An awful feeling of dread creeps over my skin. Has something tragic happened to his wife? Have those boys had to endure losing the mother they clearly adore? God, I hope not. He sighs, a bone-deep rattler that heaves through his body as he finishes his drink and slides the empty glass on to the table. If so, I’ll willingly get on that boat, he can have the lodge.
‘And now I get to see my boys only when Susie allows it, and every now and then she lets me help them with their homework over FaceTime. The rest of the time I live in a condo alone, and the silence is so damn loud I can’t hear myself think.’
So on the upside, I don’t think anything terrible has happened to his wife. On the downside, he’s clearly unhappy both at home and not at home, apart from the people he loves.
‘So … why here, why now? If you miss them so much, I mean?’ I ask because from everything he’s said I can’t understand why he’d sign up to be three thousand miles away from the sons he adores, or why, if things were so dire, he didn’t use our little issue as a reason, an excuse even, to go home again.
He puffs out and slumps back in his chair, a defeated sag to his body.
‘Look, being a good dad is everything to me, but the situation with Susie … I kind of reached a point where I felt like I was doing them more harm than good.’
‘What did you do that made you feel that way?’ I’m unsure of what else to say. My own dad died when I was a baby – my only experience of my father is missing him.
He shakes his head. ‘Why do you assume it was me? Susie holds all the cards and I have an empty hand. My whole life was perfect, and then boom, she drops this huge fuckin’ bomb in the middle of it.’ He makes air explosions with his hands. ‘I’d been home less than a week after my last assignment and she tells me she isn’t happy, she needs something different, asks me to step out of the picture for a while so she can think straight. And I do it because this guy,’ he jerks his thumbs to his chest, ‘this guy decided that the only way to hang on to the life he loves is to back the hell off.’
‘Had you been away long? On assignment, I mean?’
‘Two months that time, I guess? It’s unpredictable, that’s the nature of the job. I’m home as much as I can be.’ He sets his jaw hard. ‘I’m not an office kind of guy.’
I can tell it’s a sore point. My eldest sister married a soldier and their marriage almost broke up over the fact that she felt like a single parent a lot of the time.
‘Can’t be easy on either of you,’ I say.
‘It isn’t,’ he says. ‘She asked for space and I gave it to her. But now Susie calls the shots and I hang around waiting to be let in, always on hand in case she decides she needs me. So, yeah. That’s how it is. My relationship with my kids has taken an awful hit, and with Susie, I …’ He rolls his head to one side as if he’s trying to massage out old, nagging pain. ‘When my parents split, I was Nate’s age,’ he says. ‘For me, that meant years of feeling guilty about whichever one of them I wasn’t with. They weren’t good at keeping their animosity from me. I was the ball in their game of emotional tennis, you know? I can still remember the chill in my gut whenever they were around each other.’
He swallows, looking somewhere over my shoulder. ‘I shudder at the idea my kids might ever feel that way so I laugh and joke around as much as I can with them, and I smile at Susie, and my kids are doing fine, mostly, I hope, because they think I’m fine.’ He stares at the table.
It’s clear that life has taken some pretty vicious chunks out of him. Despite our differences, it’s obvious that he’s an intrinsically decent human to the people he loves. Abstractly, I envy the depth of love necessary for a break-up to cut this deep. He’s in a very different place in his life to me, for sure, surrounded by complications and ties and demands, while I’m spinning slowly on the same lonely spot. Two opposing problems with the same solution. Otter Lodge.
‘It’s strange,’ Mack says. ‘I never fully appreciated the impact my parents’ divorce left on me until I became a father myself. I knew I wanted to be hands on, well, as much as I could given the demands of my job. So this last year has been the struggle of my life. I’m so thirsty for time with them, but still I can’t resist turning the conversation towards Susie whenever I’m with them, digging for details, using their answers to assess the state of things. But they can see right through my casual questions. Echoes of my own childhood.’ He looks at me across the table, his eyes bleak. ‘So I guess that’s why I’m really here. I’m removing myself because it’s the only way I can see to be a good dad right now. I don’t know if walking away shows strength or weakness, if it’s a risk I shouldn’t have taken, but at least my kids get a couple of months of not being in the middle of whatever’s happening with me and Susie. They get to talk to me on the phone and hear news about Salvation, and I get to hear about their days in Boston and not ask so much as a single question about their mother.’ He pauses to sigh deeply. ‘It was a real low point to realize that the best thing I can do for them is be somewhere else.’