The Good Widow_A Novel

by Liz Fenton

  “Jacks! Wait!”

  I sprint away from the sound of Nick’s voice, my feet cutting through the sand, my sandals dangling precariously from my hand. The thing is, I can’t wait. I need to get as far away as possible from the news I’ve just heard. Maybe, if I keep moving, I can outrun the truth. Dylan had been pregnant. I can’t deny the possibility that James might have been the father. And my biggest fear has been confirmed: my own omission may have been the glue that bound their relationship.

  I trip over a pile of flip-flops that lie in the sand awaiting their owners—the sunset booze cruises just docked on shore. My right knee slides into the sand, and I quickly manage to heave myself back up.

  It’s amazing how agile desperation can make you.

  I glance back to see Nick jogging behind me. There’s no doubt his pace is deliberately slow, that his strong legs barely feel the burn that mine already do. But, wisely, he keeps his distance as I barrel toward the black rocks on the north end of Ka‘anapali Beach. We both know I’m running myself into a corner. That he will catch up to me.

  It’s hard to let go of who you thought you were. Take me, for instance. I’ve always considered myself a decent person. I teach the youth of America. I like animals and babies. I cheered when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. But I now realize that those were the easy choices. That just because you aren’t a complete asshole that hates kids and kittens, it doesn’t mean that you’re good. It simply means that you aren’t bad. And it’s that in-between area that gets tricky. I’d never thought James and I had a bad marriage. He didn’t verbally abuse me; I didn’t nag him. He’d only gotten physical once. But had it been good? Not really. We existed somewhere in between. In the middle of the screaming and the love.

  I begin to slow down as I approach the black rocky peninsula that marks my dead end, unless I want to attempt to scale the wet, slippery, sharp rocks—which will definitely not end well. The sun has just set, and darkness begins to sweep the ocean. I take a left turn and walk into it, the waves lapping my calves. A few steps farther, and the water teases the hem of my yellow sundress, the one that James told me made my skin sparkle. If you really think about it, his compliment didn’t make sense. Eyes could sparkle, but skin? But James had a way of romancing his words, of making the false seem true.

  I feel Nick’s hand grab mine when the water reaches my torso.

  “Jacks.” He tugs me gently. I’m taking a postsunset swim in my perky dress after I discover my husband got his mistress pregnant, and Nick doesn’t know what to do. I don’t blame him. I don’t know what to do either. Do I keep moving into the deeper water, hoping the searing pain I’m feeling dissipates as my head goes under? That the silence under the sea will quiet my demons?

  “Jacks! Come on!”

  I shake my head as the first tears hit my chin. “I’m not ready.” And it’s true. I’m not. In my mind, the shore is where reality lives. Here, in the sea, I still have the choice to float away, to leave all this bullshit behind. I shake my hand free from his and take two steps toward the skyline—the lingering orange and red hues from the sunset muted. The sky will be completely black soon. I’m ready for the darkness to consume me.

  Nick curls his arms tightly under my legs and pushes forcefully through the water toward the beach. I struggle, but I have no chance of breaking free; I’m no match for his strong grip.

  Nick puts his mouth to my ear as he carries me. “Shh,” he whispers over and over, the same chant I used to calm my nephew when he was an infant. I’d pace the living room as my sister slept, her exhaustion finally forcing her to call and ask for my help. I’d rocked him back and forth until he calmed. In Nick’s hold, I’m much like my nephew, succumbing to the calming sounds, losing my will to struggle and becoming limp as he sets me gently on the sand.

  I wrap my hands around my knees, licking my salty tears, and Nick and I sit side by side on the sand for quite a while, listening to the soft waves lapping onto the shore. Finally I work up the courage to ask Nick the one question I need an answer to. “How can you be so sure the baby wasn’t yours?” After the bartender told us Dylan had been pregnant, Nick assured me he wasn’t the father.

  Nick takes a long pause, running his wet hand through his hair, leaving a trail of sand at his hairline. “We hadn’t had sex in at least two months.”

  “Oh,” I say, thinking about my sex life with James. We used to have sex every few days, but it had slowed in the past two years. Still, we never went more than a few weeks, no matter how bad things were. It was that addiction we had to each other. That need to be physically intertwined even when we were emotionally fragmented. “I had no idea.”

  “It’s not something you brag about.” Nick looked away.

  “Does it make it any easier?” I ask gently, feeling terrible that I wish it had been his and not James’s. Because it would make things better for me.

  “Because the baby wasn’t mine?”

  I nod.

  “I don’t know. I think I’m just numb at this point. And I’ve got to keep my shit together right now—especially when you’re out there pulling a Virginia Woolf.”

  I laugh softly. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t think you were a literary type.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me yet.” He offers me a sad smile, and I reach over and grab his hand, sand rubbing between our palms.

  “So, tell me then.”

  He thinks for a minute. “I make a mean Italian wedding soup. I broke my leg skiing when I was nineteen. And I do love to read—everything from Stephen King to Hemingway.”

  “Well, for the record, I wasn’t trying to drown myself out there.” I stare out at the dark water. “I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to get away from this.” I wave my hand in the air, not sure what I’m pointing at. Him. Me. The hotel. Maui. All of it.

  “I know,” Nick says, somehow understanding what I mean even when I’m not sure I do. “And I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I convinced you to come. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t know these things. You wouldn’t have to go through this.”

  “It’s not your fault. Maybe this is how it had to be. Maybe we needed to know.”

  I let go of his hand and lie back on the sand, letting the cool granules overtake my wet skin. The stars are beginning to emerge, and I trace my finger around the Big Dipper, remembering when James and I lay on this beach on our honeymoon and did the same thing. “It’s right there,” he said, grabbing my hand and guiding it. “How can you not see it?”

  “I do! I do!” I laughed and pointed up. But I hadn’t seen the stars connect the same way he had. I just didn’t want to disappoint him. I hated to do that. Disappoint people.

  I close my eyes to turn the stars off. They know too much.

  “Hey,” I hear Nick say.

  I open my eyes and stare up at him.

  “You look cold. Your arms are covered in goose bumps.”

  Suddenly I realize how cold I am. I sit up and wrap my arms around my knees.

  I feel Nick’s arm around my shoulder. “This okay? Or does it feel like that terrible hug?” he asks, and I want to laugh, to go back in time to when we were sitting on the deck of my hotel room with no clue about Dylan’s baby. But my sobs. They’re sitting so high up in my throat that it burns to push them down. So instead we sit in silence.

  “It’s not our fault, you know,” he finally says. “This. Them. The pregnancy. These were choices they made, for whatever reason. This isn’t about you—or me.”

  I could nod and pretend I agree. I could let Nick believe his own words. But I can’t. I have to tell someone.

  “You’re right. It isn’t about you. But it is about me,” I say.

  Nick shakes his head vehemently. “You can’t blame yourself.”

  “Actually I can,” I say, and begin to tell him why.

  I’d kept a critical piece of information from James while we were dating. Something he had a
right to know, but that I didn’t tell him because he might not have married me if I had.

  When I was twenty-one, I was diagnosed with severe endometriosis. I’d been bleeding abnormally and finally went to see my ob-gyn, who, after an ultrasound, grimly delivered the news: scar tissue had developed around my ovaries and could keep eggs from being released. Pregnancy would be difficult. Unlikely.

  “How unlikely?” I’d asked. I was so young. At an age when not getting pregnant was the priority. I wasn’t that concerned. My only experience with babies had been when I’d babysat. And all I remembered was drool, poop, and crying.

  Dr. Reynolds narrowed her green eyes. I’ll never forget their color—like moss on the back of a wet rock. “You might have a twenty percent chance of conceiving.”

  “So I have a twenty percent chance?” I was naive. Twenty percent seemed doable. Plus, my reproductive prospects at that time were limited to a guy I’d met at a dive bar in Redondo Beach who used the word legit to answer almost any question. Back then, a family seemed so far away. So surreal.

  James brought up having kids on our first date. I’d smiled and thought how different he was from the other men I’d dated recently—whose noses scrunched up if the word baby was mentioned, even in passing. He brought it up more seriously the night after he proposed. We were lying in bed, me wrapped around him. At that time I was like a sponge, desperate to soak up every drop he gave me. I’d sleep with my body pressed up against his each night, our legs twisted like a pretzel.

  “So, when do you think we should start?”

  “Start what?” I asked. Things I thought he’d respond with: training for the 5K he’d mentioned, getting our real estate licenses to flip houses because that was all the rage back then, or saving for a trip to Italy we’d talked about.

  What he actually responded with: “A baby.” Then before I could respond, he continued on. “How many kids do you want? I’d like three, maybe four.”

  The conversation with my doctor came rushing back. The way she’d looked at me like I didn’t understand the seriousness of what she was saying—that there was an 80 percent chance I couldn’t have a baby. The way I’d looked at her like she didn’t understand how young I was, how that wasn’t something I was even thinking about.

  I was so devastatingly ignorant.

  But now my future husband wanted to know when I could make him a father. Not if. He kept going, telling me about how he wanted to give his mom a bunch of grandkids.

  And I wanted nothing more than to do just that—I was dying to see if our brood would inherit his brilliant-green eyes, the deep dimple on his right cheek, the shallow one on his left. Or would they possess my dark hair and quiet intensity? I felt desperate to know.

  “Oh!” I responded in surprise.

  James’s eyes narrowed. “I know that’s a lot of kids. But you’d be a great mom, and I’m going to be a dad who’s totally invested. I want to coach their sports, teach them to swim, everything.”

  My silence must have concerned him, because he grabbed my hands and gave me the most serious look I’d seen from him at that point. “I should have told you something sooner. I had a younger brother who died when I was six. He had leukemia. My mom was going to have more children, but after he passed away she just couldn’t do it. She was so afraid of losing another child. And my dad, he was so upset. We’re Costa Rican. We have big families. My dad has five brothers. I have so many cousins, I forget their names.” He laughed gently. “I just feel compelled to continue our bloodline for him.”

  I was beginning to see the downside of a whirlwind romance. In the few months we’d been together, we’d been busy falling in love and having fun, not discussing important details like this.

  And now, after he’d told me his heart-wrenching story, how could I share mine? Because that would have been the time to do it. If I’d been honest, if I’d just repeated the three words my doctor had said to me—20 percent chance—would he have scooped me up in his arms and told me those odds were good enough for him?

  I’ll never know.

  I guess I was afraid he wouldn’t say that. That he’d leave me. And I loved him. God, how I loved him. And I wanted to be his wife. And I wanted to be a mom. And there was a chance. Maybe not for multiple kids, but at least for one. Because I could be that one in five.

  And if I wasn’t, I thought the longer we were together, the more it upped my chances—not necessarily of having a baby, but of keeping him. Because I loved him in a way I’d never loved anyone. He got under my skin in the best and worst ways. So instead of telling him what I’d heard as I sat on my ob-gyn’s table in my paper robe, I said, “Four kids sounds wonderful.”

  Because it was true; it would be.

  But we didn’t have four kids. The only four we experienced was the number of years that went by without children.

  It was New Year’s Eve when I finally told him. We’d been married for a little over three years at that point. Lots of unprotected sex had been had. There was no baby. James wanted answers. And for some reason, at 11:58 p.m. as one year was about to turn into the next, I decided to give them to him. I couldn’t start off another year with lies.

  Let’s just say we didn’t kiss at midnight. Or for a while after that.

  James was so angry. I’d never seen him that mad before. He called me a liar. He said I’d trapped him. That he’d have never married me if he’d known. I cried. And when I screamed at him that he’d only wanted me for my offspring, he told me I was the biggest mistake he’d ever made, and if it wouldn't cost him half his 401k, he’d have divorced me. He shattered the mirror hanging on the wall next to me with his fist, and I retreated into a stunned silence. And suddenly our argument shifted into what he’d done instead of what I’d done. And I let it. He finally apologized profusely, literally down on his knees, and swore to me he was sorry if he’d scared me. That he wasn’t violent. That he didn’t mean what he said. I chose to believe him.

  Our marriage was never the same again. We were a broken version of what we’d once been. I’d betrayed him. He’d told me I was a mistake while shards of glass splintered in the air around me. Neither of us could undo the terrible thing we’d done. And he changed. The man I’d said my vows to was replaced by some other guy, a guy I didn’t like very much.

  But I tolerated him. Because I’d made him like that. The temper. I had given it a reason to take up residence in our relationship. The holes he made in the wall with his fist? The broken objects he smashed in a rage? The angry words he couldn’t take back? Those things represented the children he’d never have.

  We went to specialists—reproductive endocrinologists, holistic healers, psychics. We tried acupuncture, hypnotherapy, in vitro fertilization.

  And with each negative pregnancy test, the space between us grew wider. He was adamant about not wanting to adopt. The children needed to be his. One of the times we fought about it was when I printed a bunch of information about international adoption off the Internet. He ripped it to shreds. I fell to the floor, picking up the pieces of paper, shutting my eyes and trying to conjure the man I’d fallen in love with. The one who used to bring me two pints of my favorite ice cream on his way home from work every Friday night because he knew one wouldn’t be enough. The man who’d written me a poem and recited it to me on our second anniversary. The husband who’d once told me when we were playing one of those what-if games that he’d still love me even if I lost all my hair in a freak accident.

  On the last morning I saw him, our recurring argument happened again. It came up every 28 days or 280 days, depending on when he chose to wield it like a weapon in his arsenal. And that particular morning he’d found the test in the trash can. I thought I’d buried it deep enough down under tissues. But I’d been in a daze when I tossed it. Because I’d been so sure that I finally might be pregnant. I’d been in this fertility yoga class for a few months. And I felt different, so different that I actually bought a test instead of waiting for my period to
show up as it always did. But then, after I’d peed, there it was, that single pink line.

  And I’d been so mad at myself for telling him. For letting him hope with me. I’d shared the changes I’d felt in my body—the tender breasts, the cramps in my lower abdomen. And I had felt all those things. But they’d been phantom pregnancy symptoms. A surprisingly common occurrence in women who are waiting to take a test, I’d learned when I looked it up. After I’d stared at the white plastic in my hand, my hopes crushed when that single pink line appeared. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. To confess that my body had failed us once more. But I’d planned to—when the time was right.

  He came flying into the bedroom with his white knuckles around that stick.

  “Goddamn it, Jacks! I thought you were sure this time! When were you going to tell me it was negative?”

  I sat up tall in the bed and tried to collect the right words. That I hadn’t told him because I couldn’t bear to disappoint him again. That when that lonely pink line appeared, I had lain on the bathroom floor and given up. On myself. On the notion that we could create a baby together. On us. And I was terrified that he would see it all on my face. So I had said nothing.

  “James, I was going to tell you . . .”

  “Enough with the fucking lies!”

  Like an allergic reaction to his roaring voice, tears spilled from my eyes.

  “How could you do this to me? You were so sure. I even told my mom there might be a chance.”

  I flung the sheets back from my body and got up on my knees on the mattress, absorbing his words. His pain.

  Looking back, I wish that I’d thrown my arms around his neck and told him I was just as disappointed. That I had felt a swishing in my abdomen when my period hadn’t shown on the twenty-eighth day, and that I told myself that flutter could be the child that would bring us salvation—from my deceit, from his anger. But instead of comforting him with my own intense sadness, I attacked.

  “To you?” I waved my arms across my abdomen. “I’m in this too, in case you’ve forgotten. You will never understand how much I suffer every single time it doesn’t happen. And I’m sorry. So very sorry I didn’t tell you before we got married that there is so much scar tissue around my ovaries that this whole area is most likely shot.” I pointed at my stomach again, my cheeks burning from a mix of anger and embarrassment.