I took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. I’ll talk with her.”
“Thank you for telling me about that. I didn’t mean to pry, and I know that was insanely personal. Thank you for trusting me.” Savannah brought her fingers to my cheek and traced her thumb just under my eye, that soft, genuine smile of hers lifting the heaviness from around us in an instant.
“Of course I trust you,” I said again. “That’s like saying thank you for breathing. Or … thank you for having two arms. You don’t have to thank me. I trust you.”
“I hate that she did that to you. That’s not fair.”
I shrugged. There was nothing to say. It wasn’t fair. I hated it, too. One thing I did want was to not talk about it for the rest of the night. “Come here,” I implored with a slight tug of her hand.
Savannah rose, slowly, and with a grace that I’m sure had people often mistaking her for a dancer, slid onto my lap and rested her head on my shoulder.
We spent the rest of the evening quietly talking near the fire, basking in anonymity. Breathing air free of judgment. A place where we could be anybody or nobody. Together. We made love that night until we both collapsed in exhaustion, and again when we awoke.
In the morning I drove the rental car down the side of the mountain, taking each switchback through the forest slowly, nearly coming to a stop at each magnificent vista. We were a third of the way down the mountainside when both of our cell phones began to chirp with missed calls, text messages, voicemails, which both of us, wordlessly, ignored. We didn’t discuss it. We didn’t agree to it. We said nothing. But I couldn’t avoid seeing tears that slowly rolled down her cheeks, the tears that reflected the slanting rays of the sun.
I started to say something, and she simply held out a hand, palm up, toward me. Telling me to stop. And so I shut up, took her hand in mine, and I drove, back toward the tour, back toward our lives. And she cried. And inside, I did the same.
We got back to the hotel at noon. I returned the rental car then finally checked my messages. I’d been trading voicemails and text messages with Karin for three days. It was Saturday, she wouldn’t be working, and I wouldn’t be able to put it off much longer.
We’d managed to keep our conversations short and businesslike for most of the last weeks. She knew, or suspected, about Savannah. I knew about her coming off the birth control pills and seeing a fertility doctor without my agreement. We were at a stalemate, and I absolutely refused to address the subject on the phone from thousands of miles away.
So that day, when I called from my room, I had more than a little tension and anxiety.
“Hello?”
I swallowed, and said, “Hey.”
“Gregory? It’s been a … couple days.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been busy.” I felt a lump in my throat. Whatever else I was … I didn’t like to think of myself as a liar. And yet, here I was, lying. Because I hadn’t been busy. I’d been avoiding talking to her. Because I was sleeping with another woman. No matter how much of a gulf we had in our marriage, that wasn’t right.
“How is the tour?”
I cleared my throat then said, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“It’s going well.”
“Gregory ... what’s going on? You don’t sound like you.”
A stab of irritation flashed through me. I wanted to say, of course I don’t. You tried to trap me into having children I didn’t want. I wanted to say, I’m in love with another woman. I wanted to say, I’m leaving.
I said nothing for a moment and simply took a breath because I didn’t want to lose my temper. I didn’t know who was at fault here more or less or what. I knew that I needed to tread very carefully. I knew that whatever she had done, I was the one who had been unfaithful. I was the one who had lied, systematically, for the entire summer.
So it didn’t make sense that I was so angry with her.
But I was. I’d never been so angry in my life.
“I’m just not feeling well. The tour has been exhausting,” I said. I was telling the truth. Just not all of it.
She didn’t answer. And so we sat there, in an uncomfortable silence, for fifteen seconds or thirty or a minute or ten. I don’t know how long it was. I only know it was excruciating. Finally she said, “Call me tomorrow?”
“Look ... we need to talk. Can you fly out here? Tomorrow? Our next stop is in Billings, Montana.”
She hesitated. “You want me to fly to Montana? Why?”
“Karin ... please. I’ll make the reservations. Get the time off work.”
In a hesitant tone, she said, “All right. I love you.”
I disconnected without answering, and then sat down, staring out the window. Wishing.
“I know it seems crazy. But I’ll miss you,” Savannah said.
I took a deep breath and said into the phone, “I’ll miss you too.”
I kept the phone to my ear, though for the next thirty seconds or so, neither of us spoke. My eyes scanned the signs for Domestic Arrivals as I turned into the airport.
“I love -”
“Don’t say it,” she interrupted.
I cleared my throat. “Fine. We’ll talk … tomorrow or the next day, then.”
“Goodbye,” she whispered. She sounded as if she was on the verge of tears, and I knew that I was.
I hung up the phone. I felt unaccountably angry, and I knew it wasn’t fair. It’s not as if it were Karin’s fault. But the anger was there, and it sharpened when I pulled up to the curb and saw her coming out of the door of the terminal, dragging two suitcases.
The thought that ran through my head was this: why does she need two suitcases for a single overnight trip? Which led to wondering if she was planning on staying longer and just hadn’t mentioned it?
Not logical. Not reasonable. But my anger pushed through regardless.