Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller Page B

another about the difficulties each of us faced in our everyday lives, as if to announce our individual happiness to one another was the final infidelity. And instead of disclosing our souls, we recounted complaints and kept score of the ways in which we had irritated one another or let each other down. After that we had nothing left to say.
    I asked Charlie if he could imagine me dead, really wanting to know. He said, “What kind of question is that?”
    “It doesn’t have to be a tragic death,” I pointed out. “I could be painlessly evaporated. Gently vaporized by a bunch of angels. Raptured into heaven.”
    Charlie was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “Yes, sometimes I do.”
    “Me too,” I said.
    Death is the great silencer into which people can pour their interpretations of love and loss and longing. But divorce is a choice, and it’s hard to listen to the inevitable rancorous fallout and shaky insecurity it engenders. The social disease of a breakup threatens and destabilizes, and all but the closest of friends—and sometimes even they—recede from the threat it poses. Marriage, with all its fairy-tale promise, its allure of security, and its impression of superior morality, is something we hold up as a badge of honor. Politicians and sports stars rise on the borrowed capital of long and steady marriages; they fall on their discreditable failures.
    We had made every effort. There had been the trial separations, the cultish weekend marriage seminars encouraging conjugal spirituality, a couple of disastrous vacations without the children when I missed them so much it only served to highlight that we were better parents than we were romantic partners. There had been dozens of couples’ counseling sessions with the accompanying rules about holding a relationship together by using safe words, or by setting up date nights. But the suggestions filled me with dread. I couldn’t grasp the concept of safe words—“There are no bad words,” I’ve always taught my children. “Only bad ways to use good words.” And our attempts at date nights had increasingly ended in silent standoffs or out-and-out fights.
    I had begun to understand that neither of us was wrong, and neither was either of us right. But we saw the world so differently that it seemed to me as if Charlie was living in a different space and time than I was. He saw the world in concrete terms, rationally, and as if the place were solid and the systems set in place were dependable. Charlie never questioned his own sanity, although he sometimes questioned mine. I saw the world as something fluid; I expected irrationality and surprises. I could not tell the difference between inspiration and mild madness, and most of the time I did not think the gap between the two was important.
    A month earlier I had gone to our local public library and walked down the aisle of relationship-related books, piling volume after volume into my arms. I made it as far as the help desk with the books before I pictured myself running into an acquaintance in the checkout line or in the parking lot. How would I explain these titles?
The Emergency Divorce Handbook for Women; Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way; Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Help You Decide Whether to Stay In or Get Out of Your Relationship; Coming Apart: Why Relationships End and How to Live Through the End of Yours
. My panic escalated. Even if I managed to negotiate my way out of our small-town public library parking lot without bumping into half a dozen people I knew, how would I get the books into the house unobserved? What if Charlie saw them? Worse, what if the children saw them?
    I dumped the books on the shelving cart by the door and hurried out of the library into the high-altitude sunshine, inexplicit in its cheerful clarity. What I wanted more than anything was a sign that told me unequivocally whether or not to divorce Charlie—a thunderclap from the