Authors: Ann Packer
She had been scared to death. Now she was mortified.
She thought there ought to be a hint, something from the last few days to suggest, at least in retrospect, that he was unhappy—but she couldn’t come up with a thing. They’d had the weekend to themselves, both sets of kids gone. They made love Sunday morning with the bedroom door wide open. She remembered looking at him afterward: the white stubble on his jaw, his wrinkly earlobes, the creases in his neck. He looked his age, and she liked that.
He’d never given her the silent treatment, never given her any indication that he was anything but content. He was quiet sometimes in the evening, but she thought he was tired. Or, very occasionally, angry about the war. In fact, the only times she’d heard him raise his voice had to do with the war. A couple of weeks ago there was a thing on TV about the army’s policy of forbidding the media from filming the flag-covered coffins of the dead coming home from Iraq, and he spoke out with great heat, with fire. It was a
travesty
, he said, a
disgrace
, and then he didn’t say anything for quite a while.
But it wasn’t the silent treatment. And mostly they talked a lot. Way more than she and Adam had. How could he have left? What had she done? “You’re not bothering me,” he’d said on the phone yesterday afternoon, but obviously she was. In how many different ways?
She tried calling his cousin Frank again, and this time he answered. “Oh God, no,” he said once she’d told him. “He didn’t. He didn’t.”
“You knew? That he did this? You should have told me.”
“I told
him
to tell you. He said it wasn’t going to happen with you.” Frank was silent for a moment and then said, “He loves you, Laura. A lot. He’s happier with you than he’s ever been in his life.”
She didn’t know how to respond. Frank was right—Matt told her this all the time. And yet …
“
What
happens?” she said. “What
happens
?” And Frank told her what he knew about how it was for Matt, how this feeling of restlessness built until he felt he had to leave. He had to leave, he had to leave, he
had to get out of there
. The first time, he drove north, putting miles and more miles between himself and home, and it was exhilarating at first: the freedom, the wind, the road, the radio—the components of bliss. But after several hours he began to feel bad. He drove for three days, feeling worse and worse but unable to turn around or even stop and call.
“And when he got back?” Laura said. “Sandi didn’t make him promise he wouldn’t do it again?”
“Of course she did. So the second time was worse.”
“Worse how? Worse for whom?”
“Well, I meant Matt. He felt awful.”
“Poor fellow.” She stood up and began walking. She paced to the foot of the staircase and back to the couch. “And the third time?”
“The third time he didn’t seem to care much. He called me from a motel and told me about a hawk he saw flying over the desert.”
“He called
you
? Has he called you this time?”
“Hell, no—he’d be way too ashamed to call. Listen, Laura, try to put it in perspective. I mean, it’s lousy, I know that. But he’s a good guy. Everyone has something.”
She laughed, bitterly to her own ears. After they said goodbye she sat down again and stared into the empty fireplace. Matt’s fireplace, just as it was Matt’s house. She’d brought her dining room chairs, some rugs, the girls’ beds and some odds and ends, but it was still his house, and she was a guest. A figure in a drama. A woman in a Hitchcock movie: walking blithely in the direction of some terrible woe while the audience watches and thinks: No! Stop! Frank was the audience. Sandi was—Sandi and Matt’s kids.
They
should have told her. Had any of them been tempted? Suddenly a terrible idea occurred to her: maybe he’d married her so he’d never have the chance to leave his kids—to leave
only
his kids—so there’d always be a woman he’d be leaving first and foremost, and the injury to the kids would be inadvertent, secondary.
This was creeping paranoia, almost pleasurable. You could lie down in it and never get up. He had married her because he loved her. She was sure of that.
And:
He said it wasn’t going to happen with you
. He had thought it would be different with her, that he’d be different. This almost made her feel sorry for him, but it was also arrogant. He could be a little arrogant, though in good times she thought of it as confident. Of a golf game he had scheduled: “I know I’ll win. I’m better than all three of those guys.” Of their division of household tasks: “I’ll vacuum—you probably aren’t as thorough as I am.” Even emotionally he was a little arrogant. He said it wouldn’t be a problem, the fact that Laura had a hard time saying when she was upset. “I’ll sense it,” he said, “or you’ll find a way to tell me. You’ll be honest with me. You’ll feel safe with me.”
What ecstasy it had been, hearing him say those things. It didn’t seem like arrogance, it seemed like a dream come true. And he was right: she was more open, closer with him than she’d ever been with Adam. When she and Adam finally went for counseling, the therapist listened to them for twenty minutes and then said, “Do you want to be married? Because you’re not married, you’re coworkers.”
He had to leave. He had to leave, he had to leave, he
had to get out of there
. What did that feel like? Extreme irritation with everyone around him? Or something physical, his skin crawling, his legs heavy with need?
She heard Kevin turning a page in the kitchen, and she went and stood in the doorway. “That first time,” she said. “Do you remember how he was before he left?”
Kevin looked up. After a moment he shook his head.
“How about after he came home?”
He shook his head again. He’d been six the first time, a little boy; now he was sixteen. He had an exquisite body, the muscles swelling over the bones. She had read a book about evolutionary psychology that suggested losing a child was most painful when the child was an adolescent or in his early twenties. At peak reproduction time, in other words. The grief was greatest because this was the moment when the genes should carry forward.
And the loss of a spouse? She was nearing menopause, way past reproduction; her genes had done all the carrying forward they were going to do. Did that account for the emptiness she felt tonight?
Because it was over. She was going to have to leave him. She would never go through this again.
Kevin got up and went to the fridge. He held it open and stood there with his back to her, one arm slung along the top of the door. He came back to the table with the leftover enchiladas from last night.
“You don’t want those,” she said.
“They look OK.” He sawed off a bite and chewed. “I was waiting outside for him,” he said, “but when he pulled into the driveway I ran back into the house.”
Laura was confused. “Wait, the first time?”
“I just remembered.”
“What did his face look like?”
“I ran into the house.”
There were footsteps, and in came Carly, the older of the two girls. She was only fourteen, but she was as tall as Laura, with long, twiggy legs and knees that were angular and beautiful. She had her mother’s light hair and slightly jutting chin. She was the only one of the five kids who had expressed any resistance about the marriage. She’d written Matt a letter, saying she didn’t “expect or want”—those were her words—Matt to break up with Laura; she just thought he should wait a few more years.
She was holding a cell phone, and Laura’s heart raced. “Is that him?”
Carly shook her head. “Lizzie got a text. An old one, from yesterday. You know how sometimes you’ll get a message, and it’ll be like two days late? Like it was in cell phone jail and just got out?” She held out the phone, and Laura took it.
The message said: “Cant make game show em yr stuf xo dad.” Sent yesterday at 3:52. Laura had spoken to him from her car at 3:35.
Her cell phone rang in the family room, and she hurried to answer, but it was just the girls, calling from their dad’s.
“Trina?” she said, because Trina was the one who always called. “Sweetie, let me call you in a few minutes.”
But it was Adam—calling to tell her that Trina needed her math book. The idea of driving to his house and back, fifteen minutes in each direction … It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, she imagined saying to someone.
Matt, of course.
The book was her responsibility: it was a Tuesday, Trina should’ve been with her. She was about to say she’d drive it over when Adam said he’d come get it, and her eyes stung, she was so grateful.
She was still holding Lizzie’s phone, and she headed upstairs to return it. “Knock, knock,” she said outside the closed door of the room Lizzie and Carly shared. “How are you doing in there, Liz?”
No response. She bent down to set the phone on the floor and was just straightening up again when a tiny voice said, “You can come in if you want.”
Lizzie was lying on her bed. She was on her stomach, chin propped on her fists, eyes red. At her side lay Bodie, her stuffed giraffe. Bodie was among the things that went back and forth between households; it was a bad evening when Bodie was forgotten.
“Hey, there,” Laura said.
Lizzie didn’t look at her.
“I brought your phone back. I’m glad you got the text.”
“My game was yesterday.”
Laura racked her brain. What could she say to help?
“My mom said this would happen,” Lizzie added.
Laura looked away. On the bulletin board there was a photo from the wedding, of her and Matt and all five kids; it had been pinned to the board in such a way that the thumbtack went through her face. Once, when the house was empty, she moved the tack to the top edge of the picture, but the next time she looked it had been moved back. In the photo, Lizzie was standing directly in front of Matt, his wrists crossing under her chin, holding her close. On the morning of the wedding, she had made a point of telling Laura that her mom was spending the weekend at a spa. “She’s having the biggest splurge of her life,” she said. “She’s going to spend a thousand dollars.” Carly, the objector, had been gruesomely polite. Kevin had given Laura a long hug. Because he was the oldest? A boy? “Because he’s Kevin,” Matt said. Ever since then Laura had waited in vain for a special bond to develop between her and Matt’s son.
She turned back to Lizzie: ten years old, butterfly barrette in her hair. She said, “Your dad loves you a lot.”
Lizzie pulled Bodie close and turned her face to the wall.
“Come down if you feel like it,” Laura said. “I’d love your company. We could make cookies.”
She closed the door behind her and went back downstairs. In the family room she poured herself some wine. How was she supposed to help these children? Maybe she should have let Sandi cancel her plans. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you right back,” Sandi had said. “It’s worst the first time, when you think he’s dead.”
The first time would be the only time. Laura had sold the cottage where she and the girls lived after the split; now they’d have to move again. Trina would probably figure out this period of life in a therapist’s office, but Laura feared Charlotte would bury it and be one of those people who never felt at home anywhere.
You weren’t supposed to apologize to your children—that was the conventional wisdom for divorced parents. She couldn’t remember why.
A car pulled up in front of the house. She hurried to the door, but it was just Adam, come for the math book. She stood on the porch watching as he turned off the lights and climbed out. Snow still fell, and it was sticking, a layer of white covering the driveway.
He came most of the way up the steps and stopped. He wore a watch cap over his shaggy hair, and his eyes appeared more deep-set than ever, retreating into their sockets.
“Oh, I forgot the book,” she said. “Come in and I’ll get it. You can warm up for a few minutes.”
“Just have to get cold again,” he said with a shrug.
She left him on the steps. This was Adam through and through: the resigned martyr. “Hey, I come by it honestly,” he used to say. “It’s one of the great Jewish positions.” Laura had mentioned this to Matt as a way of illustrating Adam’s style of humor, but Matt had focused on the content. He said it was no wonder Laura felt guilty—who wouldn’t if they lived with a martyr?
And living with a liar, she wanted to ask him now. How does that make people feel?
She had a math book to find. Back up the stairs she went. It looked as if a tornado had hit exactly half of Charlotte and Trina’s room. On Trina’s side the floor was covered with clothing: inside-out T-shirts, twisted panties, and three pairs of jeans that looked as if someone had just stepped out of them, legs accordioned, waists standing open like giant cans.
The book wasn’t immediately visible, and Laura kicked through the debris and then felt down the bed in case Trina’d been doing homework there.
But no, last night Trina had done her homework in the family room; Laura remembered talking to her just before she headed out to look for Matt. She went back down, but the book wasn’t on the coffee table, or under it, either. She headed for the kitchen, where Trina had been having a snack when she got home from her search.
Kevin was back at the table studying, and Carly had the paper open to the comics. Laura looked at them, tried to glean their states of mind. It was hard to tell what the older two were feeling: that’s what she’d tell Matt. Lizzie was pretty upset.
No. She had to stop.
She said, “Have you guys seen Trina’s math book?”
Simultaneously they looked up and shook their heads.
She lifted stacks of newspaper, magazines, her Mexican cookbook, still open to the enchilada recipe. She left the room and went back outside to Adam.
“Look, you should come in. It’s taking me a minute to find it.”
He looked away from her, tilting his face to the sky.
“I’m sorry. I should’ve had it waiting for you.”
“Did you call her?”
“I will.”
“I’ll be in the car.”