“Yeah . . . I guess that’s it.”
“I’ve got a great therapist for you. She has helped a lot of my patients.”
“With this sort of thing?” Josie asked. “Do a lot of your patients have this happen?”
The doctor’s answer was stunning: “I see it almost every week.”
It really was an epidemic, Josie thought.
“Is there anything else you need?” the doctor asked.
Josie recalled those moments in the dark when her chest had felt so tight and heavy that breathing was difficult. “I was wondering if I could get a prescription for Xanax, too.”
“Absolutely. Just don’t mix them with alcohol, and be careful about driving if you take more than a quarter milligram. I’ll phone in the script now.”
“Thank you,” Josie said.
“And Josie? Call the therapist today. She books up quickly.”
• • •
This is what it would be like if we were divorced.
Josie rolled the thought around in her mind as she lay in bed, staring into the dark. Beside her, Zoe slept on—she’d crawled in sometime around two in the morning—but the queen-sized mattress still felt too large without Frank’s big body sprawled across it. He was a restless sleeper; once, early on in their relationship, Josie had awoken shivering. She’d tried to tug a corner of the comforter over herself, but it was twisted around Frank, as if he were in the process of wrestling it. She’d given up and plastered herself up against Frank, soaking in his body heat. From then on, she’d always kept an extra comforter folded at the foot of the bed.
But she’d rarely needed it, because Frank was better than a hot water bottle. No matter how icy her feet were, he never shied away when she pressed them against his legs.
The bedroom felt cold again, even with warm little Zoe next to her. The thermostat was programmed to turn up the heat at six thirty, but that was still a half hour away. Josie reached down to tug the second comforter over both of them.
She lay there until light began to slowly seep in through the slatted blinds she hadn’t fully closed. Then she eased out of bed and turned off her alarm.
Frank’s sheets and blanket were folded neatly at the end of the couch when she walked through the living room on her way to the kitchen. She knew he’d brought his toiletries down to the basement shower, which was only partially finished, and that he had stored some clothes down there, too.
Frank was at the kitchen table, in the same chair she’d used when she’d called Ron. This gave her a tinge of satisfaction. She, too, had secrets now.
“Hi,” Frank said. He gestured to the platter in front of him. “I made some pancakes for everyone.”
She couldn’t meet his eyes, so she just nodded in his general direction. Then she grabbed a mug, filled it with coffee, and went back upstairs to rouse the girls.
They couldn’t go on like this for much longer. She needed to tell Frank he had to move out. She’d do it tonight.
• • •
But Frank caught Josie by surprise when he came home early from work. She was on her knees, cleaning out the refrigerator, scrubbing hard at an old ketchup stain with a sponge soaked in hot water.
“Oh, honey, you don’t have to do that—I mean, I would have,” Frank said.
Josie blew away the hair that had escaped from her ponytail and was dangling in front of her eyes. So much for her plan to do the bare minimum around the house. She’d begun that way this morning after she’d fed the kids Frank’s pancakes and had taken them to school. She’d spent hours in bed staring at game shows, until a pretty young contestant was chosen on The Price Is Right. “What’s your name, darling?” Drew Carey had asked the young woman as she’d jumped up and down. “Dana,” she’d squealed.
In an instant, Josie had leapfrogged from inertia directly into a tornado of energy. She’d thrown aside the covers, feeling a compulsion to sort through the kitchen cabinets and throw away any cans that had passed their expiration dates. She’d also washed, dried, and folded three loads of laundry before turning her attention to the refrigerator.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Don’t what?”
“Call me honey.”
“Sorry.” Frank set down his briefcase on the floor next to the kitchen table. “Do you— Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Hang on,” she said. She walked into the living room, where the girls were watching Wild Kratts, turned up the volume, and returned to the kitchen.
Frank cocked his head to the right. “Could we go upstairs?”
What now? Josie thought. But she just pushed past him and went up to their bedroom without looking back to see whether he was following.
She crossed the threshold into the room they’d once shared and stood there, her arms folded. It felt too intimate to have Frank in here. To be alone with him in the space where they’d undressed and cuddled and made love.
He seemed to grasp this, and he paused about a foot away from the entryway.
“So?” Josie prodded.
“I’ve been reading a lot about affairs,” Frank said. He rubbed the toe of his right shoe into the carpet. “I, uh, haven’t really been able to work. So I’m Googling articles and reading stuff on HuffPost—there’s so much stuff there, you wouldn’t believe it—and I bought a few books, and—”
“Frank.”
He nodded. “Right, the point. So I need to be completely honest with you. It’s only fair to you. I need to answer your questions truthfully.”
It was all she’d wanted. Yet she felt a quiver of fear at his words.
“What do you need to tell me?”
He looked down at his toe. It had made a track in the carpet by now. Josie would have to run the vacuum over it several times to erase it.
“Just tell me, Frank!”
She was so tired of wondering what else was out there, of waiting for the next avalanche to hit her.
“It was those five nights, that part is true,” Frank said quietly. He met her eyes. “We didn’t have sex but, ah, we did other things. It was purely physical. I didn’t care about her at all.”
“How long did you kiss?” Josie demanded.
Another pause. “Maybe an hour the first two times, when we were at the hotel,” Frank said. “Less on the other nights.”
“An hour?” Josie repeated.
He nodded miserably. “I know.”
“Where did you go on the other nights?” Josie asked.
Frank squeezed his eyes shut before speaking. “We were in my car one time. We went to the house of one of her friends who was out of town the other two times.”
“There is something wrong with you,” Josie hissed because she couldn’t scream.
Tears filled Frank’s eyes. “I know.”
“Did you buy her a Christmas present?” Josie asked.
“What? No. I swear. It wasn’t like that. She didn’t mean anything to me.”
“So it was just about the fooling around. That doesn’t make it any better, Frank.” Josie’s fists clenched at her sides. The rage swelled inside her, spiraling upward, filling her lungs and thickening her throat. “I want to hurt you.”
“I wish you would,” Frank responded. “I deserve it.”
“You just did these things with her, then you came home to me and never gave any indication that anything was wrong! What kind of a person does that?”
“I’m going to get help,” Frank said. “I called a marriage therapist today. Would you consider going with me?”
“No!” Josie said. “There isn’t any marriage to fix. You would’ve slept with her if I hadn’t found out.”
Frank’s features crumpled. “You are probably right.”
“What did you spend the four hundred dollars on in Atlantic City?”
Frank physically recoiled. “What— How did you know about that?”
Josie just stared at him.
“I gambled,” he said. “Blackjack. It was stupid. I started out winning,
then I lost it all on a few big hands, and I thought . . .”
His voice trailed off. Then: “And I told you another lie.”
Something icy wrapped around Josie. She nodded for Frank to continue.
“When I dropped the kids off with Maggie that first day and I told you I was out looking for you . . . I, ah . . . I wasn’t. I went into my office because I thought I had Dana’s number there. I wanted to reach her to tell her you had my cell phone. But I couldn’t find it so I just came home.”
Of all the things he might have said, this felt relatively innocuous. But it didn’t make sense, Josie thought, frowning. “You had her email address there, though.”
“Yeah, I sent her an email but I knew she probably wouldn’t check it until she got back into the office on Tuesday,” Frank said.
Josie regarded him. There was no reason for him to reveal that information. Perhaps Frank was finally being truthful with her. And Dana would not have confessed to the five encounters had she and Frank communicated.
“You didn’t have sex.” Josie couldn’t complete the sentence. She didn’t want to say Dana’s name.
“Absolutely not,” Frank said.
Her anger ebbed. Frank looked awful. He’d definitely lost weight, and his face seemed to be suddenly etched with lines. He was truly sorry; no one could fake such pain.
“Jos . . .” His voice was a plea. Perhaps he could read the softening in her stance. He took a step toward her.
An hour of making out, like teenagers who were madly in love and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It had been ages since Frank had kissed her like that. She would never be able to look at him again without that vision intruding.
“No!” she cried. She jerked back. “You need to move out. Go find an apartment or something.”
She expected Frank to protest, to fall to his knees again and beg. But he didn’t. His posture sagged as he kept looking at her.
“I learned from the books that I need to respect whatever you want,” he said. “So I will. But Josie, I’m going to spend every single day showing you how much I love you and the girls and how much I want you back. You three are the only people who matter to me. I know I didn’t act that way. But I’m going to prove it to you.”
“It’s too late.”
She turned and walked into the bedroom, shutting the door. She walked directly to her dresser and opened her jewelry box. Then she took off her slim gold wedding band, wincing as it scraped across her knuckle, and placed it on the blue velvet.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
* * *
THE THERAPIST’S EYES WERE large and soft. They seemed to regard Josie without agenda or judgment.
Her office was in the basement of her home, which made going to the appointment less intimidating than it would have felt if Josie had to visit an impersonal building. To get to the private entrance, Josie followed a stone path that wound through a side yard filled with herb gardens and a bird fountain.
When Josie walked through the door, she saw two chairs and a small table containing magazines in the waiting area. Even the magazines were nonthreatening and homey: Reader’s Digest, Cooking Light, and Highlights for Children.
When the therapist opened the door to her inner office, Josie glimpsed a cozy-looking beige couch, a coffee table, and a fabric-covered chair in the main seating area. A far corner held a wooden desk and a second chair. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with heavy volumes addressing various psychological issues: coping with anxiety, raising explosive children, thriving in the aftermath of divorce.
Josie sat down on the couch and put a crimson chenille throw pillow on her lap, running her fingers over the soothing fabric. The therapist—“Call me Sonya,” she’d said during the initial phone call—settled into the chair and crossed her legs at the ankles. She gave Josie a smile. Her voice and manner were unhurried. “What brings you here?”
Josie looked into Sonya’s understanding eyes and began to tell her story, the words streaming out of her like water from a faucet.
“I asked him to leave,” Josie concluded. “But I don’t know if I want a divorce right now. How would I tell the girls?”
Sonya nodded. “You need some space from Frank, so you’ve asked him to leave. That’s a good step.”
Sonya spoke slowly and soothingly. Her hands remained still in her lap. Her gentle eyes were steady on Josie. The tight knot Josie didn’t realize she’d been carrying around in her chest eased a bit.
“It’s hard to feel all this uncertainty.” Josie reached for a tissue from the box on the coffee table and dabbed at her eyes. “I keep bracing myself for Frank to unload another bombshell. And when I think about divorce and what it will do to the girls, I just feel frozen. But I can’t even bear to look at Frank. How could I ever be married to him again?”
Sonya nodded again and Josie had the feeling that no matter what she said, Sonya would validate her. Not even Josie’s revelation about calling Ron had provoked a reaction. But then, Sonya saw women like her every single week.
“You don’t have to decide that this minute,” Sonya said. “All you know right now is that you need more time to decide. That’s okay. That’s good. You’re going to take the time and make a careful decision.”
They talked for a while longer, then Sonya told Josie their time was up. “For your homework this week, I want you to do three things that used to make you happy. Can you do that?”
“I can’t imagine anything making me happy right now.”
“Three things,” Sonya repeated. “Tell me what you did during our next meeting.”
• • •
Getting dressed for a night out when your relationship had just shattered felt very different from when you were married.
Gone were the moments when Josie would look across the bedroom and realize Frank was putting on jeans and a black shirt, just as she was, and they’d have to negotiate who was going to change. She had no one to help her zip up, or tell her to go with the polka-dot dress instead of the navy one.
Josie held a scoop-neck, cream-colored shirt up against herself and looked in the mirror, wondering whether it would make her look even paler. She always grew pasty during the depths of the Chicago winter. She decided she could pull it off with some extra blush on her cheeks, then she pulled on her favorite jeans.
They were loose. She pulled out the waistband with her thumbs, noticing she had at least two inches of extra space. She walked into the bathroom and stepped on the scale. She’d lost nine pounds without any effort at all.
She assumed it was mostly water weight, but when she tried on her pair of skinny jeans from the bottom of the stack in her dresser, they fit perfectly, even though they were a size smaller than Josie was used to wearing.
She looked in the mirror. Her collarbones seemed more defined, as did her cheekbones. She’d been eating less than usual, but not so much as to make such a pronounced difference. It must be the adrenaline surge she’d been experiencing; it had probably boosted her metabolism.
Josie thought of the woman she’d encountered outside the preschool, the one whose husband had had an affair. I get it now, Josie thought. She wished she hadn’t recoiled from the woman’s explosion of information. She should have stepped closer and put her hand on the woman’s arm, as Karin had done. That’s how she would have treated a victim of a car wreck who was in shock.
But maybe Josie had recoiled because she recognized, on an instinctual level, that she had come too close to a dangerous truth.
She wouldn’t think about that now. She was going for drinks with Karin and Amanda—a night out with the girls was one of her happy things—and she needed to act even-keeled, because she wasn’t sure yet if she was going to tell Amanda about the affair.
Amanda was a genuinely kind woman, utterly without malice or guile. She never spoke a bad word about anyone. She also had a genius-level IQ, a fact Josie had pried out of her when she’d learned Amanda had gone to college at sixteen.
But Amanda occasionally lacked a filter, and she was incapable of keeping a secret. She never meant to violate anyone’s trust, but she had a habit of repeating information without consideration of how such news would be received.
“She’s completely clueless, but we love her anyway” was Karin’s take on Amanda.
Josie paired the cream top with her skinny jeans and camel-colored boots, then applied more makeup than she usually wore, swiping on two coats of mascara and stroking highlighter over her cheekbones. Her mother’s voice intruded in her mind with an admonition Josie had heard her say at least a dozen times: If you look good, then you can’t help but feel good. Josie answered: I haven’t looked this good in years, Mom, and I feel like complete crap. That seemed to end the conversation in her head, so Josie went downstairs.
Frank was cleaning up the dinner dishes. He turned at the sound of her boots tapping against the floor as she approached.
“I’m heading out,” she said. Zoe was practicing writing her spelling words at the kitchen table, and Izzy was playing with her Bratz dolls in the next seat over.
“I love you girls,” Josie said, dropping a kiss on each of their foreheads.
“You’re going out again?” Zoe asked.
It was only her second night this week—and her third night of the past month—but the girls always took note when she was gone. By now they were used to the fact that Daddy traveled for work and didn’t get home from the office until dinnertime. They were far more sanguine about his changing schedule than they were about Josie’s.
“Mommy deserves a night out with her friends,” Frank said.
Josie ignored him and answered the girls for herself. “Just for a bit. I’ll kiss you good night when I come in, even if you’re asleep.”
She scooped up her purse from where it was hanging on the back of Zoe’s chair.
“You look nice,” Frank said.
The Ever After Page 13
