The Marriage Lie

by Kimberly Belle

  “Hey, Iris,” my neighbor Celeste calls from across the street. She gestures to the flowers I’ve planted to replace the bushes the police and press flattened. “Looks pretty.”

  I brush off my hands and push to a stand. “Thanks. Just trying to spruce things up before the place goes on the market tomorrow.”

  As I say the words, a sharp pain hits me in the center of the chest. Despite the millions gathering dust in a bank account, I’m selling the house. I can’t afford the mortgage on my own, and my credit cards are already maxed out paying for the care of Will’s father. I’ve moved him from that horrid facility to a private memory care center, a beautiful building with sunny rooms and a cheerful staff. The monthly bills are killing me, and though Evan assures me money won’t be a problem by the time he’s done with Liberty Air—Tiffany’s story checked out, and she even produced a few damning photographs of the bachelor party in full swing to back it up—the investigation will take months or even years to sort through. My broker assures me there’s no better time to sell than now—“It’s springtime in a booming real estate market, Iris. You’re going to get top dollar”—and it makes me want to shake her.

  I’m not selling the house for the profit, you idiot. I’m selling it because I need the cash.

  I tell myself it’s just a house, an inconsequential and inanimate thing, and losing it can’t erase the memories I made here, but it still stings. Despite my half-empty bed, despite the blood that was shed here, I don’t want to leave. Only a month ago, Will and I were trying to fill this place with babies.

  “Oh, no. You’re moving?” Celeste makes a too bad face, and her eyes dart around like goldfish. I can practically hear her thinking: Whatever will we talk about once you’re gone?

  I nod. “This place is too big for just me.”

  Another pang, just as sharp as the first. That morning of the crash, I wanted so badly to be pregnant, and I was, officially, for almost a week. Turns out I was a statistic, one of the one in ten pregnancies that ends in early miscarriage, and the crying jag lasted almost as long. I tell myself it’s better this way, that a baby would have united Will and me, inextricably and forever, in a bond much more complicated than marriage. But it still hurts to think about what could have been.

  Celeste gives me a bright smile. “We’ll sure miss having you around.”

  I’ll bet. The press seems to have finally lost interest in my story, but my neighbors haven’t. They ring my doorbell all day long, popping by with casseroles and lasagnas, peppering me with questions about That Night, hoping I’ll share a gory detail or two that they haven’t already heard on the news. My fifteen minutes of fame have made me the most popular resident in all of Inman Park.

  But just like I do now with Celeste, I smile and thank them politely, and then I move along.

  Evan calls on my cell as I’m walking into the house. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I say, and already, I’m smiling. Evan and I talk a handful of times a day, and our conversations always start like this. “What’s up?”

  “Braves versus the Cards at two, that’s what’s up. I’ve got seats behind the dugout. Wanna meet me there?”

  Yet another thing Evan and I have in common, a healthy obsession with watching sports. We’ve discovered over the course of these past few weeks that there are many more interests and quirks we share, happier, more relevant things that bind us beyond the way we lost our spouses. It’s strange, when you think about it, how the one thing that brings two people together can be the exact thing keeping them apart. Maybe one day, way, way down the line, things between Evan and me could develop into more, but not yet. Not anytime soon. Both of us have a lot more grieving to do.

  “Sure,” I say. “But it’s your turn to buy the hot—” I step into my kitchen, and there he is, there’s Will. The air rushes from my lungs.

  He’s disheveled, and he’s lost weight since I saw him last. The lines on his face are deeper, too, slashing across his forehead and cupping the sides of his mouth like parentheses. Even his hair, a dark close-clipped brown, has gone gray around the temples. But he’s still as handsome as ever. My body goes numb at the sight of him.

  “What happened?” Evan says into the phone, his tone turning serious. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” My throat is strangled, and the word doesn’t come out right. It’s blurred and formless, even in my own ears.

  The line goes quiet. “Is he there? Wait. Don’t answer that. Just...be careful, and call me later.” He hangs up.

  I drop my phone onto the counter with a clatter, my eyes never leaving Will’s. I grip the marble and wait for the violent spasm of hatred and fury at seeing him again. I brace for it, but it doesn’t come. What comes is relief, swift and sudden, and love, like a warm layer of honey around my heart. I still love this man, dammit. I’m still in love with him. Despite all the lies and betrayals, I probably always will be.

  “God, I’ve missed you,” he whispers.

  I run to him, throwing myself at him with a flying leap.

  He wasn’t expecting it. He goes back on a foot, but he catches me with a loud grunt. His hands wrap around my bottom, mine wrap around his neck, and after that I lose track of who does what. All I know is that he’s kissing me, and I’m kissing him back. Thirty-three days is the longest we’ve ever been apart.

  And then I come to my senses.

  I scramble out of his grip, rear back with an arm and smack him on the cheek as hard as I can. The flesh-on-flesh sound is loud, almost deafening in the stillness of the kitchen.

  Will doesn’t move.

  I rear back and hit him again, another hard slap where his cheek has already bloomed bright pink, the perfect shadow of my handprint.

  Will jerks a little at the contact, but he lifts his chin and waits for another. It’s almost like he wants another blow. Like he welcomes the pain.

  When I don’t rear back for a third time, his face sags. “You weren’t supposed to come looking for me. You weren’t supposed to ever find out the truth.”

  “What is the truth? Because after the past month, I’m thinking pretty much every word out of your mouth was a lie.”

  He shakes his head. “I never lied about my feelings for you. Never. That part is 100 percent true.”

  A spiked ball of pain lodges behind my heart. I look around the kitchen, at once familiar and strange, at the notes on the fridge and the pictures by the bar and the marble countertops we picked out on a weekend road trip to South Carolina, and blink back tears.

  “Yet you still chose the money over me.”

  He doesn’t nod, but he doesn’t shake his head, either. “I gave the money back. Remember?”

  “You didn’t give it back. You planted it on Corban’s computer, and for what? So the police would stop looking for you, so they’d think you were dead?”

  “I did it for you. I killed Huck for you. The police weren’t going to do it, not until they saw a weapon, but Huck was a sick bastard, and he would have snapped your neck without blinking, just because he knew I was watching. I couldn’t give him that chance.”

  Huck? I frown. “I thought Huck was living in Costa Rica.”

  “Huck is Corban. His name is Corban Huck, not Hayes.”

  And suddenly, it all makes sense. The kid who lived down the hall at Rainier Vista, the son of the woman who testified she heard three voices fighting the night of the fire, is Corban. Corban is Huck. Will’s best buddy, who was supposedly running a surfing school in Costa Rica, when he was here, in Atlanta, all along.

  The lies just keep on coming.

  I cross my arms over my chest, lean a hip against the counter and settle in. “Tell me, Will. The truth this time. I need you to tell me everything.”

  * * *

  We end up on the sectional in the den, where never, not even during the worst o
f our arguments, has there been so much air between us. Only a month ago, we would have talked everything out in the center of the couch, Will propped in the corner with me tucked under an arm. We would have held hands just because our fingers were close, would have soothed our harsh words with a caress or a kiss. But today, four couch cushions and a coffee table separate us like an impenetrable crater.

  Will leans forward, his elbows on his knees, straightening a stack of magazines on the table. Busywork while he gathers his words. Next to the pile, two bottles of icy water sweat onto their coasters in a slice of afternoon sunshine. I watch a drop gather on one of them, growing fat and heavy at the bottom, and track it on its downward descent.

  “I told myself it didn’t matter you didn’t know the whole truth about me,” Will says, still looking down. “About that part of my life, I mean. Rainier Vista. My parents. I thought it was okay to keep all that from you because I got out. I put it all behind me.” He checks my expression, trying to calibrate my reaction, and he must not like what he sees, because he frowns. “You have to know, I’m not that person anymore.”

  I hold my face and tone steady. “Who set the fire?”

  “I had nothing to do with the fire. The fire was all Huck.” When I don’t respond, Will looks away, pausing as if to give himself a silent pep talk. “But, okay, yeah. I knew what he was up to. I knew and I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t go around beating on doors, either, warning people to get out.”

  “Oh, Will...” My voice cracks into a long silence.

  He watches me, and there’s guilt in his expression. “I know. I know, okay? And for the rest of my life, I will hear that mother’s screams. I will see those two kids coming out in body bags. But, swear to God, I’m not the one who lit the match.”

  “Your mother died that night, too.”

  “That woman doesn’t deserve my tears, not after what she did.” He doesn’t sound angry or bitter, just resigned to the fact that his mother wasn’t much of one. “Ditto for the man she married.”

  “I saw him in Seattle, Will. Your father’s not well.”

  “Do you want to hear that I feel bad for him? Because I don’t, and neither should you. And you shouldn’t be paying for his care. Any man who’d wake up their kid in the middle of the night just to give him a busted lip doesn’t deserve a penny of your money. I’ve washed my hands of him, of everyone in Rainier Vista.”

  “Everyone except Huck.”

  Will shakes his head, and he leans forward on the sofa, planting his elbows on his thighs. “No. I don’t know how he found me, but our reunion was not a happy one. He didn’t give me much of a choice. He told me I had to move those stocks for him or he’d tell you everything. He was one crazy son of a bitch, but he was brilliant at knowing a person’s Achilles’ heel. He knew you were mine and how much you meant to me.”

  I close my eyes briefly, the words coming back to me in a nauseating rush. Let’s smoke that rat out of his hole. What do you say? Corban may have been the one pulling the strings, but it was Will who committed the crime. First, when he stole from AppSec, then again, when he squeezed the trigger. Just because someone was threatening him, my husband is not without blame.

  An old, familiar ache blooms in my chest, but I swallow it down. “Go on,” I say, opening my eyes. “So, what happened?”

  “You know the rest. Nick found out. I left.”

  “No, I meant, what did you think was going to happen after you moved those stocks? There’s no happily-ever-after with five million stolen dollars sitting in your bank account, Will.”

  “I know, but... I had to move the stocks. There was no other option.”

  “You could have told the truth.”

  “No. I couldn’t.” He shakes his head, quick and vicious. “You don’t understand. I’d never been with a girl like you. So smart and funny and kind. And so damn beautiful.” He looks at me, and his face cracks open. “How could I not fall for you? If for no other reason than the way you looked at me.”

  “How did I look at you?”

  “Like I was good. Like I was worthy.”

  I nod, because it’s true. I did think he was good. I thought he was worthy. It never occurred to me he was a thief or a liar or a murderer. What part of the man I loved was real? What part of us?

  I’m crying now, the tears coming hard and fast. I’ve held it together for long enough, and there’s no one here but us. There’s no reason to hold them in any longer.

  “Huck sent me texts pretending to be you.”

  “I know. It’s how I knew he was losing it. It’s why I came back.”

  “You didn’t send any of them?”

  “Only the first couple, when I tracked you and Dave to Seattle. I knew what you were doing there, and I needed you to stop. When you didn’t, when I found out what Huck was up to, I put that note in your drawer because I was worried, but otherwise...” He shakes his head. “All from him.”

  “But why?”

  “To fuck with your head or to feel out how much you knew, who knows? Most likely some combination of the two. He wasn’t exactly the most rational person on the planet.”

  “And the crash?”

  At the accusation in my tone, Will sits up a little straighter. “I had nothing to do with the crash.”

  “Then how did your name get on that manifest?”

  “I was going to Orlando, remember? I—”

  I stop him with a palm. “I talked to Jessica. There was no conference.”

  “No, but there was this guy.” He winces. “For fifty thousand bucks he’d give me a new identity, make me disappear. I was meeting him in Key West.”

  I think about that morning in bed, the way he surprised me with the ring, his expression as he slid it up my finger, and the tears well up all over again.

  I gesture for him to keep going.

  Will inhales long and deep, blows it all out. “Anyway, I’d missed my flight, so I was waiting at the gate for the next one when the Liberty plane went down. It was almost too easy. You’d be surprised how many holes there were in Liberty’s firewall, how easy it was to buy myself a ticket and get my name on the list of passengers. I didn’t realize until afterward that a plane headed to Seattle would open up a whole other can of worms.”

  I think of Susanna, clutching Emma to her chest as that plane fell from the sky, of Evan’s haunted eyes at the memorial. “Those poor people! Their poor families. And for two whole weeks, I thought you were one of them, spread in a million pieces across a cornfield. Do you know what that did to me?”

  “I do, and I’m sorry. I can’t begin to tell you how much.”

  I look down, at my hands wringing on my lap, at the two rings my husband slid up my fingers. And then I press a palm to my chest, where his ring still hangs on a chain under my shirt. “What about your ring? What about your briefcase and computer?”

  “Planted.” He winces. “People will do pretty much anything for money.”

  People like you, I think, and pain lodges like a spiky boulder in my chest. I demanded the truth, but now I want to slap my hands over my ears and unhear his words. I want to press control-alt-delete and force a restart. The truth is too much. My husband is a monster.

  “See?” he says. “You’re already doing it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking at me differently. Like you’re wondering how you ever could have loved me.”

  I fall silent, because it’s true. That’s exactly what I was wondering.

  Will looks away, his gaze landing on the framed Rolling Stones photograph I gave him last year for his birthday. “You preach about nature and nurture and those poor little rich kids you work for, and yet you can’t put yourself in my shoes. You can’t imagine what it’s like when your dad’s too busy whaling on you to hold down a job and your mom’s too d
runk to care. Or what it feels like to scarf down a sandwich of rotten mayonnaise and moldy bread and feel relief there’s something lining your belly. Your life is so far removed from that kind of hell, you can’t even picture it.”

  His words weigh heavy on my heart at the same time they harden it. Yes, experience has taught me to not blame the child for their parents’ questionable behavior. Children are the product of their parents, and crappy or nonexistent parenting skills load down a child with baggage that’s no fault of their own. I’ve said it often enough that Will knows I believe this to be true. He knows I won’t think less of him for his parents’ failures.

  But he also knows I teach my students to move past their baggage by becoming accountable. I teach them responsibility for their own actions and behaviors, to follow the rules and live up to expectations. I told Will this part, too, but just like I had been able to pick and choose what I wanted to believe about him, he was able to pick and choose what he wanted to hear.

  “I didn’t know about your life because you never told me. You didn’t even try. How can I imagine something I don’t know anything about?”

  Now, for the first time today, Will grows defensive. He lurches to the edge of the couch, and his forehead creases in a frown.

  “Come on, Iris. Get real. What would you have said if I’d told you? What if I’d taken you for coffee that very first day and told you Huck and I had a plan, a brilliant, foolproof plan to walk away with more money than we ever dreamed possible. Would you have given me your number? Would you have agreed to a second date?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “What you and Huck did was wrong, Will. To your parents, to those poor kids and their mother, to AppSec, to me. To our marriage. And what if that plane hadn’t gone down? You were just going to fly off to Florida and disappear? Did you stop for a second to think about what that would be like for me?”