Monday's Lie

by Jamie Mason

  “I meant are you satisfied with what you did? You can’t control what she does with it.”

  “Yes. I think so.” And I was. Mostly. I’d always do everything differently if I had the chance. “You okay with it?”

  “Sure,” he said. “No skin off my nose either way.”

  Patrick had been watching our tennis match, agape. “I don’t even know what just happened.”

  “Me neither, really,” I said. Patrick let me hold his hand. I squeezed. A beat too late, he squeezed back.

  A patrol car rolled around the corner, and its roof lights lit up with a short whoop of the siren to clear the intersection. The officer lined up the car with the curb, and another cruiser followed in just behind it. One man stayed behind with the cars and an eye on the street while the other worked an officious stride through the deco-etched doors.

  We all watched the stage being set for the intervention.

  “Sorry your birthday dinner was ruined,” I said to Simon.

  “What ruined?” Simon scooted his chair around to set his back to the scene. “I’m eating. It’s my birthday. If they want me, they know how to find me. Let’s begin again, shall we?”

  He stood up and shook Patrick’s hand. Patrick gave over to smiling, his resistance and bother over what had just happened was helpless in the full shine of my brother’s charm. “Patrick, my man! How’s my favorite brother-in-law? Nice to see you. Thanks for taking me out for my birthday.”

  9

  Friday

  That Tuesday at the sidewalk café when I tossed an unknown element into that girl’s crisis to change the course of her day, the blue car that I’m on my way to find right now was still months away. Even then, though, its phantom engine was revving out there in the yet-to-be. If I’d known to cock an ear that evening, or even on the day I’d found the stash of bank statements, I might have heard it in the back of my mind where the future sows its seeds.

  • • •

  I never thought we were miserable. I really didn’t. I kept careful watch that we were being normal, and every little spat and eye roll seemed to fit under that heading. In some small ways, even the squabbling felt like a triumph. We fought, but we stayed. I never asked him to change. I accepted him. I thought that was what I was supposed to do.

  Then I looked up one day to find that the friendly, nearly conspiratorial glint in my husband’s eye had transformed into the flat stare of a bored coworker. And of course it hadn’t gone stale overnight. We’d made a project of it, the both of us plying the excuse of “I’m just tired” so often in our listlessness that it had turned into a secret code for the pointed exercise of neglecting each other. We had lost track of our alliance.

  But Patrick still had his dimples and his hair, and if I skipped dessert four nights in a row, I could still fit into the blue jeans I had worn in college. In our careers, we’d both been the meat that was just this side of the fat, which had kept us both—more or less—off the corporate chopping block at the low swing of the economic cleaver. There weren’t bonuses and overtime projects anymore, but we were employed.

  Money had got tight, but we were doing okay.

  So what did we have to complain about? Nothing. Everything. Just like everyone else. And being just like everyone else meant more to me than anything the blinders had blocked from my view.

  • • •

  “Why do you put up with this shit?” asked my brother after I’d discovered the first pebbles that would become an avalanche in my marriage.

  Before the big things that were importantly disastrous, there were the slippery, subtle, little things. There were upsets and fusses, but of what I thought of as the normal, modern-day, first-world brand of problems. And those were, of course, the only sort I would ever entertain.

  Patrick’s hidden bank account, his secret stash of his-not-mine, was the first decoded clue. Half a year later, his second-tier flirting with Deirdre from the coffee kiosk in the grocery store nipped at our peace. It wasn’t a big deal. They were just texts. Light innuendo among a steady stream of unnecessary details to be sharing with each other.

  But each stone that tumbled from my fortress sent me running for the wine and a debrief with Simon. I hadn’t confronted Patrick over the money or even asked about Deirdre, nor would I ever, but we were snarling at each other with exhausting regularity.

  My brother safely held most of my secrets (and some of Patrick’s as well) because he had simply never shown the inclination to do anything else with them. My brother was an angel. I looked at him now, sitting there growling at me in my own kitchen, tall and ox strong, his eyebrows bristling in irritation. But what I always saw first was the gallant little brother he’d always been.

  I pulled back on the smile that might offend him. “Because it’s normal. It sucks, but it happens sometimes.” I poured the rest of the wine into his glass.

  “That’s shit, Dee. It’s shit of you to believe it, and it’s shit of you to just accept it if that’s what you actually do believe.”

  “Couples fight. They bicker. They have a peek at the green grass over the fence, sometimes, right? That’s all it was. He didn’t actually do anything with her. Life goes on. You might even know that if you ever got out of the best-behavior phase with a girlfriend—even once. What’s your record, like three months? A season and a half, maybe?”

  “Yeah, your husband’s a jerk because I’m single.”

  “No, but life doesn’t happen in a vacuum is what I’m saying. There’s stuff and sometimes stuff gets complicated. And depressing. That’s why he’s being—that’s why he’s sometimes being a jerk. He’s depressed. He’s stressed-out and he’s making some mistakes.” I took a sip from Simon’s glass, as mine was empty.

  He glared at me, then looked away through the kitchen window, disgusted.

  I shrugged. “What? Should I just throw in the towel? This money thing is just how he grew up—always barely scraping by. It’s a security blanket, I think. It makes sense. And now Patrick wants children. He’s not wrong. We started talking about it ages ago. It’s probably time. And it’s normal. I know he can’t very well be mad at me over it, but that it hasn’t happened yet after all the articles we’ve read and with us counting the days for timing—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Please.” Simon warded off any more words with his palm in my face. “You’re still my sister, and I really don’t need to think about you and Patrick timing—things.”

  “Anyway, it’s grating on him. His rational mind has agreed to schedule things, but maybe his ego hasn’t. He just needs to feel, you know, potent. He wants to know that he’s still got it.” Neither Patrick nor Simon knew that I was swallowing birth control pills on the sly, every evening, just in case the timing of things actually worked. My mother never knew the chain of thought she’d kicked off with one comment about the merits of accidents over of course.

  “Then he should go to therapy. Or get a dog. Or make birdhouses, for God’s sake. Or how about he adjusts his nuts and acts like a grown man instead of sending flirty texts to the coffee-shop girl to distract himself ? That’s just obnoxious. And he’s got the stones to siphon money off the bank account? Just leaving you would be better than all that sneaking around if he can’t cope with life. I’d respect him more.”

  “Well, there you go.” I smiled mildly at my fuming brother. “Thanks for that. Your clarity is . . . what? Refreshing? I guess we should bury my marriage before it’s even cold. And anyway, maybe that’s what he’s gearing up for. Maybe he will leave me someday. Then you’ll respect him, and I’ll, I don’t know, I’ll get a cat.”

  I hated saying it out loud, hated the slithery fear that floated up through my head. My hard grip on the image of how things should be was not, for all my willfulness, holding my world to its place. But my face didn’t betray my slipping hold. My face, at least, I could still manage.

  Simon slapped his palms on the tabletop, scaring the salt and pepper shakers, but not me. “You’re not even ups
et.”

  “It’s not about being upset. It’s just the way it is. I’m trying to handle it maturely. Like a normal person. And Patrick’s still trying, you know. He is. He brought me flowers. See?” A mild bundle of dyed carnations and wilting Peruvian lilies staked out a little hopeful spot on the counter.

  I didn’t tell Simon that the floral department was right next to Deirdre’s perch at the coffee kiosk. I wondered if Patrick had timed his flower buying for her absence.

  “And we’re going to the movies tonight,” I added.

  Simon remained unimpressed.

  “I only wish I didn’t know,” I said. “I wish she hadn’t programmed us—”

  “Oh, here we go. God, Dee, give it a rest.”

  My mother would have understood. Whatever frost I felt when I hid my troubles from Simon’s plain sight, there was also the tingle of alert that began heating up my blood. And I didn’t hate it, but I hated that I didn’t hate it.

  In those early days, the signal was like the far wail of a siren. I could feel trouble in the near distance. But at turns, I’d reel with a swell of something less like concern and more like possibility. Then I’d have to reaffirm to myself that, no, damnit, I didn’t want anything other than what I had chosen.

  Then I’d look to Patrick and funnel my mood back to admiration of him—his long, rolling stride and easy laugh. Not too much; not too little. He’d catch me staring at him with a gleam of appreciation in my eyes, and he’d do that thing he sometimes did in a long look, like tossing a pebble down the well of my expression, waiting for the depths to echo back some inscrutable tone he so often seemed to expect, something that felt long overdue. But then I’d just wink, cutting the transaction short, reeling him in, and also myself, bypassing all the high-minded analysis in favor of a roll in the sheets.

  But life is in the blood, whether it’s warm or less so, and I had to admit to both life and blood pulling against my blue-ribbon stubbornness.

  Keeping tepid had become a chore.

  10

  When the penny drops, you’ve bought a dollar’s worth of trouble. It was one of my mother’s little sayings, one of several she employed to warn us against carelessness—this one specifically for carelessness with secrets.

  Everything changed for the first time on a Thursday. The memory of the whole scene is flagged THURSDAY in my mind, written in what I’d call Desperation Red. It really started on Wednesday, and had I known to break out the red highlighter for the calendar in my head, I guess that would be the tag, but I was clueless until Thursday evening.

  On Wednesday, in the afternoon before the blowup, my more-or-less in-plain-sight hiding place betrayed me when Patrick went for my hairdryer, and I was accused and convicted in a single discovery.

  The dominoes fell in this order: First (and painfully), an infant’s crib mobile kicked off the day’s calamity. Patrick had bought the plush, sweetly pastel thing as a gift for his coworker’s baby shower. Then an overachieving bit of adhesive had welded the price sticker onto the package. The label wouldn’t peel off with just his fingernails, and the soft plastic shell discouraged the use of a sharp scraper. The last thing to fall, finally, once he realized he wasn’t going to be able to wrap it up the way it was packaged, was the treat of a silver lining—the whole snag offered up an opportunity to deploy the recently mined Internet tip to hold a hairdryer’s stream over any stubborn tags to remove them cleanly.

  All for the want of a horseshoe nail . . .

  Thursday’s groceries were going into the pantry and I was singing as I worked. I hadn’t seen Patrick all day. He’d left earlier than usual, while I was still showering. No good-bye peck. No coffee made. No returned call when I’d checked to see if he needed anything from the store.

  I turned, and unlike on the last pass from the counter to the cupboards, the view through to the backyard was full of a grim-looking Patrick. My song yelped to a halt and my squawk rolled into a laugh as I caught up with my startle. “Hey! There you are. I thought you’d run off to join the cir—”

  Patrick tossed a bubbled card onto the counter, and I had the reprieve of one breath, one last second of not feeling like a terrible person as I looked at the clattery foil and plastic that had been rendered completely unfamiliar by being so out of place. At first, I had no idea what I was looking at.

  It stopped spinning on the granite, and the shame dragged down as the panic spiked up, holding me rigidly upright in the tug-of-war.

  “What?” I flailed for just another plain white moment before what came next.

  “I found these. Under the sink.”

  “Where did you even—? These must be ancient.”

  “Don’t, Dee. Just don’t. I found them yesterday. There’s one more gone today.”

  And the day was tagged THURSDAY forever.

  • • •

  I’d sidestepped my regular ob-gyn for the prescription, which had worked out just fine for ages until the pharmacies began sharing drug information across the grid. After that little breakthrough of technology and intrusion, every doctor knew what every other doctor was prescribing to safeguard their patients (and their malpractice insurance premiums) against substance abuse and unpleasant-to-fatal chemical interactions.

  “I thought you two were trying for a baby?” Dr. Wertz said at my next appointment. “When you were here last time, he was with you. I even wrote you a prescription for vitamins.”

  “We are,” I said, bending the blindingly obvious into absurdity.

  Dr. Wertz blinked at me.

  “I mean, we will be. Soon.”

  “I remember he was a little worried that something was wrong since it hadn’t happened yet. You have to tell him, Dee.”

  “I’m not going to take them for much longer.”

  “You know, the next thing would be testing you for ovulation if he wants to know why it’s still not working. I don’t know how we’re going to get around that one, and I won’t thank you for putting me in that position. It’s going to come out anyway.”

  “I know. I’m just . . .” What was I just? Reluctant was too weak a word; unwilling was too strong. My reasons were there, just on the back of my tongue, trying to arrange themselves into something that sounded like sense, but Wertz was a gynecologist, not a shrink. I kept quiet, and his face showed that I looked more like a stubborn enigma than the woman he’d known for years.

  He let it go with a sigh, and I trusted the net of patient confidentiality. The net held, but my tightrope didn’t.

  • • •

  The birth control pills had been stashed away in an old box of hot-oil hair treatments that I had kept through two moves for no other reason than that I’d paid for them. They didn’t work as advertised and left my hair a sad, limp mess, but by God they were mine, a fixture in the landscape of my toiletries. The skyline of boxes under the sink wouldn’t look right without it. The carton had flipped over, spilling its secret across my bathroom cabinet’s floor when Patrick rummaged for my hairdryer.

  It was a completely traceable pain. I could step back through each casual choice I’d made, each assumption that I’d used to cover my tracks to keep it all a secret—my plan and my reasons to stall baby-making. It was so ridiculous that I hadn’t thought it through better or even opted to be a better person in the first place, an honest person.

  But I wasn’t rejecting Patrick. I only wanted more time. And that would have spurred the inevitable question of what in my life needed more time. Then, the answer to that, sadly, meant acknowledging my decision to play to a picture of life instead of playing to the actual game of it as it came. All of which chased the tail of not rejecting Patrick. It was going to be hard to explain, so I figured I could wait it out until there wasn’t anything to explain. I would get over my doubts, surely, or . . . or what? I didn’t know. I’d never got all the way there. I’d always let distraction drag me away from getting to the heart of the “or what?”

  If I’d only done this or only said that, then an
errant snag of a hairdryer’s cord could just have been a mild chore of putting my toiletries back in order instead of a full-on life derailment.

  That Thursday, the fight was quieter than I would have guessed it would be, but there were tears of the worst kind. Patrick was humiliated. I had never seen him go more than red in the nose and shiny at the eyes at sad movies.

  “Why would you do this? Why would you let me think—” Breathless, he stopped and heaved in a lungful of air past the tears in his throat. “What are we doing this for?”

  I opened my mouth, knowing there were no words waiting, only mute dismay.

  Patrick pushed away from the table and staggered out of the room toward our bedroom. He pushed the door shut without a slam. Something hit the wall with a leathery thump, heavy, but not too big. His day planner? A shoe?

  Then he was quiet.

  I was hollowed out, echoey. I could float away on any current, but the unbreathable air wouldn’t move. It left me there at the table, knowing I should go into the bedroom to pad my apology with at least some effort to explain.

  I don’t know why I didn’t insist on reeling in that moment. I didn’t heed the warning of his embarrassment. Later, over and over, I would revisit the memory of his flushed face and my own hesitation and wonder if this hadn’t been the moment I lost, the all-important one that got away.

  But I was distracted from my guilt, my thoughts returning over and over to the unexpected restraint he’d shown in not confronting me the evening before when he had first found the pills. His quite-justifiable anger should have been in my face as soon as I walked through the door on Wednesday. That he’d waited to see if I was taking the pills was cleverer and cooler than I knew him to be. I’d thought it was in his DNA. He couldn’t even wait a day to give a present if he’d shopped before an anniversary or birthday. It was one of the things I loved about him. I thought he was always direct with me. I thought I would never have to consider hide-and-seek to feel at home.