Drifting

      Annabel O’Leary had spent far too long in the ladies’ room, she could feel it. There was no clock above the lopsided wicker basket that held the paper towels for hand-drying, but each passing second fell into her gut like a droplet of mercury. She grabbed a fistful of the abrasive tri-folded napkins and made one last pass at mopping the hot tears and mucus from her already-reddened face. Three clockwise swipes, a bit of dabbing at the flared, humid caverns of her nostrils. It would have to do.

           She had left her husband, professor Michael O’Leary, at the table with the complimentary Italian sourdough and the rosemary butter and the quietly brooding fruit of his first marriage, Kevin. When she returned to her seat on the opposite side of the four-top, falsely cheerful grin painted on her face to match the twinkling strands of Christmas lights threaded artlessly around the imitation-Roman columns separating them from the next row of tables.

           “Now then,” she opened the laminated monstrosity of the menu with a decisive whomp. “Has anyone made decisions on a main course?”

           Kevin softly voiced his desire for mussels in saffron broth.

           Annabel didn’t dare to lift her eyes from the fine print of the entree list, lest they immediately fill anew with tears.

           “Dad,” Kevin prodded his father’s blazer-clad elbow. “What do you want to eat?”

           Michael O’Leary, once considered the luminary of Hogarth College’s English Literature faculty, could not seem to cobble together a satisfactory sentence to express his appetite. At long last his finger traced a bumbling route to a line describing cherry-sauced pork loin. When the taut-ponytailed waitress came to collect their orders, Annabel excused herself to get her jacket from the car.

Behind the wheel of the battered beast that had seen their first romantic ramblings, Annabel shook with undulating sobs. A concerned passerby tapped on the windshield and she waved him away. It was in this car that she and Michael had become paramours, then newlyweds. She had imagined being a mother in this car. What she now anticipated was the slow decline from wife to nursemaid to widow, all before her time.

Three months after leaving his first wife, Michael had confided in her the poison of his genome. One of his great-grandfather’s had suffered it, a great-aunt, and then his father. Her beloved had written volumes upon volumes of poetry across the long creeping snake of his career, and so his confession could be nothing less than a beautifully tragic little bit of verse. She had no doubt that he had scribbled it out in various iterations on cocktail napkins and legal pads before he was secure in its final form.

“Darling,” he had whispered warmly into her ear as they sat nestled together on a rise overlooking the jade bowl of their honeymoon lake. “We O’Leary’s carry a shameful burden. It is in our blood, our traitorous blood. Ours is but a brief, flaming madness, then a quick slip into everlasting darkness.”

Michael had buried his father shortly before Annabel met him. They had visited the headstone together, laying down Irish roses and slipping their hands into each other's pockets.

“The old man would have loved you, Annabel.” Michael bit his lip. “He liked Blythe just fine, but he would have loved you.”

The morning of Christmas eve, before the scene at the restaurant, Michael had called to her across the bedroom while she was pulling on her slacks.

“Mother? Don’t go to work just yet, my belly aches.” Annabel, already devoid of the spiritual energy to tell her husband that his mother, who in old photographs and from certain angles bore a passing resemblance to her, had died half a century previous giving birth to the last of his seven Catholic brothers, ran to fetch him an antacid.

After the morning’s scrambled eggs and ham came the first of the proposals. When she came to clear his plate, Michael took Annabel’s hand in his own and stared up at her for an uncomfortable eternity with his watery green eyes.

“Annabel, my love, I know we haven’t been together long, but in my heart of hearts I know I love you with an untempered fierceness. Will you give me the great pleasure of consenting to being my wife?”

Annabel kissed his forehead and left a sorrowful vermilion lipstick mark.

“Darling,” she whispered, showing him her left hand. “We’ve been married for the last ten years.”

It saddened her even the times when he remembered who she was. What stung more was the times he called her Mother, or Blythe, or forgot her likeness entirely. That their wedding photo hung over the dresser was of no use. That day Michael proposed twice more to her, to the point where she dialed up his son Kevin on the phone and asked if he couldn’t be a dear and break away from Blythe’s party for a couple hours to accompany her and Michael to dinner at their favorite restaurant.

Michael’s driver’s license had been revoked at her request the year previous, when after hours of frightened meandering round culs-de-sac and unknown boulevards a power walker sporting a pink golf visor deep in the Maple Cove suburbs found him lost and crying behind the wheel, a mere ten miles from home. Annabel had checked to make sure he had fastened his seat belt then driven them to Blythe’s house to pick up Kevin. The awkward youth was waiting outside for them with a doggy-bag of cutout cookies. Blythe’s silver-bobbed profile was visible through a warmly lit front window, head thrown back in revelry at something one of the many chic, attractive guests had said. It was better that she had not come out to greet them, Annabel thought as Kevin wordlessly slid into the back seat.

When she and Michael had first begun their affair a decade previous, Blythe had been an assistant professor of sculpture at the college. After the heartache of a tumultuous divorce and being left for a woman twenty years her junior, Blythe had gone through a brief relapse in alcoholism before getting sober, quitting teaching, and opening up her own wildly successful gallery. She had a rotating cast of four different lovers, all handsome and well-mannered professionals who doted on her in the way handsome and well-mannered professionals did. It was both a scourge and a blessing, Annabel thought as she navigated the Christmas Eve traffic on the way to the restaurant, that in these days Blythe did not envy her replacement. The gracefully aging sculptoress had crafted for herself a vibrant new life full of love and intrigue, one that left little room for worries about an unfaithful ex-husband and his worsening forgetfulness.

When they had been seated at their favorite corner table by the slouchy and affable host, the somber Christmas Eve trio had ordered wine and avoided small talk, as there was little material these days. After a long spell of silence, Annabel had gotten up to search for the waitress. She had spent all day avoiding at all possible turns her husband’s presence, dreading the next words his unspooling mind would unleash to break her already tenuous held-together heart. When she returned to her place with the waitress and a fresh basket of bread, she found Michael whispering to his son.

“Young fella,” he muttered, leaning closer to the growing boy he had forgotten was his own offspring. “You’re not with this lovely creature across the table, are you?”

Kevin, cheeks ablaze, shook his head in an adamant no. Michael continued his patter.

“It may be a bit forward, but I’ve always been given to romantic impulse. Do you think…”

He then turned to Annabel, and in the planes of the face he’d looked upon a thousand thousand times he did not register his wife, but rather a comely stranger.

“Miss, I do not wish to impose on you, but what the hell. Would you marry me? Just for the night?”

Cue ladies’ room and scratchy napkins.

The rest of the meal proceeded in quiet infamy. Michael spilled wine into his lap and Kevin’s. The middle-aged business types at the next table, drunk off tinsel-tinis, began pointing and snickering. When dessert was polished off and Kevin had escorted his father to the car, Annabel paid the bill. She heard the Christmas Eve revelers starting up their commentary again, this time poking fun at someone’s elderly grandfather and the way his bird legs waggled between the bars of his walker. Before she could seize hold of her senses she had upset an abandoned glass of orange soda on top of the nearest offender. Over his spluttering she addressed the rest of the table.

“That will come for you all one day. The coughing, the stumbling, the forgetting your own name. But there will be a difference between you and those men you’ve spent the better part of your evening jeering at. They will decay and die surrounded by the warmth of those who love them. You will have no one who’s willing to wipe your ass and tuck you into the long goodnight. There will be not a single person on this earth who will want to take care of you. I want you to mull that over before you make fun of someone else’s husband. Merry Christmas.”

Kevin was delivered back to Blythe’s house, and Annabel drove Michael home. She helped him into his pajamas before donning her own. Tucked into bed with the lights turned off, Annabel turned toward the bedroom window as a few straggling snowflakes wound their lazy way groundward. Behind her, Michael stirred.

“Is it Christmas again already, love?” He sounded resigned.

“Yes” she said, barely a whisper.

“Do you remember the first Christmas we spent together?”

“Yes, it was shortly after you left your wife.”

“I was so scared, Annabel. What was I thinking, falling for some graduate student as though I didn’t already have a family? But when I came to know you, I knew that I wanted no other family.”

Annabel burrowed close to him, unable to open her eyes lest the unfolding scene reveal itself to be some cruel dream.

“Annabel, darling, will you marry me?”

She squeezed his hand, and in the darkness there was respite, at least for a little while.