Thought I Knew You(6)
Greg’s favorite season was fall. He loved apple picking and the pumpkin patch at Halloween. Having children seemed to give Greg permission to indulge in the juvenile fun of Halloween. He was finally able to shake off his hard, serious exterior so he could run up and down the rows of the pumpkin patch, showing Hannah how to find the perfect pumpkin. The stem had to be strong enough to hold its weight, and the sides had to be round and the bottom flat. The shell had to be thick enough to withstand carving, but not so thick that it was too hard to carve. Then we’d take our pumpkins home, and Hannah and Leah would paint theirs while Greg would spend an hour carving a perfect face into a third, using patterns and a small knife kit. I remember marveling at the change in him, his smile wide and open-mouthed, his eyes crinkling behind rimless glasses when he laughed. The gray in his sandy hair reflected the sun, and his face seemed to transform, becoming soft and malleable, where before it had been all hard angles and edges.
I missed him. I missed the idea of him being there, and I was terrified the void was permanent. I began to resent the detective’s implications. Greg wouldn’t leave this; I know that. He was practical and methodical, and he loved his children more than life. Could he leave me? My heart wondered. Maybe.
We’d been less than perfect lately. Before he left, we had a fight—a secret I had not shared with the detectives. Something had been missing lately. We had a broken connection, not beyond repair, but temporary, part of the marital ebb and flow. The subject was raw, as we had clawed at it over and over again. Whenever I tried to bring it up, Greg withdrew, and I became angry, a pattern we never seemed to be able to break.
The day he left, he’d responded differently. “Why do you push this, Claire?” He lashed out, his voice raised as much as he ever yelled, which was to say not very loudly or forcefully. “You don’t accept who I am. You don’t let me just be. I’m always not enough somehow.”
“Greg, that’s not true, and you know it. I want to go back; that’s all. I want us back the way we were a year ago. Something is going on. I have no idea what, but it eats at me. It keeps me up at night. When I lie in bed and look at your back, I want to shake you awake and ask, ‘Why are you a million miles away? Where are you?’”
“Do you cross the line, Claire?” he asked quietly, his back to me. “The demarcation line in our bed, do you move to the other side? Why do you just stare at my back? Why is it always my burden?” He picked up his suitcase, turned, and out of habit, kissed my forehead. Emotionless, rote. He left for the airport. I hadn’t seen him since.
In the dim light of the barn, the late afternoon sun shining through the slats in hazy beams, I cried. I cried because he was right. Greg was the fixer in our life, our go-to guy when everything went to pot. He’d addressed the termite problem last spring. When we had water in our basement over the summer because of three days of rain, he called a plumber to install a sump pump. Until then, I hadn’t known what a sump pump was. He paid the bills, and a few weeks ago, when we had some illegitimate charges show up on our Visa, Greg called Visa and had them cancel our cards and get the charges removed. Those little things in life that I didn’t know how to do, or wouldn’t think to do, terrified me. How were we going to work as a family until he came home? We were fractured, a puzzle missing a piece, without him. He needed to be home. He needed to come home and fix it. Fix us.
“Cody? Come here, Cody! Come home, bud!” I searched the mostly empty barn, pausing to listen for the sound of his nails on the concrete floor. The barn was empty save for the neighbor’s cat, which ran when he saw me, a black ball of fur, skittering away on little white feet.
Cody wasn’t there. I wasn’t surprised. Whether rational or not, I started to believe with unflinching certainty that Cody would not come home until Greg did.
Chapter 4
The first year I worked at Advent, my manager sent me to a training class to understand compliance and the Code of Federal Regulations for drug manufacturing. I worked in the Quality Control Lab as an entry-level technician, and the training was part of orientation. At the time, basic orientation and compliance training were temporarily done offsite in Rochester so employees from New Jersey, Rochester, and Toronto could be trained at the same time.
I jumped at the chance to do the three-day training course and dragged Sarah, my college roommate, with me. We called it a mini-cation. She took four days off work, and we drove her ten-year-old Toyota the five and a half hours to Rochester. The first night there, we each drank a bottle of wine in our hotel room, silly and drunk on our freedom. I used my corporate American Express for everything—the room, our meals, gas, and the wine. We had a completely free vacation from our one-bedroom box of an apartment. We got the most expensive room I felt comfortable getting, which included a large Jacuzzi tub.