From This Day Forward

The drive to her parents’ house felt like a trip back in time, in more ways than one. The semi-urban sprawl gave way to strip malls, then the strip malls to cow pastures.The main highway, named for a Confederate general, traversed Civil War battlefields that stretched miles. The historic landmarks were interspersed with the personal: the taco stand where Janelle had worked her first job, her hair perpetually tinged with grease; the tattoo parlor she’d tried to talk her way into with a brash teenage confidence that now seemed unthinkable; the 24-hour diner all the cool kids descended on after prom. All left her with a subtle feeling of unease.

The smells of her childhood home brought a more welcome nostalgia. Her mom had just taken cranberry bread out of the oven, which she invariably served with homemade pear butter, canned in bulk each summer from the tree in the backyard. That the pear tree had ever borne fruit was improbable. When she was seven, Janelle had planted a seed from a fruit she’d eaten, just a run-of-the-mill grocery store Bartlett pear. Her dad had helped her dig a small hole toward the back of their little acre of land and fill it in with dirt, giving it a first watering for good measure. He’d largely forgotten it when, six months later, he noticed the most tentative sprout emerging from the Virginia soil. By the time Janelle was in middle school, it was taller than he was.

She nibbled on a piece of bread as her mom put on a kettle for tea, mulling over whether to disclose the real motivation for her visit. Something about being in the house she grew up in, at the same kitchen table she used to bump her head on as a toddler, felt vulnerable, disquieting. Janelle had grown accustomed to handling her feelings like an adult, as she’d found herself unwittingly repeating to Justin, which really meant by not talking about them. For now, as the steam rose from her cup, she decided to hold the line.

*****

It was supposed to be a trial separation--or not even that, really, more like a trial of a trial. They agreed to spend a week apart with no contact, barring emergencies. It didn’t even require taking vacation days; in the new work-from-home era, close quarters felt even tighter but it was also easier than ever to distance. Justin would stay at the apartment, taking care of their aging dog Ivan and watering the plants, and Janelle would decamp to her parents’ place, where their guestroom would double as her temporary home office. She told them she just wanted a break from the city, a little bucolic retreat to break up the quarantine monotony.

They had met a decade prior, at an age when one shared psychedelic experience and compatible iTunes libraries were all it took to launch a relationship. The years that followed--by luck, mostly--had offered numerous occasions to create memories together, and few to sow discord. After college graduation, they’d lived life mostly on their terms, buoyed by two modest but steady incomes and few obligations to anyone but themselves. Their chemistry was strong and they got along so swimmingly it had only made sense to get married.

But then the one-two punch of Justin’s job loss and a deceptively serious fender bender, which left him with neck pain that disrupted his sleep for months, had thrown everything off course. He spent most days lying on the couch with a heating pad and his laptop, half-heartedly searching for work between YouTube videos. The gym, his former refuge, offered little comfort given his reduced mobility, and he had taken to drinking starting in the early afternoon. Twice a week he went to physical therapy, though when the pandemic started, quickly supplanting 9/11 as the new “before/after” event, in-person visits were off the table. The sudden stay-at-home orders, shocking in their novelty, stripped away the banal daily rituals--her bus commute, his Starbucks runs--that had allowed them to detach ever so briefly, and in so doing keep any nagging doubts or dissatisfactions about their lives, their relationship, at bay.

The curtailment of their daily routine had also seemingly created a tear in the timeline. Every day felt like they were living in the past and present simultaneously. Justin had spoken before about his childhood--his distant father, his overbearing mother, their shared conviction that you spare the rod, spoil the child--but he’d always framed it as the past, something he’d experienced and gotten over. Now, suddenly, with his 50-hour work weeks and rich social life cast into a void, Justin’s childhood self was like a third family member. It seemed rarely a day passed that Janelle didn’t make some misstep or levy some inadvertent critique that surfaced memories of an unnecessarily harsh word or a jarring slap to the face, leading Justin to lash out in kind.

Therapy, of course, was the obvious answer, but Justin scoffed at the idea, conditioned over decades to view seeking help as weakness. Janelle bought psychology books about childhood trauma, indulging her tendency to intellectualize every personal problem, to scour the literature for data-driven salves for open wounds. But more often than not she just retreated, hesitant to confront this new side of her husband that had lain dormant until his luck--and everyone’s, to be fair--had turned.

Meanwhile, for Janelle, the future likewise loomed large. Earlier in her twenties, she would have mocked the biological clock as a patriarchal construct. Now, with 30 around the corner, she heard it loud and persistent as a metronome. Her need to have a baby, non-existent just a few years before, suddenly felt primal, urgent; it was startlingly inconsonant with her otherwise methodical approach to decision-making.

And so the days passed--she doing her best to hold her tongue, he trying to tame his newfound urge to put holes in the walls. Neither of them succeeded all the time.

***

On the third day, Janelle decided to open up. She felt ashamed, yes--it was hard to acknowledge her marriage could be on the brink of collapse, just five years after her parents paid for an expensive wedding. She hated the feeling of failure, and was embarrassed that her own choices had led her here. But she recalled every past instance when she’d shared something that had felt humiliating with her mom--the arrival of her first period, her high school boyfriend’s cheating, her contraction of an STD in college--and had emerged from the confession feeling lighter, more self-assured and less self-loathing.

She shut her laptop and went out to the kitchen, where her mom was putting away some dishes. Her dad was out in the garage, taking baby steps in the long, arduous process of discarding old papers and belongings to minimize the clutter they would someday leave behind.

“Hi sweetheart,” her mom said, looking up as she took off her rubber gloves. “How’s work going today?”

“Not bad. Just drafting yet another grant application, coming up with new ways to beg rich people for money,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I need a break and some caffeine.”

“I’ll join you,” her mom said, grabbing two mugs and the lukewarm French Press.

They sat down across from each other, a half-finished crossword puzzle on the table in between them. Janelle took a deep breath and willed herself to relax her shoulders, prepping to unload all her feelings and already anticipating the sure relief it would bring. She cleared her throat.

“While we have a quiet moment, there’s something I wanted to talk with you about.”

Janelle looked up at her mother with surprise, caught off guard by this interlude. She continued to rehearse her own careful framing of her marital challenges in her mind while she waited to hear whatever news her mom had to share.

“You may have noticed your father acting a bit different.”

Had she? Janelle scanned her memory over the past couple days. Her father had always been quiet, keeping to himself. They would exchange small talk at dinner but since she’d arrived he’d mostly been holed up in the living room, watching History Channel documentaries or reading yet another biography of Lincoln. She hadn’t spent much time with him since he stopped working two years ago, but figured this was just what retirement looked like. She furrowed her brow and felt a slight wave of nausea, suddenly noticing how her mom was gripping her mug with both hands.

“There’s no need to panic. But we had some scans done recently. And it appears to be early onset dementia.”

Janelle gasped, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of her.

“Mom, oh my God. I had no idea.”

Her mother looked calm, stoic even, but Janelle noticed the twin tears welling in the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother cry. Janelle pushed her seat back, barely even noticing the harsh screeching against the floor that drove her crazy as a teenager, and rushed around to her mother, awkwardly hugging her in her seat.

“Like I said, there’s no need to panic,” her mother continued, stroking Janelle’s arm. “The doctor said there are new treatments coming out all the time, this is an area where there’s a ton of research right now with all the Baby Boomers getting old. A cure could be just around the corner.”

She swallowed. “And we’re lucky, your father saved for this and we have long-term care insurance, so we shouldn’t need anything to change. You know he never wanted to be a burden on you kids.”

At this Janelle’s own tears spilled over, both grateful and horrified that this was what her mom wanted to emphasize. She searched for the appropriate reassuring words but found herself wanting; for this she had no script.

“But I just thought you should know, especially while you’re staying here. He doesn’t always act like himself. Sometimes he gets a little bit aggressive. The doctor said it’s normal, a common symptom. And there are some medications that can help.”

She paused, glancing up to meet Janelle’s eyes.

“But he’s a bit different now than the man I married.”

***

That night Janelle couldn’t sleep. She lay in her childhood bed, the glow-in-the-dark stars somehow still affixed to the ceiling decades after she’d first demanded them. The only person she wanted to talk to was Justin, but she wanted to honor their no-contact rule. After all, it had been her idea. This whole thing had.

She woke at dawn to the neighbor’s rooster crowing, which was quaint the first few times but had quickly lost its charm. She tiptoed downstairs and stepped outside, where she walked barefoot through the dewy grass until she reached the pear tree.

Janelle sat, leaning up against the trunk. She thought back to how the tree had grown so effortlessly at first, propelled simply by its own momentum to survive. She wondered what would have happened if her dad had ignored the seedling when he saw it first poking through the soil, if he’d decided to just leave its trajectory up to fate. Maybe it would have been razed by the lawn mower. Maybe it would have grown crooked, unaided by the stake her dad planted in the ground to guide its early growth and protect it from the wind. Or perhaps it would have grown straight but scrawny, with no mulch around its base to keep away the weeds greedily seeking water and nutrients.

Three days later she would return home. She would hold Justin’s gaze when he opened the door, rather than averting her eyes. She would put away her books, invite him to join her for walks each morning. She would march towards the unknown rather than retreating. And in time, they would learn to nurture each day together, shielding one another from the elements to withstand this storm, and the next.