Last Dance

It’s our last night on Kauai together, yet not together. For the past seven days, we’ve been staying at different places due to the separation, Ian and I in a condo, and you at a hotel. We have a late morning flight back to the Bay Area tomorrow, and when we reach San Mateo, you’ll drop me off at my apartment, a tiny one bedroom I’m renting several blocks away from the house we raised Ian in–the house where you and Ian now live.

It's been hard to not think about this drop-off, and despite my best efforts to stave it off, this scene unspools in my mind: You will pull up to my place after our long flight back, and say, “Well, here we are,” all the while trying to modulate your voice, to make all of it sound normal, not the gutting transition that we both feel it to be. You’ll do this for Ian because we’re still protecting him from a hard truth: that we are no longer entertaining the idea of a trial separation, which he believes this to be, but instead, are moving headlong into a divorce. Before I dig in my purse for my keys, I will give Ian a big hug, the kind he pulls away from quickly now that he’s a teenager, and say how much fun that all was and then watch your car drive away from me, carrying your luggage, ribbons of Kauai sand loosened from our flip flops, and Ian, who is still, like us, trying to make sense of the fracture that’s just disrupted our lives. Tonight, though, on this Wednesday in mid-July, we’re driving together down the highway to meet my sister’s family for dinner. The car’s high beams illuminate the impossibly broad leaves of trees and the tall grasses fed by the North Shore’s intermittent but plentiful rainfall.

This island contains the arc of our little family–nineteen years earlier, we had discovered here that I was pregnant with Ian, we brought him back the summer he started middle school, and by the end of the summer he will be off to college, and we will be filling out the initial divorce paperwork. I hold this knowledge quietly, and it sits in my stomach, heavy and unmistakable despite the moments of hilarity and adventure, the otherworldly sunsets and gorgeous rain squalls. It’s the ache of grief that’s familiar to me, one that hollowed me out after we lost our daughter well into my second trimester. You had seen me flail about in an effort to recover over the years. I used antidepressants, therapy, writing, and alcohol. I tried to anchor myself in the raising of Ian and in us. After more than fifteen years since that loss, we had appeared to survive, even thrive at times. And hadn’t we been filled with gratitude for beating the odds, the statistics that made divorce highly likely for a couple who’d been through what we had? And hadn’t we been proud of our dead reckoning in the wake of that grief–no compass, no map, just sun and stars, just love to guide us?

In the car, you ask Ian to deejay. He’s just discovered music that predates him, old-school hip hop and funk, in particular. I can tell this delights you to no end. It’s one of those deep joys of parenthood, one that isn’t guaranteed: seeing your child cultivate a passion that is also your own. I feel your pleasure in this, feel it with you as if it’s my own.

As you drive, he tells us that he’s recently heard his first Chaka Khan song, so I have him queue up “Ain’t Nobody,” a song I’ve loved since middle school. As it opens, the synth’s notes bubble and then bloom into a melody that fills the car, and I’m reminded of the romantic yearning it introduced me to when I was twelve, bookish and introverted and in the throes of a bad perm and braces. Back then, I could only imagine what it would be like to be under the spell of euphoric love, to be carried away by desire and romance, to be loved perfectly, fully. It took a while for me to find my footing in adolescent romance, but by the time I was a senior in high school, I had my first serious boyfriend. I wouldn’t be without a relationship for the next thirty years, the last twenty-two of them with you.

Earlier in our trip, you had told me you were communicating with a woman you met online, and I told you I’d gone on a few dates. Seeing other people was something we had discussed when we first separated, and we had both, unbeknownst to the other, created online dating accounts with a blend of disbelief, humor, and dread. The reality of our separation was not quite real yet. It was as if we were just playing at it, trying it on for size, still calling each other honey, still making coffee and cocktails for each other, still seeing each other, in some ways, as a we. Right now, on the island, it’s early in the divesting process, just a month since I’ve moved out. We don’t yet know how to undo a twenty-year marriage, but after a year and a half of couple’s therapy, nothing could be clearer: I’ve hurt you too much for us to continue, and we both realize that we cannot love each other the way we need to be loved. And while we’re both pained by this knowledge of other people, we also know that moving on is what we should be doing. Every morning you’ve come to the condo for our joint activities with Ian: snorkeling, lunch, movies. Ian’s “World’s Best Grad” figurine–a cheap gold statuette that looks like an Oscar– rests on the dining room table. We rally around this milestone: our son’s just finished high school and will start a new chapter of his life, largely without us.

 In the weeks after I moved out, we had talked about having a good divorce. I began to see marriage and family as two separate entities, and I rejected the idea that one was dependent on the other. If the family could give each of us comfort and acceptance and safety, why couldn’t we still draw those things from it even if the marriage was over? Why couldn’t we still be family to one another, even if divorce legally erased that relationship? I thought about the research I had read several years ago detailing how mothers still carry the DNA of their children decades after they’re born. If I carried within me Ian’s DNA, and the DNA of the daughter we never knew, I carried yours as well. I carried all of us. There was no undoing that.

We had planned the Kauai trip six months earlier, before the separation, but after I moved out we decided that the trip would still be a family vacation, a choice that aligned with the vision we’d created together of post-divorce life: we would continue to have meals together, share the dogs, and put Ian at the center of everything we did. But what we didn’t know then is that we won’t be able to outwit the anger. The good divorce will turn adversarial when we start talking about money, the pervasive hurt between us will spark and flare into rage, my depression will deepen until I’m hospitalized, and we will go through phases of not talking at all, not even about Ian, everything we had set out not to do. Anger is a blazing, propulsive force that will undo the we of us entirely, blindsiding us with its power, duping us into believing that nothing good between us remains.

But all of that is still months away, still far from us as we drive through the warm night, Chaka Khan singing about the full force of all-enveloping love, the highway dark and shrouded, the three of us still a family, now without the center of a marriage, bopping our heads to the beat of the bass. The words I hope this night will last forever, ain’t nobody loves me better fill my heart as I sit in the backseat, with you and Ian in the front, my two boys, two of my life’s loves. I know this moment is fleeting, and that we may never have another like it. And even though what’s to end between us has still not entirely ended, I tell myself to find a permanent place for this moment in my memory. Remember this, I think. Remember. Because in this moment, the three of us are still bound to one another, tethered by years and daily commitments and communion, and by a history of love, no matter the pain, no matter the grief, no matter the anger.

I carry all of us. And there’s no undoing that.

-Genevieve Schwartz

Genevieve Schwartz Thurtle is a writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Crazyhorse, Juxtaprose, and Bodega, among others. She published an essay in HrStory in May of 2020 entitled "The Anniversary." She received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.