Intimacy--a story (i)

For a time years ago, I wrote a few stories on a kind of contract with Bethany Christian Services. To do that, I interviewed a number of people. . .couples mostly. . .about their experience with adoption. Loved it. Identity is quest for just about every human being, as it is, in spades, for adoptees. I've known many who have experienced epiphanies like no other when they meet birth mothers or father or siblings, strange, unexplained recognition that's like nothing else. 

Last month was "Adoption Month," I'm told, so I'm slightly behind. This is one of those stories, this one originally published, years ago, in the Church Herald. 

Any good? You'll have to be the judge. What I know and remember is that it includes anecdotes I picked up in interviews with people who had somewhat similar experiences. 

It's a story that will appear here for five days. I do hope that those of you who stick around for the whole thing find it satisfying. 

I called it, simply, "Intimacy."
______________________ 

The cat woke me up. He started kneading like he often does when he senses I'm awake in the morning, but it was still the middle of the night. The bright green fingers of our alarm said 2:47, I think—I was less than half awake. I shook off the cat, turned over on my side and stretched my right foot back across the bed to find Sandra's. Nothing there.

The two of us have been married thirty years. That sounds like forever, and I'm sure it makes me sound ancient, but I don't see myself that way--and I sure don't see us that way at all. I was saying we've been married thirty years, and I don’t really fear Sandra's suddenly taking off overnight with one of the hotshot salesmen she deals daily with at work. Not that she isn't beautiful. Not that I wouldn't want to if I was one of those guys.

But I was saying I woke up so startled not because I live in fear of Sandra's leaving me. I don't. We've put in far too much time together, even though I know it wasn't easy for a Southern belle like Sandra to move way up north and live up here in a town so small and closed there are only round pegs and round holes--and very few of those. When she wasn’t in bed, I had no thought about her having left.

I ramble. Sandra says so, and she's right. I swept my foot across the bed like I've done a thousand times, and I didn’t find her and how her not being there scared me. I can’t tell you how it scared me. It was a shock I can’t explain, other than to say it was like a nightmare except I was fully awake. But there is a story, several in fact.

I sat up and looked around, then scrambled out, walked downstairs, and saw a light on. There she sat in her pajamas, downing a bagel, looking guilty because she says she's been trying to lose weight that won't go away with a course midnight snacks.

"Can't sneak a thing past you," she said, smiling.

I wanted to hug her--I honest-to-God wanted to hug her, but I didn't. She would have thought it silly that I got bent out of shape simply by her being not there. She would have rolled her eyes. "Oh, Tim," she would have said, like she always does. We’re good.

I'm the kind of person who tries to tell her daily--I don't know where I got that notion, but it strikes me as good one--I try to tell her every day that I love her. It must have come out of some book I read,.I don't know. But I do. I sneak it in when I can, not just because it’s some guy’s good idea either, you know. I mean it.

Once long ago, I remember, she looked up at me shyly when I said it. We were sitting at the fireplace, the kids in bed. She turned her head at an angle and squinted as if she's got something profound on her mind. "Tim," she said, "you say that all the time because you're just trying to convince yourself."

"That's nuts," I told her.

"I don't care," she told me. "Just keep trying."

*

Tomorrow:  Tim remembers too many sleepless nights.