The Wrong Door

Number four. Married this one in a church, which I keep feeling ought to count for something, and keep finding it doesn't.

I met Colleen at a church retreat. A couples' retreat, which is the kind of joke Life saves up for a man like me, and I'll tip my hat to it, it's a good one. Science of Mind. My church, the one that taught me a man makes his own life by how he thinks, put out abundance and let it flow. It was up a canyon at a lodge that smelled of pine cleaner and old coffee, name tags in felt-tip on our chests, folding chairs in a circle, a facilitator in a turquoise bolo tie who kept saying hold that in the light. I went up that canyon with one woman on my arm and came back down having quietly swapped phone numbers with another, on the back of a retreat schedule folded small in my shirt pocket. If you want to know how a fella squares that with a whole gospel of positive thinking, the answer is he doesn't. He just thinks real positively about the swap. I was gifted that way. I could think positively about damn near anything I'd already made up my mind to do.

I'll spare you the wind-up. When it's the same pitch five times running, you don't need to watch me wind up again. I left the one I came with. I married Colleen. I told myself it was meant to be. I told myself everything was meant to be. It's a wonderful gospel for a man who never once wants to look down at his own hands.

Before I get to the house, I owe you the spiders. I promised you the spiders back on the first page, and a man ought to keep his promises to a notebook at the very least.

Colleen and I did all the church things together, the affirmations, the visualizing, the whole Science of Mind program, and one afternoon in somebody's front room with the drapes pulled a woman ran a past-life regression. Card table pushed back, everybody down on the carpet, a little cassette deck ticking out ocean sounds. You lie back, a soft voice talks you down and down, counts you back through the years, and you're meant to drift out the far end into the lives that came before this one. Colleen took to it like a duck to water, gone under inside a minute. Me, I figured I'd lie there in the dark with my hands folded on my belt buckle and think about a transmission I had up on blocks back at the shop.

But something happened. I went somewhere. And where I went was a desert, flat and hot and empty, the sun a white nail hammered into the top of the sky and no water for a hundred miles, the kind of nothing that lays its whole hand right down on your chest and leans, and I was dying in it. Face down in grit that had worked into my teeth. And I knew, the way you know things in that state, no doubt in it at all, exactly what was doing it: a spider. A bite, already gone hot and traveling up the arm. I was dying alone, in the sand, from a spider bite, and I came up off that carpet with a sound in my throat I'd never made before, heart going like a jackhammer, and I carried out a fear of spiders that never once left me the rest of my days.

Believe it or don't. I don't much care which, and the fear cared even less, it never once asked my permission. I couldn't clear a cobweb off the shop rafters without the band cinching down over my chest and my hand going stupid on the broom. The rest of my days I braced for the desert and the spider, dead certain, down in the marrow, that that was how my story ended. Because I'd seen it. Because a soft voice in a stranger's front room had walked me right up to the edge of it and made me look.

And here's the thing I've only just now caught sight of, up here, too late to do a blessed thing about it: I spent my whole life guarding the wrong door. Both hands pressed flat against the desert door, braced against the sand and the spider, so sure I knew the shape of my own ending that I never once turned around to see what was easing in behind me. I feared the water, sure, feared it plenty, never learned to swim, never trusted a thing I couldn't stand up in. But a man only guards the door he's been shown, and nobody ever walked me to the edge of a tub and made me look. Water was for other men's deaths. And it was the water that came for me in the end. Quiet. Two floors up. In a room I never used. While I was still out there squinting at the horizon for a spider that a church lady put in my head one afternoon and that was never, not for one true minute, coming.

A man can spend his entire life afraid of the wrong death. I'm the proof of it. Put that in the file.

We bought a house. The house, as it happens, the one on the good quiet street, brick and vinyl, a little square of lawn I'd swear at with a push mower on Saturdays, the townhome I'd die in, though I didn't know that yet and neither did she. We stood in the empty front room the day we got the keys and the light came in yellow across bare carpet and Colleen turned a slow circle with her arms out and said, this is ours, John, we made this, and I believed it right along with her. That's the gospel talking. You make your life by how you think. And here's a thing I didn't give two thoughts to then and can't stop turning over now: it sure wasn't my money that made it. It was Colleen's money that bought it. Her father had died and left her a little insurance, and she'd been a careful girl, she'd tended that money along for years, wouldn't touch the principal, her one sensible inheritance from a dead man, and it all went into those walls. Our house. Bought with a dead man's insurance money. Hold that receipt; a house built on that particular arithmetic keeps a certain kind of books, and I'd go and add to the ledger myself, later, in the worst way there is. But that's up ahead.

There was a jetted tub in the master. A big almond-colored thing, a step up to it, jets that thumped and gurgled when she ran them. Colleen's tub. Her sanctuary, she called it. Candles lined up on the wide lip, a paperback going soft in the steam, the door locked and the fan roaring, hours up there getting away from the marriage, which is to say getting away from me: my talking, my nerves, my checking the locks twice, my whole loud managed self that a person could only take in careful doses. And I hated that tub the way a man hates anything that hands a person a place to hide from him. So when Colleen and I went sour, I did a small mean thing I found awfully funny at the time: hauled my pipe wrench and my torch up those stairs one afternoon while she was out and bolted a pair of shower heads onto the tiled surround over that tub, ran the copper straight up the outside of the wall where anybody could see it, sweated the joints ugly on purpose, a plumbing gag with no shower pan and no curtain and nowhere for the water to go but down into her candles. Purely to turn her one sanctuary into a joke. Ha. Look what I built. And I never used the thing once. Not once, in all the years. Took my showers on the main floor, where a sensible man keeps his life lined up in a straight row.

Stop on that with me a second, because I've stopped on it a hundred times up here and it will not let go of my sleeve.

I never used that tub. It was hers. I mocked it and I avoided it for a decade.

And it is exactly where they found me. Dead. Dressed. The water running cold.

So you tell me. You tell me how a man who never once in his life used a tub turns up dead in it, the single room in his own house that belonged to the wife before my last, the one fixture he made a joke of and stepped around for ten years like it was a hole in the floor. I knew that house the way I knew my own hands, which stair popped, which faucet dripped. And there is not one path through my own habits that ends with me climbing that step and laying myself down under Colleen's spite shower with my shoes on. A machine doesn't end up in a room it was never in. A body doesn't either. Somebody put me there, or I got there in a condition I would never in my right mind get there in, and either road, that tub is not the answer to my death. But it is the biggest, strangest question in it, and it's got Colleen's name carved down under the waterline.

Colleen drank. That's what finally took us down, though I lent it a hand, and I won't pretend I didn't. It came on slow and then it didn't, wine with supper and then wine instead of it, and then the bottles I'd find in the toilet tank and behind the softener in the garage, and then it was the whole of her. She drank and it got bad and there was a program and the ugly lawyer end that those things come to, and she didn't land as soft as the others did. Last I heard she's in a hard way still. So she's got cause, sure. I took the house her dead father's money bought. I mocked her one safe room and left the copper hanging on the wall for her to look at every day. If I were running this investigation I'd have myself circling her too. But no. Colleen was long gone and going under on her own by the end, hands shaking too bad some mornings to hold a cup, and the miles between us by then were more than a person in that shape crosses. She didn't have the reach. Her cause is real and her alibi is her own wreckage.

But her tub is a witness. And I'm coming round to thinking the whole case turns on it, on the plain impossible fact of a man who feared the water and never once bathed in that room dying in it with the sprayer running down over his face.

Hold the tub. We are going to need it at the very end.

Which brings me, at last, to the one who was still my wife the morning the water was running. The fifth. The last one.

Sarah.

I have been putting off Sarah since page one of this notebook. I think you've figured out by now that I put off hardest the things I'm most afraid to look straight at.

Let me quit putting it off.