“I love you, Birdie.” His voice broke, and for a second, she saw how deeply she’d hurt him.
She wondered how long she’d carry this moment in her heart, how long she’d live with this sad and terrible ache. “I love you, too.”
“Is that supposed to help?” He stared at her for a minute, then walked out of the house and slammed the door behind him.
SIXTEEN
What in the hell had made him say divorce?
Jack slammed on the brakes. His rental car fishtailed on the muddy road and skidded to a stop. His headlights pointed out toward the rippling, black ocean.
He hadn’t been this shaken since his mother’s death, more than thirty years ago. Then, as now, his emotions had been a tangled mass with no clear beginning and no end.
If asked a week ago, he would have sworn that he and Birdie were in one of those rough patches that sometimes befell a long-term marriage. He would have said that it would pass, that nothing fundamental would change between them.
He’d thought—when he’d read her letter—that it was her way of getting his attention. The proverbial two-by-four between the ass’s eyes. It had worked. He’d talked to that snooty East Hampton rental agent, then called in sick to work and driven to the airport.
It had never occurred to him that she meant it.
Not his Birdie, who couldn’t make a decision to save her soul. How could she suddenly have found the guts to leave him? Her father’s death must have really shaken her. He’d known she was unhappy, of course, but this … this he hadn’t expected.
He’d spent more time thinking about his wife in the past twenty-four hours than in the past twenty-four years. He’d relied on his knowledge of her in planning what to say. He’d distilled it down to a script, which he’d practiced on the flight across the country.
But the woman he’d just spoken to wasn’t his Birdie.
We aren’t happy. We haven’t been happy in a long time.
Those two sentences had ruined all of his plans. He’d been scared by them, terrified, even. That was when he’d known she was serious. Fear had immediately put him on the defensive, made him say what he’d never intended to say, never even thought about.
He slumped over the steering wheel, listening to the rain. Always the rain in this godforsaken place.
He almost turned the car around. The urge to go to her, to take her in his arms and beg for forgiveness was so strong he felt choked by it. Desperate.
But what then?
She was right. That was the utter hell of it. He might have reacted impulsively—saying divorce, for God’s sake, what an idiot—but that didn’t change the truth.
If he turned around now, she’d take him back (he couldn’t imagine that she wouldn’t), and they’d slide back into that boring, half-love rut they’d developed.
Here, alone in the car, he could admit that she was right. They both deserved better.
After all these years, she’d taken the decision out of his hands.
He closed his eyes, then slowly opened them. Rain patterned the windshield, thumped hard on the roof of the car.
“I loved you, Birdie,” he whispered aloud.
It didn’t escape his notice that even when he spoke to himself, in this cheap little car where no one could hear, he used the past tense.
The next day, the movers showed up with the furniture. Elizabeth stumbled out of bed to greet them. As soon as they left, she went back to bed. She stayed there for three days.
And still, she didn’t want to get up.
She pulled the quilt up to her chin and lay there. Rain thumped on the roof, tapped on the window, a constant drip-drip-drip.
She understood now why couples broke up and got back together even if the love had turned stale. There was a safety in the known.
The irony was, this was what she’d dreamed of. All those years, as time and responsibility and daily life had slowly—so slowly—eroded her marriage and her personality, she’d dreamed of being On Her Own.
She’d always imagined that as an end in itself. A goal. A pie-in-the-sky dream that would bring with it little bluebirds of happiness.
She knew she’d made the right decision, but still, late at night when the house was dark and rain pummeled the roof, she worried that she would always be alone, that no one would ever kiss her again, or sit with her after dinner and talk about nothing. Worse yet, that no one would look at her slowly aging face and say, “You’re beautiful, Birdie,” or whisper, “I love you,” just before the lights went out.
She flung the quilt aside and sat up.
It was time to start this new life of hers.
(This was a vow she’d made at least twice a day since Jack left.) This time she meant it.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and planted her bare feet on the cold floor. Like the Bride of Frankenstein, she lumbered to a stand.
“I could paint,” she said aloud, just as she’d said every other time she’d managed to crawl out of bed, but even as she uttered the words, she felt defeated.