If I Die Before I See You by Domnica Radulescu

We saw each other again during a summer storm in the Shenandoah Valley, in the Walmart parking lot. He was returning from a trip to Russia, and I had just settled amidst those blue foggy mountains, pregnant with his child. I had dragged the messiness of my life all the way from Chicago, husband and child, to start a new job, while in love and pregnant by another man. We hadn’t seen each other in three months and were hiding from everyone. The Walmart parking lot was as ridiculous a place to meet as any, given the circumstances, but the chains of the thickly wooded Appalachians holding the entire landscape in their perfect ring, touched everything with an aura of mystery. Even the drab Walmart parking lot. We acted like criminals on the run, casting panicked glances around us, making sure nobody saw us.  

We spotted each other across the parking lot as soon as we got out of our respective cars. I got out of my beat-up Toyota Camry and walked in his direction knocking into shopping carts and stubbing my toes against cart railings. I got inside his rented car sliding like a sly cat on the seat next to him, and grabbed his hand, hungry for the stolen embraces in the cheap motel he was going to get for the afternoon.  

Every moment was a stolen moment and came at a high price. Pleasure and ecstasy were tightly packed with guilt and desperation, the deep blueness of the mountains weighed on by ominous clouds and thunder. We lived our story conscious of its reckless course and its potential for tragedy: children of our previous marriages, the spouses we had made those children with, complicated careers, hundreds of miles of American highways and cities in between. On top of all that, he was on his way to his mother’s funeral on the East Coast and had made the detour to see me on the way. His mother’s death had offered the opportunity or rather excuse for him to leave his wife and children for several days. Later in the hotel room we laughed and cried at once at that cruel irony, his mother’s death offering a convenient excuse for our adulterous passion. He said his mother would have loved the coincidence, maybe she chose the moment intentionally, he added with a bitter smile, “so we can meet even if for just an afternoon, she must have understood how desperate we are when I told her how I had met the love of my life. She lay there in her coma, and she blinked a few times; I’m sure she understood.” His eyes were fierce and tender at once, the way only his eyes could gather such emotional oxymorons. I felt grateful to his mother for dying at the right time so we could meet under the fierce thunders and bleak sky in the cheap motel in the middle of the fucking nowhere of a part of the world, where I would have never seen myself settle when I left my communist ridden country years earlier. And equally grateful for having had her blessing from her unconscious state. He was sure she had had a moment, a flicker of consciousness, that the story of our guilty fierce love brought back her consciousness for one last time. 

It was in the Howard Johnson hotel room that I gave him the news of my pregnancy which was no accident but a much-desired accomplishment. Amid the gaping abyss of our lives not only did we not avoid the complications of a child which most people with half a sense of lucidity would have done, but assiduously and lustfully threw ourselves into it. Lucidity was not our strongest suit at that time. Passion, abandon, teeth grinding, nail-biting desperation, utopian plans for a different country on top of a mountain with a view of the sea, images of all the children from our marriages reunited and living in harmony, books we wanted to write together; that was our grip on life and the world at that time.  

Chopin’s waltzes and preludes drowned our sobs and sighs of ecstasy together; it all merged and heaved rhythmically in the hot room in the cheap motel in the Appalachians. We had minutes left, he had to get back on the road. We had words for the sharp pain of the parting in French and not in English. I had them in my native Romanian and whispered them to myself, he loved to hear me speak Romanian and repeated the words after me with a funny accent. Language failed us. Somebody knocked on the door and asked if we needed room service. It seemed like a cruel joke. “What room service?” I asked dumbfounded. A ticket to paradise, I wanted to say, a pain-free divorce and happiness together, could we get that for room service? He had five hundred miles to drive to his mother’s funeral. We had minutes left until we had to leave the room, say goodbye for who knew how long. The countdown to our ominous separation was unforgiving: Ten—one last flutter of his hand over my cheek; nine—one last whisper of love in his ear; eight—erase all traces of our identity, Baudelaire poems or Edith Piaf tapes; seven—take care of yourself and the baby, when exactly is it due? Six—how long will it be till I see you again? Five—one last kiss, embrace, smelling your hair, kissing your eyes; four—what are we going to do? Three—we’ll think of something, drive carefully; two—don’t leave, goodbye my love; one—I’ll miss you so much, you’re my life. And take off! Run in the rain, get to each other’s cars, don’t look back, drive through the curtain of rain, drive to mother’s funeral and then to wife and children, drive to new home in the middle of nowhere and to husband and child. 

 I tried to stop crying, touched my belly, grabbed the wheel and drove home through the relentless rain. The chaos at home was almost a boon. It distracted me and saved me from having to explain my late arrival on a work night. I was late on a work night precisely because I had been working, I said, irritated while picking up my sweet three-year-old son who, judging by the amalgam of peanut butter, clay, sparkling glue, and apple sauce that covered parts of his face and hands, must have been in a frenzy of eating, playing and running around the house all at the same time. The rain hadn’t stopped, and I thought he is already out of town, on the highway heading north to his mother’s funeral. The evening seemed endless, and divorce seemed inevitable. Later that night I fell asleep on the sofa in the living room, holding my three-year-old. I dreamed of the roof of our new house collapsing from the rain and of me floating on the rainwater holding my child and carrying another one in my womb. My lover was walking towards me through the rain and whispering if I die before I see you, write our story in French. 

I am a Romanian-American writer of fiction, creative non-fiction and plays. I am the author of three critically acclaimed novels: Train to Trieste, Black Sea Twilight, Country of Red Azaleas and a memoir titled Dream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life. Train to Trieste was published in thirteen languages and won the 2009 Best Fiction Award from the Library of Virginia.