He didn’t wonder for one moment why she hadn’t told him. She hadn’t let him touch her since the baby was born; they hadn’t had sex in over a year. Unless the good Lord really did occasionally descend from on high in order to impregnate pretty women, Van was having an affair. Which might explain how happy she was.
She was having an affair, and she was having someone else’s baby. She was sitting on his parents’ back patio watching his folks make dinner for their two daughters, and she was pregnant with someone else’s child. She was lounging in the sun, contented, filled to the brim with her joy, drinking iced tea, smiling at his father, while her body grew a baby for someone else’s lovely family. The level of the betrayal was so vast, and came upon him so quickly in the late afternoon air, that he felt light-headed, dizzy even. But you knew, his brain reminded him. You’ve known for weeks.
Yes, he replied to himself. But now I have to talk about it.
It was the rising of the truth to the surface of the world which finally and utterly filled him with rage. So much of his life had become his own secret. His wife didn’t love him, so be it. His children were afraid of him, so be it. His wife had gone into the bed of another man, so be it. He had what he valued more than all of that—he had silence. He also had bitterness, grief, fleeting joy, struggles with the devil, conversations with God; he had within himself a universe of hope and disappointment and that was fine, it was what he had learned to make do with and even love. But no one else was allowed to see it.
It was the strength of that conviction which enabled him to make it through the rest of the afternoon, until the blessed exhaustion of both baby and toddler claimed the day. In fact, his ability to perform his life while living it somewhere else inside his head was so refined by this time that his mother would say, as she kissed him good-bye, “This is the nicest day I think we’ve ever had, Kyle. You have the nicest family I could wish for.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he said. She smiled at him with all the benign glory of her aging motherhood. What a fucking idiot, the bad side of his brain sneered, gleeful. Kyle was shocked at the malevolence of the thought, but what did it matter? She would never know. Thoughts like that came and went with lightning speed, and no one ever knew.
Both girls were asleep by the time they pulled into the driveway, which Van had predicted, so they were both already in their jammies. She carried the baby into the lovely house as Kyle lifted Maggie out of her car seat.
“Mommy do it,” the sleepy child muttered, still and always her mother’s girl.
“Tell her I’ll be in to sing her a song,” Van called back to them. “I’ll be right there, honey.”
Folding the sleeping children into their adorable bedrooms took seconds. But Van had all the time in the world. She sang a lullaby while tucking the baby into her crib. She made sure the bars were settled properly and the bumper wasn’t all bunched up. She went up to Maggie’s room to make sure she was really asleep, and not faking, and if she was in fact awake (she wasn’t) to see if she needed a cup of water or a story. She went back to the baby’s room again, to do who knows what. Exiled as always from this relentless ritual, Kyle sat alone on the edge of their bed, in their bedroom, and waited for her.
He had taken the precaution of turning the light off. For the past months Van had developed a very active schedule in her evenings. The dinner dishes took longer and longer to rinse and put into the dishwasher. On the nights when the girls went down easily, she had developed a fondness for late-night reading. Kyle didn’t mind the threadbare flimsiness of these tactics; he knew that she was avoiding their bedroom until she thought he was asleep. He sat silently in the dark and waited for her to grow weary of whatever the phony diversion was this time, and come to bed.
The whisper of that white dress. She appeared in the dark, floating through the room like a ghost.
Kyle turned on the light.
“Oh, for crying out loud.” Van put one hand on her stomach and the other on the edge of the bed. His bad brain allowed itself a shiver of delight, that he had frightened her. The other half of his brain managed to maintain a clinical distance while Van collected herself. She turned her back on him and headed for the closet. “I thought you had gone to bed.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“In the dark?” she asked, exasperated at the idea of this insanity.
“Yes, in the dark,” he replied.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t need it to make sense.”
“Honestly, Kyle, is there a point to this? Because I am really tired.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” The breath of a defensive uncertainty was taking hold under her impatience. It had been so long, years even, since he had called her out on any of her bullshit, and she was smart enough to recognize that something different was coming her way now. “Because I was outside all day, taking care of two children, in case you hadn’t noticed. As usual.” This last bit was muttered under her breath, a hostile last-minute tag.