Her advice had seemed hopelessly outdated, and though I listened patiently to her over the dinner table, in her guest room at night, with my fist stuffed against my mouth and tears running from my eyes, I rejected every bit of it. But the chlamydia cleared up quickly with medication, and Luke and I saw a marriage counselor.
Luke made promises, the counselor proclaimed us healed, and I moved back into our home. In the end, we could have saved the money. My mother knew more about marriage and men than I'd given her credit for.
“We've tried counseling before,” I answered.
“Same reason?”
I nodded.
“Try to find all the paperwork related to those sessionsâreceipts, canceled checks. Is he a serial cheater?”
I gnawed on my lip and nodded again.
“Any proof?”
“Not unless chlamydiaâ”
Bob grinned. “He gave you an STD? That's great.”
I flinched. “It's gone now,” I stammered, suddenly horrified at what this man knew about me now.
“Doctor receipts for that too,” he said. “Now listen, don't you breathe a word of this to anyone. You're vulnerable right now. If he gets to your assets before we know what's going on it's going to get ugly. You have to think self-defense right now. How many years have you been married?”
“Seventeen.”
“Excellent. Still just the two boys?”
“Yes. Gib just turned sixteen, and Carson is eight now.”
“Good, good. Keep them completely out of it, not a word.”
“Of course not,” I said, offended that he'd even mentioned it. But he either didn't notice my offense or didn't care.
“This week get everything you can, but be careful. Rent a PO box and get me the address in case we need paperwork to come through the mail. Get a safe-deposit box at a separate bank and put all your jewelry, all your legal documents in it. Don't call attention to yourself. He can't know you're removing your jewelry from the house, it's a sure tip-off.”
My mother sat in the chair next to him and reached out to take the legal pad and pen from my numb fingers. “Give me a list of what she should look for, Bob,” she said quietly. I remained speechless, taken aback at the amount of work suddenly thrust before me, the sleaziness of it all.
“Tax returns, credit card statements, insurance policies, business records, any itemized phone records you can find. Marital assets, family cash flow, credit lines. Look, if it's got dollar signs or tits attached, I want to see it.”
“Jesus, Bob,” Mother said, shooting him a pained look.
Bob took one look at my face and stammered an apology. “Hey, sorry, sorry. Look, just keep your normal schedule and mention nothing to Luke. Get together everything you can, and call me Monday.”
“Keep my normal schedule? Howâwell, I can't go to Big Dune now,” I protested.
My mother started to speak but Bob raised his hand. “You should definitely go. Tracking all this stuff down is going to take time, and the farther away from your husband you are during it the better. You'll have less opportunity to slip up and say something. Some say it's a risk, leaving the home, but from what your mother tells me you bought that home with your trust fund?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised by the fact that my heart didn't leap when I thought about losing the house the way it had when I found out Mother was selling the beach house.
“Then the law is on our side. When are you going?”
Mother raised her eyebrows at me.
“I guess I can go after Carson leaves for camp,” I said. “As long as I can get Luke to agree.”
“Agree to what?” Mother asked. “Agree to have three weeks to himself? I don't think you'll have a problem, Connie.”
I realized she was right. “Okay,” I said. “We'll leave next Saturday.”
Bob made notes on the paper, and then met my eyes. “Have you ever been unfaithful?” he asked. “Anything I need to know about? Surprises can really screw things up.”
“Absolutely not,” I said, infuriated by the question.
“Hey, the questions will get more personal than this, so get used to it. Divorce is ugly. I should know, I've done it twice, and frankly, I advise against it. But if you're determined, then I'll get the ball rolling. I'm not a divorce attorney of course, but I have plenty of them working for me. I'll be close by during the whole process, looking out for you.”
I nodded wordlessly, suddenly aware of the enormous step I'd just taken by giving this man, a man I'd always vaguely distrusted, my family's personal information. He stood, pecked my mother on the cheek, and then he was gone.
I sat back in the chair and accepted the glass of wine my mother proffered.
“You can stop this at any time,” she said. “And you can trust Bob. He knows where all the bodies are buried in this town.”
“My God, Mother,” I said, my hand at my throat. “It's like he's yourâyourâ”
“My what?” she asked coolly, raising her eyebrows.
“Your henchman or something,” I finished.
“I owe more to that man than you know, Connie. He'll take good care of you. Now, what will you do tonight?”
I shook my head. “I don't know. I guess I'll go home. The kids are probably starving.”
“Okay, then. Go home. Act normally, not a word to him, do you hear? You've got almost two weeks to get the rest of the information for Bob. You can come over Monday and we'll go through this together. And you can always change your mind.” She looked at me, her eyes more focused on me than I'd seen them in years. “You're going to be fine, Connie.”
I agreed with a nod, but on the drive home I knew that she was wrong. I couldn't do this. And I wasn't going to be fine.
Estella
A date. Connie has finally set a date. It's close to my appointment and I find myself hesitating, thinking of lying to Mother on the phone.
“I don't know,” I say, looking at my calendar as though she were in the room, watching me. “I've got some appointmentsâ”
“Connie said she's looking forward to seeing you,” she interrupts, and my heart pounds in my chest, responding to the comment, as though it can take over the conversation for me.
“She said that?” I ask. I don't believe her. My mother lies easily and convincingly.
“She did,” she says.
My heart still pounds, and its beats turn into words: “Well, as long as I'm back home by the thirtieth.”
“Then it's settled,” Mother says, and as I hang up the phone Paul comes in. His hair is filled with sawdust, and old, dried varnish streaks his shirt. He smells amazing, and I inhale deeply as his arms encircle me from behind. I pull a red pen from my desk drawer and circle the day they will come for me, draw a line through the next three weeks, and circle the day they will return me to my home, three days before my appointment.
“It's going to be fine,” Paul whispers in my ear, and I nod.
I don't know which
it
he's talking about, but I know the odds of both better than he does. And I don't know which I'm more afraid of. Those red-circled and -lined dates, or the one penciled in, silvery and glinting in the light. The numbers on the calendar fight for space in my head.
I breathe Paul in again.
CHAPTER FOUR
I avoided Luke, and even the kids, as much as I could that week. But I often caught myself staring at one of them as they spoke, watching their lips move, forgetting to answer. I continued to get Carson ready for camp and agreed to a parent-teacher conference with his music teacher for the following Wednesday, though I'd never have remembered it if I hadn't attached a note to the refrigerator.
The things I forgot that week could have easily filled a psychiatrist's hour: lunch with a friend, overdue library books, dry cleaning, Luke's favorite beer, Gib's favorite cheese crackers, Carson's favorite everything. I was scattered and short with everyone, but as soon as I was alone in the house the silence snapped me out of my haze, and I hurried to gather information.
I stealthily riffled through the papers on Luke's desk while he was gone, feeling like an intruder in my own home. I went through my jewelry, through our insurance papers, through Luke's drawers. The distance I managed to put between myself and my family in such a short period was frightening. I felt like an island, with my family eddying and flowing around me, unaware that I had become immovable. They did not change, and did not notice that I had.
Gib remained aloof and out of the house and Luke was “working hard” at the office. I purposely did not follow up on his whereabouts, and he was not home when Gib's PSAT scores came that Saturday.
I'd spent the morning fitting my fingers to Haydn, trying to lose myself in it. The sunroom where I practiced, filled with my orchids and flooded with light, was next to the kitchen, but I hadn't heard anyone come in and felt a certain satisfaction that the music had engrossed me enough to cut the rest of the world off.
Carson was playing in the pool and Gib was nowhere to be found, but when I broke from practice the mail was already on the kitchen counter, the long, nearly transparent envelope peeking out from between bills. I hadn't heard Gib leave, but I also didn't hear any bass from his stereo, which usually meant that he wasn't home. Perhaps he'd seen the envelope and was making himself scarce. I tore it open.
His reading scores, good. Writing, good, both in the slightly-better-than-average-but-not-so-much-as-to-attract-attention land that Gib had perfected. But math. How could a child with the genes this child had score so abysmally on math?
Luke's theory had been wrong. This wasn't a teacher who didn't like Gib, it was something else altogether. Could he have done it on purpose? That would be typical Gib, the same way the circumstances surrounding the test had been typical Gib.
These results were from a makeup PSAT. Gib had intercepted the notice that had come in the mail about the first test, and the date had come and gone without our knowledge. It wasn't until I went online to browse the school website that I found out he'd missed it. Luke wasn't concerned, pointing out to me that the test was voluntary to begin with.
Instead, he'd shaken his head with a mock-weary smile and told Gib to be ready to take the makeup test, winking at me behind our son's back. I was as irritated with him as I was with Gib. I knew that just because they call it the
preliminary
SAT, as though the test were merely practice, it didn't mean that the numbers wouldn't be in their permanent files. Though I didn't know that for sure and was practically superstitious about asking for more details from the school, those numbers were important to me.
Numbers had governed Estella's life for so long, gained her entry and kept her apart at the same time. That was why I had not wanted Gib's or Carson's IQ tested. I wanted them to grow up to be normal, accepted, happy.
Like me.
But with the PSAT, numbers had again assumed significance in my life, and I wanted to stress their importance to Gib. He had managed to maintain a solid B average throughout middle school, neither failing nor excelling, never giving reason for us to be more involved. And then high school had crept behind our backs and changed our child into a sneaky, untrustworthy cynic. Luke refused to believe that anything had changed. As long as Gib was still playing football, Luke was happy. Gib was at the end of his sophomore year, halfway through his high school career, and Luke was still insisting that he simply hadn't settled in yet.
He reminded me that he understood Gib better than I, that Carson was my domain, my responsibility, while Gib was his buddy.
Gib was Luke's, right from the moment he plucked him, red-faced and screaming, off my chest in the delivery room. Luke could always calm him. Luke was the one he ran to when he got hurt. He walked early, talked early, and potty-trained early. Though I never voiced the idea to anyone, I was certain that his motivation in achieving those milestones was sheer determination to get as far away from me as quickly as he could.
His shoulders broadened after he turned fourteen, and in the two years since, he'd steadily packed on muscle as easily as he packed on attitude, thrilling his coaches, making his father proud. And while I resorted to avoiding my oldest child and his aggressive maleness, Luke sought him out. He was making Gib into the man's man he'd had to wait for so long to turn into himself.
Carson had been different right from the beginning. He cried when Luke tried to pull him from my arms, and I admit that I clung the tighter to him for it. He needed me all the time. At eight he was starting to pull away slightly, but once his friends had gone home and dark fell, he was my boy again, anxious to earn my laugh. His trip to music camp that summer would be the first time he'd spent away from me, and worry was already gnawing at my stomach.
Gib and Carson were as different as Estella and I were. And it was that difference that made me push them together as often as I could. I wanted them to be friends. I wanted Gib to be kind. I wanted to watch Carson light up when his older brother walked in the room, rather than slink out, hoping to not be noticed.
Luke protested that if I forced them to be friends now, against their will, they would not be friends later in life, when it mattered more. He said this as though he knew what having a sibling who was alien to you was like. But Luke was an only child, and his theories meant little to me. Estella and I were never forced to be friends, and now, later in life, we still are not friends.
It was in this spirit of togetherness that I had wrangled Carson into the car when I drove Gib to the makeup PSAT. Gib, his barely used driver's license burning a hole in his wallet, alongside the condom he had no idea I knew about, fought to drive himself, but I was sticking to one of the few punishments I had control over. Gib punished me with silence and a straight-lined mouth as I drove, while Carson and I made careful conversation about music camp, mindful of the tension Gib radiated like a fever.