Lost Along the Way (11 page)

“I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I’ve never cheated on you. Not once.”

What about the shower?
a voice in my head asked. But it wasn’t the same thing. No matter what, one hallucination wasn’t the same as months, maybe even years’ worth of planned infidelities.

“I made a mistake, I know. But we can fix this.”

“To hell with that.”

His bravado crumbled when I reached the front door. “Daniel, please!” His voice broke this time as he started to cry. “Don’t leave me. Not like this. I’ll do anything—”

I opened the door, and two new images flashed in my mind in quick succession: my headlights washing over my dad’s unblemished driveway as I waved good-bye to Landon two weeks ago. Lydia and I having a conversation at our mailbox before my first trip to Laramie.

“Whoever he is, tell him to get his engine checked.”

I left. Chase didn’t bother to call me back. I drove until my hands stopped shaking, then pulled over long enough to call the station. I told them there’d been an emergency and I wouldn’t be back until the following Monday. The station manager sounded skeptical, but I didn’t care.

I left our neighborhood behind, driving on autopilot, barely seeing the road or the stoplights or the traffic. Even now Granny refused to let me be. The movie reel continued in my head, relentless and unavoidable. I remembered climate conferences and newscasting conventions in other
cities—things we’d planned to attend together, calling them
minivacations—until Chase begged out of them at the last minute. I remembered coming home from work some afternoons, thinking what a good mood he was in. I remembered one tiny glimmer of suspicion after another—misplaced items, his phone buzzing as a text message came in, knowing he’d showered right before I walked in the door—each one dismissed in a fit of denial. How could I have been such a fool?

I drove out of Westminster and onto the interstate, my knuckles white as I clenched the wheel. I made it almost to the Brighton exit before I had to pull off the road. I put my forehead against the steering wheel and let the dam break.

Fifteen years, wasted. Fifteen years of refusing to see. Of making excuses for him, lying to myself, telling myself he loved me, as if that was enough. I’d severed the relationship with my parents for him. I wished I could hate him, but at the moment, I only hated me. And Granny B. And her motherfucking meatloaf.

M
Y
PHONE
rang an hour later, as I left the last exit for Fort Collins in my rearview. It was Chase, of course, but I didn’t answer. When it rang a second time, I switched it off. Fireworks blossomed on the horizon, tiny flowers of light, reminding me it was a holiday. Somewhere, people were laughing and celebrating. I tried not to hate them.

It was almost eleven when I arrived in Laramie. The depressing images had finally abated, along with the fireworks. The tedium of the drive—especially the last hour or so, driving west across I-80 through the wasteland of southern Wyoming—had numbed me to everything.

I wanted it to rain. That would have suited my mood, but there was no chance. Not tonight. Not this late in the evening in southern Wyoming. Not with the high pressure center settled in on top of us as it was prone to do. There’d probably been a 20 percent chance of showers in the late afternoon, but by this time of night, outside of the monsoon season, we’d dropped to rain being a near impossibility. Still, it didn’t stop me from searching the western skies in hopes of a cumulonimbus or two.

I was unable to muster any shred of emotion as I pulled into my dad’s driveway. I felt nothing. Not relief at being there, or shame at having to return to my parents’ house after all these years with my tail between my legs. Only a great weariness.

I stared at the house, sounding the depths of this new apathy. The lights were on in the living room. A shadow moved against the drapes.

Landon? Or was I about to interrupt a burglary?

It hardly mattered. I felt absolutely nothing. Not alarm or annoyance or gratefulness. Only the disappointing knowledge there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

I stumbled up the walk and through the front door. A voice echoed from a radio in the kitchen. Landon stood in the living room amid a pile of boxes, a lumpy blue vase in his hands, apologizing before I’d even dropped my bag on the floor.

“I’m so sorry, Danny. I was here working, and then the phone rang, and I know I shouldn’t have listened, but it’s one of those old-fashioned machines, and I didn’t know how to turn it off without unplugging it, but I didn’t think I should do that in case you wanted to hear what he had to say, and I realized you were on your way, and I probably should have left, but then I thought maybe you’d want company, although I suppose maybe you’d rather be alone, and I didn’t know how to find out if I should go or stay, other than calling you on your cell, but he said you’d turned it off, and so I didn’t know what you’d want me to do.”

His words died away. He chewed his lip nervously. His dark eyes held more sympathy than I could deal with at that moment. I had to turn away from such naked compassion. The voice from the kitchen was the only sound, and it quickly resolved into one I knew. Into words I’d known I’d hear.

“Daniel, please, I’m so worried about you. At least let me know you made it to your dad’s.” I followed it into the kitchen. Found the cordless phone sitting on the counter, Chase’s voice echoing from the little box next to it. A blinking number showing three messages waiting. “We don’t have to talk tonight. I want to know you’re safe, that’s all. Then maybe after you’ve had a few days to calm down, I can drive up there and we can talk about what happ—”

I grabbed the bundle of cords behind both phone and answering machine and ripped them from the wall, cutting Chase’s pleas short, crashing the house into an ocean of silence. Exhaustion hit me so hard, I swayed on my feet. Images of mile-markers and the monotonous yellow dashes down the middle of I-80 flashed behind my lids. I toed off my shoes and headed for the bedroom, already unbuttoning my pants. I left them in a pile by the door and fell face-first onto the bed, still wearing my shirt and socks, as well as my boxers.

“Danny,” Landon said quietly behind me, “I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Rain.”

“Uhh…. What?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay.” A moment of silence. “I should probably go.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t want to disturb you.”

I couldn’t muster an answer. I was already drifting, wrapped in the feel and smell and sounds of my childhood home, somehow sinking through my bedspread and lumpy mattress into the distant past. I was a boy again. My father was watching Johnny Carson in the living room. My mother stood at my bedroom door, watching me, her eyes full of love, her every pore radiating concern. I couldn’t hear her, but I knew what she was saying.
Everything will be all right, Danny. You’ll see.

The lights clicked off. Muffled footsteps retreated down the hall.

I sighed, feeling suddenly, inexplicably at peace.

“Good night, mom.”

I
WOKE
the next morning with a tight ache in my throat and a foul taste in my mouth that told me I hadn’t brushed my teeth before falling into bed. My eyes felt like sandpaper and my heart like lead. It took me a minute to remember why. I buried my head under my pillow and resigned myself to sleeping for the rest of my life.

It seemed like a reasonable plan.

I woke again some undeterminable time later with a too-f bladder and a grumbling stomach. In the kitchen, dishes clicked lightly together. The muffled voice of a TV floated to me down the hall. For one wonderful moment, I was a teenager again, my parents alive and well. Mom would be making breakfast—or was it lunchtime already?—while my dad watched the news, or maybe
The Price is Right
. I’d wander into the kitchen and she’d smile at me. She’d pat me gently on the back and tell me that everything would work out in the end, just as she’d done last night.

But no. She hadn’t tucked me in last night. That had been Landon. And it was Landon this time, too, wearing that ridiculous green apron and tiptoeing around a steamy kitchen that smelled like heaven. A loaf pan cooled on the counter and a pot simmered on the stove.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, quickly turning off the TV.

I didn’t care. All I knew was that my parents were still dead and Chase had ripped out my heart.

“How are you feeling?”

Like shit. Like a fool. Like I’d rather climb into a hole and never emerge.
“Fine.”

“I bet you’re hungry.”

Yes. Hungry too.
“I guess.”

“I made you breakfast.”

I sank onto the stool at the breakfast bar and stared lifelessly at the horrible pink countertop that had been there my entire life. My father had complained halfheartedly that it looked like Barbie had decorated the kitchen. My mother had smiled sweetly and told him if he hated it so much, to do something about it.

Too late.

I turned away from the pink countertop to face the living room with its silent pictures on the mantel. On the other side of the window, Landon’s metal birds sat motionless, gleaming in the late-morning sun.

“Here.” Landon slid a plate in front of me. Two thick pieces of some kind of bread sat on it, still steaming, slathered in butter. I could tell it wasn’t the same bread I’d had at his house.

I wasn’t ready to think about that.

“It’s only banana bread,” he said with forced casualness.

Understanding dawned. “Banana bread, for mourning.”

“The cookbook was on top of your bag. I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s fine.” A cup of coffee appeared next to the bread. “Is that what I’m doing? Mourning?”

“I would be.”

I closed my eyes, telling myself I was done crying, but my eyes didn’t seem to believe me.

“I made soup for later too.”

I nodded mutely.

“Do… do you want to talk about what happened?”

“No.”

“I don’t blame you.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t want to intrude, Danny. I’ll work in the other room if you want some space. But Lulu always says nobody should be alone while they grieve.”

I nodded again, fighting to keep my mind away from the image those words recalled: crying on the side of my bed while Chase held me, the night Landon had called to tell me my parents were dead. But even then, my grief had been distant. I’d already learned to live without them. Landon had been the one here, waiting up, worrying over their wellbeing.

“Who was with you,” I asked, my voice hoarse, “when you grieved for my parents?”

It took him a second to answer. “Nobody.”

“You didn’t come to their funeral.” At the time, his absence hadn’t surprised me. Omaha was an eight-hour drive. Few people would make a trip like that for somebody who wasn’t family. But now that I knew him better, the realization surprised me.

“I couldn’t stand to see them put into the ground.” He took one of my mom’s towels out of the drawer and began wiping down the countertops rather than meet my eye. “I spent the day in my studio. Sometimes that’s the best place for me to be when I’m upset. It gives me a place to put all my anger.”

“Anger,” I said halfheartedly, wishing I had a place to put mine.

“It’s part of grief too.”

Yes, it did seem that way. “You know what the worst part is?”

“What?”

“It isn’t that he cheated on me. Or that he threw away fifteen years of our lives. It’s that—” I stumbled, my voice cracking. I had to wipe angrily at a tear that threatened to escape. “It’s that I lost them because of him.”

He didn’t answer at first. I knew from his thoughtful expression that he was debating his words. He set the towel aside and came to sit on the stool next to me. His hand slid toward mine on the horrid pink countertop, but he stopped short of touching me. “They were the ones who forced you to choose, Danny. Not Chase. And they regretted it.”

“But they were right, weren’t they? He wasn’t worth it.”

“Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t look at yesterday’s problems through today’s eyes.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’re trying to pretend like you chose the man who cheated on you over the parents who loved you, but that wasn’t the choice you had at the time. Your real choice was building a life with the man you loved—the man who loved you back!—or giving him up and coming home to the parents who couldn’t accept you. You chose your own happiness, and nobody could blame you for that. Not even them.”

I hung my head. I didn’t bother to fight my tears anymore. I hated for him to see me cry, but it took too much energy to fight it. “So you’re saying I didn’t make the wrong choice?”

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently. “Of course you didn’t. Choosing to be happy is rarely wrong. It may hurt like hell now, but would you really trade what you’re feeling today if it meant losing all those good years too?”

Would I? My kneejerk response was “Yes,” but my heart winced at the thought.

No. Of course not. But if Chase had been the right choice….

“Are you saying I should go back to him? Give him another chance?”

“No. Not at all. I’m just saying don’t beat yourself up. You had good years. You’ll have good years again.” He nudged the plate of banana bread closer, and my stomach grumbled. The hand that still rested on my shoulder moved a bit, his fingers lingering on the nape of my neck for a brief second before he moved quickly away. “Eat. You’ll feel better, I think.”

I couldn’t imagine feeling worse, so I obeyed, and when I was done, I had to admit the day seemed marginally less bleak. At least the terrible lump in my throat was gone. I collapsed onto the couch and spent an hour or ten staring at his lifeless birds, willing them to move, as if that would make everything better. As if their flight would mean my life wasn’t in shambles.

Eventually, Landon nudged me and nagged me until I pried myself off the couch.