I'd Give Anything(40)

“Or whether or not you were actually in love with me.”

Harris nodded. “That, too. I knew you were beautiful, and back then, you seemed so fragile. I wanted to take care of you.”

“And I let you. I was fragile. I hadn’t always been. Before you knew me, I was brave, an adventurer. Everyone said so, and it was true. But by the time you met me, I was bruised and searching for a safe haven. You happened to me, too.”

“But none of that is quite the same as being in love, is it?” said Harris. “Maybe we would have figured that out, but then suddenly, so quickly, there was Avery. Avery happened to me, and I could not believe my luck.”

“Our miraculous girl,” I said.

For a moment, we just basked in the exquisite light of our daughter, bound by shared luck and shared cherishing. Harris and I needed to end, should have ended long ago, but in ending we were each losing the person—the only person—who had shared in the private moments of being parents to Avery. The moments when our eyes met over Avery’s head. The foods and books and toys she’d loved. Her sleeplessness at four in the morning. The time she came home from school with her pockets full of marbles and beads and pebbles, “manipulatives” from her kindergarten classroom that she’d stolen because they were “so pretty, like stars that wanted to come down from the sky to live in my house.” The small, precious, shiny daily stories of her childhood. Losing that—more than betrayal or anger or incompatibility—was the tragedy at the heart of our story. Briefly, I wondered what I could’ve done to save us from this loss. But I did not wonder what I could do to save us. That horse, I remained well aware, had left the barn.

“What else did you figure out with your therapist?” I asked.

“That I’ve been depressed. Not myself. For a long time.”

“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.

“And it’s no excuse, but before I—” Harris broke off and rubbed the spot between his eyes with his finger. “Before last summer—”

“Before Cressida came to work for your company.”

“Yes. Before all that began, it had been months, a year maybe, since I’d felt—”

“Felt what?”

“That’s it,” Harris said. “Just felt.”

“A year,” I said, evenly.

“Don’t blame yourself for not noticing,” he said. “I did everything I could to hide it.”

I knew firsthand what depression was, the lightlessness and bone-deep weariness. The gray, spiraling misery. The hope jumping ship.

“No, don’t let me off the hook,” I said. “I should have paid closer attention to you, Harris. Not only during that year.”

I paid attention now. In the sunroom with winter surrounding us on three sides, the lace of trees, the stone-gray sky, sun like a pearl, I took in the man before me, Harris McCue. I saw that in the months since he’d been fired, he’d lost weight, his sweatshirt loose around his middle, his square-jawed face catching shadows. But if these changes were the aftermath of depression, he didn’t look depressed now. There was—I don’t know—an animation to him that I realized I hadn’t seen in a long time, a receptiveness to his features, a new sharpness in his movements and his gaze and his edges. As I observed him in the here and now, I also tried to summon the Harrises of the year before and the one before that. Harris after Harris after Harris. It wasn’t easy. But even my blurred and patchy recollections of my husband, from past to present, coalesced into a vision of a man walking, slowly and at long last, out of the fog and into the open.

“What a disservice I’ve done you,” I said. “Not paying attention. I’m sorry.”

The defeated, hangdog Harris of a few weeks ago would’ve waved off or protested my apology. This one said, “Thank you. And I’m sorry, too, from the bottom of my heart.”

“Thank you,” I said.

We remained for a few more seconds in the new, well-lit clearing we’d made for each other, and then Harris leaned over, picked up his box, the last one, said, “Okay, then,” and stood up.

As he turned to go, I said, “It hurts to see you leave. I know it’s what’s best, and I know we’ll both be okay, but it stings. I just wanted to say that.”

Harris didn’t turn around, but he stopped in his tracks. His shoulders rose and fell, hard inhale, slow exhale, before he said, “Thanks, Ginny,” and kept walking.



“You’re creepy, okay?” I told Kirsten. “What do you have? Spies? Camped out in my front yard? Harris just left, left-left, left for good not—no exaggeration—forty-five seconds before you called me. I may actually still be able to hear his car engine.”

“I know, but don’t worry. I don’t think he saw me. I parked a little way down your street; plus, I may have, you know, ducked when I saw him backing out of your driveway. And even if he saw my car, it’s Harris. He could’ve seen it a million times before without it making even the tiniest imprint on his memory. Harris is oblivious. Hold on. There’s probably a word to be created there. Oblivharris?”

“What? You’re here? You’re the spy you have camped out on my front lawn?”

“Is that a problem for you?”

“Get in here. No, wait, meet me at the garage. You can help me clean the garage guest suite.”