by Erin Duffy
I heard a noise, and then something hit the top of my foot. I looked down, and discovered that my bag had ripped. The recycled paper handle on the recycled paper bag that was weak, and cheap, broke in the parking lot, and my three-dollar Mexican avocados rolled away on a dirty American parking lot and disappeared under a German sports car. I dropped to my knees, futilely reaching for the stupid produce I just purchased that was now trying to escape me: avocados, a Granny Smith apple I wanted to puree for Bo’s breakfast, and two oranges just because they were still orange, and I wanted to be supportive.
Chapter 15
“ARE YOU HOME? I rang the bell three times. Where are you?” I asked. I stood on Owen’s stoop on Saturday afternoon and adjusted Bo’s shorts, more than a little annoyed that Owen couldn’t even be bothered to be on time when he knew I was going to drop off Bo and see his apartment. As much as I kind of wanted to see his apartment, I kind of didn’t want to see his apartment at all. It might answer some questions, but it would raise a lot of new ones. I didn’t really feel like adding more question marks to my life at the moment. Still, I stood there, waiting for Owen because I said I would, and one of us still believed in following through on our promises.
“I’m so sorry. I’m stuck in traffic, but I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. I left the door open. Did you try it?”
“No, Owen. I didn’t try to let myself into your house. I thought that would be breaking and entering.”
“Please go inside. I don’t want you guys standing in the rain. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Make yourself some tea. I have some in the cabinet.”
“Okay,” I said. I hung up, and pushed open the door, pausing to stroke Bo’s head and watch to see if he registered any familiarity with this place whatsoever. “So this is where you and Dad hang out, huh?” I asked, tickling him under his chin and causing him to squeal. I moved slowly as I walked around the living room, as if I was afraid someone was going to jump out of the closet and scare me. Owen’s apartment wasn’t what I was expecting. It was neat, and organized, and the couch was corduroy, not leather, and there was milk in the fridge and cereal in the cabinet and I knew I shouldn’t have been snooping, but I convinced myself that I was only doing what any responsible mother would do when allowing her infant to stay in a new place. The walls were bare, but there was a picture of Bo, framed, sitting on the coffee table next to the remote control and a copy of Sports Illustrated. The floor was covered with a beige area rug and Bo’s play mat was tucked under the window, just waiting for his arrival. I walked down the hall and stopped in Bo’s bedroom, which was, just as Owen promised, a complete replica of his room at home, except for the glider that Antonia had given me, and the elephant night-light I recently ordered from a catalog that Owen doesn’t know exists. I liked that Owen had taken the time to make this room comfortable for Bo. I hated the thought of him going to sleep without seeing my face and it did help knowing that he’d be comfortable in his room, even if I wasn’t the one tucking him in his crib.
I paused for a few seconds before I could bring myself to stick my head in the bedroom. It felt strange seeing where Owen slept without me. It looked like a typical bachelor’s bedroom: a bed with white sheets, a duvet with no cover, a pillow with no case. I wondered how he felt crawling into it at night, knowing that he’d never climb into our bed with me again. I wondered if it hurt him to think about it at all, or if Dee Dee’s giraffe legs erased the nostalgia before it got the chance to fully take hold. There weren’t any overt signs of a woman spending time here: no clothes lying around, no shoes on the floor, no jewelry on the dresser. I didn’t bother snooping around the bathroom, where maybe there’d be a toothbrush, or more likely, a curling iron, because it didn’t matter. I already knew Dee Dee was in his life. Seeing her artifacts in his apartment wasn’t going to tell me anything I didn’t know.
But his computer would.
I wouldn’t have done it. I would never have checked his computer if it wasn’t sitting open on his dresser, begging me to push the button to see what came up. I remembered what I said to him when I discovered the affair, when I’d asked how it happened, how they were possibly able to carry on for months without my ever noticing. You started flirting with your ex-girlfriend on email. That’s just awesome. I don’t know about it because I’m not the kind of wife who feels the need to search your computer while you’re in the shower. I wasn’t the type of wife to ever do that, but I was absolutely the type of soon-to-be-ex-wife to do it. No question.
I never knew Owen’s email password, but I knew his habits, and he was as likely to have his Gmail account open on his desktop as I was to have kids’ clothing websites up on mine. “Should we do this, little man?” I whispered, because I wanted some kind of affirmation from someone that it was okay to read Owen’s email, even if the someone was a baby with no verbal communication skills. So, I answered for him. “You’re right, I think we should, too.”
I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it. I guess that was how it worked in these situations. I typed Dee Dee Haines into the search box and hit enter, holding my breath while I waited for the messages to populate. There they were, the entire secret relationship of Owen and Dee Dee on email, scrolling in front of me in chronological order. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. Instead, I paged down until I got to the earliest messages, and one by one began to click and read, until I couldn’t bring myself to read any more.
The week after we moved to Connecticut.
OWEN: Thanks for the offer, but I’m going to be home tonight. Why do you want to get a drink with me? I’m just a boring married guy.
DEE DEE: You’ve never been boring. Come on, it will be like old times. Just one drink. You don’t even have to tell Claire. I’ll have you home before dinner.
OWEN: You know you’re the only girl who ever broke up with me, right?
DEE DEE: One of my biggest regrets. I shouldn’t have ever let you go.
Then, the next day.
OWEN: I must have lost my mind. I’m married, Dee Dee. I’m married and I love my wife and whatever happened between us was a one-time thing and it can’t happen again.
DEE DEE: If you didn’t still have feelings for me you wouldn’t have come over. You’re not being honest with yourself.
OWEN: I can’t do this.
Then, the week before I discovered the affair.
DEE DEE: I hate you spending so much time with Bo when I’ve never had a chance to get to know him. He’s important to you, so he’s important to me. Why don’t you book Claire a hotel and send her into the city so we can have some alone time?
OWEN: She would love that.
DEE DEE: What girl wouldn’t? Let me know when it’s booked. I’ll come over and we can spend the whole day and night together. I hate only being able to see you for short periods of time. I hate having to hide from everyone.
OWEN: I’ll think about it. I’m married, Dee. Let’s not pretend like you didn’t know that when you pursued me.
DEE DEE: I know. I’ll take you any way I can get you. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it. Think about it. It’ll be good for us to spend some time together with the baby.
I’d been wondering where Dee Dee got the idea that she and Owen were star-crossed lovers or something, and that that somehow made her less of the villain in this soap opera, and I’d just found it. She had a plan all along; from the second we met outside of our house, she knew she was going to go after Owen, pregnant wife or not. There was no point in reading any more. I knew everything I needed to know, and plenty that I didn’t need to know, and I knew that I didn’t want to know anything else. I was about to close the computer. I was going to close it and walk away, but I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the email chain before I did. It didn’t seem fair that Owen got to keep his secrets, and I was tired of things being unfair. I closed the laptop and hurried back out to the living room.
I was sitting on the couch when Owen entered ten minutes later. “I’m so
sorry about that,” he said. “Figures I’d get stuck in traffic the day you were coming over. Did you make yourself tea?”
“No. I’m okay,” I said, even though I wasn’t. What did the messages tell me? Did it make the situation better or worse to know that Dee Dee had orchestrated everything, and that if she had just left him alone maybe our family would still be intact? Did it matter? Should it? I didn’t know. There was no benefit to my knowing how it all unfolded. There was only new pain, and more questions, and I didn’t want either of those things. I should’ve left the computer alone.
“What do you think of the place?” Owen reached over and pulled Bo from my lap, and I had to fight every instinct I had to not hold him tighter, to not use him as a security blanket to comfort me as my hands trembled, but I didn’t. Like so many things this last year, I had to let him go.
“It’s nice. Bo’s room is perfect. You were right to do that,” I admitted.
“Thanks. That means a lot.”
“You have diapers and everything? I didn’t look in his changing table, but I assume you’re well stocked. I put some in the bag anyway, if you need them.”
“Thanks. I have some, but you can never have too many, right?”
“There’s Tylenol in there, too. He hasn’t been sleeping well lately.”
“Those teeth are giving you a hard time, little man, huh?” Owen asked. He held Bo over his head and made airplane noises, and Bo kicked his little feet and giggled and I gritted my teeth and nearly choked on a scream.
“I ran into Dee Dee in the grocery store,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I wanted him to know, or what I wanted him to do, but I told him anyway.
“You didn’t cut her hair, did you?” he joked. I wasn’t in the mood to laugh.
“No, Owen. She did tell me that you two were in love, and that I should stop making things so difficult for you, because, you know, this has been hard on her.”
Owen put his head in his hands for a second, and instinctively went to push the hair out of his eyes, until he realized it was no longer there. “She shouldn’t have done that. I have no idea why she would say that to you, but I’m sorry. I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t talk to her,” I ordered. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me. I just thought you should know that she had no problem confronting me while I was shopping with Bo. You got yourself a real keeper. You guys enjoy your night.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow when I bring Bo home,” Owen said. “And then on Monday, I guess.” Monday was it. The day we finally signed our divorce papers. It took four months for us to dissolve our marriage. It didn’t make a difference at this point, we were already living separate lives, but the finality of it made something inside ache. “Thanks for coming over. I hope you like it, and that it makes you feel a little better about things.”
“Yeah, Owen,” I said on my way out the door. “I’m so happy I came. I feel much, much better now.”
“WE WERE BEGINNING to wonder if you were still coming,” Lissy said when I came busting through the door of the fabric store at 6:00 P.M. “They close at seven. We don’t have all that much time so talk and look at the same time.” She handed me a large book filled with fabric swatches. I was meeting Antonia and Lissy at a store called Fancy Fabrics to look for something we could use to upholster the chairs we still hadn’t bought. I joined them at a long rectangular counter in the middle of the store, covered with brightly patterned bolts of fabric and more than a few books of samples we could browse through in the hopes of finding something we liked. After leaving Owen’s, I briefly thought about bailing on this appointment, but then decided that being alone wasn’t all that great of an idea, and besides, how long could it possibly take to pick out fabric for chairs?
“I’m sorry, Owen was late,” I said. I picked up a hot pink bolt of cotton and threw it to the side. “No way. This is way too bright.”
“How did it go? How’s the apartment?” Antonia asked.
“The apartment is fine. It’s a bachelor pad with a fully decorated nursery. That’s not the problem.”
“What happened?” Antonia asked again. “What about this one?” She held up a bright orange and red paisley that was nice and cheerful, but probably too busy for multiple chairs. “You think this would be better as an accent fabric?”
“Probably,” I agreed. “Lissy, what do you think?”
“I hate orange,” she stated.
“Okay, well, there goes that,” Antonia said as she placed the roll on the floor.
“I read his email,” I admitted. “I read his email and I saw everything. All of the emails from the beginning. She seduced him, you guys. Originally, he said no, that he was married, and he resisted it but she wore him down. It’s all there on Gmail—every sickening detail.”
“What possessed you to read his emails?” Antonia asked. She’d completely lost interest in the fabric, which was fine, because so had Lissy. “I thought you said you were over the cyberstalking!”
“This is nothing like the cyberstalking. This is not a Facebook hack. The emails were sitting right in front of me. Well, they were right in front of me once I opened his computer and searched for them.”
“Oh God,” Antonia moaned.
“How was I not supposed to read them?”
“Nothing good was going to come of that!” Antonia said, which seemed silly because nothing good had come from any of this so that really wasn’t surprising.
“Are you kidding?” Lissy asked. “Are you honestly telling me that you wouldn’t have done the same thing? I so would’ve read them. He lost his right to privacy where she’s concerned. I went through my ex’s phone once. All sorts of freaky things were on there and after that I fully support snooping. What did you find out?”
“I found out that she seduced him. She pursued him and she flirted with him and when he tried to break out she basically wouldn’t let him.”
“Don’t give him an excuse,” Antonia ordered. “He’s a big boy. He could’ve said no if he’d really wanted to.”
“I know that. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying that it was her from the very beginning. She knew she wanted him the moment she saw him. I was just a speed bump.”
“Would it have made you feel better if you’d found out that he’d gone after her?” Antonia asked.
“Of course not. I don’t think either option was better. It just hurt to see that it went on for so long. It was right there in front of me that entire time and I didn’t see it until I physically saw it.”
“Yeah, but you knew that already,” Lissy reminded me.
“I know. I know, I know, I know. Except now I know exactly what I didn’t know, you know?”
“No,” they said in unison.
“You’re almost divorced. In two days you will be totally done with this entire mess. Don’t let this stupid realization throw you. You already knew everything you needed to know. That’s why you’re getting divorced. That’s why he’s in that bachelor pad to begin with.” Antonia picked up another roll of fabric, pale pink squares embedded in bright pink squares that created a modern geometric pattern. “Thoughts?”
“That might make me have a seizure if I stare at that all day long,” Lissy admitted. This fabric shopping thing might not be as quick and easy as I’d originally hoped.
“Tell us how you really feel,” Antonia teased.
“You want to know how I really feel?” I asked, even though I knew she wasn’t talking to me. “I feel so pissed off I can barely breathe. I mean, who does she think she is? What makes her think that she’s entitled to just swoop in and destroy a family, a family with an infant! There was a baby involved and she didn’t even blink, before she went after him. It would’ve been one thing if there had been an email on there that said, ‘Hey, seeing you made me realize that I was stupid to break up with you back when we were kids, but I’m really happy for you and you seem to have a lovely family and I wish you all the best.’ That would’ve been fine. That would�
��ve been the mature, appropriate, nonpsychotic thing to do. Instead, she manipulated him and just stole him away from me and if me and Bo ended up alone and devastated, well, who cares because she got her money’s worth out of her purple underwear.” I mindlessly scanned the fabrics that were tucked into deep shelves on the wall behind me, but I wasn’t actually looking at any of them.
“What does purple underwear have to do with it?” Lissy asked.
“Oh my God, don’t ask,” Antonia said. “The girl is a total bitch, Claire. She’s probably a sociopath or has a borderline personality disorder and I’m pretty sure a clinician somewhere with a DSM-5 manual and a basic understanding of psychology could diagnose her with something, but it doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters: your husband was too weak to resist her, and too much of a wimp to come clean to you, and too much of an asshole to stop after the first time and all of that, all of it, is on him. Why would you want to be married to a man like that anyway?”
“I don’t want to be married to a man like that, you’re right. Which is good, because we’re meeting to sign the divorce papers on Monday and now I’m not sad about it in the least. I can’t wait to not be married to him anymore,” I said with a conviction I hadn’t felt about anything since this whole mess began. I also felt very strongly that it was time for people to know exactly why my life imploded, and more important, that exactly none of it was my fault. I removed my phone from my bag and pulled up the screen shot I took of the emails. If I had to see them, then everyone should see them. I opened my Instagram and uploaded the photo.
