Connecticut

Through her round glasses, Tess looks at me from across the table, her face tensed just enough to reveal the pain beneath, a visage of steel beginning to rust. She asks again: “Why?”

I look out the window of the restaurant, and a wave slams against the pier below. A fisherman outside ducks away from it. When I used to come here with my family as a kid, the waves were scarcely able to climb their way up the sand. I guess they’ve grown alongside me, in a way.

“Owen,” Tess says. “Why?” More of a demand, more of a plea, than a question.

I turn back to her. Her eyes, a marine blue gray, like open ocean, like boats being tossed in a choppy harbor, meet mine. They’re as deep as the ocean too. Confusion swirls behind them just as much as sadness and anger and disappointment and betrayal and shock and something too powerful to name. A second passes, and I find myself staring into an untouched plate of crab legs, unable to meet her gaze. She doesn’t deserve what I’m doing to her, what I’m going to do to her, what I’ve made up my mind on.

“I’m just not happy with this relationship anymore.”

“You said that. Why, though?”

Another swell mauls the pier outside. The window rattles against our table, and seawater freckles the glass pane. My eyes move toward it.

“Stop looking at the fucking ocean! Please!”

I drag my eyes back to her, only for them to drop down to my plate again. Her face has contorted even further. Her eyes shimmer. Neither of us want this. In my periphery I catch a waiter approaching us, but when he sees the glint of tears in her eyes, he spins 180 degrees and glides off.

“I don’t understand,” Tess says. “When did this happen? If you won’t tell me why, tell me when. Or tell me if it was something you did or something I did... or fucking just tell me why! I deserve to know. Please. At least tell me when.”

I know precisely when. A week and a half ago, watching the news. Tess was in the other room, on the phone with her parents. I was skimming the channels, and the word “Connecticut” flashed across a news ticker. I wanted to know if something had happened nearby, so I went back to the channel. Nothing was happening near us. Not right away. But the sound of Tess’s voice, smooth as a pour of red wine, faded from my ears. I listened to the rest of the broadcast, and as I did a pit formed in my stomach that grew, expanding like a maelstrom, devouring my lungs, my heart. When it ended, I took a walk all the way out by the pier, with the tide pummeling against its aging wooden stilts. That’s when I knew.

“Owen, for fuck’s sake,” she says. Anger has broken through. “I was happy! We were both happy! These last few years, they’ve been the happiest of my life! You were it for me!” She pauses and looks at the table. “You were it for me.”

“You were it for me too.” It slips out before I can stop it.

“Then, why?” she begs.

I look up. When her eyes meet mine, they soften a bit, and that’s when I realize I’m crying too. “You can tell me,” she says. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.”

I can’t tell her. Because if I tell her, she’ll hug me. She’ll comfort me. Worst of all she’ll understand. She’ll say it doesn’t matter, we can carry on in spite of it, and I’ll believe her. I’ll stay. I’ll be happy with her. I’ll propose, within the month, probably – I already had a ring picked out. I’ll have kids with her. We’ll wind up owning an eight-seat car with sliding doors. We’ll drive to peewee games and school plays. I’ll teach our kids how to obsess over hockey, and she’ll teach our kids how to swear. We’ll have beach days and eat here afterwards, and Tess and I will give each other a knowing glance while our kids eat crab legs, and we’ll never tell them it all almost ended here. All that will happen if I tell her. And I want it to, just as much as she does. More even. That’s exactly why I can’t say a word.

Plus, I don’t know that I could tell her. How do you properly explain the way fear strangles you when the stoic face of a news anchor says that a piece of ice the size of Connecticut broke off from Antarctica – a piece of ice bigger than the state you’ve lived in your whole life, bigger than everything you’ve ever known? How do you articulate the dread that washes over you as you realize you’ve been absentmindedly channel surfing through footage of fires out west, or the fallout of a tornado in Syracuse? How do you describe that moment, walking down the boardwalk, when a wave crashes over the docks and desecrates a new pair of Converse, and it hits you for the first time how much the waves have grown since you were a kid?

How do I tell her – without sounding insane – that in that moment, with my shoes sopping wet, I could see the future. All of it. The wedding and the minivan and the peewee games, all that would happen. But Tess and I won’t get the life our parents did. Our kids aren’t going to get our childhoods. They’ll get a shadow of it, darkened by waves that keep getting bigger and bigger and washing the sand away, robbing them of beach days, and then of dinners at this restaurant, and then eventually of everything else. And as our kids grow up, Tess and I will have to protect them from it, until one day when it’s too big to protect them from. The rest of my life showed up crystal clear in my brain, and I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live that life. Even if I had all those years to prepare, I can’t look into my kids’ eyes and tell them the world is ending. I can’t even look Tess in the eye right now.

So, I can’t stay. As much as I want to curl into her embrace and apologize for all of this, for putting her through this, she needs to leave. All the happiness she brings me now will come back to hurt us down the line. The woman of my dreams and everything we’d build together, all slowly swept away into the sea while I watch, unable to stop it... it’s not worth it. Yes, I’m a coward for this. But I’d rather she hates me. Sometimes hate is easiest.

Certainly easier than regret.

A wave slugs the window again.

“I had an affair,” I say. I try my best to sell it, but Tess doesn’t believe me. Her eyebrows twitch, and her mouth grimaces.

“You had an affair?”

“Yeah.”

“With who?”

I don’t answer.

She shakes her head. “You’re really not going to tell me why?” she says.

“That’s the truth. The affair.”

“You’re such a fucking bad liar.”

Her hands hit the wooden table as she stands. Her fingernails are painted indigo. One hand raises to her face and pushes a tear off her cheek. “I don’t understand,” she says. “I was really happy.” And she’s out of my vision before I can second guess myself. There’s a shrill chime as the front door opens and closes. I push the plate of crab legs away from me. Another wave crashes, and as it does, I decide to leave. I decide I won’t be coming back here again. Best to leave the past in the past.

I stack our plates, both still full, and pin a pair of twenties under my glass. I scribble a note on a napkin: “no change needed.” I stand and head out. As I step into the sunlight and salt greets my nostrils, the door chime racks my ears.

She was it for me.

I push it away. There’s a kind of relief in knowing your best years are behind you.