Chapter 8 #2
“The next one will be sixty-four days,” Lyle said.
We all looked at him, then at each other.
“This is bizarre, Scott,” Beth said.
“I know.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
There it was. The question I’d been dreading. I looked across the room at Beth, then Amy. She regarded me with flat, almost dead eyes.
There was no point in raising false hopes. “I don’t know.”
Beth and Amy sighed. The energy in the room dropped.
“Well,” Beth said. She patted her daughter’s knee. “We’ll figure something out. And maybe it will stop by itself, just like it started.”
We sat there. I had nothing to say.
“I’ll put some sandwiches together,” Beth said. “Come on, Lyle. Help Grandma make some lunch.”
Lyle climbed off the love seat and followed Beth out of the room. Beth, at the threshold, turned to look back at me before she exited. I couldn’t tell what the expression on her face meant.
Amy and I sat, barely able to look at each other. I stood, went over, and sat next to her on the couch. I waited, and after a few minutes she let out a breath and set her hand on my knee. I put my hand on hers, she rotated her wrist, and we intertwined our fingers.
“You know,” she said. “This is too much like Dad. It’s—I know it’s not the same, not really. But if feels the same. That’s—that makes it worse. I know Mom sees it. It’s got to be hard for her.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t think it was Beth who was bothered.
“You know what he did. What it was like for us.”
I squeezed her hand.
“He’d be gone for days with no word, then show up with some flowers or chocolates and a sorry-ass look on his face. He’d spend an hour apologizing. Then she’d let him stay, like he’d never left, and he’d promise Kate and me he was back forever.”
I thought of the promises I’d made Lyle.
That I would always come back. I’d meant every word, but there was a brittle line between intention and reality when it came to promises.
Amy’s father had probably meant every word, too.
Now here I was, making more promises I couldn’t be sure I’d keep. “But he wasn’t back forever.”
“Never. Things would be good for a while and we’d think ‘this is it, finally, we can be a family.’ Then he’d get drunk, or lose money gambling, and they’d fight. He never hit her. He was always this bumbling goon, but when he’d disa—when he’d leave…”
“Your father was a prick.” I said it without thinking.
She stiffened, then surprised me by nodding.
“Yeah. He was a prick. A major one. He couldn’t face life.
Couldn’t figure it out. That last time he left?
I knew that was it. I watched him slam the car door and squeal the tires as he drove off, and I told Kate, ‘That was the last time.’ She told me I was too little, that I didn’t get it.
But I was right. Five years later we got a call from Las Vegas, from the police.
They said he’d been found beaten to death in an alley, by loan sharks or something.
I remember Mom sitting Kate and me down to tell us.
‘Something’s happened to Dad,’ she said.
And she was crying, even after all those years raising us alone, all he’d put her through. ‘He’s never coming home.’”
I waited.
She sniffed and wiped her nose. “Fucker,” she whispered.
“I hated him. For years I hated him. I know Kate still does. But now, I look back and think of him, about this—this cartoonish joke of a man, this lie of a man, and I feel empty. Like he’s not even there.
A hole in my heart where my real father should have been. ”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I squeezed her hand again.
“I don’t want you to be that for Lyle.” She looked at me with wet eyes.
“I married you because I knew you wouldn’t be that, couldn’t be that.
I married you because you were everything my father wasn’t.
Most girls marry guys exactly like their dads.
I married the one guy I thought would never, ever be like mine. I … goddamnit…”
I pulled her toward me, and we sat there awkwardly on the couch, half turned into one another, Amy’s face buried against my shoulder as she cried. We stayed that way until Beth called us in for lunch.
The next jump took me sixty-four days forward.
We had decided to stay in Minnetonka. Amy put the Madison duplex up for sale and moved in with Beth.
It made financial sense, and it was better than going back to face reporters and coworkers who had seen the news.
And Amy needed Beth’s support. Amy found a job substituting at the nearby elementary school, and they enrolled Lyle in the same school.
I reappeared in Beth’s living room, on the couch, on a Monday morning in late August. Beth, Amy, and Lyle waited, watching the exact spot where I reappeared.
I noticed the sunlight first. The second thing I noticed was Lyle’s clothes.
They were new. At least to me. They looked like he’d already worn them a few times.
“Well, then,” Beth said, staring at me. She stopped, lost for words.
“Next time it’ll be one hundred and twenty-eight days,” Lyle said.
Amy turned and walked out of the room.
The next jump was over a third of a year. The headache followed me.
This time when I reappeared in the living room, only Beth and Lyle waited for me. They both looked older: an extra crow’s foot around Beth’s eyes, a quarter inch and a few pounds added onto Lyle. He brushed back long hair, straightened his glasses, and walked over.
“Hey, bud,” I said. He stopped before me. It was snowing outside, the sky gray and dark, and the house had the toasty, slightly closed-in feeling of having been warmed by a heater for a couple months. It was a striking change from the air-conditioned cool of moments earlier.
“You missed Christmas.”
My chest ached. It hurt even to breathe as I looked at him. Christmas. I’d missed Christmas. I hadn’t moved from the couch, but I had missed so much.
I exhaled in a shuddering rush. “How—how are you doing, bud?”
“I’m going to figure out how to save you, Dad,” he said. He looked at me, unblinking, almost challenging me to tell him no.
I slid from the couch to kneel on the wooden floor. I hugged him tight. “If anyone can, bud, it’s you.” I looked over his shoulder at Beth, and mouthed, “Amy?”
Her lips compressed in a tight line. She shook her head.
Another day, and it was two hundred and fifty-six days later. I reappeared in my spot on the couch in my mother-in-law’s house. Through the living room window, the sun shone on an early morning in September.
Only Lyle waited for me.
“Dad,” he said. He was a little older, a little taller, and he’d brushed his hair a different way, but he was still recognizably my son. Subdued, thoughtful, and quiet.
I had jumped over a year of his life in aggregate, with only a few days here and there where I’d popped back in.
I should have been there with him. Running around with him at playgrounds.
Showing him my favorite old movies, the things I’d loved as a kid his age.
Reading books in the den with him curled up in the chair next to mine.
Nine days ago, we’d been doing exactly that.
Not even two weeks. Nine days for me, well over an entire year for him.
I hugged him as tears rolled down my cheeks. “Hey, bud,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “How are you holding up?”
“It’s been a long time, Dad,” he said, but he returned my hug with fierce strength, as though he could physically prevent me from leaving again.
“How’s your mom?”
He said nothing for a long moment. “I haven’t figured out how to stop it yet, Dad.”
I broke out of his hug and held him at arm’s length.
I gazed at him, looking through the thick lenses that made his large, expressive eyes appear tiny and distant.
“Lyle. Listen to me now. I want you to enjoy your life. Don’t spend all your time thinking about me, about saving me.
You need to live. You have to live your life.
Can you do that? For me?” I barely managed to get all the words out, keeping my voice as steady as I could.
Just days earlier, for me, I’d told him he could figure it out.
I regretted saying it, regretted putting even that little bit of my hope on his shoulders like that. He had to live his own life. He had to.
Lyle gazed at me and nodded once. “Okay, Dad. But I’m still going to save you.”
I blinked away the tears and pulled him back into a hug. “I love you, Lyle. I always will.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
The next time the world slipped and reappeared, Amy waited for me in the living room, alone.
Added together, it’d been nearly three years, for everyone else, since that first day when I fell tumbling onto the road on my way to work.
For me it’d been ten days. From the light outside, or lack thereof, I could see it was deep winter again.
I took a shaky breath as I looked at my wife.
She stood with her arms tight around her chest, her jaw muscles working under her skin. She’d lost weight and there were dark bags under her eyes. When she saw me, she shut her eyes for a moment. She trembled.
“Amy,” I stood, pushing myself off the couch.
Her eyes snapped open. “Scott,” she said, and the next words came out in a rush. “I’m divorcing you.”