Page 64 of Call Off the Dark

Tyler touched her hair softly. “I knew you didn’t like him, but I didn’t realize you hated him that bad.”

Helen lowered her eyes and sighed. “I didn’t realize it either.”

Renting a kayak was Helen’s idea. One Saturday morning in April, she woke up, and even though all she felt like doing was drinking five cups of coffee while curled up on the couch, a little voice in her head urged her to try harder. So she said, “Let’s do something today.”

Tyler had long ago stopped suggesting activities because she always said she was too tired.

But that morning, he rolled over in bed and said, “Okay. What?”

Helen was looking at the weather app on her phone. “It’s supposed to hit sixty-three today. Let’s do something outside.”

“Could you hike?”

She was now in physical therapy for tendonitis in her knee, and that issue was slowly improving, but they hadn’t been running or hiking together in months.

“Probably shouldn’t hike yet.” She lowered her phone and smiled at him. “What about kayaking?”

Neither of them had ever kayaked, but Tyler would have jumped out of a plane if Helen had suggested it. “Kayaking sounds fun,” he said.

And just like that, they took up kayaking.

It was on the crisp blue waters of Lake Washington and Lake Union that Helen and Tyler started having the good conversations again.

She came to understand that the reason she didn’t want to buy a house with Tyler wasn’t because of Tyler, and it wasn’t because she’d fallen out of love with him; it was because to afford it, they would need both their current incomes. If the mortgage relied on her marketing salary, it would mean she was truly trapped. The feeling of being stuck in her job had been pressing down on her, slowly but increasingly so for years, and it had sapped the joy out of her.

“I remember on our first date,” Tyler said, “you talked about not liking your job.”

“I know. I guess I just figured as I got promoted and made more money, it would get better. It doesn’t really work like that though.”

“I’ve told you to leave,” he said. “Do something else.”

“But I don’t know what else to do. Who are these people who wake up with all these dreams and a clear vision and conviction?”

“Total assholes.”

Helen laughed and looked over at him. They were in solo kayaks that day. His forearms were getting tan from their Saturday excursions on the water, and he needed a haircut. It was blowing in the wind, and he looked adorable. She had started to enjoy their goodbye kisses in the elevator again.

“You work so hard though,” she said. “If I leave my job and try something else, or go back to school, it means we’ll have to keep living in an apartment for who knows how long.”

“Oh, Helen,” Tyler said. “I don’t care about owning a house. Anywhere you are, that’s my home.”

Once Helen gave herself permission to consider the next phase of her life, she suddenly felt like she was walking around with pockets full of possibility. She didn’t feel any rush to give notice at her job, but she felt the buoyancy of new beginnings nonetheless. At work, at home, in everything.

Memories of Helen’s early days with Tyler returned to her, and she even found a note she’d written to him only months into dating. It was so full of lust and passion. She stared at the words until she could truly feel the imprint of that golden time. She realized how very wrong she’d been to mistake her numbness for life as a numbness for her husband.

One Saturday, she emerged from the bedroom wearing a crisp white button-up shirt, her hair coiled in a bun, Tyler’s reading glasses perched on her nose. She wasn’t wearing any pants.

Tyler was blending a protein shake in the kitchen. When Helen walked in, he pressed the stop button. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve decided what my next career move is going to be.”

“Is it in the adult entertainment industry?”

Helen smiled. “Close. I’m going to be a museum curator.”

Tyler nodded because that did, indeed, make sense. All those hours watching the History Channel and those winter Sundays walking through the Museum of Flight and the Garden of Glass. Helen loved going places and seeing things: zoos, bookstores, festivals. Whatever it was, she was always fascinated with the origin of it all. Their trip together to New York had been a lot less about the nightclubs and the food and a lot more about Ellis Island and the Hell Gate Bridge.

“I could take night classes at U-Dub, get my history degree, and between that and my communications degree, I’d be highly qualified to take over the museum world.”