by Jordan Bates
He kissed me on the forehead and then turned around to leave. What I would have once considered a sweet act, left me with more questions. This wasn’t my Adam. Why was he being so cryptic?
“Adam!” I screamed after him as he walked away. He didn’t look back at me. He didn’t even flinch at my scream. My feet wouldn’t move. I was paralyzed with the fear of what was to come, but I had no idea what was happening. “Adam!”
I was yelling at myself now. People around me were staring. Heat rose to my cheeks, and then I ran. I ran to the only place I knew wouldn’t reject me. My work.
I barely made it into the lobby bathroom before breaking down. I didn’t even know what had just happened. I sank down to the floor with tears streaming down my face. It was times like this that I felt grateful for not wearing makeup. My nose was already starting to stuff up. The tears come faster the more I tried to stop them.
“Are you okay, Alexa?” I looked up, startled to see Max standing before me.
“I’m fine.” I wiped away the tears with the back of my hand and stood up. I didn’t want to let Max see me like this. “Why are you in the girls’ bathroom?”
“Darlin’, this is the men’s room.” I knew the look on my face must have shown how mortified I was, because Max couldn’t stop laughing. I tried to push past him to the door, but he wouldn’t let me pass. His hands were planted on my shoulders, holding me in place. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny.”
“You’re right. It’s not.” I shoved at his chest, but instead of pushing him away, I grabbed fistfuls of his shirt. He grabbed onto my wrists and held them tight between us.
“Alexa.” He looked down at me. My name on his lips soothed me. One of his hands moved to my face and wiped away a stray tear that had managed to sneak out again. “I was serious when I asked if you were okay.”
I didn’t answer him. The words wouldn’t form in my mouth because what was happening was something that I couldn’t explain.
“Go home.” Max released me and granted me access to the door.
“What?” I was confused as what he was telling me to do.
“Go home, Alexa.” The look on his face said that he understood what was going on, even though he had no clue why. I checked the lobby for anyone before bolting. Once I hit the sidewalk, I looked down at the note that Adam had handed me. An address was on it, so I hailed a cab and ended up 20 minutes outside the city in front of a two-story Victorian-style house. A sold sign adorned the front yard and a moving truck was in the driveway, but what I wasn’t expecting was Adam on the front porch, holding another woman.
Chapter 7
I stood there on the sidewalk in front of the house, staring. I didn’t know how long I stood there for, but I watched as he pulled her closer…kissed her nose, bopped it, brushed a piece of hair behind her ear, like he actually cared…like he had feelings for her.
She caught my eye first, a look of horror spreading across her face. His eyes met mine, and he stepped in front of her. He protected her. I stood there in the vast openness of the lawn, unable to do anything but look at them, at where my life had led me. A moving man walked beside me. I stopped him, took the box out of his hands, set it on the ground. I took the keys out of my pocket, sliced the box open, and took out a few items I hadn’t seen before, china patterns I hadn’t picked out. I looked up again. The woman had gone inside. It was just us now.
It was just us and the infinite possibilities of what had happened, where we were going, and eventually, how this would all end.
Adam called to me from the porch.
“Would you like to come in?” His voice was calm, like nothing was wrong.
I laughed at him, because when I looked from him to the house, the situation just seemed to get worse. This was my dream house, and he knew it. He knew everything about this house was all I could ever want, but I knew looking at it that this wasn’t my house. That no part of it would ever be mine.
I held up the china to him.
“What’s this?”
“It’s Natalie’s.” He said it as if it was completely normal.
“Who’s Natalie?” Even though I was asking the question, I already knew the answer.
“One of the girls at the hospital. She was a nurse.” He stepped down from the porch, walking slowly towards me.
“Was?”
“She’s here now, with me.” My heart started to rip.
“Adam.” I raised the plate in my hand higher. He didn’t try to reach for it but let me throw my tantrum. “What’s this?”
“It’s a commitment.” The way he said it, with such conviction, threw me off.
“From who?!” I could feel myself starting to shift from calm and confused to angry and sarcastic. A commitment. Wasn’t that what we had had?
“From me.” He placed a hand on his chest.
“To who?!” My voice started to crack. It wasn’t from the tears that were starting to form, it was from the screams I couldn’t control.
“To her.” He pointed back at the house. He looked back to where Natalie was standing in the doorframe, and I could see the smile pull at his lips as he looked upon her.
“But what about me?” I found myself almost begging to know what was happening, trying to get his attention back to me. We were both tiptoeing around, and it made my anxiety flare.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” He turned back to me now, not elaborating just yet. I tried to take deep breaths, because in all of this I seemed like the irrational one. The man standing in front of me, whom I had been married to for years, was talking to me like it was just any other day. He tried to reach for me, but I pulled away.
“What do you mean?” My hand gripped the plate tighter, ready to smash it.
“We haven’t been happy for a long time.”
“What do you mean? I’m your wife. I’ve been here this whole time. How are you telling me we haven’t been happy?” I waved the plate back and forth.
“Then let me rephrase.” I could feel the anger emanating from him, see the fire blazing in his eyes. “I haven’t been happy for a long time.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me? This is what husbands and wives do. They talk. They tell each other so that if something is going wrong, then they can work through it. That’s what normal couples do. They don’t just throw it away.” I didn’t know what to think. Could we work through it? The one person that I thought I could talk all of this through with was the person that was betraying me.
“She worked as one of my helping nurses every night. Every night I worked, she was there. She might not have been there at home, but she was there for me at work. We’ve known each other for years.” He tried to explain where he was coming from.
“And when did this start?”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. I watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down. I knew I wasn’t going to be prepared for this answer.
“A little over a year now.”
“A year?!” I let the plate fall from my hand, smashing it against the ground. Shards graze the tops of my feet. I would have aftermath wounds, and I knew that in a few days I would still see the cuts, still see the reminder of today. It almost seemed like a metaphor for our marriage, but it was the reality of how my heart was shattering in front of the man I thought I loved.
“Adam. How did this happen?” Tears were forming in my eyes now.
“It happened, truthfully, because I wanted it to.”
I was taken aback by his answer. He let it happen. He wanted it to happen. The man I had spent years loving wanted someone else to be there for him.
“I don’t understand, Adam.”
“You changed. You changed a lot.” His scrunched eyebrows relaxed, and his mouth pursed, like he was finally admitting what was truly bothering him. I didn’t understand what he meant, though. “You started a blog. You started writing again. You started becoming involved with this group of people and I didn’t have any idea who they were. You changed.”<
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“How?” How someone could change in front of their loved one and them not know was confusing to me. I looked Adam up and down and realized that he had changed in front of me and I hadn’t even seen it.
“You became different. You didn’t want to be there for me anymore. You wanted your own happiness.”
“Is that so wrong? I thought that’s what a marriage was. We each want the other to be happy, live their dreams.”
“That’s the thing, Alexa. I wasn’t happy anymore, and I needed to be. Natalie made me happy. She was there; she dropped everything for me.” He took a step closer to me, and I stepped back. “This move was a test, Alexa. I thought that you would let me have this. I thought that you could be there for me, be proud of me. But instead, you got a job.”
I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Of course I got a job. We needed money.”
“I was going to make more money than we had ever had. I was going to make enough for this house and more.”
“How was I supposed to know that?” I grabbed another plate out of the box and threw it across the lawn. I didn’t care if I was destroying their things. They were destroying the life I had made with Adam. “You didn’t tell me anything about this new job you got. All I knew was that we were moving, and I knew I wanted you to be happy, to have the job that you wanted.”
“That’s great, but then you went and got a promotion.”
No. Not this again. “You got the job you wanted!” I was screaming at him now. “Why couldn’t I have the job I wanted?!”
“That wasn’t the point here, Alexa!” He threw his hands in the air. “You didn’t pass the test!”
“What if I had passed your crazy test, Adam? What then? What if I hadn’t gotten a job and wasn’t the model wife?” I tried to take deep breaths between screams, but my rage kept getting stronger, and when all I heard was silence, I became scared. Adam said it was a test, but by the blank look on his face I knew the answer instantly. He would have never left her. He just didn’t want me to leave him. He just couldn’t give me up, and that made my skin crawl. “You created this fucking test, Adam, but what about what I wanted in life? You’ve had this crazy shit going on for a damn year!”
His retaliation started again. Our voices rising higher and higher. I didn’t care if anyone heard our screaming match, because this was the first time we were having this kind of conversation. One where we actually said what we felt and didn’t hold anything back.
“But what about what I wanted?!” He tried again to justify all of this. He thought he was in the right.
“But what about me?!” I threw another plate onto the ground, surprising Adam. He jumped back a little to avoid the shattered pieces. “We’ve always done what you wanted.”
“Don’t even. You were the one to always make the decisions.”
“No, I wasn’t, Adam! I never got the wedding I wanted, the car I wanted, chose what clothes I wanted to wear. I never got anything that I wanted. Everything that we’ve had together has been a compromise for you. Everything.”
“Because that’s how it should be. I’m the one who has been providing for us, so I’m the one who should be getting what they want, and I’m not!”
“Adam.” The tears streamed from my eyes. “I don’t know what you want. I thought I was giving you everything you wanted.”
“But you couldn’t! You can’t! Natalie can give me a family!” It was then that I knew what this was really about.
“Adam…” A family. I tried to not let out the sob that was threatening escape.
“No.” His face darkened. “You can’t give me the one true thing I want in life, and that’s a family.
“Adam, don’t do this. Don’t make it about that.” The sob broke free. Tears poured down my face. As much as he hurt, so did I, but he clearly couldn’t see that. I wanted a family just as much as he did.
“How can I not make it about that?” He was closer to me now, and I was too scared to move. This was an Adam I had never seen before. His hands were fisted, and the anger that was blazing in his eyes before only grew stronger. “You stole the one thing from me that I thought we could have together. Now. Now we can’t even have that.”
“Adam.” It was never intentional, but I didn’t know how to argue that. He was right, though. I had stolen our family away from us. Well, my body had.
“Just stop!” He threw his hands in the air, and I flinched.
“Don’t be mad at me!” I tried to wipe away a few of the tear streaks. “You’re the one who cheated, not me!”
“And you’re the one who can’t give me a family!”
I took another plate out of the box, throwing it towards the house this time, and I let it crash against a beam. The shards flew through the air like a masterpiece I didn’t know I could create. There was chaos in this disaster and there was no coming out of it. I didn’t know how to come out of it. This was the one thing that had truly broken us, and at one point I thought we had gotten through it, that we had moved on, but clearly I was wrong. I didn’t know the mask that Adam had created on his face. I didn’t know the pain that still lived in both of our hearts.
“Where are my things?” I wrapped my arms around my waist, trying to hold myself together.
“On a moving truck.” He waved off the answer like it wasn’t anything new.
“On a moving truck, but not here with your stuff? Our stuff?”
“None of what’s in the moving truck is ours. Everything that was shared or yours is on its way. Everything in that truck.” He pointed over to the huge moving truck as movers took out box after box. “That’s what Natalie and I have been saving together for the last year. Everything in that truck is my new life. Everything in there has nothing to do with you.”
I looked at him in horror, because it was finally hitting me. This hadn’t been some rash decision. This was something that was planned. This was something that I couldn’t have stopped even if I wanted to. This was something that we could never come back from, and I didn’t know if I wanted to. So I picked up the box of china next to me, and instead of handing it to Adam to bring into the house, to the new woman he was going to spend the rest of his life with, I cut open the bottom of it with my keys. I held the box steady before walking away, but when I turned away, I threw it to the ground.
The box opened, and plate after plate shattered in front of him. If I couldn’t break him, at least I could break some of the life that they had created together, and that would probably be the most satisfaction that I could get out of this.
“I’ll be calling my lawyer tomorrow.” I had my back to him, but I knew he still heard the words.
“Don’t worry. I’ve already called mine.” I took another step. “I already had the divorce papers drawn.”
I kept walking. Tears continued to trickle down my face. The man I had spent college with, had fallen madly in love with, was telling me I wasn’t enough for him anymore, so could I be enough for anyone else? How could anyone love such a broken woman, one who couldn’t even give the simple satisfaction of a family? It didn’t matter how much I loved Adam. It didn’t matter how much I could love someone else. I would never come back from this. I didn’t pay attention to the sound of Adam’s voice coming from behind me.
Before I hit the curb, I stopped. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the note from Adam, because in the end it was curiosity that killed the cat.
“Why did you invite me here today?” When I turned around, the smirk that covered his face didn’t shock me. I had no idea what he had just been saying, but I knew the question I asked was just what he wanted. He wanted this to hurt me more. He wanted to drive it in.
“I wanted to talk to you about all of this. I wasn’t planning on screaming out here on my front lawn. Natalie wanted to make you dinner and for us to talk it out. Be civil about it all.”
I scoffed at him. Civil? This wasn’t civil, this was sadistic.
“You thought you could invite me to
your home and that I would be okay with you cheating on me and wanting to leave me?”
“Listen. We wanted to do this in the most adult way possible in order for us to all be happy in the end.” Happy? There was that word again. I certainly wasn’t the happy one here.
“Who’s happy?”
“We are.” A voice came from behind the man standing in front of me. The woman who stood there was almost the spitting image of me, except for that blonde hair. What did she have that I didn’t? It was when I looked into those deep blue eyes that I knew what it was. The life that shone so bright, the one that sparkled only for him. I once had that sparkle, but now it was clear that past tense wasn’t enough for him.
“Enjoy your happiness.” I watched as Natalie grabbed onto his arm.
“Don’t leave, Alexa.” Adam tried to move towards me, but it wasn’t like Natalie was holding him back. She was holding him steady, as if he was the one who was breaking down. They looked like the picture-perfect family standing in the middle of their lawn.
“You don’t get to tell me not to leave when you are the one who destroyed this marriage.” I recoiled as he tried to reach for me again.
“At least let me take you to Lilly’s.” I stepped backwards, away from his enticing words, from the gentle whisper that was coming from his mouth. “Let me make sure you get home safe.”
It was when he said “home” that I turned around. Leaving both Natalie and him standing there. He had considered Lilly’s apartment my home. He had already written my future for me. I shook as I walked away from the house, barely hearing the shouts coming from behind me, and that’s when it happened. I ran.
I ran like I had done so many other times this month, not knowing how I felt. Not knowing how to come out from all of this. I didn’t run to Lilly’s. I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to tell anyone right now, because I knew inevitably that one day I would have to. I would have to tell my friends and family how my marriage failed, and that just wasn’t something I wanted to deal with right now. So, I ran to Max’s. The one person who I knew wouldn’t judge any of this. The one person who wouldn’t tell me it would all be okay. Max.
