Togetherness

It was like she’d gotten sober all over again; everything started to make sense after Daniel’s arrest. Like the occasional odd scent on his clothes that she’d always assumed was because of his commute, emerging from the train with the scent of every Bostonian on his shirt collar, as though he’d been having an affair with the city. It turned out that this smell had a name, although there was no way that Claudia was going to remember it; it was like being told the Latin name for a plant that had invaded her garden. She would only ever remember the word accelerant, and the way it felt when she’d been informed that Daniel liked to start fires. ‘What do you mean, liked?’ she’d asked the detective. Some kind of misunderstanding must have occurred, the wrong Daniel Grady had to have been caught, a zebra mistaken for a tiger. Claudia felt like she was back in speech and debate, dissecting every word and phrase for a possible exodus from other people’s contexts. Words were like traffic circles: you didn’t always enter and exit the same point as someone else. The detective had to have been wrong, and she didn’t appreciate the accusation, and she wanted Daniel to come home. ‘He does something with advertising,’ she explained. ‘Or marketing.’ But he had been captured on camera, timestamped, with ample evidence, too. She asked for the dates, and as he reeled off information, she looked at the calendar on her phone. What he divulged, and what she could see in front of her, were like two broken plate halves coming together to form a whole one, complete but scarred. And she thought about what her friend Marcy had told her after recently going through a divorce: that the most devastating thing was being forced to view your partner in a way you never expected. Like seeing them from a distance and they don’t know that you’re watching and you look at them and you think, If you’re not who I think you are, then who are you? By the time Claudia brought herself to visit Daniel, he looked so different from the husband she remembered, now nothing more than jail stubble growing on the face of the stranger talking to her about lawyers and psychologists and court dates. When it was her turn to say something, she asked him, ‘So who was it I was trying to start a family with?’ He looked down and said, ‘Me,’ as though he had intoned the name of someone impossible. She drove home, parked her Jeep next to Daniel’s Nissan, and dropped her keys in the teak bowl next to his keys, and the sound of her footsteps echoed back his absence. She walked throughout their house and imagined having to live in it without him, and she stopped at the fireplace, where Daniel had hung the watercolor they’d bought at his insistence on their most recent visit to the Cape. It showed a coastline ablaze at sunset, the outline of the fishing huts and cedar-shingled buildings sizzling in the last rays of the day, the horizon line cutting the shore in two. One half only made sense with the other.