Malcolm never knew what to do with himself when he was alone in the house. And Jess was pretty sure she’d used the last of the half-and-half. He probably wouldn’t notice until he made his next pot of coffee, and then what?
Jess pulled over to the shoulder just after the toll plaza and rolled down all the windows of her car. Just ahead was the helix that would carry her to the bridge, and then to Manhattan, then down the West Side to Cobie’s. He’d feel less nervous about the Halloween party if she went. He’d feel even less nervous about it if she put on her old Mia Wallace costume—her bangs at that moment were the exact right length, she might not even need the wig—and made it her mission to have a great time. She could always leave him again tomorrow.
A Port Authority Police cruiser pulled up to her bumper, blipped the siren, and flashed the lights.
“Okay, okay,” Jess whispered to her empty car and then drove on.
* * *
She spent seventeen weeks in Cobie’s guest bedroom and tried to think of it as time outside of time, like a burl on a tree is part of the trunk but also its own thing, complex and apart, created in response to injury or illness, the tree’s way of healing itself. She didn’t answer any calls, except from Neil and sometimes not even his. She almost never responded to texts. She took long walks after work to give Cobie privacy with her family. Sometimes she took the twins to the movies and for milkshakes, watched them flip their skateboards, listened to them play their instruments. When Cobie and Astrid argued, they usually did so via text, often while sitting in the same room. Cobie said it was so the kids wouldn’t hear them, but once, when both Cobie and Astrid were hunched over their phones with miserable expressions on their faces, furiously pecking away, the boys looked over at Jess as if to ask whether she understood what was happening. They rolled their eyes. But then, almost as often, she caught either Cobie or Astrid looking down at her phone and then looking across the room at the other with a grin.
And then Neil had gotten hammered with Patrick, spilled everything, and the burl was cut away, leaving only the damaged trunk.
* * *
The first night she spent at Neil’s, the Thursday before the storm, she stayed downstairs when he went up to manage baths, toothbrushing, pajamas, books. The kids were off from school the following day—a conference for the teachers—so Jess and Neil took off, too. The plan was to play games with the kids all day, bake, watch movies, let them get to know Jess better ahead of the snowstorm that was due to arrive on Friday evening. The latest forecasts showed the storm would be bigger than the news had first estimated, but there was time still, projections changed, it wouldn’t be the first storm the weather people made a big drama about that didn’t end up materializing.
Listening to the bedtime routine, she had the same thought she’d had her first night at Cobie’s, that a house where kids lived felt full even when the kids were out of sight, even when their toys were tidied away for the night. There were always whispered footsteps, bedsprings squeaking, doors opening and closing, faucets turned on and off. When these kids got older and had more freedom, they’d show up from school with their friends in tow, their bodies suddenly too big, their bikes abandoned to the front lawn, and like a descending army they’d look through the cabinets, clear out the snacks. Then they’d sit around saying all the obnoxious, self-important things teenagers have been saying since the beginning of time. Later still, they’d pull up in cars, run inside with breezy shouts of where they were going, where they’d been. How lucky for the person listening, to have that energy sweep through. What company to walk in to find all those scuffed bags and worn-out sneakers piled up in the front hall. Even the performance of being annoyed—“Clean up your shit!” Siobhán often yelled at her kids—had joy at the heart of it, exhausted and fed-up though that joy may be.
“Mom, you said ‘shit,’?” one always replied, and Siobhán would pull that one to her thickening midsection and hold him tight. On college breaks, all these kids would bring friends home. Someday they’d bring their husbands or wives. Their children. Neil, Siobhán, Cobie—they’d have full tables at Thanksgiving for the rest of their lives. Jess could see it, see all of it, including herself, in sort of a split screen, living in an ordered quiet, always turning on the radio for company.
I shouldn’t be here, she thought. These people were blanks to her. They moved to different music, were formed by different clay. They were appealing for those differences, she reminded herself—but now that it was time to color them in, color herself in beside them, she couldn’t see how the picture would ever look right. And she wouldn’t be able to do this again. It’s a thought that hit her at some point while she was staying with Cobie, and which she immediately tried to silence. Because if this was real between her and Neil, why would she care about that? Most people got one chance in life, and she was stealing a second. But to use that second chance and end up in a house only three miles from where she started? Why hadn’t she thought bigger, gotten farther? She didn’t have the excuse of being young anymore.
Because it was him I met, she remembered. Him I liked. She recalled the strange feeling she got, locking eyes with him from across a room when they barely knew each other’s names, recognizing him, feeling recognized, long before anything happened. A line pulled taut. A tug. A whole life that was hers to step into, if she wanted to.
She could hear Neil’s low murmur coming from upstairs, though not what he was saying. She could sneak out now, head back home, beg Malcolm for forgiveness. But whether that made her brave or cowardly depended on what was actually the right thing to do, and that’s the part she couldn’t decide. She could take the flashlight she’d spotted in Neil’s mudroom and make her way back along the ruts and inclines of the roads she knew so well until she arrived at her own door and apologized for trying something new. A new backdrop, new rooms to move through. A new way of being touched, looked at—that was part of it, too.
As she listened to him soothing one of the kids, she pictured the long walk home, how she’d rehearse her apology. But then even in her mind she stopped walking. The bouncing light stilled. She was at the exact point in the road where kids used to crawl through a broken section of the chain-link fence to find a sheltered spot to drink beers, to make out in the mossy patches between the trees. She was also not sorry for trying. For feeling a way and doing something about it. She had a problem and she was trying to solve it.
And anyway, she couldn’t leave. Neil had already carried her bag upstairs, and she’d already taken out her hairbrush, left her toiletries case on the sink. She’d already emptied her pockets of change, put it in the kids’ change jar. Next thing Neil was back downstairs, searching a drawer for menus, and from across the room he looked like a stranger to her, as if she’d met him not ten minutes before. “Let’s order dinner,” he was saying. “Your first night. Let’s open a bottle of wine. Hey,” he said, coming over to her. “I’m really happy you’re here.”
But she couldn’t keep her thoughts on track.
“Hey,” he repeated, so that she’d look at him. “Everything is going to be okay.”
“They say once a cheater always a cheater,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“Do you count this as cheating?” he asked. “Jess, this is not wrong, and I’ll never be convinced otherwise.”
She liked him best when he said things like that, when he was insistent about it and seemed absolutely sure.
The next morning the kids said hello when they padded into the kitchen, but wore puzzled expressions, like they were just remembering, Oh yes, that’s the stranger who arrived yesterday and is still here, pouring our milk into her coffee.
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