by Rachel Del
We used to lie in bed talking for hours. Sometimes she would tell me about her mother and sometimes I would open up about my father.
She shared so many stories with me back then. So many memories. Like the time, during high school, when she skipped class and went home expecting an empty house, only to find her parents sitting in the backyard, their backs to her. They sat on Adirondack chairs, both entranced by the books in their laps, yet they were holding hands. She told me that it was the first of many moments that she came to realize just how truly in love her parents were.
And then she would go silent and still, and I knew that I had lost her to her grief.
Sometimes I found the courage to describe to her the many ways I didn’t want to be like my father, or to admit that I wasn’t even certain I knew what a real marriage looked like.
But mostly Lily and I spoke of our dreams.
She wanted a big family and a marriage built on real love; one just like her parents had had. She didn’t need much in the way of stuff, she said. She just wanted to be happy, to be loved and to give love to her own family.
I wanted these things too, of course, but also wanted to grow professionally. At thirty-two, that’s what I was most focused on. I always figured that the rest would just fall into place, and that Lily would be the one to take the lead, corralling us all like animals, being the mother she was always meant to be.
I had no doubt in my mind that Lily would fit seamlessly into my world. In fact, she already had.
She was staring off down the beach, squinting away the last of the sun. She turned to me suddenly, a small smile on her lips.
“Couldn’t you imagine being here, just like this, except with a few little ones running circles around us?”
“It’s a nice picture, isn’t it?”
She sighed knowingly, her grip on my arm tightening. “You’re not scared off by that?”
“Nah.”
She smiled again. “How did I get so lucky to have found the only 32-year-old guy who isn’t scared off by talk of the future?”
“It’s easy not to be scared when it’s a future with you I’m discussing,” I said, and I had meant it.
I had picked her up out of the sand that night, carrying her back to the beach house and into the bedroom where we made love not once, but twice, because one time was just never enough for me. I could never get enough of her. And I was convinced that that would never change.
Three
Lily
I don’t know whether Thomas had thought so little of me or if he truly believed he could hide the fact that he had had an affair. I’ll admit that when I discovered his secret, my reaction was not one of hurt, anger or disappointment; rather it was something more akin to understanding.
I understood that another part of the Thomas Gardner puzzle had just clicked into place.
I understood that I had been wrong to think that I could learn to hold onto him. He was forever, always, water through my fingers.
Men who rule the world are not held back by societal ideas of what marriage should look like; they take, take, take without any regard. His ex-fiancée was simply another example to add to his long list of possessions.
It had taken me months to get where I was, months of heated arguments and tears in therapy – both with him and alone, months of days and nights made hazy from too much Chardonnay and not enough respect for myself. So when I finally built up the nerve to tell him to get out, I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.
“Jesus, Lil. I thought we were doing better. I thought we were past all of this.”
I spun on my heels, my brown hair whipping around me. “Thomas,” I said, laughing, because it seemed like the only honest reaction, “there’s no getting past this!”
I stormed around the bedroom, absentmindedly filling an overnight bag with his belongings.
“We’ll go back to therapy. We’ll work this out. We’ve come so far already,” he said. He was begging like I had never seen before.
“You can’t spend the last ten months ignoring me, treating me like I don’t exist, not even looking at me or touching me, and then go off and screw someone else and think that’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, Lil.”
“For which time Thomas, huh? Did you think of me every time you climbed into bed with her? Were you sorry then?”
“It meant nothing, it was a mistake.”
It should have made me feel better, except that it was what everyone always said. He hadn’t even possessed the decency to come up with something more original, and I told him so.
“It’s the truth!”
“Well I’m glad to see that you still know what that is,” I told him, “but here’s the thing: it means something to me. You sleeping with another woman – with that woman – means something to me. It means something to this family. It means that I can’t look at you anymore. It means that I can’t keep torturing myself like this to try and hold this marriage together. It means that I’ve already given up too much for you, and I’m not going to do it anymore.”
He never looked at me that entire time. Never asked me how I knew. He kept his pale, brown eyes cast downward, burning a hole into the wood floor.
I fumbled with the words in my mouth, wanting to tell him how his precious little Clare had tracked me down and confessed everything.
No, I wouldn’t do her dirty work. Let her tell him what she had done.
I tossed the bag onto the bed between us. “It means that it’s over.”
I stood perfectly still, staring at him as though daring him to challenge me, but as the silence in the room around us grew deeper, I knew that he too had no fight left in him. We had exhausted that avenue.
“It means that when I come back, I want you gone.”
I said goodnight to Ben as I passed him on my way to the front door.
“Mama?” he said, his voice filled with concern. I couldn’t help but feel like he knew that something had happened, that somehow he knew that our lives had just changed. I felt my resolve fade just a little, but not enough to stop myself from stepping through the doorway.
I wanted to assure Ben that everything would be okay. Instead, I stepped through the doorway, hearing Thomas’ words before the door clicked shut behind me.
“Mama’s going out for a bit, Buddy. It’s just you and me.”
I drove around with no real destination in mind; the darkness of the road dulling my pain. Why did it have to be her? Surely it would have hurt less if it were some random woman he’d met at a bar. But her? It felt personal. He had chosen the one person guaranteed to break me.
It had taken me months after we began dating to build up the nerve to ask Thomas about his past. He – like so many other men – had remained pretty mute on the subject, always brushing me off when the topic surfaced. I don’t know if I had simply caught him in a rare introspective moment, or it was just plain dumb luck, but he had finally opened up to me.
Clare Shaw was a complicated woman, he had said. She was incredibly smart and driven, but what she possessed in book smarts she lacked in street smarts. She was – as he described her – possessive, demanding and impulsive; all things that I was not.
But even then I could read between the lines. Hear the things he wasn’t saying out loud. She was sexual and passionate, all the things that I had once been but was apparently no longer.
At the time I couldn’t fathom why he would want to marry someone he spoke so poorly of, but as the years passed, I came to know more about their relationship and about Clare herself. The fact that, like Thomas, she came from family money and would have fit like a missing puzzle piece right into the Gardner family. Men who rule the world need the perfect woman at home to pick up the fallen pieces.
I met Clare only once and later on, though by that time I had come across a photo or two. Blonde, petite and unassuming, and tucked away neatly in his past, I would never have guessed she would ever be a part of our future.
**
> Thomas was handsome in an obvious kind of way. You knew just by looking at him that he had done well in life, and you knew that he would only get better looking with age in the way that men do.
I was worried that my heartbreak over losing my mother would scare him off, but he was intensely confident and dedicated to me in the way that I desperately needed. When he proposed to me in Malibu on our second anniversary, our bodies slathered in sunblock and fingers wrinkled from too much time in the water, I said yes...immediately. He’d barely had the words out of his mouth before I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him. He didn’t have a ring for me, he said. He wanted me to have exactly what I wanted and so we would shop for one together.
I hadn’t told him about my mother's ring. The one my father wore on a long chain around his neck so that it fell just above his heart. The one that he would surely never part with. The one that I so desperately wanted for my own selfish reasons.
When we began shopping for my ring, the thought of my mother's was always with me, and it wasn’t long before Thomas noticed that something wasn’t right.
“What is it?” he asked me. He was careful to gently nudge rather than push for an answer.
He knew me so well, then.
And so I told him about her ring, and only after I stopped talking did he respond. “Are you sure you couldn’t just ask him if you could have it?”
“I can’t,” I said, shaking my head, “that ring and his memories are all he has left of her. I can’t take that away from him.”
I barely took notice that we stopped looking at rings after that, but five weeks later, after slipping under the covers next to Thomas and opening the half-read book on my nightstand, there it was, tucked within the pages. My mother's ring.
“I tried,” Thomas told me, “but you were right. I couldn’t ask your father to part with the ring.” He smiled smugly, full of pride. “So I had one just like it made.”
I hugged him and kissed him and told him it was the most beautiful gift he could have ever given me. I slipped that ring onto my finger, vowing to never take it off.
I felt the lump in my throat; the one that reminded me that I was about to walk down the aisle and commit to a man for the rest of my life – without my mother by my side.
Everything moved quickly from there.
Our wedding – which took place almost exactly a year later – was far more than I could have ever imagined. The Gardner family, it turned out, was far more formal and traditional than I might have guessed. 250 people watched me walk down the aisle in an off-white, sweetheart neckline, empire-waist gown. They heard me fumble through the vows that we chose to write ourselves. They watched and laughed with me as I tripped on my dress as we took the stage for our first dance. They blew us kisses and waved as we climbed into the black, stretch limo at the end of the night. And when we got back from our honeymoon in Maui, I painstakingly wrote out 250 thank you cards for everything ranging from cheese graters to Egyptian cotton bed sheets to a stationary bike training stand.
I loved our wedding, and our honeymoon had been the stuff that dreams were made of, but I was most excited to settle down into real life as a new wife.
I would quickly learn that my husband, a man who could rule the world, who could take take take without a second thought, had already aimed for the stars, waiting – again – for the planets to shift for him, the way they always did.
We sat around the dinner table with his parents, the wine flowing and the courses never ending. I had just opened my mouth to ask Susan about how she had prepared the chicken when I was interrupted by Thomas’ father.
“I wonder if you and I could speak for a moment.”
I set down my fork, pushed my unfinished dessert aside and turned to him. “Sure, what’s on your mind Chase?”
“I’ve got a proposition for you. Thomas and I have discussed this at length and believe it to be a wonderful opportunity for you.”
“Okay…” I said, glancing briefly, curiously, at Thomas, who had abandoned his unusual decision to remain mute for most of the dinner and joined the conversation.
“I told him that you’ve been looking for a new job,” he said.
“That’s correct. I have,” I said, turning to look at Chase. The hair on the back of my arms stood up straight.
“I’d like to have you come work for me at Waterhouse, effective immediately.”
By then I had plenty of time to develop my own theory about Chase Water. Like his son, he was one of those men who could rule the world. He was stubborn and callous and from what I could tell was driven by only two things: money and attention. It seemed he could never have enough of either. By then I’d begun to suspect that there was little Chase and Thomas said or did that was not a part of some kind of master plan; a strategic move to set them up for something bigger down the line.
Back then I hadn’t been quite as easy to push around as I was now.
Back then I knew how to stand up for myself.
I knew that if I gave in that I’d spend the rest of my life living by their rules.
“Actually Chase,” I said. “I’ve interviewed with Regan & Wiley Publishing and I firmly believe that they’re the best fit for me and my goals.”
“And what are your goals?” he had asked, but jumped in before I could respond. “I assume you’d like to work your way up to being a senior editor, at the least. I could have you there in under a year.”
I responded immediately. “And that’s exactly how I know I’m making the right decision in accepting the Regan & Wiley position. No offence Sir – and I realize you have good intentions – but I was raised to work for my accomplishments instead of having them handed to me just because I know the right people.”
He had taken offence to my statement though; I had known that immediately, though I hadn’t cared much. A large part of me had felt awfully smug for having just said no to a man who was not used to hearing the word.
“She’ll think about it, Pop. No one’s making any decisions right now,” Thomas said, cutting in. I turned to look at him, outrage bubbling in my throat.
Thomas and I had been together long enough that we could, if probed, easily identify the traits that we didn’t particularly like about each other...the way he dismissed my feelings, or the way my used coffee cups only found their way into the dishwasher fifty percent of the time.
I had pulled my BlackBerry from my back pocket, quickly hammering away at the keys while Thomas and his father exchanged a look of mild curiosity.
“Actually,” I said, as I tucked the phone back into my jeans, “I’ve just now accepted the position, so there’s really nothing else to talk about.”
Thomas had words for me when we got home later that night.
“Do you have any idea how rude that was? How disrespectful?”
“Do you realize how disrespectful it was for him to think that I would ever take a job under those circumstances? I will be a senior editor one day, but it will be because I worked for it and am deserving of it.”
“So your other option is to work for one of his competitors?”
“I’m in publishing Tom. You knew this when you met me, when you proposed to me, and when you married me. What did you expect?”
“I thought you’d work for Waterhouse.”
It was then that I realized that Thomas and his family had plans for me – for whomever it was that Thomas married – that had been decided long before I had come into the picture.
This was only the beginning.
“Maybe if you had filled me in earlier on your plans for dictating the direction of my career, we could have avoided any confusion.”
I had tried not to smile when he threw his arms up into the air.
“Oh stop being so dramatic, will you?”
His comment only fueled my anger.
“No, really, let’s lay all the cards out on the table right now. What else have you decided for me, Thomas? Wait—” I thrust out my hand to stop him from
answering, “—let me guess. Three children in quick succession – two boys and a girl if you had your choice – and… I’d stay at home with them until they’re in school, right? Then, to keep myself occupied I’d start volunteering at the school, maybe join the PTA, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of keeping the house tidy and having dinner on the table when you get home at night. Am I on the right track?”
“Jesus, Lily! What has gotten into you? It was just a job offer—”
“No. It wasn’t just a job offer. It is you and your father's way of trying to control me the way you want to control everything and everyone else.”
I hadn’t meant to say it. Not really. But that didn’t diminish the truth of the statement.
I had slowly lifted my gaze to meet his, expecting him to be angry, annoyed perhaps, but his eyes revealed something altogether different. Hurt. I dropped my eyes to the floor.
“Is that how little you think of me?”
“Tom—”
“If that’s how little you think of me then we have much bigger problems to deal with.”
When I climbed into bed two hours later, having cleaned the day off of my body and putting a fair dent into the biography on my nightstand, he still hadn’t come to bed. I knew that I had set in motion something that I wasn’t sure could ever be stopped.
Four
Lily
“Thomas bought it for me.”
I knew what Christina was going to say before she opened her mouth.
“You told me you would never be caught dead in a real leather jacket.”
“Oh God, I know,” I said, laughing it off, “but you should see these women, Chris, with their perfectly manicured nails and hair done just right. And they all stay home, kids or no kids, doing God knows what. I was the only one there with a ring smaller than the sun and wearing fake pearls in my ears.”
