“There’s still too much light,” I said. “We can barely see the stars.” It dawned on me then that I should have been terrified. The fire escape was narrow and slick; I had no idea whether we’d be able to get down safely, and there was a chance I’d be caught with a student, at night, wearing nothing but a raincoat. I told myself that Dean would be moving on soon, that the end of summer was in sight, but none of those things explained the calm I felt on the roof, or why I was living as if these were the last months that would belong to me.
Dean glanced at his watch, the hands glowing neon green in the darkness. “It’s almost time.”
Seconds later, streaks of light moved behind the clouds, pale and swift as fish in a river. I tried to count them, but they were passing too quickly and I lost track after a few seconds. Something about all that light passing over my head, so far from my grasp, made my entire body throb. The four walls of my office felt very far away.
The next time my mother called, she asked if I’d seen my father. It was a few days after the meteor shower and my hands still ached from gripping the wet bars of the fire escape.
“Not in a long time.” I had been the one to identify his body at the morgue after he was pulled from the river. I remembered the green bruise on his cheekbone, the bluish color of his skin, the way the veins in his face and hands resembled the intricate lines of a map. He’d looked like a Hollywood corpse, a dummy, a joke.
“He was here for breakfast and I haven’t seen him since. Do you think I should start calling the neighbors?”
Her voice was calm. I pictured her standing on the linoleum floor of her kitchen, in a lavender housedress and slippers, bobby pins holding back her graying bangs.
“Dov’é,” she said, Italian for where are you? The child of Italian immigrants, she had, in the last year, started speaking the language she’d abandoned as a girl. The L passed and I waited for the shaking to stop before I answered.
“Mom,” I said. “Why don’t I come to Nebraska next weekend, just to see how things are?”
“Oh, Diane,” she said. “We don’t live there anymore.”
In bed that night, I didn’t resist when my husband slid his hands underneath my nightgown. I didn’t resist when he began moving over me in a halting rhythm. We hadn’t made love in so long that his body had become unfamiliar to me. The broad hands, the dark circle of hair around his belly button. The lights were off. He could have been a stranger. He went soft before either of us could finish and lay on top of me for a minute, a big heap of man resting between my thighs.
After he rolled away, we were quiet for a while. He breath was deep and ragged, like someone trying to recover from a sprint. I stayed on my back, blinking at the darkness.
“Diane,” he finally said, and when I didn’t reply, he started telling me about his practice dives with the Discovery Group at Winthrop Harbor. He talked about how strange it felt to be sealed inside the rubbery wetsuit, how it took him a few tries to suck oxygen through the mouthpiece properly. When he first opened his eyes, it was the deepest dark he’d ever seen, darker than the waters of Maine, and he recalled a calming exercise he’d learned on the swim team, which was to visualize an empty white room.
“Do you realize how hard that is?” he asked. “To make yourself see only in white?”
“Haven’t tried it lately.” It was hot and through the open window, I heard traffic below, voices on the sidewalks. That afternoon, I’d left the university and gone to a nearby park, where I intended to think about my paper on misunderstandings, but instead I read a newspaper article on people who had changed their identities. A new social security number, driver’s license, birth certificate, passport, name. It could all be bought. One person, quoted anonymously in the article, said he changed his identity every five years, so he never had to be the same person for too long. I watched teenagers kick around a soccer ball and wondered what I would choose for a new name: Betty, Raquel, Lucinda. I had planned to stay in the park for an hour and then return to school, but in the end, I didn’t go back at all, even though I had student conferences. I called the department secretary and asked her to post a sign—Out Sick—on my office door.
“When I got to that place, to the white room, it felt like my head opened and my brain floated right out of my body,” my husband said. “I was completely calm. I could have swum for hours.”
I rested a hand on his stomach. His skin was damp with sweat. That evening, I’d found another message my husband had taken down for me on a paper napkin, this one from my mother’s cousin, asking me to call.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Your plan is to survey all three thousand miles of Lake Michigan with this group until someone sees the mishegenabeg?”
“We have to track it first,” he said. “Pay attention to wave patterns and water levels. I am a trained scientist, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“That’s not the same as being some kind of explorer.”
His stomach tightened underneath my hand. “People can change. What we want can change.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “I don’t think we change very much at all.”
“I’ve figured out what I want,” he said. “Maybe you should do the same.”
“I’m working on it.” I pulled my hand away and shifted in the dark.
My husband turned on the bedside lamp and picked up Mishegenabeg: The Myth of Lake Michigan from the bedside table. “I’m learning the most fascinating things from this book,” he said. The earliest sighting of the mishegenabeg had occurred in the eighteen hundreds, when the giant head of a snake emerged from the lake, dousing a boating crew in water. One crew member even claimed the monster had spoken to him in Latin.
“That’s insane,” I said. In the low light of the bedroom, my husband looked different; the stubble collecting on his cheeks and chin made his eyes appear darker, more remote. What’s happened to you? I wanted to ask, and wondered if he would want to turn that question back onto me.
“Go to sleep, Diane,” he said, opening the book. “And dream your dark dreams.”
A different summer, five years earlier. My husband and I drove outside the city to see a botanical garden in Glencoe. We visited the bulb garden, where red and orange tulips were clustered around small stone statues of foxes, then the Japanese garden, which had raked gravel and gingko trees and water lilies. At the lakeside garden, we watched Canadian geese lumber from a pond, their bodies large and awkward on land, and looked for the birds listed in our guide — cardinals, egrets, warblers, wrens. We wandered the path that circled the perimeter of the property, passing a statue of Linnaeus and a little bronze bear and picnic tables stacked with flyers advertising a horticultural therapy program. We didn’t follow the suggested route in our guide, but walked without direction, my husband occasionally reaching out and squeezing my fingers.
I could not say for sure that I was happier then, though when I look back on that afternoon, the bird-watching and the flowers, the day seemed to mark a turn in the path — as in, from there everything got worse. There was so much we didn’t know in Glencoe: that my husband would be twice denied the promotion he’d been counting on and the book he spent his evenings and weekends researching would never find a publisher, that my father would have a heart attack while trout fishing and capsize his boat, that I would drop my dry-erase marker after seeing Dean in the back of my classroom for the first time. The truth was, in Glencoe my husband got impatient with me when I took too long exploring the bulb garden and, for a week after our visit, complained about the sunburn he’d gotten on his neck. The truth was, we got into a fight on the way back to the city, over an errant comment I’d made in the Japanese Garden, about how it depressed me to see so much beauty all at once, as though everything good in the world, or at least in Illinois, was contained right here. The truth was, that same week, in my office hours, I’d come close to taking a flirtatious student up on his offer to go out for a drink. The truth was, I’d always had recklessness in me. The truth was, things were already getting worse. But, in later years, I would not be able to resist re-writing that day in memory; I needed the altered version, I came to realize, in order to keep hoping for something better.