Chapter 16

Al moved back in almost like nothing had happened ... almost. I was sleeping on the sofa again, which I'd stopped doing two or three months before she'd run. She was skinny – not merely thinner than her youth, but just plain skinny. I thought that she was even skinnier than she'd been when I'd found her on Central. She swore she hadn't gotten onto drugs, and I believed her, for she displayed no signs of either withdrawal or use. But she hadn't been eating right, and I suspected that emotional distress was part of it too. Certainly she had bad dreams almost every night for a while, and sometimes she'd still be half in the dream when I got to her, and she'd shrink from me in abject terror before I could convince her of who I was.

But it was in many ways as it had been before. She stepped right into her old clothes, which still hung in the closet. She began cooking again, her skills only a little less than they'd become on the day she'd left. She even found the book she'd been reading when she disappeared, which I'd put on top of the TV and left alone for three years, and picked up where she'd left off. We began our walks again, and we'd hold hands and put our arms around each other.

But it wasn't quite the same. And Al knew it, and sometimes I'd see her face go pensive, and sometimes her voice would be a little shaky as she spoke to me as a wife speaks to her husband. And always there was in my mind, and before long visible before my eyes, the baby that was growing within her. By the time she was five months along there was no doubt – she was definitely pregnant, the bulge of her belly easy to see on her slender body, and she was buying new clothes all the time, for her old ones wouldn't accommodate her expanding waist.

It was a Sunday afternoon in November that Al returned from one of her shopping trips. She had on a yellow dress with white daisies printed on it, and a black leather jacket with zippers here and there. She was puffing a little as she came in the door. "I swear, Alan, carrying this person around is getting to be more and more like work."

I couldn't help smiling. We hadn't yet picked out a name – I couldn't bring myself to think of that – and so we'd taken to calling the child "this person." And I supposed that as the baby got bigger and bigger inside Al's womb, it would be more and more work. Never mind the additional weight of placenta and amniotic fluid and her own expanding flesh – I wondered how on earth a woman could walk around for nine months with a baby hanging from her middle. Just pick up an eight pound weight sometime, and think of that inside you, weighing you down.

I put my bookmark in the book I was reading, and got up to take her bags from her. I carried them into the bedroom, with Al calling after me to just put them on the bed and she'd put everything away later. When I got back to the living room she was sitting on the sofa, her feet on the coffee table and her hands on her belly.

I sat down beside her, a little distance between us. She reached over and took my hand – and released it when she felt me flinch. At times I would still do that, usually when something had reminded me that she was carrying someone else's child. I reached and took her hand. "I'm sorry, Al. I don't mean to do that."

"But you do, and it feels like you're rejecting me."

"I know, I know..."

"And there's something else, Alan. You haven't once called me 'Alison' since I came back."

"I haven't?" I hadn't thought about it.

"No, you haven't. I used to love it when you called me that, because it happened when you were feeling especially close to me. But you haven't done it at all since you brought me back."

"I'm sorry ... Al." I couldn't bring myself to say her full name, I found.

"I feel so much of the time like I'm just living in your apartment, like I'm a guest here. I know you're not trying to make me feel that way, but that's how I do feel."

I wanted to retort that she'd made me feel a lot worse than that, but I held my tongue. Finally I said, "I'm sorry, Al. I'm not trying to do that to you."

"I know you're not, Alan. I know it. You're doing the best you can to be a loving husband, within the constraints of our emotional disruptions. But ... but there's a part of you that's behind a brick wall. You used to be completely open to me. And now ... you're not."

"I honestly don't know what to tell you, Al."

"And I want you to always be honest with me. You were before ... before I was gone, and I want you to be honest with me now. I'd rather you honestly tell me things that hurt me, than lie to me."

"I won't ever lie to you, Al. I promise you that."

"I know you won't. That was what made our marriage work before. And I believe it's the only thing that can make it work now. But that means that you're going to have come out from behind that wall, Alan. You can't keep part of yourself away from me, not and be honest with me."

I wanted to tell her that I wasn't keeping part of myself back, but I knew that I was. And honesty required me, since we were talking about it, to tell her why that was so. "Al, you've told me something – as much as you could – of what drove you to run. And I've tried to understand that, and I think I have understood it, as much as a man can understand that kind of fear. Let me tell you, as best as I can, what I went through – what I'm going through."