Robin Gaines

Word Count 1783

From the backlit door frame, my husband hollered into the dark bedroom, “The car’s gone.”

“What do you mean?” I was half-awake now, my brain still spongy from the extra glass of wine I had several hours ago.

“The car. It’s not in the driveway. Did you go out last night and leave it somewhere?”

I sat up and threw off the covers. I had three glasses of wine last night, not 30. And in all the 38 years we’ve been married, I’ve never left the house in the middle of the night, much less left my car somewhere I didn’t remember.

“Are you sure it’s not there?” This, my usual response when he stares into the refrigerator announcing we’re out of mustard.

We went to bed at the same time, I remind him. At 9:30, we had finished watching another episode in another Netflix series, turned off the lights, and trudged up the stairs kissing good night on the landing. “Safe travels tomorrow,” I said. “Text me when you land.” I turned left, he turned right, and we shut our bedroom doors.

I like to read. He hates the light on. I sleep with a noise machine (tinnitus). The noise keeps him up. And there’s his snoring. He was getting up early to catch a flight to Florida to get out of the cold, my husband more risk-tolerant of the possibility of catching COVID on the plane than putting up with one more day of 20-degree weather and the chilliness between us.

It was 5:30 a.m., and the adrenaline pumped through me as I dressed in yesterday’s workout clothes and followed him down the stairs through the kitchen to the patio door overlooking the driveway. Yep, the car wasn’t where I had parked it yesterday afternoon.

“Tell me you locked it.”

“Does it matter now?” I said because I knew I hadn’t. We live on a quiet street of historic Victorian homes two blocks from the police station. Not the kind of place one expects a felony to occur.

In coats and shoes, we staggered out onto the dark driveway and stared in silence at the empty space where the car should have been. Maybe we were trying to manifest the car back or at least process where it went. Similar to our marriage. Off and on for the last two years, we’ve been wondering where it went as we stare at our therapist for answers.

We shuffled down the icy driveway to the curb and squinted up and down the street into the early morning darkness. Did I have the car in park? Could it have rolled down the driveway onto the neighbor’s lawn?

This isn’t out of the realm of possibility for us as a couple. Over the years, we’ve rented lake cottages that included the use of boats neither one of us had any business operating. Once, we returned with our three kids from a day spent on Mackinaw Island to find the ski boat missing from the dock (the wind blew it off the hoist we forgot to raise). Or the time we returned from getting ice cream in town and the rental boat had sunk because we forgot to put the drain plug in. The Coast Guard had to be called in for that one.

The car was missing, and it had to be my fault, or his fault, or both of us somehow guilty of not paying enough attention. Another wake-up call to our ambivalence.

Rick called the police. Ten minutes later, two masked officers stood around the kitchen island asking questions while snow dripped from their boots. Did I leave the key in the car? No, we had both fobs. Could the vehicle have been repossessed? No, we had just made the monthly lease payment. Did we have security cameras on the house? Another no. “I didn’t think we needed them living so close to the police station.” Then one of the officers asked, “Will you both be around today in case we have more questions?”

The insurance company had to be contacted, plus Ford leasing. “I’ll change my flight,” my husband said, checking his phone for the time.

“Why?” I said. “There’s nothing for you to do here that you couldn’t do by phone from Florida.” It came out of my mouth rehearsed. But underneath the subtext: Just leave. You always do, and I’ll handle this on my own like I always do.

We were married in our mid-20s, both working in the music business. He was and still is a concert promoter. I worked as a box office manager, then freelance music journalist, and one-time research intern at Rolling Stone. Music brought us together, and music took him away from the family for most of our marriage.

I started therapy six years ago when I was overwhelmed with moving my 80-plus-year-old mother out of an abusive marriage, helping plan a wedding for my daughter, downsizing into a condo, and my debut novel coming out. Momentous occasions from the outside, but on the inside, I felt empty.

A couple of years into trying to fix me, I realized it was the marriage that needed the overhaul and who my husband and I were inside it. Over the years, I struggled with his frequent absences and how it triggered abandonment issues from childhood where my coping mechanism—DO NOT SHOW NEEDINESS OF ANY KIND—was as habitual as brushing my teeth every morning.

The slope of my husband’s shoulders, the curve of his back are his most recognizable features as he walks out the door to catch another flight, to cover another show, I joked to girlfriends. For years, when I’d attend a funeral, a neighborhood barbeque, a school function—alone—people would ask where he was. “With his other family in LA,” I’d smirk, explaining or reexplaining how he travels 2,000 miles back and forth every other week for meetings at the company’s headquarters. “His California daughter must have had a big soccer game,” I’d say, “or, the other wife must have insisted he finally attend a Parent-Teacher conference.”

Laughing off his absence seemed better than the alternative: letting people in on my secret loneliness.

Tell each other what you need is our therapist’s wise counsel. I want her to be happy, he says.

I want him, I say, to feel my pain.

The pain on the morning of November 10, 2016, as I sobbed into my pajama sleeve at the horror of a Trump presidency, and he didn’t hold me. Instead, he was distant and resolute. “It’s only four years.” Or when he didn’t turn the car around on his way to the airport after hearing about the shooting in Las Vegas where our daughter and son-in-law were working backstage. “I thought I could do more from my office.” So he got on a plane and left me to find out about it through texts from friends and family.

I needed a hug when Trump was elected. I needed him to come home so we could listen together to the horror our daughter and son-in-law experienced. But I didn’t tell my husband that. Not then. Only in the therapist’s office when so much was already in the rear-view mirror. It feels, I told her, like we quit paying attention to each other and have steered the barge of our marriage on autopilot for so long it’s lost at sea.

We have so much around us and so little between us anymore. Our children are grown, happy in their lives. They always came first for me. With their father, his career was everything, with family creeping in at a close second. We accepted the terms of this agreement early on, and now we’re unsure how to stop treating our marriage like a working partnership and more like a relationship with a beating heart.

Since COVID times, we’ve spent more consecutive hours under the same roof than during any other time in our four decades together, and we still find the silences easier than difficult conversations. We don’t yell or scream or throw things. We stare into space, at our phones, out the dark windows, into televisions, laptop screens, newspapers, or books to fill the silence. When we finally look at one another, the accumulated resentments I revisit cause Rick and his familiar back to leave the room. “I’ll talk to you about this in the morning.”

But we seldom do.

We fill the emptiness discussing what’s for dinner at 10:30 in the morning, our Zoom meeting schedules, the weather, his aches and pains, and my never going away tinnitus. We bore one another and had been too busy to recognize what’s been missing all along: we’ve never really been there for each other without kids to raise, a business to run, family to take care of. The connection we have now feels like a bridge made of vapor.

Throughout our marriage, we’ve always maintained we were better parents and partners together than apart, but now I’m wondering if that was ever true. Maybe we’re better together apart. Maybe what I need he can never give me. And what he needs from me is not to want more. He wants to fix us. I want us to evolve. But into what?

“Don’t dump me,” my husband says when I ask him how we move forward. “You’re the best part of my life.” And I wonder, which part?

Later that day, video cameras in the parking lots of our town’s Baptist and Lutheran churches would show grainy footage of my car on the back of a trailer cab around 2 a.m. that morning. Hours after my husband had landed in Florida, the car was found in Detroit stripped of its tires and the front end grill along with the headlights and sensors.

A couple of days later, I dropped off the key fob to the collision shop where it was towed. I walked through the lot strewn with crumpled metal wondering with horror if the cars’ occupants survived. Amongst the wreckage sat my wheel-less SUV, like a boat moored in place. The missing front grill like a dark void where a mouth would be if a car had a voice.

“Is it fixable?” I asked the shop manager. “Or is it totaled?”

Someone from the insurance company would make that call, she said.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the broken vehicle would want us to do. “Don’t consign me to the scrap heap with the others,” I imagined it saying. “Replace the missing parts, and let’s find our true north again.” But let’s be honest. Cars and people are never the same reassembled.

*

Robin’s first novel, INVINCIBLE SUMMERS (ELJ Editions), was a Shelf Unbound 2018 Best Indie Notable 100 Book, runner-up in General Fiction at the Florida Book Festival, and semi-finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Award & John Simmons Short Fiction Award. As a former music journalist, she started as a research intern at  Rolling Stone before writing magazine and newspaper interviews and critiques. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Lit Break, Crack the Spine, Slice, The Citron Review, Redux: A Literary Journal, and Beyond the Plots Anthology. In addition, Robin writes a book blog at www.robingaines.net and facilitates writing workshops all over the world for Wide Open Writing. She has just finished her second novel, MOSAIC.