“Maureen,” he said, “could I speak to Rachel alone for a minute?”
“Of course, of course.” Maureen returned the box of tissues to a credenza, then changed her mind, brought it back and placed it on the coffee table. She refilled Rachel’s glass of water. She fussed with the corner of a throw rug. Then she gave them both a smile that was supposed to be comforting but curdled into something terrified. She left the room.
“When you were two,” Jeremy said, “your mother and I fought pretty much every minute we were in each other’s presence. Do you know what it’s like to fight with someone every day? Someone who claims to dislike conflict but who in fact lives for it?”
Rachel cocked her head at him. “You’re really asking me this?”
He smiled. And then the smile went away. “It scours the soul, damages the heart. You can feel yourself dying. Living with your mother—from the time she’d decided I was the enemy onward, anyway—was to live in a state of perpetual war. I was walking up the driveway after work once, and I threw up. Just puked into the snow covering our lawn. And there was nothing specifically wrong at that particularly moment, but I knew that the second I walked into the house, she’d come at me about something. Could be anything—my tone of voice, the tie I chose that day, something I’d said three weeks earlier, something someone else had said about me, a feeling she had, an intuition she’d received as if by divine providence that something was not right about me, a dream that suggested the same . . .” He shook his head and let out a small gasp, as if surprised how fresh the memories could be even now, almost thirty years later.
“So why did you hang in there as long as you did?”
He knelt before her. He took her hands and pressed them to his upper lip and breathed in the smell of them. “You,” he said. “I would have stayed because of you and puked in the driveway every night and gotten an ulcer and early heart disease and every other possible malady if it meant I could have raised you.”
He let go of her hands and sat on the coffee table in front of her.
“But,” she managed.
“But,” he said, “your mother knew that. She knew I had no legal footing but she knew I’d stay in your life, whether she liked it or not. So one night, the last night we ever made love, I remember that well, I woke up and she was gone. I ran to your room and you were there, sleeping away. I walked around the house. There was no note, no Elizabeth. No cell phones back then and we hadn’t made any friends I could call.”
“You’d been there two years by that point. You had no friends?”
He nodded. “Two and a half.” He leaned forward on the edge of the coffee table. “Your mother torpedoed any attempts at a social life. I couldn’t see it at the time—we were so overwhelmed with work and having a baby and then a newborn and all the labor-intensive stages of, well, having a child. So I’m not even sure I noticed how cut off we were until that night. I taught in Worcester back then, at Holy Cross. My commute was a bear, and your mother sure wasn’t going to socialize in Worcester. But when I’d suggest going out with her coworkers, fellow faculty and such, she’d say, ‘So-and-so secretly hates women,’ or ‘So-and-so is just so pretentious,’ or, the nuclear option, ‘So-and-so looks at Rachel funny.’”
“Me?”
He nodded. “How was I going to respond to that?”
“She used to do the same thing with my friends,” Rachel said. “All these backhanded slights, you know? ‘Jennifer seems nice . . . for someone with her insecurities.’ Or ‘Chloe could be so pretty but why does she dress that way? Does she know the message she’s sending?’” Rachel rolled her eyes at it now, but she could feel the stab of it just below her rib cage to realize how many friendships her mother had shamed her out of.
Jeremy said, “Sometimes she’d actually make plans with another couple or a group of coworkers and we’d be all set to go. And then, right at the last minute, it would fall through. The sitter’s car broke down, Elizabeth felt ill, you looked like you were coming down with something—‘Doesn’t she feel hot, JJ?’—the other couple called to cancel, even though I couldn’t recall hearing the phone ring. The excuses always seemed perfectly reasonable in the moment. It was only over time, in the rearview, that I saw how they piled up. Either way, we had no friends.”
“So this night she disappeared?”
“She came back at dawn,” he said. “She’d been beaten.” He looked at the floor. “And worse. All the visible injuries were to her body, not her face. But she’d been raped and battered.”
“By who?”
He met her eyes. “There’s the question. She’d been to the police, though. Had pictures taken. She consented to a rape kit.” He sucked a wet breath to the back of his throat. “She told the police she wouldn’t identify her attacker. Not then anyway. But once she came home and told me, she assured me that if I didn’t come to my senses and admit the truth, she—”
“Wait a minute,” Rachel said, “what truth?”
“That I’d impregnated her.”
“But you hadn’t.”
“Right.”
“So . . .”
“So she insisted I say I had. She said the only way we could be together was if I was wholly honest with her and stopped lying about fathering you. I said, ‘Elizabeth, I’ll tell the world I’m Rachel’s father. I’ll sign all documents to that effect. If we divorce, I’ll pay child support until she’s eighteen. But what I won’t do, what I can’t do, what it is categorically insane to ask me to do is to claim to you, her mother, that I planted the seed. That’s too much to ask of anyone.’”
“And what did she say to that?” Rachel asked, even though she had a pretty good idea.
“She asked me why I insisted on lying. She asked me what sickness was in me that I would try to make her seem as if she were being unreasonable about something so crucial. She asked me to admit that I was trying to make her look as if she were insane.” He pressed his palms together, as if in prayer, and his voice grew very soft, almost a whisper. “The game, as I understood it, was that she could never believe I loved her unless I agreed to abide by an unreasonable contract. The unreasonable aspect of the demand was the point. That was her deal breaker—meet me there in the cave of my own insanity or meet me nowhere.”
“And you chose nowhere.”
“I chose the truth.” He leaned back on the table. “And my sanity.”
Rachel felt a bitter smile tug the corners of her mouth. “She didn’t like that, did she?”
“She told me if I was determined to live a life of cowardice and lies, then I could never see you again. If I left that house, I was leaving your life forever.”
“And you left.”
“And I left.”