Winter 2007

Reasons for Living
Rachael Mann

The first time Annie thought about killing herself, she told me that she had envisioned her absence as romantic. She thought about leaving a letter for her lover, telling him that the voices of the birds in the mornings through the almost-open windows made her heart want to break with the wanting it to go on and on without her ever having to move her own body. But there was no lover then and she thought that her parents would never understand a letter like that, would never see that she had put those words together because the sounds of the syllables fit for reasons that she only vaguely understood.

But the second time she considered it, it was not for romance. It was for a feeling of uselessness—a day-to-day tide that seemed unrelenting in its lack of productivity. But when Annie closed her eyes and imagined things going on without her—because they do, they always do—it gave her such true sadness, not at all fear, that she let the idea go. It was thinking about her clothes going unworn, her words never being heard again, her books being sold to the used-book store down the hill after a certain number of years when those who loved her were able to be rid of them and someone, upon opening the front flap and seeing A. Kerchival written inside in Annie’s own hand, never knowing that she no longer lived.

And the third time, the last time Annie considered suicide, she said it was because she thought of what it would be like if heaven were real. She thought about being weightless, colorless, shapeless and existing only inside a sound. She thought again about those birds outside her window, every window of every place she’d ever lived, and what it was like to know only movement, being, survival. But in the end, she told me, each time she’d decided she loved living too much. I thought it sounded like bullshit. In a way, she surprised me—will always surprise me. Annie was the kind of person who didn’t seem as if anything of consequence had ever happened to her; she never knew what it was like not to love life. She was still young, married with a toddler—a little girl—and successful in all the ways that I wasn’t, and no one else I knew was, yet. She might be so even still. Missing someone is complicated in ways I can only begin to understand.

Maybe this is what struck me as the saddest thing when Annie, my best friend whom I’d known since college, died in a car accident on I-5 between Seattle and Everett. She had already considered her options and living was it—the thing. No one knew why she was on the freeway that day. She had no appointments in her address book, no one left a message on her voice mail asking where she was when she didn’t show up, and no one came to tell her husband, Jacob, anything that he didn’t know about her, like an affair—a lover to whom she might have written a letter. And so two years have passed since her funeral, and still Jacob doesn’t understand why there was a packed suitcase in her back seat and their daughter was left at her daycare and told that Jacob would pick her up when he had no idea he was to do so.

Annie has passed from my day-to-day thoughts—sometimes, I think, like a friend with whom I’ve only lost touch and will likely fall back in with one day. I am expecting no one anymore, as tends to happen when we gracelessly age—something I wonder why Annie never had to experience. She never had to usher in her thirtieth birthday alone, as I did a few years back. Nor her thirty-fifth which will come for me in just a few months. In fact, she never had to be alone for any time at all, to live your life according to only your own graceless schedule. This is what I find most exhausting.

But I am not thinking about any of this when Jacob knocks on my door. It is cold out—an unseasonable freeze settling in and I pull my shoulders close as I open the door for Jacob. A sluggish moth, the last of the fall season, flickers around my porch light and I hold the door wide for him to pass. Jacob has done some of this graceless aging himself. He is still tall and slender enough that he doesn’t appear to be an old man, but he has certainly gotten older in small ways, in ways only I would notice. The wrinkles in the corners of his eyes are not light, don’t appear when he smiles, but are instead an ever-present part of his face. His hands are perpetually in his pockets and his shoulders hunch. I remember him as a young man who asked my friend to dance in a restaurant where no one was dancing because it wasn’t that type of place, and when she said no, he asked if he could join us. He once looked young and capable—the kind of man Annie and I both watched all through college and imagined ourselves with someday.

“Do you want some tea?” I ask, shutting the door and turning off the porch light. The moth can now move away from my porch, out into the street glimmering with frost. I picture its paper-thin body hanging in the space above the asphalt but below the streetlights, hovering until the rain sweeps through and melts the ground soft.

Jacob follows me into the kitchen. He sits on a chair in the corner while I put the kettle on the stove. This is not abnormal—Jacob’s arrival. We are not sleeping together, we have never slept together. He just shows up sometimes after work while Lindsay, their daughter, is at her after-school program and we keep each other company for an hour or so. We are old friends. We never really talk about Annie anymore, and not because we try to avoid her name. We talk about Lindsay and we talk about our jobs—his teaching high school and mine as a paralegal at one of the mid-size firms downtown. We talk about our gardens, the mysterious noises emanating from the engines of our respective cars. We talk about our pets and the quality of our sleep—mine which is solitary and his which is not because of the small, warm body of his daughter, who still crawls into his bed after he has fallen asleep. Annie used to say that people aren’t meant to sleep alone.

But, tonight, Jacob seems unsteady, nervous and I want to touch his arm and tell him to relax. Right off he says, “I think I’m going to get married, Meg.”

I laugh. “So this is the year? You just decide you’re ready?”

He looks up at me, shaking his head. “No, really. I met someone. I want to marry her.”

In the beat before the kettle whistles, I think I’ve misheard him. But I nod, walk to the stove and begin pouring water over our tea bags. “Who is she?” I try not to feel as if he should have told me this before, but it’s hard not to. Did he wonder if I have kept my allegiance this long? If I would tell him Annie wouldn’t want him to remarry? I can’t begin to know now what Annie would have told him, were she to take a ghostly shape and stand here in my kitchen. I don’t know if she’d have given him the permission he wants, or if she’d say she wouldn’t stand for it. Would she have said that, rather than someone else, he should have ended up with me, her best friend? I doubt it—she was not that magnanimous and I have never considered what it would be like to sleep beside him, although I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t want to.

“She works with me. She’s the vice-principal.”

“What does that mean for your work? Would that be a problem?”

“Yes.” He takes the mug from me, wrapping his hands around it like he’s cold. “I’m going to leave Roosevelt, probably in the spring. Holy Names has offered me a job there, and I think I should take it. It’s private and I could enroll Lindsay. I sure as hell can’t afford the tuition someplace like that now.”

I sit across from him. He is not successful, not in a way that seems important. Annie had left her job as a guidance counselor at the University of Washington, a good position, to raise Lindsay while Jacob continued to teach. She always said she’d go back, said she loved the work, but she never really showed promise of doing that. But what strikes me now is that he seems aware of his lack of outright success—something that Annie was willing to give up. Jacob has not moved forward at all in the years since Annie’s death. “Do you want to do that?” I ask.

“Teach at Holy Names? Sure. It’s a much better job.” He sips at the tea but doesn’t look up at me.

“What about Lindsay? Has she met her?”

“They get along,” Jacob says. “Angela really likes her and Lindsay seems to like Angela, too.”

They get along? Is that all? I ask, “That’s her name? Angela?”

“Angela. Angela Wickers. I’d like the four of us, you, me, Angela and Lindsay, to go out to dinner this weekend. Before I ask her.”

The name is oddly familiar and I can’t remember why. Even stranger, I can’t imagine why he’s asking me to go to dinner with them, but I will. Despite the fact that we see each other regularly and talk about our lives in detail, Jacob and I are not friends in that way—the way you are when you want someone to meet your potential future spouse. Because we are here, together, in ways that have long gone unspoken since Annie’s death, I think there is something to this that he wants me to understand—something he’s trying to show me about who he’s become in the past few years. But I already know him, have seen him alone, then married and now alone again. “Why do you want me to come, Jacob?”

He sighs and sticks his fingertip in his cup, swirls it around. “I’m not looking for your permission. I know it’s not like that anymore. I miss her all the time, but I don’t feel guilty. I don’t think you’re going to make me feel that way either.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s just that—” His voice breaks and he hesitates. I’m not quite sure what he’s going to say next, and I am afraid that he thinks it will be something I can’t understand. Because he has known love—I have seen it but haven’t known it myself since a man I dated not long after college, a man with whom I believed I’d start a life—an old story if ever there was one. There has been little for me since. “It’s just that I want to make sure I’m not fucking up again.”

“Again?” This isn’t what I’ve expected to hear. “What are you talking about?”

He stands and sets the mug down. “You and I both know she was leaving me that day.” He puts his arms into his jacket sleeves. “There’s no proof, I understand that. There won’t ever be. But just the same. She had a suitcase where the baby seat should have been, and that’s something I’ve had to come to terms with. And I don’t want to pick somebody else I can’t ever make happy.”

I don’t know what to say. “I don’t know that she was leaving you.” But this isn’t true—I have thought it, but I haven’t been able to imagine the reasons why she might have felt this way. Why you might walk away from a man like this, a life like Annie had.

“Well, that’s kind of you.” His voice is flat as he squeezes my arm and I reach for his hand, hold onto him. I can feel the place where our skin touched after he pulls away. “Thanks for the tea. I’ll call you? How about Friday?”

I nod and just like that he goes, the door pulling shut softly behind him. I really don’t know, will never know, if she was leaving him that day or not, but I have thought about the fact that when she recounted her near-suicides to me, he was never the reason she pulled back. He was not the thing she said that she loved about living life, and I guess I just always assumed that she never needed to articulate that—because she had Jacob and she had Lindsay, who must have filled that need for meaning, gave her use and romance and a sense of the beyond all at once. Jacob never seemed to question, before now, that they were anything but happy—at least he never told me otherwise.

After Jacob leaves, I sit at the table still, my tea undrunk. They had, as most of us do with our partners, their problems, but I never thought it serious. Now I think of Annie driving north to the border because she imagined something new there. She imagined Washington giving way to wide, snow-swept plains and grass thick as animal hide—maybe Canada was like a bridge to all the good things she was missing that none of us realized she lacked. She thought that she might yell into the wind and hear an echo of her own voice returned.

Jacob has always been the kind of man who never seems at ease. His new girlfriend, Angela, looks so at ease. I realize I have met her before as soon as I see them waiting for me in the parking lot, when she places her hand in mine and we shake—her name is clear to me. When Jacob began teaching at Roosevelt High School, Annie threw him a party at their house and invited the entire faculty. Angela had shown up late, and I remember this because Annie held my arm and said in a low whisper, “She’s the new vice-principal. They just hired her a few days before Jake. And the principal is supposed to retire any time now, so she’s probably being primed for the job.” Annie nodded her head and added, “She’s pretty, Meg, isn’t she?”

I agreed, but Angela was only pretty in that way that women have when they’re approaching middle-age with trepidation. I thought Annie realized this—she had to have seen it in other women already. Angela was tall and wore pumps, a suit combination with a sweater underneath, even though it was clearly a casual house party. She wanted to appear in control, competent. Angela is three years closer to middle age now and is still wearing the same style of clothes. I still think she wants to seem in control, competent. Or maybe she just is. I don’t think I ever knew her last name, Wickers, but it fits her—brisk and proper.

We are at a restaurant along Lake Union, an upscale family-style restaurant. Annie loved restaurants with velvet blinds and dimmed candles—the sorts of places where she had to ask a friend, quite often me, to watch Lindsay when they went out. The kind of restaurant that we used to dress up to go to when we were in college and thought that there really was something special to this business of being an adult. It was a treat for me to be able to eat at nice places, but I think it was what Annie expected of life. She’d sit straight and hold her glass like it would shatter if she let go even a little. But here, the hostess wears a short-sleeved polo and smiles, grabbing a cup full of crayons and a paper placemat with the outline of a smiling salmon holding a fork and knife. People are sitting around heavy, round wood tables and laughing out loud over shelled king crab and potato skins.

We walk in a line—Jacob and Lindsay hand-in-hand, then Angela, then me. At the table, Angela sits across from Jacob and I take the seat beside her, so he can pull Lindsay’s chair closer to him. Angela’s perfume is almost overpowering—over the seafood, the butter, the fried grease—I can smell her scent, flowery and light. Their heads move together and I notice the way Angela has leaned toward them, to hear Lindsay’s small voice. I press my chair back, rocking the two front legs off the floor, and pick up the menu, looking through the different arrangements of seafood. Jacob points to things on the menu and says, “What do you want to eat?” I start to say the halibut, but I realize just in time that he isn’t speaking to me.

“I can read it,” Lindsay says and grabs the menu from him. I think she is looking at the pictures alongside the words when she says, “Chicken.”

“Strips?”

She nods and fiddles with the crayons while Jacob’s arm is stretched across the back of her chair. She holds one in her fist and swirls it over the tablemat, leaving behind a trail of blue. But the crayon snaps and Angela laughs. Lindsay looks up, startled, and I think that she’s going to look angry for being the center of this laughter, but then she laughs, too. I like Angela for a second, like that she was able to open Lindsay and make her shimmer. Sometimes Lindsay lights up for me, but most often we are serious. When Jacob has parent-teacher conferences or administrative meetings that keep him late, Lindsay and I watch movies and make cookies, draw pictures and read stories. We talk, and I think that this is what she most needs—what a child who can never know her mother must crave. Now, I try to think of something funny to tack on to Angela’s moment of comic success, but I can’t. I freeze sometimes, lose the part of myself that conjures up words and then phrases. No one notices my silence. We have a nice dinner—Lindsay eats her chicken carefully and I have to remind myself that she’s five and no longer the three-year-old she was when her mother died. Even though I see her with regularity, I am always amazed by how much of a person she has become.

Angela keeps laughing and I notice again that Jacob looks more at ease with her than he ever has, even with me on those nights just after the accident when he would call and I’d come over. The first night, after he’d left the hospital, I came over to help in whatever ways I could and he had crouched on the carpet, leaning his cheek against my knee while I sat on their sofa—Annie’s favorite blanket across the arched back of the couch. “Did she love me?” he’d asked, and I said yes, not only because it was the thing to say, but also because I knew it must be true. And then he said, “You’d tell me if she didn’t.” It wasn’t a question, and so I didn’t say anything back. I wanted to touch him, to place my hands on the sides of his face and tell him that he was going to be all right—that even the worst hurts pass. I wanted to tell him all the good things I could think of, but I didn’t. I could barely do anything—I felt like things were coming loose and too much space was floating, unanchored, through the house and that I was on the cusp of that same impossible feeling pooling inside me. I only wanted to make him stand up.

Later, I fell asleep on the sofa and the next morning I made Jacob and Lindsay eggs. This happened many times, but hasn’t in so long. And he hasn’t spoken of it in well over a year so I wonder occasionally if he even remembers or if the memories have been clouded over. But I still think of their kitchen, warm as the radiator ticked and coffee percolated while I beat the eggs with a whisk and dropped in shredded cheese. Bacon popped grease. We all three sat at the kitchen table and ate breakfast—warm and almost safe as rain slid down the windows. I don’t think he’s more at ease because Angela’s better for him. Instead I try to think about it like he’s an entirely different person than he was before. You can’t compare a twenty-three-year old in a college bar to a widower in his mid-thirties who is on a date with a woman he’s hoping to marry. I want to keep Jacob laughing, turn his face to mine. I am going to tell a joke that has always made him crack a smile and I feel fluid—like I’ve lost that clumsiness I felt when Angela had teased Lindsay. These are words I know by heart.

“Okay, I have a joke,” I say. I set down my napkin beside my empty plate and lay my hands, palm down, on either side. “What did eight say to zero?”

It’s now late and the restaurant is hazy with the covered candles blinking on each table. Behind Jacob and Lindsay, the marina lights have come on and the boats are tethered only by shadows. Angela looks at Jacob and says, “I don’t know.” She is smiling, but he isn’t. He has turned his head and is biting the inside of his cheek.

“What did eight say to zero?” I ask again, slower this time. He looks at his plate and I realize he’s not going to give up the punch line. For a second I think that maybe he hopes Angela isn’t going to get it and the joke will remain ours but I begin to see that won’t be the case. “Where’s your belt?” I finally say. Angela starts laughing, but she too can tell that something’s not right. I say, stammering, “I know, it’s silly—”

“I think it’s funny,” Angela says. She’s twisting her napkin in her lap and I see her reach under the table and pat his leg. What’s wrong? she mouths at him with a tilt of her head.

“Nothing,” he says. But Angela keeps staring at him. “Really it’s nothing. It’s just that it’s an old Annie joke.”

“A what?” Angela says.

“An Annie joke. Then you’re supposed to ask, What did zero say to eight? Right, Meg?” He looks at me as he speaks, then turns his face down. I don’t understand why he is reacting this way—like Annie isn’t part of this dinner. She’s the reason we’re all here, but he looks hurt. Like he doesn’t remember.

“A mommy joke?” Lindsay asks, and Jacob looks over at her. “Say it again.”

“Not right now,” he says and places a hand on her leg. “Let us talk.”

Lindsay looks at me, her eyes bright in the soft light. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize.” I want to tell him that I forgot she’d told us that joke, but I hadn’t. I remember sitting at that restaurant. He asked her to dance and she said no. She held a wine glass of water in her hand and told this same joke. He laughed like it was the best joke he’d ever heard. How he said it was stupid, even though he laughed, and she looked like she’d lit up the room. People at the other tables had stared at the three of us.

“Keep telling it, Meg,” Jacob says. “There’s more. What did zero say to eight?”

“I’m sorry,” I say again, but I’m a little indignant. Lindsay fidgets in her chair and Angela is running a nail down her water glass, tracing a line in the condensation.

“Nice belt.” Jacob pauses and says, “Zero says to eight, Nice belt.” He holds his hands open, but there is an edge of sadness to his voice that seems like it’s breaking out and will silence all of us. “What? You don’t think that one’s funny?”

My face has gone red, I can feel it. I think of Annie sliding up and out of her chair, giving him her hand. She said she’d take that dance after all, but Jacob had blushed and said she’d called his bluff. “If you’ll excuse me,” I say, pushing my chair back. “I have to use the restroom.” I set my napkin on the table and ask Lindsay, “Do you need to come, too?”

She nods and climbs off her seat. I walk her to the bathroom and my hands are shaking. I look back and see Jacob and Angela staring at the tablecloth, then Angela straightens and says something to him. I keep walking.

In the bathroom, Lindsay goes into the stall and I lean against the sink. She doesn’t seem to notice that I was the one who needed to use the restroom, and I suddenly feel very empty. I think what my reasons were—the reasons I gave Annie that afternoon at the coffee shop when she sat very very straight and told me about the three times she’d thought of killing herself. We talked about things like this—Annie was melodramatic sometimes. She had finished talking, then set down her coffee. “What about you? What are the reasons you get up everyday?” she said.

“Me?”

She nodded. “You.”

“I don’t know.”

“Listen, Meg. Listen to me. I need your reasons.” I looked over at her and her eyes were too liquid. Like she was coming undone in slow, immeasurable ways. I can’t decide why I didn’t pay more attention to her.

“Okay,” I said, though I was exasperated with this. I didn’t want to tabulate my reasons for living because I was, I know now, afraid that they wouldn’t amount to enough in either of our eyes. “Because otherwise I’d never get to see you.” I smiled at her and leaned forward to touch her hand. We sat there a moment, and then she picked her coffee back up. She brushed her face with her fingers and it was like the redness from her lids and eyes melted back into her skin. It was like she’d never been unhappy, and I thought maybe I’d said the right thing. I thought maybe that was important to Annie, I was important to Annie, and I was glad. I wanted that.

“Whatever,” she said, looking embarrassed as she reached for her purse. If this was a movie, that would have been the last time we saw one another—a few days later her car would have been side-swiped by a semi on the freeway and she’d have been crushed against the steering column until the jaws of life could saw the car into two pieces, then the paramedics would have airlifted her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead two hours later. But this isn’t a movie, and that isn’t the truth. Instead she stood and rubbed her swollen stomach, full of a child who wouldn’t be born for another month and a half. Annie was just beginning her marriage, and I was her best friend—the girl she’d gone to college with and who had remained, for some reason, the person she always came to. The person who lives simply because she continues to breathe, continues to move and exist within the world.

I can’t say why I am still that person—why her jokes come to me in the middle of dinner and why they are still so much a part of the way I think. I take Lindsay’s hand after she dries them on a paper towel. She shakes her hair back from her face as we walk and I remember that this is what Annie did. This is her motion, so familiar that I feel her hand in mine as we leave the restroom. But then Lindsay says, “Why did he say it was an Annie joke?”

We stop and I crouch down—I don’t know what I want to say. I wonder how she remembers Annie. Is she a voice and a shaft of light hair fallen across a blank face? Is she the photograph from the Christmas before she died that still hangs in their hall? Or is she the dark shape that moves before Lindsay’s closed eyes in the moments just before she sleeps? I tell her, “Because it was a joke your mom told us a long time ago.”

“Tell it again,” she says. She presses her eyelids closed, like she’s trying to imagine an image as I say the words.

“What did eight say to zero?”

“What?” She opens her eyes.

“Where’s your belt?” Lindsay smiles, but even I, who know so little about the way her face looks from day-to-day, can tell it isn’t the happiest smile. I stand and take her hand again, walking back to the table.

Jacob is sitting where I was before, and I sit in his old seat with Lindsay beside me. She kicks her legs against the rungs of her chair.

“Please, I really am sorry,” I say. I lean toward them and rest my hands on top of Jacob and Angela’s. I want to pull their warmth up and out of their bodies, lay it across me. I don’t want this to end, any of it. “Really. I was having a really good time, and I’d like it if we could just forget about it.”

“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Angela says as she looks over at Jacob. Then she says, “It was a good joke.” She clears her throat and glances over at me. “Clearly Ann was a funny lady.” She smiles and I let go of their hands. I feel like life has suspended itself here for a minute, letting me catch my breath and figure out how things fit back together.

“Annie,” I say. “I called her Annie.”

You say a name and just like that, the magic goes out of things. It becomes another in a string of words I’d take back if I could—she isn’t Annie anymore. She isn’t even Ann. She has gone. Jacob’s eyes are down and when Lindsay says, “Daddy,” he looks up and says, “What, baby?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

But it isn’t nothing. I let go of their hands and sit back against my chair. Jacob wraps his hands more tightly around Angela’s. He thinks that he will someday soon tell her all his secrets, those unnamable fears and insecurities that rise and keep rising as he ages, and that when she tells him hers, life will become linear again. I know it. Lindsay will get older and our shadowed outlines, mine and Annie’s, will grow harder to pin-point, harder to distinguish from the way she’s been told to see them. I think that maybe we all want to be the middle, the center around which life revolves. I look at Jacob’s hand—their intertwined fingers as he rubs her skin with his thumb. There will be champagne in clinking glasses and a white dress, a towering cake and armfuls of flowers. A toast promising all the happiness two people can possess. Once again, all the good things will come to them. I fiddle, picking up Lindsay’s blue crayon, the broken one, while I am waiting for someone to speak—I hear Jacob take a deep breath. Running the blunted edge of the crayon along my arm until it leaves a film of blue on my skin like a bruise, I then hold my arm out and look at the way I have covered myself.