Vanessa worked in event marketing, a business that rewarded exactly the kind of charisma she possessed. She could walk into a room full of strangers and make each person feel uniquely welcome. Early in our marriage, I loved watching her do it. Later, I wondered how a woman so careful with the feelings of people she'd just met could become so careless with mine.
We lived in a brick house on a quiet street north of downtown Newark, with a narrow backyard, uneven garden beds, and a kitchen we'd remodeled together. We weren't living in a fairy tale, but for a while we had built something sturdy. On Saturday mornings we used to drive to a bakery for coffee and bring home warm bread. In winter we watched old movies beneath the same blanket, her feet tucked beneath my legs. We had talked about children, once with excitement and later with increasing vagueness, and then not at all.
I thought about those years as I cleaned the counters. The memory that returned first wasn't our wedding or even the day we met. It was an afternoon three years earlier, when Vanessa stood on a stepladder painting the trim above our kitchen window and accidentally brushed white paint through her hair. She'd screamed as if disaster had struck; I'd laughed so hard that she threatened to paint my face next. We ended up sitting on the floor eating takeout from cartons because neither of us wanted to clean the stove.
That memory made the silence in the kitchen almost unbearable. I had not married a stranger, and I didn't believe Vanessa had always been the person who'd just walked out of our front door. The trouble was that our good history could not keep rescuing our bad present. It could tell me why I'd stayed, but it couldn't tell me how to stay any longer.
I walked into the bedroom, opened the closet, and took down a canvas weekend bag. I packed two shirts, work trousers, underwear, my toothbrush, and the medications I took for seasonal allergies. I added my laptop, charging cables, and the slim folder containing a copy of our home insurance policy. Then I sat on the edge of the bed with the bag between my shoes and stared at the photograph on the dresser.
It showed us in Cape May, standing on the beach three summers after our wedding. Vanessa was wearing a white sweater, her hair whipping across her cheek, and I'd wrapped one arm around her waist. The photograph had been taken seconds after she told me she wanted to grow old in a little house near the ocean with a porch full of plants. I could still remember exactly how happy I was when she said it.