Julia washed the dinner dishes and wiped the kitchen countertops. She cleaned her face and put on her nightgown. Alice was asleep in the bassinet, her face peaceful. Julia watched her perfect features for a few minutes—her tiny nose, her pink cheeks, her long eyelashes—and then sat down on the couch. She’d finished her normal evening routine, even if this wasn’t a normal evening. For the first time, Julia considered the sheet of folded paper William had handed her. When he’d walked out, she’d put it down, still folded, on the coffee table. She was aware of a prickly sensation in her chest, aware that she was scared to unfold the sheet. Don’t be silly, she thought, and with feigned confidence smoothed the page flat on her lap. William’s handwriting was different from his father’s: His letters were round and easy to read. His handwriting was as familiar to Julia as her own.
I’m no good for you and Alice. If I stayed, I’d ruin your life. You deserve to be free, Julia. Our marriage is over. I’m sorry for everything.
She read the sentences on a loop, as if they were a book she restarted as soon as she reached the last page. After a while she stopped and lay down on the couch. She wished Sylvie was beside her on the cushions, to hold her. Julia wasn’t ready to talk, but she was alone in a way that felt dangerous. She got up and double-checked the lock on the front door. She dug out the old toolbox from under the kitchen sink and removed the rusty hammer they’d used to hang pictures when they moved. She placed the hammer next to the letter and check on the small coffee table, in case she needed protection, and lay back down. She told herself to sleep but found she couldn’t close her eyes. Any small noise and she pushed herself upright, wondering if it was William’s key in the lock. Had he ever been out past ten? No. It was now midnight. After midnight, the bars would be closed. The campus buildings were shut. Alice woke up, and Julia fed her back to sleep. She was still on the couch at three in the morning. She thought, Is this actually happening?
Julia hadn’t lost her clarity from Alice’s birth. When she paid attention, she could see everything. But she’d paid as little attention to William as possible since Alice was born. She’d kept her gaze averted, partly because Julia had come to know what, apparently, her husband had also figured out: They didn’t work together. Or perhaps they had worked, while Julia was intent on fixing the world and people around her. She had pushed William into the career of teaching, pushed him into graduate school, even pushed him to marry her. But Julia had stopped pushing when Alice was born. And when she stopped pushing, something in their marriage sputtered to a stop. She’d continued to play her role as a wife, and he’d continued to play his role as a husband, but they’d done no more than go through the motions for a while now.
“I was going to stay with you, though,” she said to the empty room. “I’d made a commitment.”
It hurt her that William didn’t feel the same way. But still, she thought, it was brave of him to leave. He’d always struggled with decisions, and this had to be the boldest move of his life. Julia thought she’d masked her new sense of independence after Alice’s birth, but he saw through her. He saw that she didn’t need him. He noticed that she’d taken her hands off his back and that he was no longer being moved forward in a direction she’d chosen.
Julia called Sylvie when the sun rose, then showered and put some care into her appearance. She would set the stage for her new life by making sure the woman in the mirror looked presentable. She’d always believed in dressing for the part she wanted, and she didn’t want to appear like a disheveled victim. Julia remembered her childhood self twirling into a room, singing, Ta-da! She took her time in front of the mirror and put on some lipstick and a little eyeliner. She wove her hair into a neat updo. When Julia was fully dressed, she left a professional-sounding message on Professor Cooper’s machine, explaining that she was available to work and that she was sure she could bring a lot of value to his company. I can do this, she thought, when she hung up. I can do anything.
But this confidence twanged, like a rubber band, into doubt. Did she have a good sense of what she was capable of? Julia had known that she wouldn’t leave William, even when he’d disappointed and irritated her. She had married him for better and for worse. But she’d also known that if their marriage were ever to end, it would be her decision, not his. William had needed her; she hadn’t needed him. How was it possible that she was the one being left behind?
Julia rubbed her forehead and forced her thoughts elsewhere. As if answering an essay question for school, she tried to figure out who William would be without her pushing him. He’d probably like to be a high school basketball coach, she thought, and felt pleased with herself for being so mature and generous about the man who had lied to her and walked out on his family. Equally true was the fact that she never would have married a high school basketball coach. Men like that lived in small houses in Pilsen like the one she’d grown up in. They wore sweatshirts on workdays and barely made enough money to pay the rent.
Julia had wanted to be married to a college professor. She’d had secret aspirations for William: that he would be a college president in his later career or perhaps even run for public office. These aspirations had disappeared after she’d read his book, though. She realized then that there was something wrong deep inside him—after all, what kind of man would type the words I’m terrible on a page?—which meant he would never be successful. A college professor still seemed possible, though, and even inevitable. Julia had sat in on one of William’s classes during the spring, and at the end he’d said, nicely, that the sight of her grinning like a Cheshire cat at the back of the room had made it hard for him to concentrate. But William had been remarkable, breaking up the material with small jokes, fostering an interesting discussion on the ethics of war even though it was a lecture course. For the first time, he’d seemed to utilize his size off the basketball court. His height gave his presence significance. He was meant to stand out, so it made sense for him to be alone in the front of the room. Look at me, his body said, and the students complied.
Julia would have stayed married to the man at the front of the classroom. But the man who had just walked out, the one who had hidden ten thousand dollars and who knew what else, was a stranger. She hadn’t known, hadn’t wanted to know, who William was for a long time. When her husband came home after being out for the day, she never asked him where—or who—he’d been.
Julia needed to see Sylvie, because nothing in her life seemed real unless her sister shared it. But Sylvie showed up pale and panicked, as if the building were on fire. Julia was unsettled by her sister’s intensity from the moment she opened the door. It felt like her sister had arrived with a problem, instead of showing up to help Julia with hers.
Sylvie studied the evidence on the coffee table: the five sentences, the check. She said, “Before he left, did William explain why he’d missed his classes? What else did he say to you?”
“He didn’t say anything.”