When I look back, two days stand out in my memory. One was the day I first realized my son had vanished. There had been signs for a week or so: He'd begun whining instead of speaking, and holding his hand in front of his eyes -- palm close to his face, fingers flapping -- in an odd and completely new way. But there was a moment, standing in the kitchen, staring down at him, that I saw, really saw, and felt an icy shudder begin at my feet and rise up my legs until I had to reach out and lean on the counter in order to keep from falling down.

The other was the day we left that house. Who knows what might have happened if we had stayed? If that call had come and the husband and wife had come over and we'd all drunk coffee and talked and worked out a compromise and hugged one another and become friends ... Our lives could have taken an easier course, or a harder one. It could have changed everything; it could have changed nothing.

One thing I've always suspected, though, is that my marriage might have survived -- or at least been prolonged -- if we had stayed in that house.

Shortly after we closed and drove off, installed ourselves in the overpriced rental and began looking frantically for jobs, my husband -- nine years sober -- began drinking again. He was moderate about it at first. And it didn't seem like a bad thing: a glass of cheap wine in the evening to take the edge off. This was our quiet time together and I was, stupidly, all for it, believing he'd beaten his demons long ago.

But, of course, I was entirely wrong. He blamed himself for the loss of our home. He was seething with guilt. And as was his habit, hard-wired from the time he was a teen, he salved his feelings of shame and frustration with alcohol.

What actually happened next is a jumble inside my head -- in small part due to the passage of time, but mostly because I have since written a story for which I mined all these incidents, then shaped and twisted and reimagined them until the fiction I dreamed up all but replaced the memories of who we were.

I know there was a lost summer, during which we stayed in a variety of places. Then there was a broken-down house that we bought so Jim could fix it up and resell it at a profit, which he did. We lived in that house while he was working on it, and our kids were able to have a semi-normal school year. But inside our family, something had broken.

Jim continued to drink. I became fiercely independent, driven and angry. A year and a half after leaving our home, we finally were back on our feet, financially. So we forged ahead: I went to grad school and we bought a house nearly as big as the one on the pond. Jim took another sales job, on the condition he would do it for only a couple years, in order to get me through the degree program. After that, it would be my turn to support us.

He lasted exactly six months.

That debut novel to which the blog writer referred chronicled this: the end of a marriage between two people who truly love each other, the outcome of a series of bad and unlucky choices, the missteps you wish you could take back seconds after they happen. Instead of the loss of a house and a marriage undone largely by alcoholism, I imagined a couple whose mistakes were more exotic: a transaction with bad cops, a Faustian-style bargain, a risky unorthodox "cure" for their autistic son. Still, our experiences informed the emotions behind everything I wrote. And it's likely there never would have been such a book had we not gone through what we did.

Three years after leaving our house, Jim and I separated. I studied and wrote. He drank. After a failed tour of rehab, he reached a bottom so low he decided it was better for our children not to see him. Torn between fury and concern for the man who had been my husband for 13 years, I agreed. We divorced; he moved to Louisiana and I went to Providence, R.I. For six months once, I didn't hear from him at all and I thought he might be dead. But we never completely came apart.

Once, when I needed help, I called his cellphone and he sold everything he owned to fly out to Rhode Island. Then, shortly after I moved back to Minnesota two years ago, he e-mailed from a YMCA in South Dakota where he'd landed after his latest attempt to dry out, asking about the children and offering to send money. When I responded, saying Andrew -- now a teenager, long emerged from his autistic fugue and recovered from that chaotic year of wandering -- had grown beyond me and needed his father, Jim found a way to come home.

For some reason, I wrote to the blogger who occupies my old house and told him a brief, sanitized version of this story. I said that the move had, indeed, been hard on us but that Jim and I had managed, somehow, to remain the best of friends. Then I told him he was a fine writer and wished him the best of luck with his novel. I don't know why I did it, exactly. Maybe it was because he'd admitted, after all these years, that he and his wife might have done the wrong thing. And I felt strangely empowered.

He responded right away: a long message full of details about his life, the anxiety that had plagued him, the work that was very slow getting off the ground. He repeated his apology about the circumstances of our house deal: I hope we didn't seem crass in any way. For years I kept wondering if we hadn't somehow jinxed this place.

He'd been reading my essays -- in the magazine and online -- and had ordered my book from the library, he wrote sheepishly, because he could not afford to buy it. But he was happy to hear that "Mr. Bauer" and I were on good terms; it was good for kids, he attested from his own childhood experience, if their divorced parents were amicable.

Then he asked if I would like to visit him and see the house.

Reading this, the last sentence in his message to me, I caught my breath. Gone was the serene maturity with which I'd handled this odd encounter. Suddenly, I was angry. Who was he to invite me back into my own home for a visit? I read over the message, differently, seeing that it was peppered with references to his nearly finished manuscript. And I became meanly suspicious: here was a man who thought, after everything that had happened, that I might be of use to him! Clearly, he wanted me to visit so he could mine me for details about publishing and get a list of my contacts in New York.

Thankfully, I waited to respond. I walked away from the computer, went to a post-surgical doctor appointment, picked up my younger son from school, conducted a few interviews, then drove home to look over the blogger's message again. This time, there was no hint of the exploitation I'd read into it before -- only a sad, articulate, kind man who sat alone, struggling to write, as I often do.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Around 5:30 that afternoon, I was lying on the living room couch when the door opened and Jim walked in, just as he used to do, a decade ago. Since my surgery, he'd been coming over after work to help the children with dinner, check their homework, and do the heavier cleaning. He'd also hemmed a pair of my pants and darned a hole in my cashmere sweater, both of which he dropped into my lap before going into the kitchen to pour me a glass of wine.

Sober three years this time, he still looks most vulnerable to me when he is doing this. He insists it doesn't bother him -- that I shouldn't get up, reach for a glass, lift the bottle -- but sometimes, I wonder.

When he came back, I accepted the glass and gestured for him to sit next to me. He scowled. He wasn't much for talking, even back when we were married. This is one of his least favorite things about spending the evenings with us -- my desire to hash over the day. He perched on the edge of the sofa, a few inches from my bare feet, elbows planted on his thighs.

He looks completely different from the man he was in 1997. Back then he was dark-haired and clean-shaven but for a neat mustache. Now, he wears his thinning hair in a long ponytail. His beard is entirely gray. He is back to working with his hands and does not bother anymore trying to get the paint and chemicals and oil stains out of his clothes. He had on a ripped T-shirt and a pair of camouflage pants flecked with dried globs of something yellow.

I'd begun to hurt and had taken a pain pill earlier. Between that and the wine, the afternoon, sunny and warm for September, slowly started to soften. I arched my back and pointed my toes. Jim and I weren't touching -- we rarely do -- but I could feel him, within inches of my feet. "I have to tell you about this thing I read this morning," I said.

He looked at me. Then he sat back, and I began.

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