Chapter Five - Somewhere in America

"And I see losing love is like a window in your heart,
Everybody sees you’re blown apart, everybody sees the wind blow"

"Graceland" Paul Simon

He was busy working, in the afternoon on a day like any other, when the office phone rang, He had his feet up on the windowsill and was looking out over Broadway. He had a call on line one the receptionist said, it was his Father, he never called him at work. His blood went cold, He knew it was bad. Son, he said, your Mother died last night, you have to come home. That was it? He couldn't catch it, he asked him to repeat it, then he heard the shaking in his usually stern Father's voice and he knew it was true, he was in New York, and she was in England....but at the same time not in England. He hadn't had the chance to say goodbye.

It was a couple of days after I'd come back to Madrid from visiting him for Christmas, I talked to him the night before, he wasn't feeling good and I told him to go to the doctor's the next day, I will, he said, goodnight son, talk to you tomorrow. The next morning I got a phone call from my brother. Doug, he said, I heard the discomfort in his usually placid voice, Dad's dead, he had a heart attack this morning, around 6, he was going to the kitchen to make tea....he just....collapsed. It was too late to stop it, it was now in the past, I turned around repacked my suitcase and went back to England, it was too late to tell him that I loved him, even after all the years of mutual suffering, I would have to bury that part of myself along with him.

I was at college in Orlando, she came down to visit me, my wife, I was still so much in love with her after 12 years of marriage. We went for a drive, then we went for a walk in a park, we were walking through the rose garden, let's sit down she said, we need to talk. It's...well...it's like, when you come back to New York I don't want us to live together anymore, I want to move on. All I remember now was the park bench, and the heat, and her perfume, I couldn't weigh her words, they weighed more than gravity. Later that year I went back to New York to live alone, and in a way I still do.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and it was raining. He was driving to the market when she messaged him on his BlackBerry, he tried to read but was about to lose control of the car so he pulled off the road into the market's parking lot and without turning off the motor sat motionless there in hell in the rain reading the flow of the severing words, desperately thumbing the keys of the phone in reply, trying to stem the flow, to cauterize the wound, to stop her leaving him for ever. She was walking away from something dangerous, something she didn't even know about, because it was his dream not hers, she was only afraid of causing damage. The messages stopped, he sent her a final "?", there was no reply...there was a vacuum. He threw the phone on the floor, violently as almost to separate his head from his body he wrenched himself forwards in the seat clutching at the steering wheel and felt such a strong desire to drive blindly into the Main Street traffic, to collide with something real and substantial and true, to do something to take away the pain. Rocking backwards and forwards like a child he couldn't stop crying, weeping for himself and his life, and for what he'd done, and feeling so sorry for himself, so sorry for misunderstanding her intentions. After a while he calmed down enough to walk quietly through the parking lot through the pouring rain into the market, carefully comatose, reddened tear stained eyes blind, trying not to look his fellow shoppers in the eyes, because they would be able to sense his extreme vulnerability, feel his guilt. He bought what he needed, milk, cereal, a box of rat poison powder and a gallon of Clorox, and by old habit smiled at the cashier. He walked out into the rain and got back into the car...OK, he thought...time to go home and act like nothing's happened.

Alone in the apartment, sitting by the window, she was fixedly staring at the computer screen and she couldn't believe what she was reading, the force of the blow had knocked the breath from her lungs, she gulped and gasped for air and kept reading, she couldn't pull her eyes away...transfixed,nailed to the chair by the betrayal in the words scrolling before her eyes. The pages went on and on, some so old they were mildewed and yellowed by time. Every hurt she'd ever endured from every man was there, brazen and unapologetic, stacked up like the dirty dishes, ugly and twisted. Here she was in the realness of the comfort of her own home, by her window, looking at her trees, and yet this was also really happening. She pulled her knees up to her chest to protect her heart from the arrows, yet also left herself wide open, so open and vulnerable like Saint Sebastian pierced through and through by the awful knowledge that this was probably going to kill her, and if not the whole of her, then it would raze that private garden that she had loved and watered with her resilience and tears. Then mercifully she slowly ceased shaking and groaning and a cold fear entered her veins, what does this mean?, she asked, what's the point if this is what you always get in the end, I shall be strong enough to get over this, I've done it before, and I'll do it again. She unfolded herself, and stood up, looked out of the window at the fall leaves on the covered pool, yes, she thought, everything has it's season.