“Are you okay?” Michael asked, and I nodded and adjusted the delicate bundle in my arms.
He made a few quick turns before driving down a road that ran adjacent to a small cemetery dotted with simple white headstones. “Let’s park here,” I said, gesturing. Michael extracted the keys, and I slid out the passenger-side door and waited for him to walk down the little stone path with me.
The moon overhead illuminated the graveyard, and even though I’d been here only once before, I found my way quickly as I wove through the rows of headstones. I stopped by a weeping willow tree and knelt down. I reached out with a fingertip and traced the carved letters on her headstone. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER read the inscription, followed by the dates of her birth and death.
I closed my eyes and remembered what had happened on the night that she died:
A shrill ring cut through my sleep. My hand reached out in the darkness, fumbling across the nightstand and knocking a half-full glass of water to the floor before I snatched up the phone. I squinted at the clock in the darkness: 2:00 A.M. My chest squeezed around my heart, as though trying to cushion it from the coming news.
“Julia?”
My father. But it didn’t sound like him.
“It’s Mom,” he said.
“What happened? Is she okay?”
But I already knew, even before he said the words, “Mom’s gone.”
It was a stroke, my father told me in a choked voice. But Mom was barely in her sixties; didn’t older people have them? I leapt out of bed and paced the bedroom, clinging to the phone with both hands. I felt too numb to cry, too frantic to sit still, too dazed to ask anything other than “Why?” over and over again.
Later, I pieced together what happened: Mom had gone to a friend’s house for a walk after dinner. “Do you have your ice cream?” Mom had asked as they’d stepped out the front door. The friend had looked at my mom, thinking she’d misheard. “Did you ask if I had my car keys?” the friend had asked, wondering why she would need keys when they were just going out for a walk. Mom hadn’t answered. She’d stumbled twice in the first block of their walk. Her friend had suggested they sit and rest for a while, then they’d walked back to Mom’s house—her friend just walked her home, so slowly, too slowly, while Mom’s brain cells were dying—and Dad was there. He’d taken one look at Mom’s lopsided smile and rushed her to the car and driven straight to the hospital. But it was too late.
“Can I see her?” I asked my father, clutching the phone in my still-dark bedroom. It had been almost two years since I’d visited my mother. How had it been that long? I should have made her come stay with me more often. I should have gone to her.
I’d tried to think of the last thing I’d said to her. Did I tell her I loved her, or had I just hung up the phone with an absentminded “Bye”?
“I can be there in a few hours. Just don’t let them … take her anywhere,” I begged. I hung up and reached for my cell phone on the bureau, as one clear word fought its way through the fog in my mind. Michael. He’d know what to do. He’d help me get to my mother quickly.
First I dialed his cell phone. I had to redial twice because my fingers were shaking so much. No one answered, but it was possible Michael had turned it off because he’d gone to bed. I managed to choke out a message, begging him to call me right away.
Where was he staying tonight? I closed my eyes and tried to focus; I couldn’t even remember which city he was in. Had he told me the name of the hotel?
I stumbled to my computer and turned it on, and the screen filled the room with a weak blue light. I scrolled through my e-mails, trying to find the latest one Kate had sent with Michael’s schedule for the week. Usually I ignored those e-mails, but I didn’t delete them until the week was through.
L.A. He was in L.A.
I found Kate’s notation of the hotel and the phone number and dialed blindly, asking the front desk to put me through to his room. The phone rang once, twice, then three times. I almost dropped the receiver when a woman answered.
“Michael?” My voice was almost a plea.
“He’s in the shower,” Roxanne purred, a victorious laugh in her voice. She paused a moment to let that sink in. “Can I, ah … help you with something, Mrs. Dunhill?”
I still have no memory of what I did during those next moments. I must’ve put the phone back in its cradle at some point, and I know I blindly grabbed handfuls of clothing to throw into a suitcase. All the wrong things, it turned out later. I didn’t need exercise pants and high-heeled boots and wispy spring scarves to say good-bye to my mother.
I sped to the hospital still in my nightgown with my winter coat thrown over it, depending on my GPS to guide me. A nurse in a white uniform let me in and directed me to my mother’s room. I hurried to her bedside and dropped to my knees, holding her cold hand and kissing it over and over again. I lay my head next to hers while my tears soaked the pillow and mingled with her hair.
After a while—maybe a half hour, maybe much longer—I stood up. There was a blanket on the foot of the bed, and I pulled it up and tucked it around my mother, as gently as she’d done to me on so many nights when I was a child. I’d been a restless sleeper, and my mom always woke up in the middle of the night, creeping into my room to pull the covers up from the foot of my bed, half-awakening me as I burrowed into the warmth that felt like her love.
Someone put a hand on my shoulder and whispered that it was time to go.
“Where?” I wanted to cry. Both of my homes had been destroyed: the one in West Virginia, and now the one in D.C., too. I didn’t have anywhere to go.
Then I realized the hand on my shoulder belonged to my father, and I jerked away.
“Julie, honey,” he began.
I looked at him and felt the ugly words rise in my throat, threatening to choke me. I felt dizzy with grief and anger. It was my father’s fault; everything was his fault. His gambling had ruined her life, and now the stress of it had killed her. But I somehow kept the words back as I stumbled out of the room, realizing that, on some level, my father probably knew it, too. Speaking the words aloud would be pointlessly cruel.
He stood in the doorway, watching me go, his hands outstretched. “I love you,” he called.
Funny, Michael had said the exact same thing to me before he’d left for his trip with Roxanne.
I ran to my car and drove to the outskirts of town and sat there, staring at the horizon as the sky changed from black to gray to purple to blue, all the colors of a bruise. I thought about the letters Mom had sent me every month—letters, when everyone else in the world relied on e-mail and impersonal texts—always handwritten on pale yellow stationery. Those notes never hinted that this was coming; her writing was never shaky or unclear. They were relentlessly cheerful, with chatty updates about what was going on around town. “I’ve planted some daffodils this spring, and they look so pretty in the front yard,” or “Do you remember Sadie Robinson? She has three little girls now and they’re the cutest things, walking down the street all in a row together like little ducks.”
I’d always written her back, and called, and even invited her to come with me to New York, cajoling her with promises of a nice hotel and shopping on Fifth Avenue, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t want to leave my father, and she knew things were too awkward between us for him to come. My mother’s loyalty was her downfall, I realized. She could have had such a different life.
Just then my cell phone rang. I looked down and saw Michael’s number flashing. It was almost 9:00 A.M. So it had taken him this long to get back to me, I thought, feeling my mouth twist in bitterness. Was Roxanne still beside him in bed?
I picked up the phone and weighed it in my hand. I’d unwittingly followed in my mother’s footsteps, despite my vow that I’d have a very different kind of life, I realized. I, too, was bound to a man who’d keep hurting me.
The phone rang again, and I hurled it out of my car window as hard as I could, watching it shatter against the paveme
nt. I tried to imagine starting over without Michael, but I felt paralyzed. I could see myself yelling at him, confronting him with the evidence I’d gathered, but then what? It was like watching a movie that suddenly went dark, midscene. I had no idea what I’d do—how my life would play out—without Michael.
I sat there for hours. In the end, I finally drove home, and when Michael walked in the door that night, I turned away as he tried to comfort me. He misunderstood, assuming I was angry because he’d stayed for his morning meeting instead of rushing home right away. “I’m sorry,” he whispered over and over, but I wouldn’t talk to him. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door and stayed there, curled on the floor, for the entire night. I felt as though the outer layer of my skin had been scraped off, and the slightest touch or sound would send arrows of unbearable pain shooting through me. I knew I couldn’t handle confronting him, not now, not while I was mourning my mother. I couldn’t bear to hear what was between Michael and Roxanne. What if it wasn’t just a fling? If he truly cared about her, then maybe he’d leave me. Just like my mother had left me, and before her, my father. I’d have no one.
A day later, Michael asked when the funeral would be held, and then I did scream at him. I watched him recoil from the gritty, horrible sound of my voice: How could he think I’d go to the funeral and see my father, who’d probably try to borrow money from the priest who performed the service?
“Go back to L.A.,” I hissed at Michael as my mind filled with images of his body wrapped around Roxanne’s slim, lithe one. “Why’d you even bother to come home?”
He lifted up his hands, as though he was surrendering, and walked out of the room. “Whenever you want to talk,” he started to say, but I slammed the door behind him …
Now I laid the bouquet of yellow tulips I’d been carrying on my mother’s grave. They were her favorite flowers, but she never bought them for herself. “Too expensive,” she’d say, reaching instead for a more practical potted mum, something that would last for months.
Every week since she’d died, I’d had a dozen tulips sent to her grave. But this was the first time I’d brought them here myself; I hadn’t been back to my hometown since that night. And other than cursory phone calls on holidays, I hadn’t reached out to my father. I still hadn’t forgiven him. Something had twisted inside of me that night, turning me into a person I didn’t recognize. The little girl who rode around on her dad’s shoulders, giggling uncontrollably while he pawed his feet at the ground and neighed like a horse, had died that night, too.
I looked up from the simple words on her headstone to face Michael.
“When my mom died …,” I began. I couldn’t continue; it felt like something sharp was lodged in the center of my chest.
“I wasn’t here for you,” Michael said. He knelt down next to me. “I should have flown back first thing. I can’t believe I went to that damn meeting. Julia, I’m so sorry.”
It was time to finally deal with this, too.
“It wasn’t the meeting so much as the fact that Roxanne answered your phone in the middle of the night,” I said abruptly. “In your hotel room in L.A.”
I raised my eyes to look at him. Honesty, he’d promised me. If he dared lie to me, here by my mother’s grave …
“She answered my phone?” he said, confusion and then something else, something darker, flitting across his face.
“You had an affair with her,” I said. Anger bubbled just beneath my skin, making it feel hot and tight, and I crossed my arms over my chest.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
Here it comes, I thought.
“Oh, God, I have to tell you this. I did lie to you … about some things, before … But you didn’t say anything about her answering my phone. Julia, why didn’t you tell me?”
I sidestepped that question; I had a very good reason, but not one I was prepared to reveal now. “Don’t you dare lie to me again.”
“There was this one night,” he began. “It wasn’t in L.A., though. It was a month or so before your mother passed away. We were all in New York, a big group of us from the company. I’d had a couple drinks at dinner, and then we went to the bar for some cognacs. Afterward we went back to the hotel and she and I ended up alone in the elevator. She started kissing me. We stopped when the doors opened and there were people in the hallway so we ended up going into our own rooms.”
He swallowed hard. “But, ah, she knocked on my door later that night.”
I stared at him, feeling my insides harden.
“We kissed again, and this time it went further.”
He looked away from me, and I could see him fighting to hold back his emotions and keep his voice level.
“She started doing other things. Rubbing up against me and touching me. I … I took off her blouse … but then I looked down and I saw she had a condom in her hand, all ready to go. And all of a sudden”—he met my eyes again—“I realized I couldn’t go through with it.”
“You weren’t having an affair?” I asked incredulously. “So why did she answer your phone? She was in your room. I called you the night my mother died, and she said you were taking a fucking shower!”
“Julia, whenever I go to L.A. I always stay—stayed—in the same hotel. I get the penthouse suite. It’s huge. There’s a dining room and living room and sometimes I hold meetings there, especially if we’re working late. People are always in and out of there.”
It had been 2:00 A.M. my time, but 11:00 on the West Coast. Not out of the question for late meetings, for the old Michael.
“Sometimes when it got late we ordered up room service,” Michael was saying. “I don’t know why I didn’t answer the phone, but maybe I didn’t hear it ring or figured it was the kitchen calling. I could’ve been on another call, or having a conversation with someone else. Maybe I was in the shower, if I’d just gotten back from the hotel gym or something. But do you really think I’d let another woman answer my phone if I was cheating on you?”
“You didn’t sleep with her.” I sidestepped his question, wanting to stay on the offensive. “But you flirted with her. You had a great time stringing her along, didn’t you? You did everything except fuck her.”
“Julia, the man I was—You’re right, I liked being pursued. It was all about my ego. But she didn’t want me, she only wanted what I could give her. And the truth is, I didn’t even like her that much. That night in my hotel room, I came to my senses. I know what I did was horrible—but I stopped it after a couple of minutes. I did stop it.”
Michael reached for my hand, but I pulled away. I’d constructed a completely different story in my mind during all the times I’d imagined his night with Roxanne; I’d never anticipated this one.
“I think she wanted you to know something happened,” he was saying. “She was trying to get between us, Julia. Otherwise why would she say that to you? She was a little bit … off.”
She had been trying to get between us, I realized with a jolt. The very first time I’d met her, her predatory look at Michael was designed to unsettle me. If he really had been in the shower … Well, technically, she would’ve told the truth. But her voice sent a very different message, one that was unmistakable. She wanted me to think they’d been intimate. She wanted to ignite something between Michael and me.
Then I spun around with a fresh accusation on my lips: “But she sent you e-mails! She said she wanted your lips and body!”
Before Michael even said a word, I closed my eyes and heard his earlier words echo: “She wanted more.”
She’d been pursuing him, not sending him a love note. Just like Noah’s riddle about the waiter and the missing dollar bill, the true answer depended on your point of view. It’s like an optical illusion, Noah had said. I’d viewed her e-mail through the lens of what I’d expected to see, I’d kept my eye on the deck of cards instead of the sleeve.
“What happened after that night?” I asked.
“She sent me messages for a while. Phone mes
sages and e-mails. I was stuck. I couldn’t fire her because we’d been intimate—to a point. I couldn’t push back too hard. And she was close to Dale; when things went wrong for the company, the two of them worked together to keep it quiet. I knew her well enough to know she could’ve made things … difficult. But Julia, you’re the only woman I’d ever kissed, up until then.”
He paused and swallowed. “I’ve got to tell you this part, too. Dale saw us. He was in the hallway when I came out of her room. It was almost as if he was waiting for me. He was the one who probably called to change your name for the place card for that dinner—it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Why?” I asked again.
“It was his way of letting me know he had something on me, too. I think he wanted to screw with me any way he could. And I liked knowing I could outsmart him, but more than that, I knew his fortunes were tied to my company. I knew he was trapped. I got to bully a bully for once, Julia. I got off on it.”
He sighed. “But back to Roxanne.”
“Do me a favor,” I said tightly. “Don’t ever say her name again.”
“Sorry,” Michael said. “After that night I made sure we were never alone. I ignored her e-mails. After a while, she took another job—I kind of helped nudge that along by recommending her at another company.
“Julia.” He reached out and cupped my cheeks with his hands and made me look at him. “There’s one other reason I stopped it, the most important one of all…. I kept seeing your face.” I stared at him, and the realization swept over me: He was telling me the truth. I could feel it.
Tears blurred the words on my mother’s headstone. I stood up and ran, my breath creating white puffs in the night air, like tiny ghosts. Michael chased after me, calling my name. I finally stopped and leaned against a gnarled oak tree. My legs felt so weak I didn’t trust them to hold me up.
“Julia, I’m so sorry. Please believe me.”
“I do,” I whispered.
Skipping a Beat Page 22
