And she wasn’t wrong, really. We had only the one bad fight while she was pregnant, and never argued at all while Haim was a baby. It was only in the middle of his second year, when he started to resemble a separate person, no longer our little ball of love and chubby rolls, that we began to fight again.
There was only one time that I doubted anything in those years. Charlie was five months pregnant, and going through a phase where she was so fatigued, she climbed into bed at about six p.m. and slept through the night. Usually, I lay with her for an hour or two because she said this was the only way she could fall asleep. It was a Saturday, though, and I had been invited to a party thrown by my fellow students in the masters program. It was at seven thirty, and after ten or so minutes of lying still with Charlie, I got up. I felt anxious. I wanted to take a shower and get ready.
“What are you doing?” she said, and I told her. She didn’t say anything after that.
The party was in an old, warm house. A cool drizzle had begun to fall in the twilight as I pulled in. Inside the front room a couple amps and an electric organ were set up and a few of my colleagues were playing together. In the kitchen a group of women were pouring bottles of alcohol into a pot on the stove, making something they called “blood.”
After about an hour I texted Charlie. I was thinking that I wished she was there with me. There was something refreshing about the way these new people looked at her, about knowing they were looking at her and not seeing Attica and all that had happened there.
What are you up to? I sent her, hoping she was still awake.
After a few minutes she texted back. I’ve packed, it said. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone.
I suppose I should have thought she was joking, should have paused at the unbelievable, melodramatic way she was doing this. But a few weeks earlier, Charlie had come home and not been able to recognize my face.
“It’s different somehow,” she’d said, looking at me almost with wonder. “It’s like, you don’t look like you. Or you do, but just not you you.”
“It’s like,” she said later, “imagine if you had an identical twin. You look like your own twin, if that makes any sense. I know it’s you, but for some reason it doesn’t feel like you. Like you’re an impostor of yourself.”
This kind of dissociation had happened once before, in Attica, right before everything fell apart. Back then I was obsessed with the medical implications, an official cause, maybe Capgras Syndrome. Then, when everything happened there, I spent days wondering if my wife was schizophrenic, if she had some kind of early-onset dementia, if maybe even she’d had some kind of traumatic brain injury years ago without knowing it. But by the time it happened again, by the time Charlie was saying this pregnant, I understood that she was not sick, that there was nothing actually wrong with her. This was not dissociation, I thought, standing in the bathroom door, watching her watch me. This is the imitation, subconscious or not, of dissociation, of delusion. Just as back then her wandering down the shoulder of the highway had been, this was Charlie getting scared, and attempting to leave me.
That was three weeks before the party. Then I got the text. I’ve packed, it said. By the time you get back, I’ll be gone. I wasn’t even surprised, just ill. I stepped outside of the crowded kitchen, into what was now a steady rain.
“Where are you?” I said into the phone. “Tell me where you are, and we’ll talk about this.”
“No more talking,” Charlie said. “I have nothing more to say.”
“Come on,” I said. “Just come back home, I’m going to my car now, I’ll come back and we’ll talk about it.”
“I don’t want you to try and bully me out of it,” Charlie said. “I’ve decided.”
The wife of the poet who was hosting the party stuck her head out of the back door.
“Come in, come in!” she called. “You’re getting all wet!”
I waved to her that I was OK.
“I won’t try to talk you out of anything,” I said. “I just want to see you.”
Charlie didn’t say anything. There was the sound of children laughing. Until that moment I’d thought she was bluffing, was sitting in our bedroom, the suitcase open dramatically beside her.
“Come on, Charlie,” I said. “If we sit down and see each other just for a few minutes before you go it’s one thing. If you leave like this, via, via text message and a phone call, it’s something else.”
Through a side window I could see one of my classmates playing guitar, his eyes closed, face gesturing with the emotion of the riff.
“I was very angry when you left,” Charlie said after a while. “When you get back home go inside and see if you still want to talk.”
Back at the house, her closet was emptied out, her suitcases and car gone. I thought she might’ve broken my laptop, but it was safe on my desk. In the living room, though, our TV stand and the shelf underneath it were bare; only a few jagged, smashed pieces of plastic were left in the places where our television and my expensive game system usually were. The hammer was sitting in the middle of the coffee table. Everything was strangely orderly. This missing television and game system was what I’d been using to kill the long hours between when Charlie fell asleep and when I went to bed.
“I can sense you’re gone,” she often said. “Even in my sleep.”
I called Charlie again.
“I still want to talk,” I said.
“I’m on my way,” she said.
And it was in these few minutes before she got back to the house from wherever she was that I thought all the things I had not allowed myself to dwell on. I remembered her face in the queasy lights of the rest stop, the two policemen bracketing her. I thought of how desperate I’d felt when we’d moved here to Iowa, how much I thought that if something drastic didn’t change, I would lose her. I remembered thinking that a baby would be the thing, maybe the only gesture crazy or grand or selfless enough to jar us both out of our failing, competing ideas of ourselves and our marriage and make our life a life spent together, about something more than our problems. And it was only when I heard her car pull up, and tried to imagine how it would work for the rest of the pregnancy, if someone would have to call me to tell me my wife had gone into labor, if she would even still be my wife by then — it was only when the door opened, and I saw her empty, even face that I thought, just for a moment, to my great shame, that she was carrying my mistake.
“I’m so manipulative,” she said later that night, almost laughing. “The TV and your system are in the basement. The plastic bits were from an old shower radio. I bet you didn’t even really look in the closet, did you? All my clothes are still there, I just pushed them way to the ends of the bar, behind the doors. You know where I was when you called? I was at the movie theater. I thought I might see a movie, to keep myself from answering when you rang. But I couldn’t choose one. I couldn’t go in. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I walked in and I saw you and you looked so. . and I thought, I thought that I’d really done it this time, that you were going to leave me and that would be it. I was so angry, and I didn’t realize until I saw you how stupid, how totally stupid it was of me.”
There may have been a time when we were not yet the people we are now, but we certainly always contained them.
Now, in the car, the post-parade traffic was letting up. Charlie’s hand was still on mine. There is a time just after your child is born when you fall wildly in love with your wife all over again. There is something new in this world only because you have loved her, and that fact is its own kind of rapture, with the squealing, squirming proof right there, always, in your arms. For the first three months, when Charlie’s breasts swelled with milk and all you could see of Haim’s limbs were the rolls of fat, I couldn’t take my eyes off of either of them. I don’t know what happens to this feeling, if it simply fades or if it just breaks apart, letting its embers fall and be buried in the middle of other, different feelings that trouble you years later.