It isn’t the easiest day at the office, though. Many times, I have the urge to pick up my cell phone and call Marian and spill the beans, or shoot Adam a text. Something along the lines of, Hope you’re having a good day, or See you tonight. XO. Something kind of neutral and loving. Something that says I’m thinking about him. I know that as soon as I do that, though, I’ll spend the remainder of the afternoon anxiously checking and rechecking my text messages, hoping for a response. Hoping for a text that reads something like, Let’s forget about this separation nonsense, or You’re all I’ll ever need, Halley. Come home.
I have one urge that I do give in to today—to downright cry, alone. I take my tears to the women’s bathroom, and seeing how it is the first real, tissue-needing cry since Adam and I started on this rocky path, I let the tears come, unrestrained. They aren’t tears of anger so much as they are tears of sadness and hopelessness. Tears of shock that come as unexpectedly as the reason behind them. I know they are the first of many, yet I feel somehow better afterward. My eyes look as if they’ve taken a beating, but it feels good—if that can be an appropriate word in this case—to acknowledge my pain.
Utterly spent, I come home to an empty condo. I usually beat Adam home from work, but I stayed later today. Perhaps he has the same game plan. I don’t allow myself to ponder where he is or why he isn’t home yet. Instead, I sit in front of my computer and continue the work I halted at the office. It’s during my Anne of Green Gables research for my Copper passion project (I can’t work with Laura right now) that I fall asleep at my desk. It’s half past nine when I wake to hear Adam turn on the shower and whistle that no-name tune he whistles every single night.
I notice his running clothes and Nikes in the bedroom, piled by the bathroom door, which is slightly ajar. A pang of sorrow hits as I think of how Adam and I used to jog together. Not all the time, but only in the alternate universe of what is our new now am I a morning jogger and he an evening one.
I crawl into bed without so much as taking off my makeup or brushing my teeth—activities that would undoubtedly force me to interact with Adam, or at the very least come into contact with him. The prospect of what we wouldn’t be able to say to each other is too much to bear. I pull the duvet halfway over my head and shut my eyes. Before Adam can step from the shower and conclude his habitual tune, I fall into some much-needed sleep.
On night two Adam gets home, again, later than I do. This time, however, he joins me in the living room for the remainder of the Friends episode I’m watching. We finally share words, though they are brief and only about work.
“Work going well?” Adam asks.
“Yeah,” I reply. “You?”
“Busy. But good.” He looks at the TV screen, lets out a single beat of laughter, and says, “Ah, this is a good episode.”
Then we sit next to each other and don’t say another word until lights out.
“I love you, Hals.” On one crooked arm Adam leans over onto my side of the bed, and we kiss.
“I love you, Adam.”
They aren’t heavy I love yous, but their lightness isn’t exactly something to boast about, either. They are habitual in a world that is becoming anything but familiar.
We do versions of this for three days, never once mentioning our supposedly impending separation. Perhaps both of us would rather forget it was ever mentioned? Maybe delay and denial feel less painful than the cold, hard truth.
It is on morning four when I receive an early-morning text, right as I’m about to take another atypical solo morning jog. It’s from Nina. She says she’ll swing by after work with the tube of lipstick I left on her guest bathroom sink when Adam and I visited for dinner. It isn’t as if I don’t have other lipsticks tiding me over, though that particular MAC shade of pink is my favorite. One I’ve worn since college. I could get it from her whenever we see each other next.
Don’t make the drive for that, hon. But thx! I text.
Nina texts back, I miss you and I want to visit.
I consider asking Adam if he knows anything about Nina’s plans, and then I start to imagine what he must have said to her about our plight. Did he run to his little sister and tell her I was cruel and selfish, refusing to give him something she values so highly? Are we already at that immature stage in a separation of designating whose friends are whose, what relationships have to change, sides forced to be taken? I can’t picture any of it. This is Adam and me. Nina and me. Things surely could not deteriorate to this.
So I do the least anxiety-causing thing I can think of, and the most realistic. I view Nina’s invitation as a hand held out to a friend, a sister-in-law who has always been more sister than in-law. I miss her, anyhow, and even though I don’t like the idea that Adam has talked to someone else about our marriage troubles, thereby making them that more real (I know, calling the kettle black), I am relieved Nina already knows. Because the sooner you start talking, the sooner you get to fixing. At least that’s what I hope for.
“You are too sweet, Nina,” I say when Nina shows up at my front door after work. She has a bottle of red wine in one manicured hand and a tube of my favorite lipstick in the other.
“If I were sweet”—she looks to my lipstick—“I would’ve brought this by sooner.”
I take the wine and lipstick. “You’re ridiculous.” I fetch a wineglass for me and, from the fridge, a bottle of sparkling water for Nina. We move to the living room.
“Got to say, as always, you look great, Nina.” Her face has become more round and soft, a lovely effect of pregnancy that she wears flawlessly. Her lips are lightly colored with her signature mauve lipstick, probably still the YSL color she’s worn since college. She’s wearing the most darling skirt, a Ted Baker judging by the large-print flowers, with a fitted black tee. If Adam saw her right now, I could picture him telling me, See, pregnancy isn’t awful. Nina looks great, and you’d look so beautiful pregnant, Halley.
“So, how are you feeling?” I ask, tucking a leg under my seat.
“Fantastic,” Nina says. “With that awful first trimester morning sickness at all hours of the day long gone, I feel like a million bucks.”
When Nina first began experiencing morning sickness morning, noon, and night, I remember commenting to Adam how misguided the term was. He’d said something about how Nina probably just got the short end of the stick, that the term probably existed because most women do experience sickness only in the morning. I laughed and made a curt remark about how that’s one of many ways pregnancy and motherhood blindside a woman. No, thank you.
I blink away the unpleasant memory of Adam and say, “Well, it shows. I’m glad to hear you’re not feeling so sick anymore.”
Nina places a throw pillow behind her back for added support. “I may not be throwing up anymore, but now my feet are already starting to swell. These are some of the last shoes I can tolerate that aren’t comfy sneakers or slippers.” She laughs to herself.
“You could do worse,” I say of her fashionable black patent leather ballet flats.
“Did you know Rylan’s about the size of a cauliflower now?”
Nina pulls her cell phone from her large designer handbag. While I consider the peculiarity of how produce is commonly used to describe a baby’s growth, Nina opens an app on her phone. The app tracks the growth of the baby, alerts you to interesting facts about the baby and your pregnant body, and tells you what to expect week after week.
“That’s amazing,” I say, impressed at how something so large, relatively speaking, is growing and thriving inside little Nina. It is called the miracle of life for a reason, and I’m happy Nina is getting to experience every bit of it.
Nina kicks off her shoes and props her feet on the ottoman. She takes a drink of water. “So, Halley. How are you doing, doll?”
It’s uncanny how direct yet polite Nina is, like her brother. It’s equal parts cut-to-the-chase, and kindness and courtesy. It’s evident Nina and Adam’s parents raised them to be kind and understan
ding children, composed and empathetic adults. Adam would make a spectacular father. I have never doubted that.
“I’ve been better,” I say.
“I’m sorry.” She rubs my arm.
“I love that you’re here, Nina. But did Adam, by chance . . . ask you to come over?”
The idea then strikes me: Is Adam trying to find an easy way to initiate the separation? Is he so scared to come to me directly and ask me to leave our home that he employs his sister?
Now I’m just being foolish and paranoid.
Nina shakes her head. “Adam and I’ve talked about what’s going on,” she says. “A little bit, not much detail. I’m here on my own, for my friend who’s obviously going through a difficult time.”
“Thanks, Nina.”
“I know if Griffin and I were going through something like this, I’d want you around.” She then quickly adds, with a worried look on her face, “It’s all right that I’m here, right?”
I laugh. “You never have to ask, Nina.”
I catch her up on all the details that Adam’s left out—which, to my relief, is quite a lot—and I’m careful with how I phrase things. Adam is not the enemy or the victim, and neither am I. We are a married couple at a low point and we’re trying to figure things out. After I tell Nina that we’re as distant as we’ve ever been, I ask, “Um, Nina? Do you know if . . . if Adam expects me to leave our home for our . . . separation?” I ball both of my fists, anxious about her response. “Is that why he hasn’t brought up the separation idea again?”
“To not be with you is the last thing Adam wants,” she says. “He’s as torn up over this as you are.”
“He suggested it,” I say quickly.
Nina only nods.
Just as quickly, I add, “I suppose it’s not a bad idea, the separation. Actually, I don’t think I can quantify it—good, bad. I mean, who knows how to deal with something like this when you’ve never had to? When you’ve never thought you would ever have to?”
Nina keeps nodding, her mere presence comforting.
I don’t want to make Nina feel as if she needs to take sides, so I say, “Adam’s probably right that we should give each other some space. The way things are now, I don’t see how we’re going to reach a conclusion, at least not without building up the tension till someone bursts.” It’s a logical line of thought, but it’s far from easy to swallow. In theory it seems sound, at least worth a try. In practice I’d rather go to bed for a month and sleep away the problems.
“He’s looking for an apartment,” Nina says with as much forced positivity as she can muster, given the situation at hand.
It’s as if a knife slices through me. My husband is already looking for another place to live. With every step toward separation, I’m getting closer to being without Adam. It’s the theory versus the practice. Denial is dead, and reality sets in.
I’m crushed.
I bite my bottom lip. “He . . . is?”
Nina looks heartbroken, as if she wishes she were recounting only the scoop on this afternoon’s episode of her favorite soap and not the reality that is her brother’s and best friend’s lives.
“But it isn’t looking promising yet.” She squeezes my knee. “Everything’s without vacancy or too expensive or too far from his office.”
“No,” I say, scrunching my brow and getting a hold of my thoughts. “I’ll move out.” I finish my wine.
“He doesn’t want to make this harder on you,” she says, now undoubtedly assuming the role of intermediary. Separation never felt so imminent.
“No, my staying here with all these memories”—I cast about the room—“will certainly be harder. I couldn’t do it.”
Nina rubs my arm again, and I say, “I’ll stay with Marian.”
I haven’t asked Marian yet. In fact, I haven’t even breathed a word about the separation to her. I figured once Adam and I made a real move toward it, then I would. Doing so now would just make things more . . . real. Although I’m starting to feel that this talk with Nina is move enough. Things are real. This is not a bad dream from which I’ll wake, nor something a Snow White kind of sleep will make dissolve. This is what has become of my life, as unexpected and as unplanned as it may be. It’s time to face the music. I am separating from my husband.
“Old roommates reunite,” Nina says with a cheery smile. I adore how positive she’s trying to be through all of this.
I sniff a laugh. “Not exactly under the dream circumstances, but yeah.” I roll my empty wineglass between my hands. I’m temporarily mesmerized by the way the rich red drop of impossible-to-reach drink rolls around like a bead of uncatchable, unstoppable mercury.
“I’m sad, Nina. Heartbroken and sad.”
“I know you are.”
“And Adam can’t do anything about my sadness.” I draw my gaze from the mercurial bead to Nina’s chocolate eyes. Her uncanny polite directness isn’t the only thing she shares with Adam. I swallow hard. I miss Adam and the way things were.
“That’s why I’m here,” Nina says, encouraging. “That’s why you have a friend, a sister, to help with that.” She pulls me into a hug.
“Hey.” I decide to turn the conversation. “I think Adam’s going to be busy with work during that ballet. You want a girls’ night?”
“He doesn’t want to go, does he?” she says.
Adam is no Philistine, and ordinarily he’d have no qualms about accompanying me to a ballet or symphony, the kind of date I’m more prone to choose. However, it isn’t a matter of whether or not Adam wants to go. I’m deciding that, given our separation, this is something I’m going to try without him. The big deal isn’t going without him or having a girls’ night, it’s my deciding to try to realize the reality of our separation—move beyond theory and get to practice. There will be many things Adam and I will temporarily no longer share, and a ballet seems like one of the easiest to start with.
Adam arrives at the tail end of Nina’s visit.
“Stay for dinner, Nina,” Adam offers. “We can all go out somewhere, maybe meet Griffin someplace?”
“Thanks,” Nina says, “but I’ve got dinner in the Crock-Pot, and I’m feeling too tired to be anywhere but home, dressed in my pajamas.” She glances at her swollen feet.
“Thanks for coming over,” I tell her.
We hug goodbye, and Adam gives his sister a kiss on the cheek as she’s out the door. Before Nina turns away, she darts her eyes from the back of Adam’s head to me, and gives a thin smile. A Keep your chin up, girl smile mixed with I’m so, so sorry.
Once Nina leaves, the place becomes considerably quieter.
“Um, takeout for dinner?” I say, keeping it brief.
“Sounds fine.” Adam pulls out his cell phone to place the order.
“I’ll take my usual, with the yellow curry.”
“Are you sure about Thai again? We had it the other night.”
“Then pizza,” I say, lackluster. “I don’t care.”
“I’ll order Thai.” He says this as if it takes all his energy.
This is our new normal. This is the Brennan household. Terse, tight, and terrible.
When I tell Adam my plans to enjoy the ballet with Nina, so he doesn’t have to deal with making it work with his schedule, I catch a small flash of sadness streak across his face. It’s as if he recognizes, as do I, that this is really happening. That there is going to be a separation, and that it will hurt. It already does, and we haven’t even reached for the first piece of luggage. There isn’t even three feet of distance between us on the sofa as we eat dinner in silence, but it may as well be the ocean.
Five
The following evening, as Adam sits in bed with his computer aglow on his lap, a small sheaf of papers at his side atop the duvet, I announce that we are one step closer to our trial separation.
“What do you mean?” he asks, looking up from his laptop.
“I mean that I’m moving out.”
“No, Halley. You stay he
re. A separation was my suggestion. I’ll move out.”
I apply my hand lotion and shake my head. “No,” I say, eyeing my sparkly princess-cut wedding ring. I’m careful not to press lotion into it. I’ve always refused to take it off, even when applying lotion, because I nearly lost it once by doing so. Ever since, Adam made me promise to keep it on, no matter what. If that meant excessive ring cleanings, so be it. As I look at my wedding ring, as we discuss who will live where during our separation, I can’t help but wonder if Adam would mind now if I took it off.
I sigh. “No,” I say again. “It’s our problem, and I don’t want—” I stop myself. “I can’t live here. Not without you.”
“I’ve been . . . looking for an apartment, Halley,” he says with hesitation. His forehead knits and his eyes narrow.
“I heard.” My voice is steady. I rub the excess hand lotion onto my forearms and elbows.
He closes his laptop and sets it aside. “I’ll leave as soon as one becomes available. Besides, moving’s a hassle, and I don’t want you to have to do tha—”
“It’s done. I’ll be out by next week.”
“You found a place?” he asks, surprised. “So . . . fast!”
I take my routine pills. “I’m rooming with Marian.”
I asked Marian earlier this afternoon if she could use a roommate for a while. After a lengthy call about everything from how Adam and I came to this conclusion to if I was still all right with bar soap—she wanted to make sure I felt right at home in my . . . new home—it was settled. Old roomies were, as Nina said, going to be reunited.
Everything the Heart Wants: A Novel Page 8
