Marriage, Found?

The story of a broken ring, part two.

I was sweaty from my yoga session, sitting criss-cross-applesauce on my mat with my daughter on my lap, casually scrolling through Facebook Marketplace when I came across a free listing for a stainless steel double-basin kitchen sink just down the road.

I called out to my husband, washing dishes behind me at our old porcelain sink, stained and chipped and in very sorry shape. “Check this out- someone is getting rid of their sink.” I held up the phone as he dried his hands and strolled over.

He took it and I twisted around, hopefully watching his face. As the professional carpenter and general fix-it guy in the house, he has full veto rights when it comes to anything falling under the category of “home improvement.” He furrowed his brow, as he does when he is reading and critically analyzing something, and mumbled some measurements under his breath.

“Is the tape measurer where it’s supposed to be?” He asked, giving me a loaded look as he headed towards the mudroom.

“Um, maybe?” I said, trying to look cute.

It was entirely possible I hadn’t put it back in the right place when I’d measured the curtains earlier in the week. I had a knack for something my husband had playfully dubbed “secret stashing” early in our relationship, calling it my super power. He once found a pair of my socks in the freezer. “Um, Kendall?” He had said, dramatically revealing them from behind the open door, his eyes flickering with amusement. “Can you tell me why you are freezing your socks?” We had laughed so hard. I remembered getting ready for work, holding them in one hand while getting out the ice cube tray with the other, thinking about God knows what. A scene from the new novel I was reading, cold fusion, the fact that an octopus has brain cells in its tentacles. I found myself coming back into my body, holding my glass of ice water with cold, bare feet, looking everywhere for those darn socks. Oh well, I’d grab a new pair. The Secret Stasher strikes again!

To this day I maintain that this isn’t due to absent-mindedness, per se, but something closer to present-mindedness. I’m not vacant, I am over-occupied, you see.

But now, ten years into our marriage, I noticed that I had a familiar knot of worry sitting in my stomach as I heard him open the squeaky door of the tool cupboard in the mud room. Did I screw up again? I thought, already preparing to explain myself to the only person on the planet that never misplaced a thing. What was wrong with me?

He returned with the shiny silver tool in his palm. I exhaled in relief, kissing the baby’s head. Good job, Mama. I whispered to myself as I watched him un-scroll the yellow tape along the kitchen counter.

The sink was just the right size.

I imagined replacing the old one with something new and shiny, not yet damaged by age and neglect. A fresh start.

---

We saw the sink sitting in the driveway as we pulled in. My daughter babbled in her car seat as my husband backed up to it to make loading it a bit easier. I hopped out as he put it in park, offering a friendly wave to the woman stepping out of the house. My breath caught as I raised my hand.

The stone in my wedding ring was missing. I grabbed my finger, the rough edges of the familiar band foreign under my touch, frantically looking down at the ground around me, patting down my yoga pants.

“What’s wrong?” My husband asked.

“My sapphire is gone!” I said, holding out my hand.

He and the woman both looked at the now empty ring and then down at the rocky driveway, as though we would all see it sitting on top of the gravel, glittering in the sun.

“Could it have happened at home?” He asked, as I opened the car door, running my hands along the leather folds of the passenger seat.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I feel like I would have noticed that it was missing during the car ride.”

I would have, right? The sharp prongs on the ring felt rough and unsettling, obvious. The absence of the gem was more remarkable than the humble, dark sapphire had ever been.

I picked up pebbles on the floormat, one by one, chucking them out the door as I went. I could hear the rushing of my pulse in my ears and the knot in my stomach had returned.

When did this happen? I thought, searching for clues inside of my memory.

How long had it been missing?

---

When he had slipped that ring on my finger, a decade earlier, it had been the only thing I had been wearing. We hadn’t thought about how we’d need to amend our engagement story later, when everyone would inevitably ask about how he had proposed. We couldn’t tell our families that I had travelled all the way from my apartment on San Juan Island to his house in Bellingham wearing only a long, wool coat in the middle of December. How cold the wind felt on my bare skin when it whipped up under the hem as I stood on the deck of the ferry, a secret smile on my lips. How I had tied a big bow around my waist when I pulled into his driveway, presenting myself to him as an early Christmas gift.

I fell into his arms and he laid me on the bed, both of us laughing at my ridiculous gesture. His kisses felt like home. I was warm and safe and his house smelled like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

“You seem to have misplaced your clothes, Miss.” He said as he unbuttoned the coat. “Should I check the freezer?”

I giggled into his neck.

I didn’t think I could be any happier.

And then he jumped off the bed and opened the drawer on his bedside table, turning around with a black velvet box in his hand.

He kneeled down and I stopped breathing.

“I was going to do this later this weekend, but this feels like exactly the right moment.” He said, holding my eyes, telling me how much he loved me, how he wanted us to never be apart.

I said yes, yes, yes.

We crafted a story that would be appropriate for the grandparents while we fed each other warm cookies, smiling between every bite.

---

I was delighted that he had chosen a sapphire, blue like the deep sea.

I didn’t trust diamonds. I didn’t want to wonder where my gem had come from, and at what cost.

My sapphire was made in a laboratory, and that put me at ease. Like me, the ring wasn’t flashy or conventional. It had been designed by the person I loved the most, intentionally and thoughtfully.

It was perfect for me. He was perfect for me.

The night of my engagement, fully clothed once again.

---

I wore that ring in the early days of our marriage, digging up potatoes and carrots in the raised garden bed outside of our first home, painting the new chicken coop, preparing meals and a brand new life. I wore it as my hands packed boxes and loaded donations into the back of my car when we sold that house and nearly everything inside of it, and I wore it as I jammed precious few items into my giant backpack soon after, things I hoped would sustain me as we headed to Africa for the next six months. I wore it wielding a pick ax in Uganda, blisters forming under the band. I wore it while tugging and squeezing the teat of a cow in South Africa, listening to the satisfying jet stream of milk hit the metal bucket below. I wore it gripping hiking poles in Alaska and Spain and New Zealand. I wore it making tortillas in Belize and making love in dozens of beds that were not my own. I spun that ring around and around the base of my finger, reminding myself to breathe, waiting for the results of the biopsy that would tell me whether or not they had removed all of the melanoma. I wore it in the shower that same night as my husband washed the blood from my hair and rocked me back and forth, whispering reassurances into my ear. I wore it as I held up countless pregnancy tests with a single, lonely line, and one time, against all odds, as a second line appeared, a line that would change absolutely everything. I took it off for a few months as my fingers swelled in solidarity with my belly, and replaced it when those same fingers traced the perfect chubby folds on my daughter’s thighs. I wore it for many years sleeping with my hand on my husband’s chest, and later, when that same hand would trace the empty spot on the bed where he once laid, a spot now occupied by a tiny thing that woke my up five times a night, hungry and demanding, while he slept in the other room.

---

We looked every where for that stone. In the woman’s driveway who was selling the sink, in the car, in our own driveway, the mudroom, the kitchen, the thick living room carpet, my daughter’s diaper, every dresser drawer, the damn freezer. Again and again I would rack my brain when my husband asked the last time I had seen it, what exactly I had done that morning.

“I don’t remember.” I kept saying.

I don’t remember when it disappeared. It had always been there, and then it just wasn’t anymore.

At some point, we stopped looking.

---

Before our daughter was born, we had always navigated marriage side-by-side. Together, but independent. Imagine two people companionably paddling two single kayaks along the seashore. Pointing at interesting birds, silently listening to the paddles as they broke the surface of the water, stopping to take in a sunset together. Sometimes one or the other of us would go exploring a side channel alone, but we were most content when we were able to share the experience, to take in the same sights and smells and sounds from the comfort of our own boats.

And then, when the baby came, we found ourselves suddenly in a three-person kayak, the baby nestled in the middle. Don’t rock the boat or you’ll tip her out, don’t make too much noise! Is she ok? Is she sleeping enough? When did she last eat? What’s that rash?

We were out of sync, banging our paddles together, arguing over who should be in front and who should be in the back, the brawn vs. the brain, who should be steering and navigating and who was doing the lion’s share of the paddling.

We were exhausted, out of our depth. We wanted to return to our single boats, but didn’t know how, not with this new person on board. Was this just the way of things now?

Where did our companionable relationship go? When had we lost it, exactly?

---

Five years after losing the stone, just a few months ago, we said the hard stuff out loud.

We weren’t happy. This wasn’t working. Maybe we needed more space.

On our property there is a small, one-bedroom house that we have been working on since we bought it, and an old mobile home from the 1970s that we rented to friends early on, but that has been my personal sleeping space for the last year or so. We often talk about hauling it away and replacing it with something less… unsightly. But it’s so darn useful right now.

Our daughter sleeps in the only bedroom in the house, my husband sleeps on the couch in the same house which has miraculously cured his back-pain, and I sleep on the giant king bed in the mobile home which we spent a fortune on when I was pregnant because we wanted to invest in a really good mattress.

It’s weird, but it works.

We all “live” in the house but every night I kiss my family good night and walk past the shed and the trampoline, up the porch steps and down the hall of the mobile home with its wood paneled walls and thread-bare carpet and sink into my incredibly comfortable king mattress. In the morning I wake early and return the exact same way, bidding them good morning as I walk through the door.

Maybe I’ll just move over there for a bit, I said one night. We can go back to living parallel lives. Together, but separate.

We decided to try it out, not having any idea what exactly that meant.

---

Precisely one day later, we discovered that the house was filled with black mold.

The cause of my husband and daughter’s ongoing medical problems clicked into place. It was a good news/ bad news situation.

Good news: Everyone is going to start feeling a lot better after mold-remediation and anti-fungal treatments. The mystery has been solved!

Bad News: mold remediation means removing all the flooring, tearing up the walls, and replacing all the moldy kitchen cabinets. A full, unplanned, gutting and remodel of the house.

Deep breath, we can do this. One day at a time.

My husband and daughter moved into the mobile home with me.

---

Here’s the funny thing:

I realized that when I padded down the hall in the morning and found my husband drinking coffee at the kitchen table in our newly shared space, I felt happy. And when he was gone, when he left early for work or was tearing up flooring at the house before dawn, I missed him.

---

I decided to repaint the mudroom after he had removed the flooring and the washer and dryer and scrubbed and treated the concrete subfloor a couple of weeks ago.

The room was completely empty, the walls echoing as I dragged the paint can around. I picked a greyish beige color to cover the aggressive red that had been in there, a more soothing color. A fresh start.

At one point my ladder bumped into the big dryer vent hose that was coming out of the exterior wall. We had shook it out earlier in the day, marveling at all the lint that tumbled out as my husband vacuumed up the mess. We had propped it up and out of the way to lay the new flooring, and I heard it thunk to the ground as I scooted the ladder closer to the corner.

No harm done, I thought. I left it laying there.

When he got home from work, my husband was inspecting my paint job, standing right beside me, when he bent over to prop the hose back up.

Laying on the concrete, right next to the hose, was a tiny lint ball and something else that caught the light.

“Must be one of Finley’s sticky gems,” he said, looking at it for a second before pulling his arm back, preparing to throw it out of the open door.

“Wait!” I said, my whole body on alert, not knowing why, grabbing his arm, tenderly plucking the gem from his hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

I breathlessly ran to the bathroom, running the gem under the water in the faucet, washing the soot away. It began to shine. Blue like the deep sea.

There is NO WAY. I thought, looking down at the tiny stone in the palm of my hand.

For nearly five years it has sat in that hose. Through hundreds of dry cycles it has clung on for dear life.

Somehow it did not come out when I shook that hose with all my might, as my husband vacuumed up the masses of lint.

It waited until we were together in an empty room, the space between us filled with questions about the future, to present itself to us.

What are the odds? Can you even begin to quantify such a thing?

Remember me? It seemed to ask. You thought you’d lost me, but I’ve been here all along, secretly hiding in the folds, waiting to be found again.

I ask you, dear friends, do you believe in miracles, in signs? Because I can’t reason this one out.

I don’t think I want to.

I'm a believer, you see.

Sometimes the simplest, most elegant answer is the closest one to the truth.

And this time the answer was pure magic. A lost thing, found. A broken thing, mended. A tiny answer to an unspoken prayer, right in the palm of my hand.

I can't pretend to know what will happen next, but I do know this: I am paying attention.