What if they hadn’t gotten married so quickly? What if that baby had been born? It was like those Choose Your Own Adventure books he used to love as a kid, where you could follow a dozen different paths to a different conclusion, each road forking again and again.
The doctor said it was perfectly normal. It happened more than people knew. As many as fifty percent of pregnancies, often before the woman even knew she was pregnant. Between fifteen and twenty-five percent of recognized pregnancies. And it could be for no reason at all, or at least no reason a doctor could isolate. The important thing to know was that there was nothing to worry about. Jess was only twenty-five and the picture of health. When the time came and they wanted to try again, it would more than likely all be fine.
Although they were knocked down, surprised by how sad they were, they agreed that good had come out of it. They were bound now. They loved each other and had no regrets. Jess recovered fairly quickly. She started the job with the union. She took the bar exam and passed with flying colors. She said she didn’t know how much she was allowed to grieve, given that it wasn’t something she’d been trying for or even wanted, and that she’d only been nine weeks along. Malcolm told her it wasn’t a question of being allowed, she felt what she felt, there was no rule book. Mostly, he was surprised. They both felt sort of guilty, like maybe they’d done something wrong—stayed out too late or tried to do too much in such a short period—but Jess said she felt better day by day, so Malcolm did, too. They agreed they had to get a bigger apartment and then, eventually, a house. Though they could have handled it, they were sure, now at least they could plan a little. Be ready. Now at least they knew what to expect.
three
Malcolm woke around noon on the Saturday after the storm to the sound of a loud crack, followed by a crash. His mind bleary, he thought for a moment that the noise came from inside the house, but then he heard another crack and looked over in time to glimpse a large, dark shape passing his bedroom window. The image of a body came to mind, someone jumping from the roof. It would be high enough to break a few bones, maybe, but not to die. Plus, no person could have gotten into the house without him hearing. Not Jess, in any case. If Jess so much as drove down their street, he’d feel a chord struck deep in his chest and he’d just know.
And then he remembered what Patrick and Siobhán had told him the night before. He tried to sit square to it, tried to take a good look, but it was as if what they said—about Jess, about Patrick’s friend Neil—existed behind thick glass. In daylight, from the bed he considered more hers than his, since she used to always be in it when he came home at night, her long body turned toward his side, it felt absurd that she was sleeping, perhaps, at that very moment, in a place that was unfamiliar to him. That she was showering, or moving through rooms she felt at home in, while he, if he visited her, wouldn’t know which door led where. For one second, he thought he might have dreamed it entirely, but then he noticed his clothes from the night before in a heap by the bathroom door, the topography of their bedroom so different without Jess’s lotions and compacts and makeup brushes and multivitamins spread over the top of her dresser. Without six-and-a-half-years’ worth of prescription bottles and hormone creams. Without her bangles and hoop earrings.
He looked at his phone. No new texts. No missed calls. He googled her name as he did most days, and there she was, Jessica Gephardt, senior counsel, wearing a blazer, her hair neater than it was in real life.
He looked back at the last text she sent, nearly a month earlier.
Malcolm, I canceled Dr. Hanley going forward. He’s charging us full price for the last two sessions because he held the hour but we didn’t show.
No abbreviations. Perfect punctuation. What about the therapy sessions before that? He wondered if she went alone, and whether that was ethical, talking about him in couples therapy when he wasn’t there. She found Dr. Hanley because she thought he’d help her remind Malcolm of what they were working so hard for. But instead Dr. Hanley wanted to start way back. “There isn’t enough time for that,” Jess blurted out during their third session.
That she’d used his full name bothered him—not Mal, but Malcolm. Before last night Patrick had been suggesting Malcolm go to her, as if that didn’t occur to him every single day. But when he pictured it—pulling up to Cobie’s building, waiting on the stoop like a delivery boy while Jess decided whether to come out or not: screw that. And what would he say? She left him. If anyone should be doing the seeking, it should be her.
As he lay in bed, still looking at her LinkedIn photo, it dawned on him that the fact that no one had asked for her lately meant they probably all knew. No one asking for her was the best evidence that what Patrick and Siobhán had told him was true.
As soon as he got out of bed, he noticed the house was brutally cold, and when he went to the window, he saw two huge tree limbs on the ground below, just lying there in the snow, joint to joint, like a pair of lovers who’d spent themselves and then fallen asleep. There were two matching blemishes left behind on the tree. He pulled the comforter off their bed, wrapped it around his bare shoulders, and walked down the hall to one of the front windows. The Bennetts’ mailbox was gone. Gerry Kowalski’s little two-door hatchback was just a lump. The Colemans’ collie was outside, and all Malcolm could see of him was his head hopping above the surface of the snow now and again while Jon Coleman stood in his open garage door blowing into his cupped fists. There was not even a tire mark in the road, no sign that the town plow had passed. Everyone’s winter-bald gardens were buried under a blanket so clean and new that even Mike Dunleavy’s trash-heap yard looked as tidy as a postcard. The sky was blue, cloudless. The tops of the row of evergreens across the street leaned in the wind. The temperature was expected to drop into the teens by nightfall and stay there for several days.
He wanted to call her right then and tell her it was time to come home. She was embarrassing herself, he would say, everyone knew what she’d done, but there was still a chance to work it out. There’d been a blizzard and enough was enough.
He tried once again to picture Neil Bratton. Jess was sleeping with him? Malcolm made himself picture it. He felt absurdly na?ve, but was it possible they were just good friends, had a bunch in common, and people had drawn their own conclusions? He listed their shared interests on his fingers. They were both lawyers. That was one. He moved to his second finger but he couldn’t think of anything else. He tried to decide whether it mattered. Malcolm had slept with what was probably considered a lot of people. God knew they didn’t all mean something to him. And if he slept with someone new today, or ever, that person would never mean what Jess meant to him. It wouldn’t mean that person really knew him, or would have any sort of say in his life. Jess was usually the one who told him how to think about things, how to see them, and he was trying to understand what she’d done the way she would if she weren’t Jess, and he wasn’t Malcolm, and Neil Bratton was a standin for anyone, and the people they were thinking about weren’t them.
Maybe for Jess it was just mechanical, a joining of bodies without really knowing each other. If so, he could possibly get over that. But she would have confessed more easily, if this thing with Neil Bratton meant nothing. She was not a liar, so the seriousness of whatever was between her and this guy, this stranger, was the only thing that explained her silence. In a lineup of kneecaps or elbows, he could pick out Jess’s from a group of a thousand. From fifty yards away he could tell her exact thought by the set of her shoulders.