The World Outside, 32
Humbled
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Erik was asleep by the time Joanna climbed up to the loft that night, and he left for the day before she woke up the next morning. She felt aimless all morning, but she successfully avoided the couch. If she let herself sit on it, she worried it would be like giving up and giving in to her behavior over the last several months. She snacked on some cheese and crackers around noon, but she didn’t have much of an appetite. Eventually, she took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and got in the car to drive to Poppa’s office. She’d barely spoken to him about anything of consequence, and she hadn’t seen him often, in months. Maybe coming clean to him would be a first step for her.
She saw when she walked in that Poppa was in the middle of his annual Files Bonanza. Every year, he chose one day to give his secretary the day off, unplug his phones, and consolidate, shred, alphabetize, and organize all his files as needed. It was always a long day, but it wasn’t any secret that he relished the quiet. He must have been ready for a break when Joanna walked in, though, because he gave her a big smile.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked cheerfully. Then, he noticed the look on her face and cocked his head. “What’s the matter?”
“Poppa, I—” Her voice broke. She closed the space between them and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She cried on his shoulder, his hands rubbing her back, for a long time.
When she was able to step back and wipe her face, she figured she just had to get the words out.
“I got pregnant,” she began in a shaky voice, “but I lost the baby. Right before Christmas.”
“Oh…Jo…” Poppa whispered, leaning back against the edge of his desk.
“I didn’t deal with it well.”
“Of course. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
“I went down to New York and didn’t tell Erik,” she whispered. “I just…couldn’t be around him.”
“Hm.”
“But he came to get me, and he’s so angry, and I don’t know how to fix this.”
Poppa exhaled loudly, glancing down at his folded hands, and then looked back up at Joanna. He crossed his arms across his chest.
“You’ve been dealt a bad hand,” he finally said. Joanna nodded. “How long were you down there?”
“A couple of days. I thought I’d stay longer, but then I decided to come home. And then he showed up before I had a chance to come back on my own.”
Poppa nodded and looked thoughtful again. “There’s a big difference between leaving your husband and getting a break for a few days—you see that, right?” Joanna nodded, aware that she hadn’t broached the worst part. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to tell Poppa about Max. “Your grandmother did something similar when we were young; I don’t know if I ever told you that.”
“No—why did she leave?”
“Well, like anything, it felt like much more was wrong at the time than I think now, looking back. We were broke and if I remember correctly, she’d been passed over on a job, and things were hard. We didn’t know how to be married yet. It just got to her. So she took a cab down to Portland and got on the bus and made it to Boston, where she stayed in a cheap motel before coming home with her tail between her legs. I think she was gone for about four days, all told.”
“Were—were you upset?”
“Oh yes. If I’d thought we were broke before that, four days in a motel, plus cab and bus fare, really wiped us out. And I’d finally succumbed and gotten the police involved, so I was humiliated. And—I felt like a failure, as a husband. As a man. She’d been going through something, and I’d had no idea how to help her. I’d known she was upset, but I hadn’t known what to do. That’s not an easy feeling for a man. For anyone, but maybe especially for a man.”
Joanna cringed. Poppa’s words were sounding an awful lot like Erik’s.
“Did you forgive her?”
Poppa looked at her meaningfully. “Of course,” he said. “It was hard. I was very hurt. But over time, it became a part of our story. It was no longer the story itself. Or even the most recent part of the story. Or—honestly—even the most painful part of the story.” He cocked his head. “Come to think of it, I think I said something similar to you after Josh died.”
“How long until that’s true for us?”
“Every relationship is different, sweetheart. And every person is different. The best thing I can say right now is to make sure Erik always knows that you love him. He might be feeling pretty…tender right now.”
Joanna had a hard time imagining Erik as anything but strong, stoic, unmoved. But then she remembered how he’d cried (sort of) when Ro died and how hurt he’d sounded in his last voicemail.
“You’re doing the right thing here, Jo,” he said to her a few minutes later, out on the sidewalk, as she got into her car. She nodded. “And Jo—” He bent down so that he was looking at her through her window. “Next time something like this happens…for God’s sake, ask for help. No more running away, you hear me?”
The exasperation in his voice belied the gentleness in his eyes; Joanna gave him a sheepish grin and nodded her head. He stood back up and watched as she pulled away from the curb and started down the road.
Joanna didn’t have a plan, but she found herself pulling into Erik’s mother’s driveway a few minutes later. Mrs. Donovan—Adele—she’d told Joanna to call her that a number of times, but Joanna always had trouble seeing her as anything other than Mrs. Donovan—was clearly nervous to have this unexpected visitor. It made Joanna rethink her previous assumptions about who actually held all the power in the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship.
Joanna kept insisting that she was fine, that she didn’t need anything, but Adele wasn’t comfortable until she’d made a pot of tea and put a coffee cake on the table. While Joanna picked at a slice of the cake and marveled at the fact that she knew a person who kept things like coffee cake in her house, she waited for Erik’s mother to stop making up tasks and sit down, so she could get this over with.
Finally, she did. She blew on her tea to cool it and smiled at Joanna over the rim of her cup. “It’s nice to see you, Joanna,” she said, sounding slightly out of breath. “I feel like I haven’t seen much of you two since the wedding.” She offered a small smile which Joanna took to mean that there were no hard feelings. Still, her stomach clenched.
“Oh—yeah. It’s just been crazy. You know…”
She was regretting showing up like this. This was Erik’s mom; had he told her himself? Or did he even want her to know? But she wanted Erik to know that she could talk about it, that she could handle it, that she was trying. She popped a big bite of coffee cake into her mouth to buy some time and then, after swallowing, faced Adele and told her, in as steady a voice as she could, that they had lost a baby in December and that she hadn’t handled it well. “I’m just now sort of…coming out of some depression about it, I guess you could say,” she told her at the end.
Adele was sitting very still, tears in her eyes. Her hands were wrapped tightly around her mug; she hadn’t moved since Joanna had started talking. But now she was done, and she couldn’t think of anything more to say, so she just sat back in her chair.
It felt like quite a long time went by before Adele reached one hand out slowly and covered Joanna’s with it. She had a soft, gentle touch.
“You and I are very much alike,” she said finally. She smiled in response to the surprised look that Joanna gave her. “You, ah, you probably don’t remember this, but after Erik’s father died, he and I went and moved in with my parents, up North. We stayed for about a year.” She had let go of Joanna’s hand by now and was sitting back in her own chair. “I had never much liked it down here. It just wasn’t home. And when Henry died, I thought that my only reason for staying here was gone, so we left. But you know what, Jo? I got there, and it wasn’t home either. Not anymore.” She smiled in a way that made Joanna think of the word poignant. “I kept Erik up there longer than I should have, because I was so determined to make it fit. But…he’s always been his father’s child. He needed to be here. So I came back—for him.” Now she looked directly at Joanna, focused again. “I’m glad I did. I’ve been watching you, ever since Erik was in high school. Anyone he had his eye on was of particular interest to me,” she said. Joanna smiled briefly. “For all that he’s lost—his father, his best friend, his dog, for God’s sake, and now his baby—he’s always had you.” Joanna looked down, thinking about how close he had come to losing her, too. Adele continued in an embarrassed voice. “I don’t know…why I’m telling you all this, except to say that I know you felt like you didn’t have a place here, after Josh died. And maybe you still feel that way. But sometimes your place isn’t your place because it’s your place; sometimes it’s your place because it’s for someone you love. If that makes sense,” she finished. She sat back again, seeming relieved to have the words all out of her mouth.
For a moment, Joanna imagined what her life might have looked like if Adele hadn’t moved back to Grace when Erik was young. She could have lost him back then, and she wouldn’t have even known it. It made her all the more determined to do what she had to do to keep him now.
She and Adele hugged goodbye a minute later and Joanna drove a little down the road before pulling off to the side and digging her phone out of her purse. Before she could talk herself out of it, she dialed Mike’s number and waited, her heart beating hard. His son answered and chatted with her for a minute before passing off the phone.
“Well, well. Joanna,” he said.
She couldn’t figure out his tone; she decided to get right to the point.
“I’m calling to apologize. Erik and I…we…” She cleared her throat, almost dizzy from the pounding she felt beneath her breastbone, and squeezed her eyes shut. “We lost the baby last year, and I…didn’t deal with it well.” With her free hand, she began manically clicking the top of a pen she found in her cupholder. “Or at all, really. I’m honestly just now coming off of all this.”
“Aha.” His tone was still vague.
“I lied to you, and I left you in the lurch this year, and you and the kids deserve better. I’m sorry.” She tried to get the rest of it out in a rush. “I had to call and tell you that—and to say, I understand if the position isn’t available anymore for next year but…if it is, I want you to know that I will fulfill my responsibilities and that you won’t have to worry about my reliability.”
His silence lasted for so long that Joanna wondered if she had hung up the phone by accident. She was about to pull it away from her ear to check when she heard him take a breath.
“Hmmmm…” And then nothing for several moments more. And then, “I’m not going to lie, Jo, I was shocked when you just didn’t show up this year. I’m very sorry for what you both went through, of course, and I can understand that you had trouble recovering, but you just—you can’t—conduct yourself this way.”
“I know,” she said in a small voice. He sighed again.
“I suppose,” he said slowly, “that it would be curmudgeonly of me not to offer you a second chance, as an appeal to grace, if nothing else.” More silence; she could tell he was thinking over what he’d just said. “What do you say? Shall we try one more year?” Before she could answer, he told her in a voice that brooked no opposition, “With the understanding that if there’s another issue, you’ve thrown away your last chance. You’re going to have to outshine even yourself, Jo. If I can’t depend on you, if I can’t trust you, it lets me down, but it lets the kids down too.”
“I understand.”
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “I’m willing to give it another shot if you are.”
“I am.”
“All right then.”
“Thanks Mike,” she said, breathing an enormous sigh of relief.
They agreed that she would come in for a meeting in the next few weeks, and they said goodbye.
It was nearing dinnertime when Joanna got home. She bent forward, resting her forehead on the steering wheel, for a few deep breaths after she parked the car. Erik wouldn’t be home anytime soon; Joanna took a shower and, for the first time in a long time, she made an effort. She shaved her legs, she coated her hair with oil and her skin with lotion, she cut her nails. When she was done, she put on clean sweatpants and a tank top and sat on the back porch, watching the crowds begin to die out. She felt like she’d lost about a hundred pounds of the baggage she’d been carrying around on her shoulders. Reliving the miscarriage all day had been just as horrific as she’d feared, but the results had humbled her.
After a little while, when the sun was reflecting off the ocean so strongly that it hurt her eyes, she went inside and called Mary.
“Joey!” she whisper-screamed into the phone. She must have been in the middle of putting her own baby, Elizabeth, to bed. Joanna closed her eyes briefly; she wondered if she’d make it through this phone call with those sounds in the background. “What on earth is going on? Where are you?”
For the first time that day, the words just poured out. She told Mary everything: the pregnancy, the miscarriage, the depression, the weight, the wall she’d put up between her and Erik, the months of no sex and sleeping on the couch, the trip to New York—even the stupid choice she’d made to stay with Max.
“Max?” Mary screeched at that point. “Jo, he’s such a…” She sighed impatiently.
“I know.”
“You have to be careful about stuff like that. You can’t just walk out and go stay with another guy.”
“I know.”
“Especially Max. Ugh.”
“I know, Mary! I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly.”
“Okay. Sorry. It’s just—I worry about you sometimes.”
Our friendship in a nutshell, Joanna thought, smiling to herself. Maybe Mary would never stop worrying about her. Maybe she would never stop making her feel like she had to. The world goes round.
“It was stupid. But I realized it and was about to come home. Erik just got there first.”
“He must have been ma-ad,” Mary said in a singsong voice, her tone a bit lighter.
“I’m trying to make it better,” Joanna told her in a small voice.
“Oh, J…he loves you. You know that. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Joanna asked Mary about Elizabeth at that point. She’d been hearing intermittent cooing on Mary’s end of the conversation, sounds that broke her apart but didn’t make her run away. She figured that was progress.
Mary sounded exhausted and crazed, but happy. She was still nannying for the same family, which allowed her to keep Elizabeth with her during the day; Andy was still barely home, but they were approaching a routine. “A weird routine, but a routine,” she told Joanna. At four months, Elizabeth was starting to show a personality and was sleeping for longer stretches, both of which made Mary like her more, she confessed.
It was a little after ten when Mary’s yawns, though she tried to hide them, made it futile to keep talking. They said goodbye and hung up the phone. Joanna felt completely wiped out, like there wasn’t a single emotion left inside of her after the day she’d had.
+++
Erik got home about an hour later. She was in bed, half asleep, when he walked in the door. She heard him go to the bathroom and then climb up the ladder, sighing when he got to their room. Listening to his wallet, keys, and loose change clatter onto the bookshelf was intimate and familiar; she was turned away from him but she knew every move he was making.
She heard him pull his shirt over his head and throw it into the hamper. The mattress dipped a little when he sat down to take off his boots—he untied the first one, slid it off, set it on the floor, and then did the same with the other one—and then he just sat there for several long moments. She wondered what he was doing, and then she felt his hand sweep slowly across her cheek and hair, his fingers resting on the back of her head for a few seconds before he stood up and walked back across the room.
A minute later, he slid under the covers. She was surprised by how strongly she wanted him to put his arms around her and pull her in close. She hadn’t felt that desire in a long time. She thought he might do it, given the way he’d just touched her, but he didn’t. Instead, he laid down on his back and fell quickly asleep, leaving a good five inches of space between them. She wanted to cry. How would they fix this, if they stayed so careful with each other?
Without giving herself time to think, Joanna turned to face him. She put the weight and the shame and the sadness and the comparisons out of her mind as firmly as she could and laid a nervous hand on his stomach, feeling as it rose up and down in time with his breaths. It was disheartening to realize how shy she felt next to her sleeping husband. She scooted a little closer anyway, until she could crane her neck far enough to kiss him on the cheek.
Nothing—his breaths continued, steady in, steady out.
Even more shy now, she propped herself up on one elbow and lowered her lips to his, lingering there for a moment.
Nothing.
She even pressed her lips down, just a little bit, but he didn’t move. Joanna opened her eyes, her lips still on his, and watched him sleep for a few seconds.
She rolled back to her side, fighting a creeping sense of humiliation. He didn’t reject me, she reasoned with herself. He’s just sleeping. But she couldn’t help feeling like she’d been examined and found wanting. She scooted farther away from him and turned toward the wall. It was a long time before she fell asleep.