Departures
by Heather Nguyen
Art by Vanessa Leung
I noticed him when we were deplaning. I knew it was him because he was wearing that old Dartmouth t-shirt, the one he wore when he mowed the lawn. The one I used to steal from his top drawer and sleep in when he traveled. It has a row of holes in the neck, right by the tag. I could see the holes. I could see the tag flipped up out of his shirt.
My heart was pounding hard as I sidled up to the aisle and cut in front of an old woman. She was carrying a neck pillow in one hand and a wicker basket in the other, and when I shoved myself between her and the man in front of her, she dropped her pillow. She said “oh!” and as she bent over to pick up the neck pillow, her basket fell open and loaves of sliced bread wrapped in parchment paper fell out. I wanted to turn around and help her, but I couldn’t stop looking at him. I felt like if I blinked – if I looked away, or let myself lose sight of him, he would disappear.
When was the last time I’d seen him? I pursed my lips, trying to remember. I could feel my brows scrunching up. Last March, maybe? Last March, when he told me there was another woman, and she was pregnant, and he wanted a divorce. No – last April, when we finalized it. When I signed my name next to his – twin last names – and he took the house key off of his key ring and set it next to me.
“No hard feelings?” he’d said, clapping his hand on my shoulder.
“Hard feelings,” is what I’d told him. I’d snatched the key off the table and stormed out. I lean toward the dramatic sometimes – he used to like that about me. In the end, he’d sigh and say, “why do you have to be so goddamn dramatic?”
The line started to lurch forward slowly. Passengers shuffled their feet toward the jetway. It didn’t surprise me to see him here in Austin. I smiled to myself a little smugly: he would always think of me when he came here. He proposed to me here when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-seven and thirteen days, exactly three years after I killed our baby.
I craned forward to see him better, leaning forward on my tippy toes. Was she here? I didn’t see her. I imagined her with their baby in a sling wrap against her chest, neck strung with a strand of Baltic amber and forehead glistening with essential oil. I pretended to myself that I couldn’t remember her name, but I could feel it ready to fall from between my lips: Bridgitte.
His hair was a little longer than he normally wore it. It gets curly when it’s long and bleached by the sun every summer. Maybe between Bridgitte and their baby, he didn’t have enough time to get it cut as often. I imagined him outside in a yard with perfectly trimmed grass, pushing his baby in a swing in the sunshine, his skin turning golden-brown and freckly.
How old would their daughter be now? I’d heard from a friend of a friend that Bridgitte had had her baby on the fourth of July. I imagined my ex, drunk off of one-too-many warm Coronas, holding their ugly baby while the sky exploded outside and the world went on without them.
I had the abortion when I was twenty and he was twenty-four and thirteen days. His mom cried on the phone when he told her. She sent me a card: two glossy purple butterflies against yellow hyacinth, and the words “Our Deepest Sympathy” in curling script. The inside was blank.
I could lead with that. I could say, “I’m sorry I killed our baby.” Because I am sorry. Or I could tell him that Tortilla, the stray cat we’d found outside a gas station in Quitman, Mississippi had died last year and I’d buried in him our backyard. Or that I had finally changed the address for my voter’s registration, and I didn’t need to drive forty-five minutes to a church down the road from my old high school to vote anymore.
When I made it onto the jetway, I picked up the pace. I watched his head as he walked away from the plane in a smooth, easy gait. I shoved past a large family wearing matching “Austin Family Reunion, Austin, TX” t-shirts. I slowed down once I got behind him. I could smell his Dove shampoo.
Almost automatically, I reached for his tag and tucked it back into his shirt. He turned to face me, and I could see the confusion on his face. I tucked my hand under his elbow and turned my face up toward him with a tiny smile, then realized – it wasn’t him.
My thumb reached over to my ring finger automatically, to run across the bands I’d worn for six years, when I was his wife. There was no ring. There hadn’t been for over a year now.
“I’m sorry,” I said, jerking my hand back. “I thought you were my husband.”
The man didn’t say anything, just narrowed his eyes and started walking faster.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m so sorry.”
Vanessa Leung, Self Portrait, charcoal on paper