What would I do? What would I say?

When I passed the university bookstore, I glanced at the window display and saw at least three dozen books arranged under a sign for faculty titles. Among books on climate change, Sufi literature, and French cinema, my gaze landed on a slim paperback with a cover that showed the outline of a woman’s face as she held up a mirror, creating an endless series of reflections vanishing into the center of the photograph.

The name of the book was Portal.

The author was Karly Chance.

I went into the bookstore and picked up a copy. The first thing I did was check the last page to see whether the publisher had included a photograph, but the only information was a brief biography. Karly Chance is a lecturer and poet-in-residence at Northwestern University. This is her first collection.

That was all.

I checked the listing of poems included in the book. The one-word titles unsettled me. One was called “Cut.” Another, “Plaything.” Another, “Jump.” Another, “Candy.” When I flipped through the pages, I was impressed but also horrified. Her poems used beautiful imagery to build a tableau of violent self-destruction, like Thomas Eakins painting the blood of a nineteenth-century surgical procedure in exquisite detail.

It seemed impossible to me that the Karly I knew could have written these poems. I’d never seen a side like that in her personality. But then again, this was not the Karly I knew.

I also thought about the word her faculty colleague had used in describing her background.

Trauma.

“You should read the book,” a voice next to me said.

I looked around and saw a young woman no more than twenty, in a Northwestern T-shirt, with her brunette hair tied in a ponytail. Her name tag told me she was a bookstore employee. As I held the book in my hand, she tapped a purple-painted fingernail on the cover.

“The poems are really deep. I mean, some of them will turn your stomach, but if you want to know what depression can do to someone’s head, it’s all in here.”

My finger caressed Karly’s name on the cover. “Do you know her?”

“Sure. I’ve taken her class.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s amazing. So many of the profs around here are just talking heads, you know? But Karly lived it.”

I smiled. “You’ve sold me.”

I followed the young woman to the cash register. As she rang up the sale and took my money, I said, “You mentioned depression. Is that what the poems are about?”

“Oh, yeah. She spent years in the cave.”

“Did something happen to her?”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, Karly was in a car accident right after college. She talks about it in class and doesn’t sugarcoat how bad it was. She had her mom in the car with her, and they were having some kind of big argument. The two of them didn’t get along, like really didn’t get along. Karly got distracted. She ran a red light, and they got T-boned. Her mom was killed.”

I felt those words like a blow to my chest.

“She spiraled after that,” the girl went on. “She spent a year in hell. Heavy into meth, abusive relationships, suicide attempts. The last time she almost succeeded.”

I hesitated, but I needed to know. “What did she do?”

“She drove her car right into the river.”

I had trouble standing. Waves of violent memories rolled over me. My mother, dead on the floor. My father, with the gun in his mouth. Roscoe, dead in the seat next to me, his face shredded by broken glass. Dylan Moran on the riverbank, the rats eating his face.

Karly and I, swirling and tumbling in the black water.

Roscoe said: Fate has a way of making even the smallest details converge.

“Shit,” I murmured.

“Yeah. When they pulled her out, she was dead. No heartbeat. No oxygen for like four minutes. They put her in a coma to give her brain a chance to recover, but nobody figured she’d come out of it. But she did. She says that was what finally turned her around.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“Anyway, enjoy the book,” the girl told me with a macabre smile.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I left the store, still devastated by what I’d heard. I took the stairs up to the next level, and I used a coffee coupon on my receipt to buy myself an iced latte. When a table opened up, I sat down and began reading Karly’s book.

Knowing it was her, knowing what she’d been through in this life, made the words almost unbearable to me. All this naked emotion roared off the page. Fury. Lust. Savagery. Ecstasy. Coldness. Guilt. Despair. “Plaything” was about bondage with a series of strangers. “Candy” was about her overdose of pills. “Jump” was about standing on an eighteenth-story Marina City balcony, naked and high as a kite, hallucinating that her mother was shouting from the ground below that she should climb over the railing.

Jump, she said to me.

Jump, she sang.

I told myself that this was a different Karly, not my Karly, not the woman I knew, but I realized something as I read the book that made me impossibly sad.

This was my Karly.

I could hear her voice in the turn of a phrase. Little things she’d said when we were together, the words she’d made up about people, showed up here. The poems sounded exactly like her. All the pain, all the darkness, had been inside her when she and I were together. Same soul, same mind. Maybe it had taken a journey of shame to bring it to the page, but she’d had this identical wounded heart all along. I had never seen it, never asked her about it, never dived into the deep, deep pool of who she really was.

I had loved this woman and not known her at all.

How could I have missed it?

I was in tears when I put the book down, for everything I’d lost, for everything I’d failed to appreciate while I had her. I hadn’t looked up from the pages for an hour. My vision was blurred, and I wiped my eyes. I hadn’t touched the coffee at all, and the ice had melted away, leaving a drink as muddy brown as the flooded river. Trying to regain some sense of where I was, my stare traveled from table to table, person to person, spying on the lives of others.

Then my gaze froze.

My heart stopped.

Not even twenty feet away from me, a woman with jagged blond hair sat in profile, her graceful fingers tapping on the keyboard of a laptop. When she paused, which wasn’t often, she sipped tea from a paper cup. Her face was absorbed in her work, and she didn’t seem to notice the rest of the world.

She had no idea that a stranger at another table had seen her. That I had to plant my feet on the floor with heavy chains to stop myself from getting up and sweeping her into my arms.

That woman was Karly.

Perfect. Gorgeous. Alive.

That woman was my wife.

Seeing her, I felt like a tongue-tied fool, with no idea what to do next. I could get up, go over there, introduce myself. But then what? Anything I would say to her felt completely insufficient to that moment. And yet if I offered even a glimmer of what was happening to me, she’d think I was crazy. I was the one whose world was turning upside down, not her.

Needless to say, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. After a while, she felt it, the way you get that prick in your neck that someone is watching you. I saw her head turn, taking in the people around her, wondering where that odd feeling had come from. She stared at the others in the coffee shop one by one, and then, finally, she stared at me. Just for an instant, she looked right at me, before she moved on. I looked away, too, but the damage to my soul was already done.

I was crushed.

She didn’t know me. There wasn’t any recognition at all. Ten years ago, we’d had one date, and I’d come and gone from her life without making so much as a ripple. In my world, she’d found me bleeding in the car next to Roscoe, and we’d fallen in love with each other in the time it took for her to tell me that everything was going to be fine. But not now. Her gaze passed over me with no interest at all, no attraction, not even a physical curiosity. I felt nothing from her. Complete disinterest. That was worse than any other reaction she could have given.

The despair I felt made the reality of my situation very clear. Roscoe was right. I didn’t belong in this world.

I got up from the table, took Karly’s book with me, and left. I didn’t even turn around for another glimpse of her. The risk of her looking back with those blank eyes was too painful. I went downstairs, anxious to get back outside. I knew what I should do. Go back to the lake, find a quiet place where no one could see me, and say the escape word simply and clearly. Say it out loud and hope that it would send me home.

But fate got in my way and reminded me why I was here.

As I walked back into the sunshine, I met a man coming the other way. He was old and slightly stooped, with salt-and-pepper hair. We were on a collision course, and I side-stepped to give him space. Instead, he blocked my path.

His weathered face studied me curiously. “Oh, hello again. Did you find her?”

“What?”