Husband and Wife Read online

  I opened my eyes in the here and now, the sunlight bouncing viciously off a parking lot full of windshields. For a moment I didn’t know if I’d resurfaced from a memory or a dream. It didn’t seem possible I could have been that girl in the maze. Had all my cells replaced themselves since then? What could I say, what could I do, to go back there now and be that girl again?

  In the back of the car my children, Nathan’s children, went on dreaming. I risked the slow, quiet extrication of my cell phone from my bag. I dialed Helen. When she answered on the second ring, I murmured into the phone that it was me.

  “Hey!” she said. “I’ve been meaning to call you for ages.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “But listen,” she said, “can I—” She was about to ask me if she could call me back, and she’d promise she’d call me right back, but then one of her children would demand a book and the other would want a snack, and her mother would call or the guy would show up to fix the cable, and then her husband would come in asking if she knew where to find his keys and they’d get in an argument about why he could never find them that would evolve into an argument about arguing in front of the kids, and then it would be dinnertime and then bedtime and then Helen would collapse on the couch, washed ashore at last, drained as a shipwreck survivor and certainly too tired to call me back. Meanwhile in the backseat Binx stirred and whimpered in his sleep. I didn’t have time to wait. I had no time.

  “Nathan cheated on me,” I said.

  “What?” she said. “Nathan?”

  The incredulity in her voice—was that a compliment to me? To him? “You sound surprised,” I said.

  “I’m beyond surprised,” she said. “I’m incredulous. I’m flabbergasted.”

  “Well, I’m enraged,” I said. “I’m enraged, I’m distraught, I’m losing my goddamn mind. I can’t sleep, I don’t want to eat, I skipped out on work yesterday, I genuinely think I’m going crazy, and right now, right at this moment, I’m sitting in a parking lot staking out a place where he likes to go because I thought he might turn up here. I haven’t seen him in two days and he’s not answering his phone. For all I know he’s dead. Maybe it would be better if he was.”

  There was a flat silence, one that went on long enough that I thought we’d lost the connection, and I said, “Hello?”

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m caught off guard.”

  “I know,” I said. “I am, too.” I was losing it, breathing hard. I was the werewolf catching sight of the full moon, feeling the pain and the power of a claw bursting through what used to be a hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t believe it. What happened?”

  “Oh, he slept with some writer. And then he confessed, and said he wanted to work it out, and I tried for a week or so and then I asked him to leave, and now he’s gone, really, really gone. At least before he left I had this illusion of being in control, because he kept telling me what happened next was my decision, but now I’ve got no control at all because I don’t even know where he is. And I’m pissed, I’m just so pissed that I let him stay one day, one minute, after he told me. I can’t help but think things would have been totally different before the kids. I wouldn’t have just taken it, you know. I wouldn’t have tried so hard.”

  “Oh, Sarah,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I blinked, and spilled tears. “If you sympathize with me, I really will come undone. Let’s talk about revenge. Let’s talk about raw animal sex.”

  “OK,” she said. “I—” Then I heard her son’s voice, as loudly as if he too had his mouth against the phone. “Mommy,” he said, “it won’t come out.”

  “It will,” Helen said. “You just have to relax and then push a little.”

  “I’m trying,” Ian said. “It won’t come out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Helen said to me. “I’m in a public bathroom with Ian. He’s having some trouble pooping.”

  “Oh,” I said, amused despite myself, sympathetic, and—no question—deflated.

  “No matter what’s going on in our lives,” Helen said, “there’s still the matter of excrement.”

  “And naps,” I said. “And food. And breast milk. And puzzles.”

  “Yes,” Helen said. “But mostly excrement.” Her son wailed, and Helen again offered reassurances, if slightly testier ones, and then she said to me, “So on that other topic you should come visit me.”

  “That’s what Rajiv said,” I said. “He e-mailed me.”

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. “I mean, I think it’s interesting, too. Do you know something I don’t?”

  “He’s single again,” she said. “I know that.”

  “Is it possible he’s still hung up on me?”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “Can you find out?” I asked. “I know I sound so ridiculous and junior high, Helen, but you have no idea, I really think I’m losing it. I need something, and maybe a guy who’s hung up on me is the thing I need.”

  “I’ll find out. I wish there was something else I could do for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Mommy!” Ian shouted.

  “I really can’t believe that Nathan…”

  “I know,” I said.

  “What a motherfucker,” Helen said, and Ian said, “Daddy says you shouldn’t say that!” and Helen said, “Be quiet for a minute,” and Ian said, “But Daddy says…,” and Helen said, “I know what Daddy says. These are extreme circumstances.” I closed my eyes and listened to them argue, back and forth, back and forth, the endless, exhausting exchange.

  “I should let you go,” I said. I hoped that Helen would say no, I clearly needed to talk, but I wasn’t surprised when she said again that she was sorry, that she was in a public bathroom with her constipated child. How could I compete with the immediacy of that circumstance, that need?

  “What are you going to do?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t know. If he’s going to disappear, I wish he would die. At least I’d get five hundred thousand from the life insurance if he died.”

  “Mommy!” Ian shouted.

  “I’ll call you,” Helen said, raising her voice over Ian’s increasing caterwaul. “I’ll call you as soon as I can,” and then I heard her saying, “Stop it, stop it now, you need to calm—” and then the line went dead.

  I heard the small wet squeak of finger sucking and turned to see that Mattie was awake, gazing out the window while she twirled her hair.

  “Mattie,” I said, “did you just wake up?”

  She turned her gaze on me, eyes blank and sleepy.

  “Mattie?” I reached back and popped the fingers out of her mouth. She made an inhuman sound of protest and lunged for her hand, but I pulled it farther back. “Did you hear Mommy talking?”

  “I want to suck my fingers!” she shouted. She strained against my hand, and I let go, and once again the fingers stopped her mouth. I started up the car, my heart careening like a getaway driver’s, as though fleeing the scene might save me from accounting for my crime. She hadn’t heard.

  When we got home, Nathan wasn’t there. We went inside just long enough to check the voice mail—nothing—and change Binx’s diaper, then I suggested we walk down to the mailbox, clapping my hands, my voice unnaturally bright.

  Three or four feet from the road I put the brake on the stroller and left Binx where he could watch as Mattie and I, holding hands, looking both ways, crossed the road to the mailbox. I held Mattie up so she could open the door—nothing there but a solitary piece of junk mail. She reached in to get it, and the mailbox didn’t move. “The mailbox is fixed,” she said.

  “What?” I put her down, leaned over her to try to wiggle it. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s funny. Mr. Dodson must have fixed it.”

  “Daddy fixed it,” she said. She said it with such certainty I pictured Nathan sneaking back here with a hammer and nails, too tortured to talk to us but still wanting to expres
s his love, a steadied mailbox the first step back toward a steadied life. “He’s back,” she said.

  “Back?”

  “At the house,” she said. “He’s back at the house. He fixed the mailbox this morning.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “He did,” she said. “He did.”

  “No, he didn’t, Mattie!” I snapped. “He hasn’t been here, OK?”

  “Where’s my daddy?” she shouted, the last word dissolving into a wail. Across the street Binx joined in the screaming. If he’d had words they would have been, “You left me all alone!”

  “Jesus!” I shouted. “Will everybody just stop screaming!” I grabbed Mattie’s hand and started back into the road, and a car I’d failed to see, a car I hadn’t even bothered to look for, just missed us, with a whoosh and a squeal and the long, fading expletive of the horn.

  “Oh my God,” I said. I was shaking. “Oh my God.” I picked Mattie up and she buried her face in my shoulder, clinging to my neck. I looked both ways seven times before I ran across the street back to Binx, Mattie bouncing against me. Binx’s face was red, his hands balled into fists, and as I shifted Mattie to one hip and tried to unbuckle his straps with one hand two tiny perfect tears rolled down his cheeks. Still holding Mattie, I wrangled him out of the stroller, and then I sat down in the dirt with the kids on my lap, both of them suddenly, miraculously silent. We watched a bird strut by Mrs. Dodson’s scarecrow as though it had never had a thing to fear.

  “That car almost hit us,” Mattie said. “We would have been squished.”

  “I know, I’m sorry, I know.”

  “Will I die?” Mattie asked.

  That was the first time, the first time she’d asked me that question, and it was my fault that she was asking it, that I went cold, then hot, then cold again, and that now I had to answer. Yes was the answer, wasn’t it, but I could neither say it nor believe it. “You mean if a car hits you?”

  “Yes. Will I die if a car hits me?”

  “It depends.”

  “When will I die?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer. I tightened my grip on both my children.

  “If you die,” she went on, merciless, “can a doctor fix you?”

  “No, honey,” I said.

  “When will you die?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Yesterday you said you wanted Daddy to die,” she said.

  “That wasn’t yesterday,” I said.

  “Earlier,” she said, taking a stab. “A few days ago.”

  “That was today,” I said. I knew that what was necessary was a speech on people saying things they didn’t mean, perhaps a distracting use of the word hyperbole, which would cause her to ask what that meant and in the process steer her off her original course entirely. I just repeated, helplessly, “That was today.”

  Mattie squirmed off my lap and sprawled in the dirt on her back. “Don’t step on the died girl,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I put the kids to bed at six o’clock—one of the perks of having children still too young to tell time—because I just couldn’t be responsible another minute. I hadn’t been doing such a hot job of it, anyway, so it seemed like a good idea to call it quits. I hadn’t touched food all day, and the thought of eating had no appeal for me now, but I wanted a glass of wine, or maybe a bottle of wine, and I wanted to get out my Buffy DVDs and sit on the couch and watch them until I passed out. When no one is watching, we can do what we want to do. That is the pleasure of being alone.

  I was watching the season-two finale, which is the one where Buffy believes she’s lost everything and then realizes she has one thing left and that’s herself, and I was thinking that Buffy manages to find that notion empowering but hell if I could, maybe because I was without superpowers, when I heard a car coming up the drive. When you live out in the country and your house is a quarter mile off the road, it’s very startling to hear the approach of an unexpected car. Nathan and I had never failed to react to the sound of wheels on gravel with anything less than alarm. Much of the time it was just the mailman with a package, but every so often the sound heralded the arrival of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Once it had been a carload of them, and they’d circled the house, two going to the kitchen door, two to the front, one to the side, the door we used as our entrance. Nathan and I were watching out the window of his study. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “We’re surrounded.” I made him go talk to them, and because he was nicer than I was we ended up with multiples copies of the Watchtower and, ominously, a promise that they’d return.

  Despite the lack of sleep and the lack of food and the abundance of alcohol, I wasn’t addled enough to think Jehovah’s Witnesses were coming up the drive. I thought it was Nathan. I went into what can only be described as a panic. I turned off the TV, shoved the empty wine bottle under the couch, ran into the bathroom to wash my face, because I’d been crying, because it was very painful for Buffy to have to put a sword through her occasionally evil boyfriend, her one and only true love. I didn’t want Nathan to think I’d been sitting around getting drunk and crying over him, as if there were some profit in convincing him that his infidelity and craven disappearance had absolutely no effect on me.

  But it wasn’t Nathan. It was Smith. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw his face in the glass on the side door. He spotted me, gave me a wry half-smile, and lifted his hand to say hello. I stopped where I was, knocked back by a rush of conflicting emotions too many and too fearsome to identify. I couldn’t will myself to go to the door, but I managed to raise my own hand and wave him in, and so he entered. “Hi,” he said, closing the door quietly behind him. I noticed that he knew that if he wasn’t careful the screen door would slam. Had he known that a long time or just noticed it the day before?

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get out here any earlier,” he said, setting a grocery bag on the counter. “Busy day.”

  He seemed to think I’d expected him. I thought about telling him that I hadn’t, that he didn’t have to feel any obligation to me, but the truth was I liked him feeling it, that his sense of responsibility was strong enough that he assumed I’d take him for granted. No matter what the magazines say, it seems to me we should take each other for granted, husbands and wives, and gift each other with the small, unnoticed pleasure of assuming someone will want to know what you’d like for dinner, someone will be there when you call.

  “Yeah?” I said. “What did you do?”

  “I had a lunch interview with a guy—maybe you’d know him, he used to be in that group Buffalo Girls? He just split off to start his own band and they’re pretty interesting, they combine alt-country with electronica, if you can imagine that. I ended up going back to his place to hear some of what they’ve been recording, so I was late to meet Holly—she wanted me to go with her to shop for a new couch—and it took a while to, uh, work things out with her.” He pulled out a bag of apples and a carton of milk. “Then I went to the grocery store. I picked up a few things for you. Noticed you were running low on stuff for the kids, and I know Nathan does the shopping…”

  “You are amazing,” I said. “You are a freaking saint.” I felt indignant at the difficult, reproving Holly. Couldn’t she see the effort he made?

  “It’s just milk,” he said. He seemed embarrassed. He opened the fridge, saw last night’s dinner plate in there, with its plastic wrap, and stood there a moment with the fridge door open. “You didn’t eat your enchiladas?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t hungry.”

  “Did you eat anything today?”

  “Eat?”

  “You know,” he said. “Put food in your mouth. Chew. Swallow.”

  “I don’t want to eat.”

  “You have to eat something,” he said. “You’re breast-feeding. I don’t know much about kids, but I know a breast-feeding mother has to eat.”

  I made a face, a childish “bleh�
� face, like Mattie made when presented with vegetables. Smith looked worried, annoyed, and helpless, which I imagined was about what I looked like when Mattie wouldn’t eat. I wasn’t playacting exactly, but a small part of me watched the scene at a sociologist’s remove, wondering what Smith would do now, what I would do. There was something interesting and entertaining about his consternation. It was kind of fun to play the child.

  “There must be something that sounds good,” he said. “Let’s see. Pizza?”

  I shook my head.

  “A burger? Mexican? Sushi?”

  “A milkshake,” I said. “I’d drink a milkshake.”

  He checked his watch. “I think Maple View is still open,” he said. “What flavor do you want?”

  “Vanilla,” I said.

  “Is that your favorite?” he asked.

  The question struck me as oddly intimate. “It’s my favorite milkshake flavor,” I said. “Not my favorite in general.”

  He nodded. “Got it,” he said, and then he said he’d be right back.

  Since the whole point of watching Buffy was total immersion in a world that was familiar and yet far, far from my own, I didn’t want to go back to it knowing I’d be interrupted. I stood in the kitchen, feeling surprisingly hopeless about not knowing what to do with the next ten minutes, and then I was visited by one of those torturing bulletins from my anxious mother-brain, ever prepared to believe that a child-rearing screwup would bring punishment: Your children might be dead, they might have died in their sleep because you sent their father away and brought up death, his death, and then you got far too drunk to be able to drive them to the emergency room, even though you were the only responsible adult around.

  Binx was a light sleeper, so I snuck into his room like a burglar. As I approached the crib, he twitched—alive!—and I froze, stood there a minute, then slowly, slowly backed out of the room. I closed the door and then released the doorknob as carefully as if a wrong move would explode us.