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I remember the soft pressure of Kim’s hand on mine, how she stood so upright, her petite frame sinuously curved, her brown, alert eyes meeting mine for the first time, acknowledging.
She and her husband, Justin, were out doing lawn work that early spring day. They were my elderly mother’s new neighbors in Chestertown. Justin was cutting back shrubs, and Kim was clearing out beds that bordered their modest brick rancher. She had some herbs in black pots on the front cement porch that she was making planting space for; I helped her decide what to plant where, the two of us literally putting our heads together, her brown shoulder-length bob mingling with my short blonde wedge. Justin didn’t seem to notice our immediate connection, or, if he did, it didn’t seem to concern him.
That evening, Kim and I sat on their screened-in back porch and drank a bottle of Shiraz. Justin didn’t drink anymore—he’d recently sold his cabinetry business and had too much time and energy on his hands, but so far he was channeling it on the river; nearly every weekend in warm weather, he went white water kayaking—and in the winter he’d spend a week or more in Costa Rica, barreling down huge waterfalls. Kim approached life with more caution and hesitancy. Her animal spirit guide was a deer—she ran like one, and she gazed at you with that same mix of fear and curiosity.
Justin had a group of younger friends who went rafting with him. Kim said all his friends were younger, that he fancied himself some kind of hippy guru with his mass of grey curls, but she didn’t seem to care as long as he wasn’t drinking.
“It’s been a struggle,” she told me that night, her legs tucked under her on the Adirondack chair, her posture directed towards me. She told me that she’d left Justin once. But then he quit drinking, started going to AA meetings, and repented. She took him back.
She and Justin were going on twenty-two years of marriage then. They had one child together, a daughter who had just started college in Massachusetts. I could tell that Kim missed her, that she was lonely. And she hated her job; she did data entry for an insurance company, a job she found tedious and mentally numbing.
“Max doesn’t drink much,” I said about my husband. “But he can be so distant. He has this fixation with the stars.”
Max and I had been married nineteen years then. We crossed the Atlantic in a sailboat when we first got together in our twenties and could never recapture that sense of adventure in our marriage. But we were comfortable with each other. And we threw our energy into our respective careers. Max was an investment manager who traveled a great deal on business, and I was a domestic pet veterinarian. I was freelancing as a traveling vet then, making house calls. At night, when he was home, Max went into his observatory, a separate building on our property, to study the stars, planets, and God knows what else. At the same time, I researched the latest findings on domestic animal diseases and answered e-mails from distressed pet owners.
I had just turned forty-five, a year older than Kim, an age I found a bit unsettling. Now I was facing fifty, and it seemed I had mounted all the big hurdles. Max and I had never wanted children. My four cats were my babies. And Max had his stars. The thing is, after our rough and tumble sail across the Atlantic, our near-death experiences, we were content to live an ordered life on terra firma, in our Frank Lloyd Wright-style home built into a bank overlooking Still Pond Creek. But, still, there was this yearning.
“I used to feel it was my fault when Justin drank too much,” she said. “I always felt like the trigger. But it wasn’t me. It was never me.”
I took a sip of wine. “But it should be you—you deserve to be happy.”
She looked at me in that way, curious, yet trepidatious.
“Everyone deserves to be happy,” I said, talking to myself as much as her.
After that night, Kim and I started spending more and more time together, running, biking, kayaking on the calm Chester, the spring turning into the heat of the summer. Both of us loved moving our bodies and building strength and endurance. Sometimes Kim would suggest bringing another friend along, but I discouraged it; I wanted her all to myself.
Max and Justin didn’t seem to mind. Once the four of us went out to dinner, and Max and Justin started talking politics—Max a moderate conservative, and Justin an extreme liberal. Let’s just say that was the end of that, and I was glad. But nothing sexual had happened between Kim and me yet, other than the way we held each other’s gaze, her brown eyes searching my blue eyes, a casual caress on the shoulder, back.
It wasn’t until the end of that July, nearly a year after I’d met Kim, the night of my 20th wedding anniversary party. Kim had helped me plan the party. We hired a local band, went to Wine World and filled two carts, bought flowers at the farmers market that morning in Chestertown. We invited half the town. I wanted it, for whatever reason, to be a big blow-out—when I think back on it now, what I actually wanted was a big front. I’m sure Max would’ve rather have been alone with his stars, but he was a good sport.
It was a sizzling day, in the low nineties. Kim and I were opening bags of ice, pouring them into a canoe in the backyard that we were then going to fill with cans of beer and bottles of white wine. We were both kneeling beside the canoe, the ice melting fast in our hands. I put one of the cubes on a pulse point on her neck to cool her down. She put one to my lips. I sucked in the moisture with the tips of her fingers.
Later that evening, Max and I proposed a toast to each other, our standard stale one: “To many more adventures together.” I glanced at Kim from across the yard; she was looking at me with a yearning I could not mistake. When the party was in full swing, people dancing, the band playing songs from the seventies and eighties, Justin caught up in political talk, shaking hands, announcing his candidacy for a county commissioner seat, Max taking people into his observatory, it was easy for Kim and me to slip away. We went into my study upstairs and undressed under low light; neither one of us had ever been with another woman before, but it was natural, intuitive, our bodies slight, so similar in shape, strong and limber. Certainly, I took the lead, but Kim followed me to the river.
The rest of the night, we were careful not to get too close, to circulate around the party, but it felt, despite all the warm bodies, that we were the only ones actually alive. I fielded all the usual vet questions professionally enough, about fleas, vaccinations, heart murmurs… but inside I was a giddy little girl. Later, when the party was over and Max and I were getting ready for bed, he said I looked vibrant and happy.
I kissed him, thinking of Kim.
The next day, I called her with jubilation in my heart, but she was quiet on the phone, evasive. I asked her to meet me at the local coffee shop. At first, she said she couldn’t. She had to clean her daughter’s room and change the sheets. Her daughter was coming home for a few days next week after a trip to Europe before returning to college. But I convinced her we needed to talk.
I wanted to kiss her as soon as I saw her, to hold her, but she had her guard up, her body tense, her eyes alert, looking around for signs of danger, for people she knew. We ordered chai tea at the counter, said hello to several people who had been at the party—Vic and Jessie, Paula and Mare—then sat down at a back table.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her right away, unable to contain my nerves.
She looked away, said in a low, tremulous voice. “I think we took it too far last night. . . I’ve never cheated on Justin before.”
“You’re feeling guilty?”
She nodded, took a sip of tea, holding on to the steaming mug with both hands.
I sought out her gaze. “We can’t help what happened.”
She looked down at the mug again. “Justin wants me to help him in his campaign. He’s so serious about this. He wants to make a difference. He has great ideas for bringing green jobs into the county. . . . ”
I nodded while she spoke, desperately trying to think of a way to draw her back.
“You don’t have to play the supportive wife,” I said, when she’d finished what seemed like her stump speech for Justin.
“It’s not just an act,” she said haltingly.
“Maybe not,” I said, leaving it at that.
Sometimes I’d see Kim and Justin arm-in-arm in the park during the farmers market on Saturdays, making the rounds at vendor booths (Kim would be careful to lead him in the direction away from me). Justin’s chances were slim to none in this conservative county, but he did have his group of followers—college students, artists, eccentrics.
Oh, I played my part. I put a Justin Howell for County Commissioner sign in our front yard—much to Max’s dismay. And I went to the little political strategy meetings they held at their house, and offered my two cents. I wanted Justin to see me as supportive, as a positive force in their lives. And I wanted to spend time with Kim.
She now goes for her runs alone, saying she needs to clear her head and that she is too busy for other exercise. However, I ran into her once on her way to a yoga class at Washington College—a spur-of-the-moment thing, she claimed —but I had my doubts, so I started attending the same class, but she never showed up again.
I’d still stop by their house when I was visiting my mom, take Kim flowers and bottles of wine, and we’d meet from time to time at the loccaféafe for lunch or a cup of tea. I’d keep the conversation light so as not to scare her away: gardening, fitness, and the books we were reading. . . But on one occasion, when we were alone in cafécafé, I asked her if she still loved Justin.
She took a sip of tea, her hand slightly shaking, sunspots on her delicate palms. “He needs me,” she said.
I put my hand on hers. “What do you need?”
She shook her head, looked out the window, and saw gold ginkgo leaves shimmering on the sidewalk like a sun-kissed stream.
“I need you,” I said.
She turned to me, the connection between us still so strong, but she pulled her hand slowly away, looked back out the window.
Not long after that last meeting at the café, Kim found an empty vodka bottle in their kitchen garbage can, which led to a big fight between her and Justin. She came to stay with Max and me that next night. Max and I had moved into separate bedrooms by then; we were growing farther and farther apart, neither one of us doing anything to bridge the divide. We were just postponing the inevitable. Of course, I wanted Kim to sleep with me in my bed, but I knew she wasn’t ready for that yet, so I pulled out the sofa bed in the den and piled on warm blankets.
I had spent the day making home-made meatballs, my Italian grandmother’s recipe, and her famous home-made spaghetti sauce. I was hoping Max would go out for dinner, but I’d forgotten that was his favorite meal, so he joined us, telling us more than we needed to know about Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, some of Max’s clients losing their entire retirement savings. As he talked, I tried to remember what I had found attractive about him, his face now fleshy, tired. I put my hand to my throat, gesturing for him to cut it short; then he asked Kim if she’d like to go into the observatory later, take a look at Venus on the rise. Kim glanced over at me, said sure, and I smiled, the planet Venus named after the Roman goddess of love. Max then told us that Venus is the second-brightest object in the sky after the moon.
In the observatory, we took turns looking at Venus in the telescope, a bright white marble in the sky, the surface obscured by sulfur dioxide clouds. It is said that Venus, the Roman goddess, arose from the foam of the seashore, and that she married Vulcan, a homely metal worker god, with whom she was perpetually unsatisfied, so she had many extramarital affairs. I was quite sure that Kim and Justin were still having sex together. I hated more than anything to imagine this, his gruff hands on her petite frame, his solid mass on her fluidity.
Kim and I went back to the house while Max stayed behind, saying he was hoping to catch the first of the Orionid meteor shower. I opened another bottle of Merlot, poured us each a glass, and we went into the living room. The fire Max had started earlier was nearly out, so I stirred up the ashes, added more kindling, another log, then sat beside Kim on the plush couch.
“You know you can stay with us as long as you want.”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“You’re not. You know that. Max and I are just going through the motions.”
“Justin’s been texting me,” she said. “He keeps telling me it wasn’t his bottle. He doesn’t know where it came from. I want to believe him. I mean, I want to be able to trust him.”
“But can you?”
She stared into the fire, the log beginning to take hold, white and gold flames lapping in waves. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “I’m not sure about anything right now.”
I took her hand. “You can be sure about us.”
I kissed her then, and she kissed me back; but, afterwards, she said she was tired, that she wanted to wash up and go to bed. I walked her to the bathroom, then waited for her, looking out the window: a shooting star flashed down from the sky; I wished for Kim. When she came out of the bathroom, looking angelic in blue silk pajamas, I took her hand, led her to the den, where I kissed her goodnight, tucked her in, told her I loved her, wanting so badly to hear her say those words back to me. “I’m just so tired,” she said and rolled over, facing the wall.
In the morning, there was a note left on the kitchen table thanking us for our hospitality. She’d gone back home, to Justin.
The night of the election, I went to Duffy’s Tavern with Kim and Justin to wait for the results. All the Democratic candidates were there with their supporters. Kim and I sat on the same side of a booth together while Justin made the rounds. Kim was tired, nervous, and she drank more pints of Guinness than she should’ve that night. She started talking about her fear of death, the thought of nothingness, of no longer existing. She said she’d wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, her heart pounding, the room so dark. I tried to comfort her—I told her that there’s a peace in death, that I’d seen it on the face of so many animals I’d had to euthanize; but I could still see the fear in her eyes, so I put my arm around her and left it there; when Justin looked over, I smiled. He surged ahead in the polls at one point, and we cheered, but his lead didn’t last.
The next morning, Kim called and left a message that she needed to see me right away.
“I had too much to drink last night,” she whispered when I arrived at the coffee shop and sat down at a table in the back across from her. “I think I said too much to Justin.”
“Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”
She looked at me with those frantic doe eyes. I could tell she felt trapped. “Did he hurt you?” I asked. “Or threaten you?”
She shook her head.
“Then what are you afraid of?” I asked, putting my hand on hers. I could see others in the café looking over, but I didn’t care.
“I think we need to stop seeing each other for a while,” she said slowly, pulling her hand away. “At least until after the holidays. I need to spend time with my family.”
I nodded, knowing she’d run if I pushed too far.
But I wanted her. I craved her. When the weather grew warmer, I asked her to go on a weekend trip with me to a cabin in West Virginia. Ostensibly, a hiking trip. It was only fair, I said, with Justin spending most of his weekends on the river now—that weekend he was planning on kayaking the Potomac River in Harper’s Ferry. She agreed. And she and Justin had another argument, but in the end, she said, he understood that she was lonely.
Did he ever confront me? Only once. The day before, we were planning to leave. I was getting into my Wagoneer at their place, and he came around from out back. He put his head in the passenger side window, looked me in the eyes, his upper lip twitching. “I know you planted that bottle in our garbage can.”
“Justin, why would I—”
“Cut the crap.”
I put the car in reverse.
“She’s vulnerable,” he said. “You don’t know her like I do.”
“I could say the same,” I said, backing out of the drive.
That night, Kim called to tell me she’d found a box of condoms in Justin’s underwear drawer—she said he never used them when they were together. She was very upset, so I drove back over to their place. Justin was supposedly at an AA meeting. I found her wrapped in a blanket in the big armchair where Justin usually sat, in front of the wide-screen TV—the screen blank. She looked so small, so fragile, that I almost regretted what I had done.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said, crying. “Everything’s such a mess.”
I wanted to tell her to leave Justin, that I could take care of her. But I could see from the pain in her eyes that this wasn’t the time. I walked over to her, knelt, and let her head rest on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” I said, running my fingers in small circles on her back until she calmed down. Then I poured us each a glass of wine and sat on the couch across from her.
“Do you think it’s Megan?” I asked her.
Kim bit her bottom lip, making it bleed.
“Megan’s animal spirit must be an ostrich,” I said, trying to make Kim smile, but she was lost in thought. Megan was the only girl in the rafting group, in her early thirties, long and slender, her head too small for the rest of her body—but she was popular with the guys and girls, trading partners as often as she traded jobs.
“We’ll be close to Harper’s Ferry. We could drive to where they’re camping after we get settled in,” I said, thinking she might finally leave Justin if she caught him in the act. I was convinced that he was having an affair, despite the lack of proof.
She took a sip of wine, the color matching the blood on her lip. “No,” she said.
We arrived at the cabin a little after ten in the morning, having left early, around seven. Justin was still packing his jeep when he kissed Kim goodbye and gave me a cautionary look. She was quiet on the ride, and I didn’t push her to talk. As far as I knew, she hadn’t said anything to Justin about the condoms. We listened to folk and bluegrass music, talked about musicians we’d like to see in concert. She and Justin had been to a lot of shows together in the past, but he was more into country now, something Kim had no interest in. I told her I’d get tickets for Judy Collins when she came back around on tour—and Dylan, and Joan Baez. There were so many other things I wanted to say along the way. I wanted to tell her that this past year had been agony for me, that the two of us belonged together.
We threw our backpacks on the double bed that I specifically requested, washed up in the small bathroom. The cabin was sparse, just the bed and a dresser, a mirror above the dresser. White lace curtains in the two windows, the pine walls bare. We were in the Blue Ridge Mountains, surrounded by the budding green of deciduous trees, near the Appalachian Trail, where we planned to hike the next day. “Hungry?” I asked her. She nodded.
We found a café in the local town, ordered tea and egg salad sandwiches.
“I just want to enjoy this day,” Kim said. “I don’t want to think about Justin.”
“Good,” I said, lifting my tea cup, and she clinked mine with hers.
Another couple, two women hikers, glanced our way.
“But after all these years,” she said, shaking her head. “Everything we’ve been through.”
“Shh,” I said, putting a finger to my lips.
After lunch, we went to Harpers Ferry Historic Park, where we took the walking path to John Brown’s Fort, the old fire engine house, where the abolitionist John Brown and his men were barricaded in 1859. In the pamphlet for the self-guided tour, it says that many thought he was insane, that his plan for an armed slave insurrection was a suicide mission; they said it was an attempt of a fanatic or madman with “unreasoning fury,” but people in the north were more forgiving—Thoreau wrote that “He has a spark of Divinity in him.” The Independent reported that “The controlling motive of his demonstration was sublime.” But did his sublime motives excuse the murders? Kim didn’t believe so, but I said that perhaps, sometimes, there is no other way—that if you passionately believe that something is right (or wrong), then the means, however extreme, justify the end.
I took her hand when we came out of the fort; I wanted her to see, the world to see, that what we had was good and right. We continued on the gravel path, up the slight incline to the scenic overlook, then looked down at the water gap, where Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia intersect, and where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers converge, the two of us seeming to merge like the rivers, flow into one body. I leaned over to kiss her, and she kissed me back, her dark eyes specked with gold in the sun.
“Let’s go back to the cabin,” she said.
The rest of that day is like a dream that replays over and over in my mind. Kim said it didn’t matter who Justin was with; she wanted to be with me. We stopped at a gourmet shop, filled our baskets with wines, exotic fruits, cheeses, crackers, chocolates, and then, back at the cabin, we feasted, made love, over and over, talked about our future, our dreams. She would quit her job, and we would move to Colorado, live in the mountains; I would work full-time as a vet and support her financially so she could take up painting, photography, pottery… We would travel to Europe, bike around France, drink in the lavender fields and the Louvre, rent a villa on the coast of Spain, swim in the Mediterranean, dine on drunken mussels and aged wines, like characters in a Hemingway novel. When she finally told me she loved me, it was as if the sea had been released. But there was a sadness in her voice now, a hesitancy; I couldn’t help but feel that she was slipping away. We made love more passionately, more urgently than before, but I could feel the fear now, her heart pounding, her body breaking out into a light sweat. I did everything I knew to calm her, massaging her back, even biting the back of her neck, like a mother’s hold on her kitten. But I couldn’t bring her back.
I remember coming out of the bathroom that night and finding her looking in the mirror. It was as if she didn’t recognize herself, like an animal trying to find the other identical animal behind the glass. I walked up behind her, put my arms around her, and held her so close her heart felt like my own. “Everything will be okay,” I whispered, kissing the side of her neck, leading her back to bed, where I held her tightly through the night, thinking about the pentobarbital I had in my vet bag in the car. I had enough to put her to sleep forever, to make her mine forever. But I couldn’t do it; I loved her too much.
In the morning, she was gone. She had taken her backpack and walked to the bus station in town, leaving me a note that said she loved me, but she just couldn’t bring herself to leave Justin. I left her alone after that, and by the end of the fall, she and Justin had moved without a forwarding address. I divorced Rex and have had other relationships with women, but I still think about Kim and fervently hope she made it across the river to the deep quiet of the forest.
