Authors: Jenni Moen
GRACE
“Don’t forget that we have dinner with Arden tonight,” I said, busting
unannounced into Kate’s room. I was anxious. Arden was all I could think about.
Kate was sitting on her bed, leafing through a familiar stack of
papers. The mere sight of them caused even my toes to seize up. I began backing
my way out of the room, not wanting to get sucked back into the dismal abyss of
Jonathan’s affair. Not today. I had enough on my mind.
Why Kate was
reading over it again was a mystery to me. I had to give it to her though. She
was relentless. She was determined to figure out who Hope was, hunt her down
and, I feared, put an end to her. I, on the other hand, had spent the past few
days with my head stuck safely back in the sand, wanting just to enjoy my time
with Paul.
She pushed her
glasses up on her nose and glanced up at me. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m kind of
surprised that she picked tonight. It was her choice, wasn’t it?” I asked from the
doorway.
“Yeah, it was her
suggestion. Why?”
“Today’s her birthday. I’m surprised that
she’d rather spend it with us than her kids.” I didn’t mention that it was
possible that Arden had a hidden agenda.
“Maybe she wanted a
girl’s night out for her birthday,” Kate said without looking up. “We can give
her a couple of bottles of that terrible wine I bought.”
She returned to her
reading, and I reached for the doorknob to pull it shut behind me. “Sure. And
I’ll go get her a bunch of yellow tulips. Those are her favorites.” Maybe I
could ply her with wine and flowers and buy her silence.
As I pulled the
door closed behind me, there was a shuffling of papers and then muttering.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” Kate said, louder now. “No, no, no.”
I threw the door
wide open again to find a wide-eyed and panic-stricken Kate frantically
skimming the page in her hand. With an index finger, she traced a line midway
down the page and then began pounding on the sheet so hard I thought her finger
might poke clean through it. “Holy fucking shit, Grace. I can’t believe we
missed this. What a fucking bitch.”
“Hope? Well, yeah.” Of course, she was a
bitch. What kind of woman knowingly wrecks a marriage?
“No, not Hope …
well, yes, Hope … she was right here. Right under our noses the whole time, and
we missed it,” Kate stammered. She was so excited that she could barely speak,
her level of anxiety unmistakable. It was infectious, and I could feel my blood
pressure rising. An audible whoosh filled my head.
“You figured out
who Hope is.” My voice was a hoarse whisper. I’d thought I wanted to know, but
now that I was sure that I was about to find out, it didn’t seem like such a
good idea. What was I going to do with the knowledge? Jonathan was gone. What
would be the point in confronting the woman?
Kate was still
staring at the paper in front of her. She shook her head in disbelief. “Did you
read all of this, Grace? Every page?”
“No. I could only
take so much.”
“Yeah? Well, guess
who else has a birthday today.”
“Who?”
“Guess who else has
a weak spot for yellow tulips?” She leveled her eyes on me. When I didn’t
immediately answer, she went on, her words wild and unhinged. “What did you do
with Arden last year for her birthday?”
“I don’t think we
did anything,” I answered cautiously. “I think she was out of town or
something.
I think her sister had
just had a baby or something.” I shook my head trying to remember.
“Did she take the
kids?”
“I don’t know. I
doubt it.”
“And where was
Jonathan?”
“I don’t know.
Why?”
“Because according
to this, he was with her.”
My stubborn resolve
not to refuse to face the facts that had been right in front of my face
dissolved. “Hope is Arden.” The words hung in my throat, choking me. All this
time, I’d thought that Hope was a nickname that he’d given his lover because
that was what she represented to him. But, Hope was his lover’s middle
name.
“Arden Hope Fitzgerald.”
Kate looked like
she’d just sucked on a lemon, as if the horrible taste in her mouth was more
than she could bear. I knew the feeling. I could taste it, too. “Exactly,” she
said.
She sprung off the
bed and blew past me, leaving me standing in the hall. When I realized where
she was going, I followed, tripping over my feet and the dog
who
’d
again been shadowing me around the house all morning. She yanked the drawer of
the table beside my bed with such force that the entire thing came free and
clattered to the floor. I glared at the phone that had tormented me for so many
months, now resting among the bodice ripper novels spread at our feet.
Kate lacked my
hesitation and slid to the floor. With the phone in her hand, she pounded on
the screen. The keyboard popped up on the display, and she entered a-r-d-e-n. I
held my breath while I waited for the screen to change, fully expecting the
jackass to have made his girlfriend and my whore of a best friend’s name his
security code.
I was almost
relieved when the phone denied us entry. Almost.
I expected her to
try something different but she paused. “Are you sure that you even want in
this thing now? No telling what you’ll find.”
“Yes,” I
practically screamed at her. “My kids’ voices are in there. I don’t even care
about Jonathan and his shit any more. I just want to hear Trey and Isabelle
again.”
It wasn’t entirely true.
I did care. Now that I knew who Hope was and how fiercely
I’d
been betrayed by both my husband and my best friend
, I had a perverse
desire to know every sordid detail. There’d be no more of this head in the sand
bullshit. I was done being a doormat.
But first, I wanted
to hear my kids’ voices.
She tried it again.
Nothing again.
Letting out a huff
of air, she shook the phone in frustration, and then she tried it again, using
a capital letters for the first letter. When that didn’t work, she tried Arden’s
name in all caps.
Again, we were
refused. “I think you only have one more chance before it locks up.”
“
Gah
! I know.”
“Try today’s date,”
I said, resisting the urge to rip it from her hands. I’d tried every other date
I could think of. Why not try this one? His girlfriend’s birthday was as good
of a guess as any.
She punched in the
four numbers for the month and day, and the phone came to life. “What a
douche.” Anger emanated off her. “Even after everything, I can’t even believe
that
that
man made his passcode the birthday of the woman he was having
an affair with. Who does that?” She was preaching to the choir. I could hardly
believe it myself.
She handed me the
phone. Her shoulders slumped. All her previous energy drained. “Do you want to
be alone?”
I nodded. “Maybe
for a little bit.”
She unfolded her
legs and stood to leave. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.” She pulled the
door shut behind her, and I collapsed on the bed.
First
things first.
I ignored the screen
full of notifications indicating all the things he’d missed during the last few
months and opened up his voicemail. I skimmed past the three most recent
messages, ignoring the dates and names, until I found what I was looking for.
Home.
A small voice began
to speak, and I closed my eyes. Instantly, I was sitting at our kitchen table,
having an afternoon snack with my two favorite beings.
“Hi, Daddy. It’s
Isabelle. Mommy says you have to work late tonight so Trey and I wanted to call
and sing you a song.” A series of clatters and thumps indicated that the phone
had been dropped and then swooped up again. “Okay. Got it.”
“One, two,
three, go,” Trey said.
“No. I get to
say when.”
“Why you?” he
whined.
“Because I’m the
oldest, and being the oldest is best.”
Trey grumbled in
the background, bringing a smile to my face. “One day, I’m going to be the
biggest, and I’ll be best.”
“Okay, one, two,
three, go,” she said, ignoring his threat.
It had been an
ordinary day.
A day that had seemed no different or more
important than any other.
Yet now it seemed spectacular.
One of the hundreds of days that would be remembered as the most
important day of my life.
I’d cried a lot
during the past two weeks. But each time, Jonathan had been the reason. I
hadn’t cried for him. I’d cried
because
of him. Lonely tears had turned
into bitter tears. I’d felt wounded and cheated, and the tears that fell were
no longer because I missed him but because he’d tainted every memory I had.
Not all tears are
alike. Not all despair is equal. The bitter tears that stripped me to nothing
more than skin and bone were strangely easier to bear than these. I’d
eventually numbed to them. However, the tears I cried now stemmed from love
rather than anger and were even harder to swallow. I would never become numb to
them. Even if I moved forward – or sideways as Paul had suggested –
I would never stop feeling the loss of Isabelle and Trey.
So rather than thumb my way through
Jonathan’s phone, which surely hid many more secrets, I allowed myself to
wallow in the loss of my two little angels. And I cried.
I cried because a
thirty-three second recording of my two favorite voices would have to be enough
to last me the rest of my life. I cried until I was too exhausted to cry
any
more
. I
cried until my head and heart couldn’t take any more.
When I woke up
several hours later, I wasn’t alone. Kate was curled up next to me with her arm
thrown over the top of me as if she’d been trying to hug me in my sleep. Dark
hair partially covered her face and fanned across the pillow. Lips fuller than
mine twitched as if she giving someone an earful. I didn’t have to imagine
who
.
I carefully slid
her arm off me and slowly rolled to the edge of the bed so as not to wake her. Jonathan’s
phone was now resting on the bedside table. The screen was dark, but that would
no longer a source of frustration for me. It was time for me to face the music.
I tiptoed across
the room and opened the door. I continued creeping down the hall until I was in
Kate’s room. Papers were still strewn all over her bed, but I could see that
while I’d been sleeping, she’d been hard at work. She gone through the chat
string yet again, highlighting anything that she had found interesting. At some
point she must have snuck into my room for the box of bank statements because
those had also been thrown about on the bed.
I nestled myself
into the middle of it all and started with the phone. I typed in today’s date
again. This time, when it opened up, I looked at each icon on the screen,
noting all of the missed notifications. In addition to the three voicemails
that I’d skimmed past earlier, Jonathan had missed 28 text messages, 144
Facebook messages, and 1256 emails.
I was well aware of
what each of the Facebook messages would say. After his death, I’d watched his
wall, taking consolation in each message. Every single one of the 144 messages
were from people expressing their disbelief that he was gone, their horror at
the tragedy to which he’d succumbed, their praise for the hero he’d attempted
to be, and their assurance that he would never be forgotten.
I wondered now how
many of those 144 people had even known who Jonathan really was. I suspected
the answer was one. That one person, who’d possibly known
him
better than anyone else, had also left a message though I couldn’t remember now
what it had said. I was sure that Arden’s message had been as generic and
flavorless as the rest, with no hint as to the true depth of her grief.
I skipped those
messages. I also skipped the emails. It would take me all day to get through
1256 emails, even if most of them were advertisements and spam. Instead, I dove
straight into his text messages.
Naturally, the last
received message was from Arden. Unsurprisingly, her name was listed as
Hope
in his phone.
Similar to the message she’d sent to his computer the day after his
death, the despair in her text was unmistakable. Very different from any
message she would have left on Facebook for the whole world to see.
Without reading
them, I began skimming backwards, hitting the ‘Load Earlier Messages’ button
when I came to it. I’d skimmed through more than four years of messages. I
stopped, not because I’d reached the end, but because they seemed to go
indefinitely. The man had been cheating on me for more than four years.
Had
the man seriously not known that he could delete the entire string every so
often to get rid of the years worth of evidence against him?