Chapter 1

“How do you live without someone who’s been part of your life for twenty years?”

“Depends,” Sarah said, enigmatic as usual.

The irony of therapy --- basically paying to talk to someone --- is that you end up talking to yourself a lot, a characteristic most of us associate with crazies on the street. I wondered how dissimilar I was, really, from them. What separated me from them other than a shower, shave and clean clothes?

* * * * *

“Where’s my hoodie?” Kelsey yelled from the second floor, but I could already hear her bounding heavily down the stairs. She came into the kitchen with a look of annoyance on her normally pretty face. I winced involuntarily when I saw the black circles around her eyes --- not from lack of sleep, but from too much mascara --- and my reaction only deepened her vexation.

“What hoodie?” I asked, trying to smile pleasantly.

“My Juicy.” She could barely keep the exasperation out of her voice. “The pink one,” she added, just in case I was a complete moron and severely fashion-impaired.

“Probably in the laundry, sweetie.”

“The laundry? Da-a-d! I wanted those things washed last night!”

I sighed. “Sorry. I forgot.”

She folded her slender arms, shifted her weight onto one foot, pouting. “Now what am I supposed to do?”

“You know, you could have put a load in all by yourself if you needed clean clothes.”

The logic was lost on her. My smart, funny, attractive and utterly spoiled, almost fifteen-year-old daughter stabbed me with one more blood-letting look, tossed her head and flounced out of the room. I shook my head. I had never understood why a girl that pretty would want to cover it up with so much face paint. I didn’t mind her wearing make-up. It was the quantity that bothered me. She’d never admit to being pretty, of course. Letty, my mother-in-law, never wasted an opportunity to remind her that “Pretty is as pretty does.” Kelsey would likely have to wait until adulthood to objectively recognize that her grandmother had all the warmth of a January day in Juneau.

Kelsey was smart, too --- way smarter than either of her parents --- which made me sometimes wonder whose child she really was. She wouldn’t admit that, either, since intelligence was pretty low on the list of qualities required to run in Kelsey’s circle of friends, or even belong to her peer group. Looks, fashion sense and the ability to lip synch all the misogynistic, foul and mean spirited lyrics from the latest gangsta rapper hit were far more important. It was just a phase, I kept reminding myself. And when it was over there would be another phase in its place to deal with.

The ring of the phone saved me from her laser beam stare of death. She leapt for it and snatched up the receiver.

“Hello? Hello?” She frowned, held the phone away for an instant, then pressed it to her ear again. “Hello?” She appeared to listen, and handed it to me. “For you, I think.”

I took the receiver and said hello. There was no response. I heard a soft click and the line went dead. “That was strange. Did they say who it was?”

Kelsey shook her head. “Maybe it was a wrong number. Sounded like gibberish to me, like some foreign language.”

I pressed a button on the phone and checked Caller ID. The number was blocked. “Then why did you think it was for me, sweetie?”

She shrugged.

“Um, Dad?” A soft voice piped up behind me.

I turned. “Yeah, Bud?”

Tyler had his nose in a paper bag on the kitchen counter. His hair, dark as a glass of stout, was whorled with cowlicks, making him look as if he’d just woken up. He had, but he always looked that way. He was shy, quiet. A serious child. Small for his age, he always seemed to be swimming in his clothes. It made him look younger than ten.

“Is this my lunch?”

“Sure is. Something wrong?”

“Um, no.” He turned his big blue eyes my direction. As usual, they hid his thoughts, but not the fact that his adolescent brain was churning them out at a rate of hundreds per second.

“It’s just that ...” He paused. “Well, Mom always puts applesauce in there.”

“Right, kiddo. Sorry.”

I almost left it at that. I had a million things to do, and it wasn’t important. At least not to me, not right then. Ordinarily, I would have let my children’s small criticisms bounce off unnoticed. With a full schedule, though, the morning already felt rushed, and my own impatience had somehow left me more vulnerable to their small slights.

Then again, it could have been because nothing was ordinary anymore.

I took a step toward the refrigerator, but the shadow that crossed Tyler’s face for a split second stopped me. In that instant there was something in his eyes --- hurt? guilt? --- that shifted my self-centered focus outward to a slightly bigger picture. There, I saw my kids’ accusatory looks, heard their unasked question --- where’s Mom? Mom would have remembered laundry and applesauce.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride to school. If we leave a little early, we can swing by the store and get whatever kind you want. Okay?”

He shrugged, then nodded, but didn’t meet my gaze. I put two frozen waffles in the toaster and finished washing and cutting up some strawberries while the waffles heated. The sound of the water running in the sink was strangely soothing. The repetitive motion of rinsing, stemming and cutting each berry under the rush of cold water from the faucet stilled the anxious thoughts in my head, leaving it blissfully empty for a brief moment. The toaster’s metallic twang jarred me back to reality. I plated the waffles and joined Tyler at the table. We gave each other a quick half-smile of acknowledgement and started eating in silence.

No doubt there was even more going on in Tyler’s head than mine, but none of it needed discussion even if it was ready for the light of day, so our silence wasn’t strained. Sitting there together, in fact, provided its own form of contentment. It’s a guy thing. Men aren’t programmed for conversation, particularly idle chit-chat. It’s not in our genes. We can do it when prompted, but it’s sort of like getting a dog to walk on its hind legs. It’s mildly amusing, but there’s not much point to it.

Kelsey bounded back into the kitchen wearing an entirely different outfit. She stopped in front of the table and looked from Tyler’s plate to my bowl and back.

“Where’s my breakfast?”

“I didn’t know what you wanted. I’ll make you something if you’d like.”

“No time.” She reached over Tyler’s shoulder, snatched the uneaten waffle off his plate and skipped away.

“Hey!” He whirled, arm outstretched. Kelsey was already out of reach, mouth full of waffle. “Dad! Kelsey took my waffle!”

“I saw it, Bud. I’ll get you another.” I pushed back from the table and walked to the freezer. On the way, I threw my daughter a disapproving look, hoping she’d take the hint and apologize to her brother, maybe even offer to get him another. She was already shrugging into her backpack.

“Dad, don’t forget that I’ve got practice after school, then I’m going to Jennie’s house to do homework before we do our community service project. I probably won’t be home for dinner. ‘Bye. I gotta go or I’ll be late.” A mouthful of waffle made the tumble of words barely intelligible.

“Wait! What? When will I see you, then? When will you be home? Need a ride? Do you have your phone?” I shot the questions at her almost as fast as she’d rattled off her schedule for the day, but not fast enough to get a definitive answer before she was out the door.

“I’ll call you,” she said over her shoulder as she dashed out.

When had I completely lost control? The two separate occasions on which I’d stood in a hospital delivery room garbed in green like a B-movie Martian and cut their umbilical cords, I decided. Then again, maybe I’d never been in control. My life felt as if it was lived on a runaway train, just waiting for enough speed or a curve sharp enough to send it off the tracks into the mother of all wrecks. But the breakfast table was still, my son’s face calm. No one here seemed panicked except me. I reached out and tousled Tyler’s hair. A little messier couldn’t hurt.

“Come on, Bud. Go brush your teeth and get your coat. Time to go.”

I’d already long forgotten the phone call.

* * * * *

“Right, it depends.” I conceded Sarah’s point. “If it’s a casual acquaintance, I suppose it’s not much of a loss. Sort of like getting a wisdom tooth pulled before it ever comes in. You know it’s there, but you never really notice. When it comes out, you sort of poke at the space with your tongue for a while until you forget you ever had one.

“If it’s one of your kids, you probably can’t wait until they leave home. I’m already looking forward to an empty nest, and I still have years to go.”

Sarah smiled.

“This is different,” I went on. “It’s like my life was taken away from me. I don’t know, like suddenly discovering after all these years that you’re adopted, or were raised by wolves. You wonder what’s real and what’s a lie. You wonder who you are, where you really belong. You live by a certain set of rules, then all of a sudden, the game changes and there are no rules. How do you go on if you don’t know what the game is? How do you live if you don’t even know what the rules are?”

“How do you want to live?”

Ah, the therapist’s principal artifice --- answer a question with a question.

“Any way but this. I hate living like this.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think.”

“Rather than focus on what you believe you’re supposed to do or think, let’s talk about what you feel. What is it you hate about living like this?”

She was determined to get it out of me.

“I feel guilty, and I don’t know why. I feel relieved, and that just makes me feel more guilty.”

“Relieved?”

* * * * *

Tyler and I stopped at the grocery store and bought a box of cinnamon-flavored applesauce. I remembered picking apples when I was a kid and helping my mother cut and cook them and press them, still steaming, through a Foley food mill. The kitchen smelled wonderful for days afterward. We packed it in plastic containers and froze it. Throughout the year, the containers would come out on occasion to accompany a pork chop dinner or Sunday pancakes or gingerbread for dessert. Now applesauce comes in little single-serve plastic tubes. Kids squeeze it into their mouths like toothpaste.

I wondered why I’d never taken my children to an apple orchard, never given them the chance to experience an autumn day in the crisp outdoor air and then in a warm kitchen redolent of cooked apples and cinnamon. Was life so much busier now that we had no time to make applesauce? We couldn’t sacrifice one day of our normal routine for a family activity that the kids would remember all their lives? My father had never taken part in making gloriously sweet and spicy pink soup out of crunchy, freshly picked apples. That didn’t mean I couldn’t. I looked ruefully at the box Tyler held. I was short-changing my kids, depriving myself.

I stopped at the bakery on the way out and bought a tall double latte and an almond biscotti. I couldn’t afford it, but it was a habit that would be hard to break. I had become addicted to lattes --- the Northwest’s version of a plain cup of Joe --- almost from the first one I ever tasted. It had reminded me of café au lait in Paris --- dark, roasty, aromatic, bitter coffee sweetened with steamed milk and lumps of sugar. The taste alone was enough to wake you, never mind the jolt of caffeine. Tyler fidgeted impatiently while I dreamed of fresh croissants laden with butter and strawberry jam in a Paris cafe.

“Want a donut, kiddo?”

“No, thanks.”

I couldn’t even distract him with a bribe. Didn’t he know how short childhood really is? We drove to school, still early enough that there wasn’t yet a long line winding into the parking lot. Near the end of the drive we finally ran into a string of half a dozen cars. Slowly, we inched our way, a car-length at a time, to the bus shelter where each car stopped to disgorge its contents of kids, coats, knapsacks and lunch boxes. The car in front of us pulled up to the drop-off. Tyler slung his backpack over one shoulder, picked up his lunch in one hand and grabbed the door handle in the other. When our turn came, he bailed out like a paratrooper and hit the ground running before I’d stopped.

“’Bye, Dad.” He swung the door shut.

“See you after school,” I called through the open window. “Love you, Bud.” He was already gone. I rolled away to make room for the car behind me.

I took the floating bridge into downtown Seattle. Traffic was light since it was after nine, but you never knew in this town. A little rain --- something we get frequently at certain times of the year --- and the freeway might have been jammed. As long as I’ve lived here I’ve never understood the native population’s lack of common sense. Granted, rain doesn’t fall all the time in Seattle. That’s a myth. Summers here are quite beautiful, in fact --- sunny and dry as tinder, turning lawns brown and putting forests at high risk for fire. But it’s as if people are in denial. It rains; they forget how to drive. It rains; they forget how to build roofs that don’t leak (the old Key Arena), crumble (King Dome, since imploded) or collapse (Husky Stadium). Water is everywhere, but Seattleites still have trouble figuring out how to get over it, or out from under it.

The bridge I crossed --- a mile-and-a-half expanse of steel and concrete across the surface of Lake Washington --- is a good example. Actually two bridges built side by side, both essentially resemble a series of barges tied together and anchored to the bottom of the lake with cables. The original bridge was built before the start of World War II. Fifty years later, a new one was constructed to add more lanes. When it was finished, work refurbishing the old one began. Rumor has it that someone forgot to close a seacock one day. Overnight, a big storm filled a section with water. The weight dragged the next section underwater so it filled up, too, and so on, like dominoes, until the bridge resembled the Titanic. Half a mile of bridge went to the bottom.

The region has had more than its share of catastrophic bridge failures. I wondered if I was having one of my own, or if I could shore up the damage before the accumulated weight of too many things gone wrong pulled us all into the silent darkness beneath the surface.

The bridge was floating just fine at present. Rush-hour stragglers, often as discombobulated by sunshine as rain, were behaving themselves. At least I didn’t have to depend on a ferry to get off the island. The glossy surface of the lake made me wonder which ocean Mary was flying over this time. I wondered if there was a bridge in the world long enough to traverse the ocean that had opened up between us.

The trip into town was quick. I followed Interstate 90 to its very end --- or beginning if you’re traveling east to Boston. A left on 4th Avenue, and another left on Jackson took me down toward Pioneer Square. I circled a few blocks looking for street parking, unwilling to shell out twelve bucks to park in a lot for the short time I planned on being there. Finally fed up, I wedged into a loading zone, turned on the emergency flashers, locked up and left. I drive a white minivan, plain enough to be mistaken for a delivery van instead of a passenger car. Instead of crossing my fingers, I thumbed my nose at the gods and dared them to send a meter maid --- excuse me, “traffic control officer” --- rolling by in one of those scooters.

The receptionist didn’t look up when I stepped off the elevator. I walked past her desk, feeling as inconsequential as a wisp of fog. Back past several offices and cubicles sat the space I had called mine for the past three years. A desk, two-drawer file cabinet and two chairs all covered in matching wood-grained plastic laminate furnished the small ten-by-twelve office. The window overlooked the century-old iron-and-glass pergola on the square below. The pergola had been reconstructed a few years before after a truck had cornered a little too closely, clipped a post and brought it crashing down.

The office had never really felt like mine, and now it wasn’t. Devoid of personal items, it had reverted to its former anonymity, waiting to be transformed by the next occupant. For now, it gave no indication of the sort of work done in this place. It could have been an office in almost any corporation in America.

Easing into the chair behind the desk, I turned on the computer. While it booted up, I picked up the handset on the phone and checked voicemail --- no messages. I turned my attention to the computer. None of the forty seven e-mail messages in my in-box were personal or important. I erased them all and shut down the computer. I went through the desk drawers one more time to reassure myself I’d taken everything. A guy from research named Dave stuck his head through the open doorframe. I don’t think I ever knew his last name.

“Last day, huh?”

“Yeah, this is it.”

“Well, good luck.”

“Thanks.” I gave him a half-smile.

He hung awkwardly in the doorway for a moment, hands braced on either side of the frame. With a flush of embarrassment, he gave a short wave and disappeared from view.

I took a last look around, then got up and walked out. No one in the surrounding offices said a word to me as I left. After I picked up my paycheck, my e-mail and voicemail boxes would be cancelled and wiped clean, my name purged from address lists, and I would disappear from corporate consciousness like a wave receding on the sand.