“He’s busy with the baby.”
“I really need to talk to him.” Alison knew she was reaching for straws. But this runaround with the hospital just couldn’t continue, and she needed help, and she also knew enough about the way the world worked. When you’re getting a runaround, you need an insider. She just needed Kyle to get on the phone with one of these nurses, for two minutes. It might help. It had to help.
“Well, I’ll tell him you called,” Van said.
Alison willed herself not to panic. “I just need him for a second, Van. My mom is really in trouble and there’s no one here to help us, I just need to even ask him just a few questions. She’s really sick.”
“Awwwww,” said Van. “I’m sure they’re giving her great care there.”
“Well, they’re not—they’re not—I just thought—”
“I’ll have Kyle call you right back,” Van promised.
And then she hung up the phone.
twenty-six
VAN SLIPPED the phone back into its cradle in the kitchen. She turned back to the lovely granite countertop and wiped off the leafy remains of a head of cauliflower she had just finished dismembering. The idea that Alison Moore would call their home and ask for help from Kyle was laughable, aside from the fact that it completely laid bare all of Kyle’s insistent lies about his relationship with her. Alison just happened to come into town because her mother happened to be sick, and she happened to need a doctor? It was a ludicrous story, particularly when you factored in that Kyle didn’t work at that hospital and that oh by the way he’s a pediatrician. Your mother is sick in the hospital, so you decided you needed to call in your local pediatrician? That was hilarious, really. This whole situation was hilarious.
Van’s bitterness had settled into a permanent distortion. She knew she could not stand in it forever, but her wound was fresh, and exceptionally deep. The hopes she had nurtured for a life with a man who adored her were less than nothing now. She was humiliated by the fact that she had ever hoped anything. Why Kyle had refused to grant her an annulment, no one honestly could say. He insisted it was a lie that he would not tell to his God, but lying relentlessly about his feelings for this other woman seemed to be something he was fine with. He insisted that it would be bad for the girls, to be raised by someone who wasn’t their own father, but he didn’t seem to think that it was a problem for him to raise someone else’s child. In fact, he made quite a show of doting on that baby. It was unseemly, frankly, given the fact that the boy wasn’t his. Another lie he felt okay about perpetrating. It’s okay to tell the world that the baby is your baby, but it’s not okay to say, hey, we made a mistake, we should get an annulment? People got divorced all the time; who cared what you called it? If the Catholics wanted to call it an annulment, what was the big deal?
The light in the kitchen was shifting, settling into stronger angles; the sun was starting its descent. It was all too late anyway. Martin was gone. Not gone from Cincinnati, but gone from her life; as the days ticked by, he had become more and more frustrated with the way Kyle was dragging his feet. And then he was gone, and she was stuck. She could have gone to see him at his law office, she could have created a scene, embarrassed him, embarrassed herself. But the whole idea seemed disgusting to her. I’m carrying your child. I betrayed my husband. I have put my whole family through months of torture and you’re tired. So sorry you found this tiring. She did not send him an announcement when the baby was born.
Kyle never asked about her lover. After their one hissing argument the night he finally figured a few things out, he had been silent, and she resented his impassivity even more than she had the months and years before this crisis. Why was everything so hidden with him? Over time she had found in his silence betrayal, then judgment, then punishment, then cruelty. There may have been love in there at some point, but who could tell? It was a stunning change of course to have him insist on going into couple’s counseling, where apparently all anyone did ever was try to communicate, in ever more grueling detail. Up to this moment in time, she would have said that communicating was the last thing Kyle wanted to do, with anyone.