going home

Eleanor told Harold over dinner one night that she was pregnant. The next morning, she woke and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over, tying his shoes. She said, "Good morning," and he didn't look up. She touched his back, the cable of his sweater scratchy against her fingers. It was a cold morning; she hadn't realized it until now. She tugged the quilt more tightly around her body.

Harold straightened up and sighed, still looking away from her. He sat stiffly, and she knew that there was something wrong. He began by saying, "It's just..." and stopped. The words hung thin for a moment, and he started again: "I mean..."

Again, he stopped. She watched him lean over and rest his face in his palms, and wanted to go to him. As she gathered herself for the journey across the mattress, he planted his hands on his knees and got to his feet. She paused, and pulled the blankets more snugly around her, sealing out the crisp air. She waited.

Harold exhaled in a rush, and said, finally, "Don't hate me," and before she could ask him what he was talking about, he bent over, took her face firmly in his hands, and kissed her brow. Then he was gone, and she had scarcely sensed his absence before she heard the front door close, and the squeal of the station wagon protesting the cold.

She lay back against the pillows. If she rolled her eyes back far enough, she could see the window panes above her. Frost lay over the glass in intricate sheets, thin and sharp and cold. The telephone rang, and she realized only now that the light coming through the window was dim; she glanced at the bedside table, at the clock radio, and confirmed: it was barely morning at all. The phone rang, and rang again, and she finally picked it up, thinking that if it was anybody, anybody at all, she really wouldn't know what to say.

It was Harold, and he said, in a rush before she could say anything at all, "I meant to tell you that I'm sorry. Don't hate me, that was a stupid thing to say. Don't hate me. Of course you'll hate me."

She had been right; she didn't know what to say.

Harold listened to her silence. Behind his breath she could hear the silence of the rest of the world; they were the only two people awake in the dark, and he was leaving, and she was being left.

Harold said, "What will you name it?"

She didn't know what to say. So she said goodbye to Harold, and hung up the phone, and a moment later it rang again. She picked up the receiver, and Harold said, "Is it even mine?" and she put the phone down once more. When in the stillness the phone remained quiet, she nodded to herself, and then, as if she had known that she would do this all along, she disappeared into the hallway, returning to plumb the closet for her overnight bag, and when she stepped onto the porch an hour later, she was warm in her green sweater, the bag a modest weight in her right hand.

She had always had a key on her ring that appeared to fit no lock she or Harold owned. One day he asked her about it, this strange, small key with the orange plastic sheath. "What's this for?" he asked. And she lied to him, felt no remorse for doing so. "It's for my mom's garage door," she said, supposing as the lie slipped off of her tongue that she might actually never have to prove this.

Six hours after packing her bag and driving through the night, she was crossing the California border into Oregon. Two hours after that, she was in Grants Pass, marveling as dawn broke at the plumes of rose and orange in the sky. A few minutes later she had parked the Acura at the curb of a tidy little cottage on the corner of Elborn and Minnesota. She sat behind the wheel for a few minutes longer than absolutely necessary, surprised at the sudden attack of conscience that enveloped her. And then she carried her bag up the porch steps to the door and found it open, and knew that somehow he had known.

She found him in his bedroom, sitting up in bed, a lamp cocked over his hands, which cradled a mystery novel. He looked up at her, over the reading glasses he'd recently begun to wear, and a small smile cracked his face. She said, "Been up all night?" and he nodded. She said, "Waiting for me?" and the nod wasn't necessary. She knew.

She put her bag down beside the door and walked across the small bedroom and climbed onto the bed and straight up against him, tucking her head against the crook of his shoulder, her favorite place in the whole world, and, as always seemed to happen in this first moment, all the pieces of her jumbled-up life notched into place in a way that surprised her. Somehow for all the comfort and warmth and sense of home she took from Jack, she was always taken aback, in a pleasant and why-the-hell-hadn't-I-noticed sort of way, by the sensation that, whenever she saw him, battles were suspended, storms calmed.

A throaty woman sang the blues from the stereo across the bedroom, and Jack was already three glasses into the bottle of red wine on the bedside table. She gave him a cute grin and said, "It's not even six yet," and he shrugged. Then the amusement faded from his eyes, and he said, squeezing her close, "What's going on?"

She told him everything: Harold, and the baby, and the wrecked wagon, and the way Harold was on notice at work, and had been served papers, finally, by his estranged wife, and how he was always growling at the walls lately. And Jack listened as her story warbled from hysterical to strangely calm to bemused, and when she was finished he said, "I have an idea."