When I'm Not Myself

by Deborah J. Wolf

  Also by Deborah J. Wolf:

  With You and Without You

  When I’m Not Myself

  Deborah J. Wolf

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  A CHAT WITH DEBORAH J. WOLF

  Copyright Page

  For the countless unbelievably

  amazing women in my life.

  You know who you are.

  And for Edward A. Wolf,

  who believes I can do anything.

  Silly bear.

  Acknowledgments

  I am blessed to have the most incredible agent in the world who despite his much more well-known clients, takes every one of my calls and stands unfailingly by my work. Thank you, Richard Morris, for every tireless minute you’ve put into this book and into building my budding writing career. My editor, Audrey LaFehr, has the uncanny knack of knowing exactly what input is needed to help turn things around, and at just the right moment. I am grateful for her continued sound guidance and direction.

  My father, the president of my fan club, passed away just before the printing of my first book, With You and Without You. He never had the chance to read this one, but I have felt his presence whispered through the pages more than once. My mother, Janet Pretto, and my brother, Bill Pretto, have carried forth the tradition of soundly rooting on my cause. It’s rather embarrassing, actually, but I am humbled by their belief that I could actually do this more than once.

  I’ve had the most marvelous support from an ever-growing crowd of people who have sung the praises of my first book while encouraging me along with the second. They include those who hosted book club meetings and helped sell copy after copy of With You and Without You. (No doubt, some of them bought multiple copies themselves.) They are some of my closest friends and some of my newest acquaintances. I am constantly amazed when they introduce me as their “famous friend, the author” and I am indebted to them for their dedication.

  For Kerry and Sherri, thank you for your years of friendship topped by acres of laughter and miles of loyalty. Somewhere in the pages of this book are the hints of weekends we’ve spent together, of secrets we’ve shared, and moments I’d never trade for anything in the world.

  For Julie Ann Mardirossian, who embarrassingly enough was left off my acceptance speech the first time around. This is your fifteen minutes of fame. Use them wisely.

  I am honored to call Frank Priscaro and David Hukari two of my dearest friends and confidants. For some reason still unknown to me, they’ve taken it upon themselves to provide that extra bit of confidence that sometimes still eludes me. It must be the years of wisdom they’ve got on me. They are, after all, much, much older. And wiser.

  For Bradley, Andrew, Hannah, Colette, Ryan, Will, Lauren, and Megan . . . so you’ll have something for show and tell. And for Jordan and Brodie, who still think their mom is pretty cool, I love you very much.

  And finally, for Ted, this one is for you. Not a day goes by that I don’t forget how damn lucky I am.

  1

  Cara’s husband left her six months and twenty-three pounds ago. He turned her in for a new model, an updated Barbie. It wasn’t that she was being cruel; her replacement’s name was Barbie. Barbie was twenty-seven and quite pretty. Cara was in a position to know because she had spent enough time studying her from across the soccer field—the petite frame, narrow hips, pancake-flat stomach, and round, melon-shaped augmented breasts.

  Cara turned forty-three this year, and although she was down three dress sizes since Jack had moved out, she’d lost the weight in all the wrong places. She was thinner in the face, but the lines were still there, the round curve of her belly still prominent. Cara had a closetful of clothes that didn’t fit her and very few that did. She didn’t think of the size 14s as her fat clothes; she thought of them as her married clothes, those that she’d peel off when Jack would still watch her undress. For that reason alone, she couldn’t seem to part with them. They hung in her closet and mocked her silently.

  They had four children together, Jack and Cara. The kids were the only things they shared anymore. Jack and Cara arranged to split their time with the kids evenly as if they were slicing a piece of pie right down the middle.

  Katherine. Katie-girl, Kit-Kat, Kate, Kitten. Seventeen and a beauty, though, thank God Katie hadn’t yet figured that out. She was tough at the surface, but soft and sweet if you scratched just beneath. Katie sided with Cara automatically, defensively; her first go at unconditional love. Jack, on the other hand, got a dose of love with more conditions than he could recognize or find names for. Katie went the first three months without speaking to him; she went longer without speaking to Barbie, regardless of the pile of endless gifts the poor woman futily showered upon her.

  William. Willie, Will the Thrill, Baby-Boy-Blue. Second in line, you’d never know it. Because of the distance between him and Katie—seven years—Will was more like a firstborn, and acted sometimes as if he was the eldest of the bunch. Independent and strong-willed, he suddenly needed neither his father nor his mother when Jack left, angry with the both of them for the cards unfairly dealt him. Unable to touch or control his own emotions, Will’s outbursts came in long stretches that lasted days where he’d hurl discontentment like fast pitches on a baseball field.

  Luke. Linus, Luke Skywalker, Lucas John Clancy. Two years behind Will, Luke stumbled through the third grade, stunned by what had befallen his family, and crawled so deeply into a shell it took nearly everything Cara had to pull him back out. For weeks, just after Jack left, she would find him each morning curled at the end of his bed and sucking his thumb, his sheets still damp from some middle-of-the-night accident. Luke hated to be left alone now and would do anything to avoid being so.

  And, Claire. Claire-bear. Joy of joy, sweet little princess. The last in a series, only eleven months behind Luke, they might as well have been twins. Angel eyes, sweet and cuddly, Claire would never utter an unforgivable word toward anyone. She was the most moved by her father’s disappearance, and wanted to talk about it every waking hour. Cara cringed and blinked back the tears as Claire’s questions came like topics in a round of Jeopardy! She tried her best to answer her daughter’s inquisitions, washing the venom from her mouth. Claire forgave Jack instantly and without repercussion, and was the only one to warm to Barbie, accepting her readily and crawling into her arms, unaware of what this did to Cara, how it tore her apart to see her daughter loyal to the woman who had stolen her husband.

  Even with a full house, Cara never knew the loneliness would be so numbing. Jack left them with everything except his company.

  He packed on a stifling Sunday afternoon in August, as if he was going on one of his extended business trips. He took the best suitcase and filled it with two weeks’ worth of the underwear Cara had just folded and stacked neatly in two piles in the top right-hand drawer of his pine armoire. Briefs, for the most part, along with a few pairs of boxers. He took his black socks and two pairs of his good black wingtip shoes. He l
ayered a few golf shirts in with his khakis and stacked a few T-shirts and jeans on top of those. He was a horrible packer; everything would be wrinkled by the time he got across town to Barbie’s condominium. Everything but his suits and dress shirts. Still in the bags from the dry cleaners, he left those on hangers and looped them over the coat hook in the backseat of his 7 Series.

  Cara watched him load the car. When he was done, he turned toward her and said, “Well, I guess that’s about it.” His sunglasses were perched on the end of his nose so Cara couldn’t see his eyes, the blue eyes she had fallen in love with so long ago when they’d first met, but she had a feeling he wasn’t looking directly at her, anyway. Coward. It was as if he’d been stripped of the features that had once made him so attractive to her.

  “Really? Are you sure you have everything you need?”

  Jack dwarfed her. She felt nearly invisible in his presence now.

  He stared at her awkwardly with a crooked eyebrow, not sure what to make of her concern.

  “I mean, that’s it? This is how it ends? This can’t be the way it ends. This is just pathetic. Me standing here in the driveway in my shorts and sweatshirt and you driving off with a carload full of clothes from the dry cleaners? They’re not even neatly folded, Jack. Everything’s going to be a mess by the time you . . . Well, I mean, wouldn’t you like me to fold them for you?”

  He tilted his head and stared straight through her. “Yeah, Cara, I think that’s it,” he said, sensibly. “I’m not really sure what else there’d be.”

  He settled himself behind the wheel as if he was driving off to work, then pulled the seatbelt tight over his wide chest and buckled it. The sun stretched in long bands across the sky, bleeding. Cara thought about what a beautiful sunset it would be, about how this would be the last sunset she would remember with Jack.

  “Wait! Wait!” Cara screamed after he’d backed out of the driveway and started down the court they had lived on for fourteen years. She tore after the car the way Katie used to when she didn’t want him to go. Halfway down the block he stopped the car. Cara stood on the sidewalk parallel with his car and stared at him, trying to catch her breath. The pavement beneath her bare feet was hot, as if she was stuck walking through a bed of coals. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet.

  “You can’t go, Jack,” Cara said. “Please, you can’t leave.”

  He took a deep breath, then calmly said to her. “Why not?”

  Cara’s hands fell to her sides and she felt naked, as vulnerable as she had the first time she’d given a speech in junior high school. He stared at her, waiting on her answer. Trouble was, she didn’t have one. There was no good answer, no real reason for him to stay. There was so much that had passed between them, so many weeks and months, years even, of distance that had grown like weeds between who they were.

  “Why not?” he asked her again, impatiently.

  She couldn’t answer him. There was nothing left, really. He was right about that, about this being all that was left, an awkward silence that spanned the distance between them, from the sidewalk to the hot pavement where his car sat idling. She stared at her bare feet, discontented with the way her toes looked, the week-long stubble that angrily stood at attention on her legs. She’d let herself go, there was little attractive about her. She’d become who she thought she would never become, so disinterested in taking care of herself, of putting herself first, that he’d lost interest in her along the way.

  He drove away then, slowly at first as if he was afraid she might come after him again, before accelerating sharply and taking the corner with an embarrassing screech from his tires. She stood watching the back bumper of his car, the turn signal blinking urgently, until it disappeared from sight.

  After Jack left, Cara sat as still as she could in the bedroom that had been theirs together and listened for the first sounds of the house to come back to life, for familiarity to breed itself back into the room. Jack had purposely sent the boys and Claire to Cara’s sister’s house. Katie was out with some of her friends. From the bedroom, Cara could hear the Whitneys’s sprinklers kick on next door, a dull chuck-chuck-chuck followed by a thick spray of water. A block over she could hear a dog barking at kids passing on their bikes. But inside there were no real sounds of life. All that was left was the pierce of silence that screamed in wailing cries from room to room, haunting the halls. Sadness crept into Cara’s house, the house that was now hers alone, easing its way in, seeping into the paint on the wall, into the fabric on every piece of furniture. Like the stench of the poison left behind by a smoker, sadness grew on Cara like a debilitating cancer.

  When Katie arrived home Cara was sitting at the kitchen table, a square box of tissues surrounded by nearly two dozen balled up, crumpled, snotty used Kleenex in front of her. Cara’s eyes were bloodshot and swollen; she’d been crying in waves for nearly three hours.

  She couldn’t think of an easy explanation for her daughter when Katie said to her, “Mom, what’s wrong? What’s going on? Where’s Daddy?”

  “C’mere, sweetie,” Cara said in a slur, drunk on the exhaustion and nausea that had washed over her. She yawned big, her body convulsing involuntarily, and patted the side of the chair, though clearly there wasn’t enough room for the both of them.

  Besides, Katie, with her feet planted firmly on the floor in an old pair of grimy tennis shoes, wasn’t willing to budge from the very spot that welded her to the floor. Instinctively she said to Cara again, slightly more in control and with an edge in her voice this time, a thin line of distaste running through her vocals, “Where’s Daddy?” Women’s intuition.

  “He left, sweetie. He left this afternoon . . . Um, he moved out. I think he just finally needed some space. All the arguing we’ve been doing, you know. He didn’t see much way around it, I guess. We’ve been disagreeing on things for a long while now.”

  The color drained from Katie’s pink cheeks, her eyes changed from their usual lustrous green to a dark, dead brown. “He what?” she asked Cara in a tone that accused no one but the man who was not there to stand in his own defense.

  Cara plucked a fresh tissue from the box in front of her and blew her nose with effort. She pulled herself up from the kitchen table and pushed the chair out from behind her, letting the harsh scraping sound fill the room. Her daughter was frozen, rigid with hostility. She meant to take Katie into her arms and hold her, but she didn’t have anywhere near the strength required to do it. Cara took a step toward Katie but her daughter backed away, cold.

  “What do you mean, ‘He moved out’? Where the hell did he go?” Katie took the backpack she had slung over her shoulder and heaved it across the room and into the foyer. It slid, then came to a halt near the base of the stairs, taking out a pair of Will’s shoes in its path. Katie’s temper was known to flare; she was easily angered, especially these days when there had been so much anger in the house, so much screaming and yelling and arguing. She was resentful and moody, the anger playing out in small Broadway shows that were most often negatively reviewed.

  “Katie,” Cara warned her, though she was hardly in a place to be strict with her. “Can we sit down? I want to talk to you about this. I want to make sure you’re okay. Dad would want to make sure you were okay. You know how much he cares about you, honey. He always has.”

  Katie looked at her with disbelief and shook her head, disgusted. How could her mother defend him?

  “Okay, okay,” Cara said and moved even closer to her daughter, invading Katie’s personal space, “if he wanted to make sure you were all right, he’d have been here to tell you himself.”

  “Where’d he go, Mom? Tell me where he is.” Her thick dark eyebrows narrowed, a wrinkle forming above the bridge of her nose.

  Cara stumbled. DAMN, Jack. Damn, damn, damn. He’d left this for her to clean up, for her to make right.

  “He’s staying with a friend, honey.” Cara picked at a button on her shorts, avoiding Katie�
�s eyes. She didn’t feel like she owed Jack anything, certainly not the least bit of dignity, but she did want to spare her daughter the ugly truth, the lies that would come crashing down on her soon enough. Besides, she wasn’t sure Katie was altogether strong enough to tolerate the truth, not the enormity of it in its entirety.

  “Where?”

  “Um, I, well . . .”

  “He’s with someone else, isn’t he?” Katie asked, and then when Cara didn’t answer her right off, barked at her, “Isn’t he? Tell me, Mom. He went to stay with that woman, didn’t he?”

  At seventeen, Katie was keen to pick up on the scent of another woman. She’d been through her first heartbreak, the first boy who had disappointed her, and so the feeling now was not unfamiliar, though far more grave coming from her father. She shuffled across the kitchen floor until she reached the bakers rack in the corner. One-handed she picked up a small, framed photo of her father and her at a dance taken years earlier. In it Katie was twelve; her leg was in a cast and she was on crutches. It was the year she had fractured her ankle skiing but insisted on going to the father-daughter dance anyway. Jack was holding her as if she was his bride and he was crossing the threshold, her white-cast leg swinging wildly in the air.

  Katie was ages different now, harder and unforgiving. She had lived through the unraveling of her parents’ marriage, the broken promises, the ugly disagreements followed by stretches of silence and discontentment. She had learned from both of them that life didn’t work out the way it was supposed to, that commitments weren’t always kept.

  “DIDN’T HE?” she screamed, not at Cara, but at the silent room, before she hurled the photo against the far wall, glass shattering in shards across the floor.