FIVE
I splashed water on my face, freshened my lipstick, and crammed my feet back into my shoes. With Janet’s help, I found the waiters, gave them instructions, and led the crowd in “Happy Birthday” after the cake I’d ordered from Isgro’s, with buttercream icing and a flaming crown of candles, was brought to the table. I clapped when Dave blew out all the candles, without letting myself wonder what he might have wished for, and used my fork to push bits of cake and frosting around my plate. I laughed at the jokes, raised my glass in a toast, and discreetly managed the payment of the check. I kissed Dan and Marie goodbye, let Barry hug me, and whispered, “I’m okay. I promise,” after Janet pulled me into a hug and said, “You know I’m here if you want to talk about anything.”
The ride home was silent, as if we’d both tacitly agreed not to fight until we were back at the house. I paid Katrina, Dave drove to her dorm, and I crept past Ellie’s bedroom and into my own, shucking off my dress and my painful undergarments, then pulling on a T-shirt that dated back to the 1990s and was where sexy went to die. I had planned on feigning sleep by the time Dave returned from the drop-off, but he turned on the lights and waited at the door until I sat up.
“Happy birthday,” I said, blinking at him. In my dreams I’d been in the bathtub, with Dave kneeling beside me, rubbing a warm washcloth against my shoulders, telling me that he loved me.
“What was that about?” he demanded.
I could have been coy, asking what he was talking about. Instead, I said, “Why don’t you tell me?”
He stared in my direction, hands jammed in the pockets of his suit pants, jaw jutting.
“Come on,” I sighed. “L. McIntyre? Lindsay? Linds? The one you e-mail with all day long?”
I watched as one of his hands went to his cheek and started rubbing. When he finally managed to speak, his voice was strangled. “It’s not like that.”
“Oh? Then what’s it like?”
“We talk,” he said, sounding indignant. Somehow, I didn’t think he was lying. I knew how he looked when he lied, how he’d rock from his heels to his toes, how his voice would rise. There was no shifting and no squeaking. Just Dave, looking wretched. “She’s a friend.”
I didn’t reply, or let my face show my relief.
“This hasn’t been easy for me.” Dave’s eyes were wide, his face arranged in his little-boy-wants-a-cookie expression, the one that usually made me feel sympathetic.
“Which part?” I asked, hearing the edge in my voice.
“Living here,” Dave said.
“What do you mean?” I was honestly bewildered. “You were the one who wanted to move. You were the one who complained all the time about us being in a starter house, and how you didn’t want to raise Ellie in the city.” I would have been happy to stay. I loved our little house, with its spiral staircase, the fireplace in the kitchen that contractors had uncovered when they’d installed our new dishwasher, the French doors that opened onto a narrow brick walkway, and a niche that was the perfect size for a grill and a hanging basket of impatiens that I’d set on the ground when we cooked.
Without a word, Dave turned, walked into the bathroom, and shut the door. I could hear water running, could picture him squeezing more toothpaste than he needed from the center of the tube, then leaving the tube uncapped and spit and toothpaste drips inside the sink, because buying the toothpaste and cleaning the sink were my jobs. That was the deal we’d made, the terms we’d both agreed on, before everything had changed.
Not fair, I thought, and was suddenly so angry that I jumped out of bed and knocked—pounded—on the door. “Do you think I’m happy like this? Doing everything?” I asked. “I’m the one who’s paying the mortgage. I’m the one who takes care of Ellie. I’m the one who’s in charge of her schedule, and our social life, and keeping the house clean and making sure the car gets inspected. Don’t you think I get tired? That maybe I’d like someone to talk to? Someone to take me to lunch?”
His voice came through the door, maddeningly calm. “You seem to be doing just fine by yourself.”
My fingers curled into fists. “So, what? I should complain more, so you know that I’m unhappy? Well, consider this an official update: I’m unhappy.”
“Keep your voice down,” Dave hissed as he opened the door. In his white T-shirt and boxer shorts, with his hair combed away from his forehead, exposing the growing wings of skin on his temples, he had a narrow, aquiline appeal, and I knew that if we were to split, it would take him approximately ten minutes to replace me. “You just don’t seem very interested in hearing from me.”
“I’m just . . . I’m overwhelmed. It’s all too much. I need you to help me.” I meant to sound sincere, but I thought I’d only managed sullen. Reaching out, I let my fingertips brush his forearm, feeling the soft hair, the warm skin, remembering that I used to spend hours dreaming of when he would touch me again, happy weekends when we barely got out of bed, delighting in each other’s bodies.
“I’m busy, too.” He went to the bed, pulled off a blanket and two pillows, and stood, facing me, with the bedding bundled in his arms. “I’m basically doing the work of three people now. And blogging and answering e-mail, and doing those goddamn live chats.” He rubbed at his cheek again. “I’ll help you as much as I can, but full-time is full-time.”
“I can’t keep doing all of this,” I said. There were tears on my cheeks. I scrubbed them away. “I can’t. There’s my work, my dad, my mom, and everything with Ellie, and the house, and it’s all just too much, Dave.”
He tilted his head, skewering me with his gaze. “Just a thought here, but do you think maybe the pills are part of the problem?”
My breath froze in my throat. My hands turned to ice. I couldn’t move. Had he guessed the extent of it, how many pills I was taking, how many different doctors were prescribing how many different things, and how I’d come to depend on medication to get through my days? “What are you talking about?” I asked.
He looked at me for a long moment. I felt myself cringing, wondering what he’d say . . . but instead of confronting me with what he knew or what he’d guessed, he said, “I need to get some sleep.”
“David . . .” He turned toward the door. I followed him into the guest room, reaching for him and not quite touching his shirt. “I’m sor—,” I started to say, then stopped when I realized that I didn’t know what I was apologizing for. Was I sorry that I wasn’t the one he wanted to talk to, to share his life with? Was I sorry I was taking so many pills, or just sorry that I’d gotten caught?
“Do you think we should go to counseling?” I asked, hating how timid I sounded. “Maybe we just need to sit down with someone and figure it all out.”
He shrugged, pulling back the covers on the guest-room bed. There was a phone charger plugged into the wall and a stack of Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine on the floor beside the bed, where I’d meant to put a table. He had more or less moved in here, and somehow I’d let it happen.
“Look, I’m sorry if I seem a little spacey, but things have been so stressful,” I said. “Did you see what people were saying about me in the comments on that story?” I tried to sound like I was joking, like it didn’t really bother me. “Jesus, who’s reading the paper these days? A bunch of sixteen-year-old virgins stockpiling guns in their parents’ basements?” I wanted to tell him how much the comments hurt me, and how much I wanted him to need me, to want me in his life, the way my own parents had not. I wanted to tell him why I needed the pills, and maybe even ask him for help . . . because, honestly, it was starting to scare me, how many of them I took, and how I couldn’t imagine getting through a day without them.
“What an encouraging thought,” he said. “Given that newspaper readers are my employers.”
I pressed my lips together. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to take pills until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wanted to hate him, wanted to be angry enough to throw something heavy and sharp at his face, but I wasn’t. Maybe because I loved him . . . or maybe it wasn’t love so much as knowledge, or time, something weedy and unlovely and impossible to kill; the cockroach of emotions, a feeling that could survive even nuclear war. We had spent the past ten years of our lives together, and now every place I went, every song I heard, all of my familiar phrases and jokes, Ellie’s bedtime ritual (three kisses on her forehead and a quick spritz of monster spray), all of it I’d seen or heard or experienced or created with my husband. At our favorite restaurants I knew what he’d order, and then what I’d convince him to order by saying I just want a few bites, after which I would end up devouring it. I knew which pump he’d pull up to at the gas station, which glaze he liked on the chicken at Federal Donuts, and how he’d always forget his mother’s birthday and have to spend a hundred dollars on flowers at the last minute unless I reminded him to get her a gift. I was myself, but, I realized as I looked at his silhouette, I was also half of a marriage. How could I live a life where the person who’d built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who’d seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?
With stiff jerks of his arms, Dave pulled the decorative pillows off the guest-room bed and tossed them on the floor. “I’m going to sleep,” he announced.
“Wait,” I said. He didn’t answer, just lay on the bed, on his side, knees drawn up toward his chest, hands folded. He might as well have donned a sandwich board reading CLOSED. “Dave.” He didn’t answer. I stood there, wringing my hands, and then I stepped back out into the hallway and closed the door. After the miscarriage, he was the one who’d handled the business of telling both sets of parents that there would still be a wedding but there wouldn’t be a baby. I’d never asked what he’d said, and all he told me was, “There’s nothing for you to worry about. Just concentrate on getting better.” He’d never made me feel like I’d trapped him, and, if his parents had decided I was a gold digger and told him this was his chance to slip free of the handcuffs and make a better choice, he’d never let me hear about it.
I walked back to the master bedroom, remembering when Ellie was six weeks old and barely sleeping two hours at a time and Dave had found, on his own, a little cottage at Bethany Beach. “Maybe the sound of the water will calm her down,” he’d said, and I’d been so frayed, so exhausted, shuffling through my days like a zombie in need of a shower, that I’d agreed, thinking that anything had to be better than the nights of screams we’d endured. Dave had packed for all three of us, considerately choosing only my most comfortable leggings and sweatpants, nothing with an actual waistband or buttons or zippers, because my scar was still tender and my actual waist was still buried under rolls of water weight and pregnancy bloat. He’d picked out onesies and tiny cotton pants for Ellie, as well as the dye-and-scent-free detergent we washed her stuff in; he’d packed my breast pump and bottles and nipples and pacifiers, rattles and board books and burp cloths and diaper cream and the dozens of items, big and small, that the baby required. He had loaded up the little Honda, slotting the Pack ’n Play and the suitcases, the bassinet and the jogging stroller into the trunk as if expertly engineering a game of Tetris.
In the cottage, a pair of sunwashed rooms plus a galley kitchen, he’d instructed me to nap on the daybed on the porch while Ellie, who’d fallen asleep after a hundred miles of wailing, slept in her car seat beside me, and he made the beds and set up the Pack ’n Play. He’d held the baby while I swam. The cottage was on the bay, and there was a little island, just a clump of trees and shrubs and wild blackberries, maybe a quarter of a mile out. I’d done the crawl all the way there, then breaststroked back, feeling my heart beating hard, the muscles of my chest and shoulders working, and then I’d flipped on my back and let the salt water buoy me and the waves rock me. “Don’t worry, I’ve got her,” he said after I’d rinsed off in the outdoor shower and had nursed Ellie on the porch. He clipped her into the jogging stroller and trotted off to town, returning an hour later with cartons full of shrimp and fries, clams and coleslaw—a feast, exactly what I was craving. “I’ve got her,” he said again that night, and I’d collapsed onto the crisp sheets just after seven, falling almost instantly into the deepest sleep I could remember.
When I woke up to the rosy glow of the sunrise, it was just after five in the morning. Ellie had slept through the night—there she was, blinking calmly from the center of the bed, where Dave had put her. He was on her other side in his familiar position, curled up with his knees pulled toward his chest, in his T-shirt and his boxers, dark hair sticking up in unruly cowlicks, breathing deeply, not quite snoring as he slept. I could hear the sound of the waves through the window, and of Ellie smacking her lips while she wiggled her fingers in the air and stared as if they were the best movie she’d ever seen. Now we are three, I thought. That thought filled me with such unalloyed delight that it took my breath away. This was what it meant to be a family; all three of us, so close. This was what I’d worked for and wanted since I was a little girl.
Now my husband was taking some other woman to lunch. He thought that I was spacey. No, actually, he thought I was a junkie. Worse, he was discontented with his life, our life, in a way I couldn’t understand and, thus, couldn’t fix. Had we ever really been that happy, I wondered, remembering that morning at the beach, or had I still been taking the post-C-section Percocet?
The bottle of OxyContin was still in my purse, but there were Vicodin on the bedside table. I crunched two pills between my teeth and lay back on the pillow, remembering to set the alarm on my phone so that I could wake up at six the next morning, when the life I’d always wanted would start all over again.