Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett Page B

she would leave the table. But the next night was a little better. Michael wasn’t there to distract his brother and sister with laughter, but still, it was better.
      
    Being up and about again, I started taking these walks. I wake early and bring Kelsey, who runs off the leash once we reach the woods. The cool oxygen of the plants and trees before the sun has dried them feels like a balm to my lungs. I’ve always preferred the woods in America to the woods where I grew up in Hampshire, which I can never help knowing are the hemmed-in exception to towns and villages and farms. New England is the other way around: a series of clearings in a forest. Keep walking north, and the clearings will shrink, until there are none. I don’t meet other people here, and that’s what matters. My mind can rest. Which is when my situation becomes obvious. There is no getting better. There is love I cannot bear, which has kept me from drifting entirely loose. There are the medicines I can take that flood my mind without discrimination, slowing the monster, moving the struggle underwater, where I then must live in the murk. But there is no killing the beast. Since I was a young man, it has hunted me. And it will hunt me until I am dead. The older I become, the closer it gets.
      
    It’s midmorning by the time I cross back over the river and follow the path into the field at the end of our street, which is saturated now in the July heat. The grass is intensely green, the scrub-apple trees by the road past blooming, on into their pure summer verdancy, along with the rhododendron and the lilac, their flowers gone, their leaves fat with sun. The air smells of the fecund soil—the flesh covering the skull of the planet, the muck from which the plants rise, busy in the mindless life of heat. Celia and Alec were drugged with sleep when I left the house, as they always are, and I didn’t want to wake them. In summer, I can’t be sure of their whereabouts, but last night at dinner I paid attention, and got a sense of where they would be today.
      
    Turning before I reach the house, I carry on into the center of the town. It’s quiet. Kids are away at camp or on holiday. The shops have bins and tables of merchandise out on the sidewalk and signs announcing sales. A few skateboarders sit glumly on the bench under the awning of the ice cream store watching the cars move slowly past. Across the street a woman smiles at me and waves enthusiastically and I nod and wave back, though I have no idea who she is. A mother of one of the children’s friends, in all likelihood, someone I’ve met at the school or in a driveway picking up Alec or Celia. I look away and keep walking lest she cross the street and begin speaking to me. In another time, I would have hooked into the aggression of her good cheer and doubled it up until running into her became an event with a momentum of its own. I’ve lived vicariously at times off that birthright of the American upper-middle class—their competitive optimism. It’s what I loved about working in this country. What are your plans? How’s the project? How’s business? When I left university in Britain, we didn’t have entrepreneurs. We had managers and industrial relations. Meeting someone at a party led to the circumlocutions designed to tease out where you’d been at school, one’s accent having made one acceptable company in the first place. In America, I flew all over the country talking to people about their wildest ambitions and they were always delighted to see me, even if I could promise them nothing. Calling them back a year or two later, after my partners and I had raised a fund, and telling them I wanted to help them create what they’d been dreaming of was a heady feeling. But that was a lifetime ago.
      
    Back then, in Samoset, we rented a house for three hundred dollars a month. We had a secondhand station wagon, a vegetable garden, enough money that Margaret could stay home. Alec used