hugged him first, tightly, for a full minute, then kissed him briefly and started yelling, swatting at his arm. “How dare
you, how dare you, how dare you? I thought you were dead!”
“Honey, I called and told you where I was going.” He was extraordinarily calm, infuriatingly so. But evidently, he’d spent the last five days here meditating beside this peaceful bay! Watching the birds flutter around! Why wouldn’t he be calm?
“No, you didn’t!”
“I did. I left a message on the machine at Innisfree. Saturday. I borrowed some guy’s phone at a gas station before I drove
out of signal range.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“I did.”
“Nobody got a message! You’ve been missing for a whole week!”
“What?” David said, even as Lindy thought suddenly: Dad. Maybe her dad had listened to a message, deleted it, forgotten all about it.
“Oh, David.” She started to cry. “So much has happened.”
He took her hand and led her to sit down on one of the logs beside the fire ring. He held her hands. His familiar dark eyes
were full of sorrow, regret, love. “How did you find me?”
“A statewide search!” she said, mustering anger again. “Everybody—I—you wouldn’t believe—”
“Lindy,” he said, like she was breaking his heart. Like she was breaking his heart!
“You—The kids—Hailey!” She could not form sentences. It still seemed like everything was lost, that it was too late to get
any of it back.
David squeezed her hands. “I was planning to come back tomorrow. Monday, maybe, at the latest. I’m sorry you didn’t get the
message. Is everything on track for the wedding?”
She yanked her hands away. “Jesus Christ, David. You never seem to realize that we need you. Well, it’s too late now!”
He appeared to falter, at that. He leaned back slightly and blinked. “What do you mean?”
“It’s all ruined! Everything is ruined. If you want to take all our money and run away, see if I care. The kids just wanted
to know you were alive! We know about your heart, David. And about the money. We searched the computer, we found everything,
the missing hundred and nine thousand dollars, and, God, for a few days I thought you’d run off and were having a baby with
Tiffany—”
“What?” he said, shocked now, then he laughed.
“It’s not funny! Nothing about this is funny. Up till five minutes ago, we thought you might’ve run away to Canada! Why did
you bring your passport? Were you planning on running away to Canada?”
“I didn’t. It’s in the safety deposit box.”
“Oh. Right.” Lindy had forgotten they’d agreed months ago to stow their passports at the bank. She quickly resurrected her
outrage. “Well, Mom is selling Innisfree and moving Dad to Florida—she said you knew! Did you know Dad has dementia?”
“What?” His face said he had not.
“And now Hailey’s not getting married!”
“What? What happened?”
Lindy shook her head. It felt too late even to explain. How, while he’d sat here soaking in the peace of the woods, their
life had fallen apart. “It’s all over. Our life together. Our family. It’s over, David. If that’s what you wanted, that’s
what you’ve managed to achieve! The kids hate me, and so will your sister and brother when they find out everything! And when
they all find out you were just here, hanging out, fine, just not bothering to call, just selfishly hanging out without thinking of the impact it would have on everybody, they’ll all probably hate you, too.”
He sat up straighter, looking puzzled, shocked. “Honey, no. I just came up here for—you know, my head gets crowded. My head
was getting really, really crowded. I couldn’t face everybody at the party. I couldn’t. It was really bad, but I’m doing better
now. What happened with the wedding? Is Hailey okay?”
Lindy didn’t want to hear it. And she didn’t have it in her to try to explain. She covered her face with her hands. He squeezed
her knee, then she felt him get up and leave. Behind her hands, she was crying now. The door of the Subaru squeaked open,
then slammed shut again. Birds sang. He sat down again beside her and touched her arm so that she would lower her hands, and
when she did, he was holding out a check for her to see.
She took it in her hands. It was a cashier’s check made out to Lindy’s mother for a hundred and two thousand dollars.
“I was going to see if she’d do owner financing. Take this as a down payment and then finance the rest. I wasn’t sure it would be enough, but I was hoping . . .”
“What?”
“But then, on the drive up, I just got—Lindy. I guess you know now, if you looked at the computer.” He pointed to the check
with a dirty fingernail. “This is everything. It’s all I’ve managed to save all our lives. And I felt like—like such a goddamn
failure. My whole life adds up to this? And all I wanted was to make a good life for you and the kids. And I thought—it was
going to destroy you to lose Innisfree, but if I do this, put this money toward it, we’ve got nothing left. We’re starting
from zero. Nothing even for the other kids’ weddings, when the time comes. I mean, I had to take some money out of our savings
account to pay the bills for Hailey’s, and that isn’t even over yet. I didn’t know what to do. I felt I’d mismanaged everything.
Failed at everything I’d ever tried to do.”
Lindy stared at the check, blinking. She felt stunned, like something had exploded in front of her. Maybe it had. The money
missing from their savings account had mostly gone toward Hailey’s wedding. The rest of it, plus all their retirement money,
was here in her hands. It seemed absurd, suddenly. No wonder he’d been stressed. “You didn’t think of talking to me?”
“Not right now. I couldn’t. Not with the parties. The wedding.”
She looked up at him, knowing what he said was true. Regretting it. “Oh, God. I’ve been—obsessed. And it all fucking fell
apart, anyway, you know? Because you did this!” She wanted to hate him. Looking in his eyes, seeing his earnestness, and remembering
the husband he actually was—not the husband that, this past week, she’d been imagining him to be—hating him was hard to do.
Also, it was impossible not to see right now that, if she hadn’t been so remote, so obsessed, so blind to him, so unaware, he probably would have talked to her.
“Lindy, you and the kids are everything to me,” he said.
“I needed to get my head right for you. I needed to be . . . the guy you’ve come to depend on.
Not—not the version of me that loses his mind.
The way I used to. I know you remember it!
And I—I was getting close, it felt like.
On the drive up, I just thought, I can’t do this, I can’t face all the people.
I can’t smile and pretend I feel normal when it feels like my skin is on inside out and my mind is screaming at me, and mostly I couldn’t face you and tell you we might have to give up Innisfree, when I’d spent all these years assuring you I had everything under control.
I just—I wanted to, Lin. I wanted to have it all under control. But . . . I guess I didn’t.”
“Oh, David.” She felt her anger collapsing, falling away. She hated to think that he’d been feeling that way; that he’d thought
running off alone was the only solution. “I wish you had told me.”
“Well, I didn’t want to admit . . .” He didn’t seem to know how to finish his sentence. He rested his hand over hers, looked
at her beseechingly. “I just didn’t want to ruin anything for you, Lin. I just thought everything would go easier if I wasn’t
there. Even my birthday party. I guess I wasn’t in my right mind. I mean, I know I wasn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you didn’t
get my message. I’m sorry I didn’t try calling again. I didn’t plan to stay gone so long. It just felt so peaceful here.”
The loon cried again in the distance. She looked into his dark eyes, which she loved so much. (She would need to ask him about
the EKG! Had he had it done?)
But now she was remembering being young with him. How desperate she’d been to make him see.
“David,” she said, keeping a firm edge to her voice. “I need you to understand something now. If you’ve never understood it
before, you must understand it now. Without you, the center does not hold.”
“Things fall apart?”
She smiled slightly because she was happy he knew the poem she was referring to, and because if she didn’t, her anger would
fire up again, or she’d start crying recalling the events of the past week. “More than you can imagine.”
He nodded slowly. “I will try to remember that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s a hole you’ve always had in you, David.
You’ve never truly believed that your presence mattered.
You always felt it was optional, a choice.
And you believing that has done more than enough harm to our family now.
Enough. It’s not a choice. We need you! Never mind about the money.
Your life adds up to so much more than some number in a bank account. We
just need you.”
“Okay, Lin. I’m sorry,” he said again, and he appeared truly contrite.
She sighed. It seemed enough for now. And she knew then that she would not divorce him. She suddenly couldn’t imagine even
mentioning the word.
But she could imagine trying instead to begin a new chapter with him. She could imagine trying to learn to love him more loosely,
to listen, not to assume. She found herself hoping they could actually save Innisfree. The owner financing idea might work.
They could try to save everything. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Maybe they were at the end of one road—but it seemed possible now that they could be at the beginning of another.
She stood. “Okay. We have a lot more to talk about. But right now, I think your daughter would like to see you.”
David smiled and stood beside her, and Lindy looked up at him and—she couldn’t help it—smiled back. She would certainly be
angry again—very angry—later. But right now, she was happy and relieved to see him alive, well, and the husband she’d always
known him to be. Flaws and all.
He reached out his hand, she took it, and together they turned and began walking toward the car.
It felt strange to realize she had a husband again, after all the scenarios she’d imagined to the contrary. But it felt good.
“Is Hailey okay?” he asked again. “Why did they call off the wedding?”
Lindy shook her head, not sure she understood entirely herself, but recalling the sternness of Noah’s face, and the way Hailey’s
face lit up whenever Jack was near. “I’ll let her explain. But I do think it’s going to turn out to be for the best.” She
laughed a little. “It’s too late to get any of our money back, though.”
“I don’t care about that. Just as long as this is the right choice for her and she’s happy.”
“I knew you’d say that,” Lindy said lightly, glad to think there were still some things she knew about her husband.
“I’m relieved, actually,” David said. “I never liked that guy. But I didn’t want to alienate her by arguing against it. Or
you. You seemed to like him so much. I wondered if I was wrong.”
Despite everything, Lindy smiled again, because she could’ve predicted he would say all that, too. “You weren’t wrong, David.
I’m sorry. Also, I should tell you, Jack Westfield is with her.”
“Jack Westfield?”
She laughed, a release of tension at the strangeness of it all. “You missed quite a lot, honey. They’re the ones who helped
me figure out where you were. Hailey refused to give up, and I think Jack is at least a little bit in love with her. I think
she might be in love with him, too.”
“I always kind of liked Jack,” David said thoughtfully.
“Oh, of course you did,” she said, nudging him slightly with her shoulder as they made their way through the tall shelter
of pines back toward the car, back toward the world.