“Do I? Do I have to know anything?” His reasoning seemed sound, his actions explainable. Except that picture. The red bra, the pale expanse of skin. She couldn’t unsee it.
Gabe was coloring at the dining room table, mostly arranging the colored pencils to comply with some internal need. He loved markers, crayons, colored pencils. He rolled them around his hands and smiled. He pressed the sharpened tips against the pads of his fingers and threw them across the room when they weren’t sharp enough. He peeled the wrappers off the crayons and then got furious when they broke. They spent half of Nate’s paycheck on new crayons alone. Oh God, Nate’s paycheck.
“Fired?” Alecia repeated, feeling slow, late on the response. “As in . . . ?”
“Temporary leave. Until ‘we get the mess sorted out.’ Bachman’s words.” Tad Bachman, Mt. Oanoke school principal, a young guy, not much older than Alecia. Nate’s racquetball buddy, of course.
“I’ll have to go back to work.” Alecia said automatically, her brain spinning. She said it like it could be a sacrifice, and she flashed on the new outfit hanging in her closet. Shoes she hadn’t even shown Nate. Expensive, creamy makeup. It didn’t feel like a sacrifice, it felt slippery and decadent and freeing.
“No. It’s temporary. I’ll still get paid. I’ll just be . . . here.” Nate looked around then caught Alecia’s eyes. “I didn’t do this thing. Never.”
“Why do they think you did, then? What did you actually do?” Alecia pulled her arms around her waist. She was shivering. Their townhouse had a shoddy air-conditioning system; it needed maintenance, maybe replacement. It rambled and groaned and they spent April through September sweating through the thinnest T-shirts. But Alecia couldn’t get warm, and her back teeth clanged together.
“I let a student get too close. I wanted to help her. Her family—it’s awful. You can’t even understand the nightmare. I’ve done this before, you know. Gotten too close, tried to help too much. It’s never backfired like this, and it’s never . . .” Nate looked around the room, avoiding Alecia’s eyes. “Sexual. It wasn’t this time, either. God, this is impossible. Someone is saying it is, that I slept with her. That’s just crazy.”
“Who is saying that?”
“Bachman said that she admitted it. Those were his exact words. I said, admitted what? You can’t admit a lie.” He toed the chair, like a caught toddler, and shook his head. “I asked what’s ten years of friendship mean to him? He said it’s more complicated than that.”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore, Nate.” Alecia remembered the Instagram picture, the flush swell of breast up close to the camera lens. She imagined Nate thumbing the image, his breath hitching. She imagined that girl straddling her husband’s body, her long skinny, teenage legs wrapped around his middle-aged naked bottom, her white hair splayed on a white pillowcase.
“Look, I’ll tell you the same thing I told Tad. I paid for her hotel room. I met her at that motel; she said she needed help and I helped her. The reporter took a picture of me hugging her. I was comforting her. Do you see that?” Nate said slowly, annunciating each syllable, like they often did to Gabe, but with more patience.
“I know this is what you say. But you lied about it. You lied to me. How do I believe you now?” Alecia knew that Nate often believed she was unreasonable. That her opinions on mostly everything, to him, seemed unfounded. The difference between them was that he blindly trusted: people, fate, goodness. And she, largely, did not.
“I explained all that. I’ve been explaining all of that. For days now, but like everything else, you can’t let it go.”
Alecia said nothing because she knew he was lying about at least one thing: that picture. A lie by omission is still a lie.
She imagined saying it now, I know you liked her picture. She imagined his reaction. Would he laugh? It was just the Internet. Nothing real, not tangible. It seemed undignified to divorce her husband because of something that may or may not have happened on social media, like they were sinking to the level of his students.
His student.
But no, it was real. It was tangible. The affair, if it happened, was with a student, for the love of God. Were they divorcing? Is that what was happening?
She wondered if, at fifty, she’d look back here at this moment and think oh, this is how it ended. And then maybe later, of course it did.
“Whoever is saying all of this is lying,” Nate insisted, still holding that backpack, still standing in the same spot. “Alecia, I don’t know why, but I swear I’m going to find out. I just need you to believe in me.”
When she didn’t answer, he said, for the first time, “You know I love you, right?” But his voice quavered a little and caught on the love and the first words that flitted into Alecia’s mind weren’t yes or no, but do I? Do I know that?
He dropped the backpack and stepped forward, toward Alecia. He gripped her arms, his fingers digging into the soft, bare flesh, his thumbs sliding under the sleeves of her white T-shirt, his eyes wild. His chin wobbled. “Do you believe me?” He brought his hands up to cup her face, his fingers sliding around her neck to thread through her hair. She could smell the desperate musk of sweat on his skin. “Do you?” He whispered again, his voice hoarse and shaky.
Alecia couldn’t do this, she couldn’t look into his eyes and break his heart, no matter how many ways he broke hers. She needed time to figure it all out, to be alone, to think.
“Yes.” She gripped his wrists and sagged against him, her weight pulling against his arms. He crushed her to his chest, her face pushed into the solid muscle, his breathing ragged. He stroked her hair, her face, and all she could think about was the day ten years ago at her cousin’s wedding, the same feeling of having all the air pushed from her lungs. She whispered back, “I believe you.” It could have even been the truth.
She remembers after that wedding in the parking lot they looked at the sky before driving home. They saw three shooting stars, right in a row. A shooting star isn’t really a star, he’d said. It’s the dust from a comet’s tail, burning up in the earth’s atmosphere.
So the thing everyone wishes on? It’s both the end of everything and actually nothing at all.
?????
The phone rang all day and Alecia left it for Nate to answer, a kind of penance. Libby Locking called the house, then Alecia’s cell phone, alternating until finally Alecia answered.
“Is it true?” She demanded, then her voice softened. “Are you okay? Do you need a . . . safe house?” Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“For God’s sake, Libby, you know Nate. Do you think it’s true?” Alecia pushed her thumb into her eye socket. “And a safe house? Are you kidding me?” She regretted taking the phone call. Bridget had called, twice, but Alecia declined both. Bridget was too close to it; she didn’t want to listen to her either defend Nate or bash him. She just needed the day. Just to think.