by Megan Crane
It was all borrowed time and hand-me-downs. None of it was mine. None of it fitted. I was paralysed. Still. Waiting around for someone to notice how well-behaved and worthy I was, and reward me for it. As if that were likely to happen.
It was well after midnight on New Year’s Eve. I was all alone, and I still had no idea what to do about it.
18
‘Carolyn was here today,’ Tim said.
I looked up from the foot of his bed, where I was busying myself by unnecessarily folding and refolding his blankets as he sprawled there, catching his breath. He had just returned from another gruelling session with his physical therapist and was still sweating, but he looked like the Tim I remembered, coming home from a workout at the gym and throwing himself on the couch in sweats and a T-shirt. Only the fact that we were in this rehab centre rather than our house indicated that he was anything but healthy. That and his spotty memory.
And, of course, all the small details about his little love triangle that we hadn’t discussed until today. Until now. Because he hadn’t let Carolyn in to see him before today – or so I’d thought. But it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been the last to know something, would it?
‘Oh?’ He wasn’t looking at me when I glanced at him. His attention was focused on his hands, as if there were secrets tattooed there. ‘How was that?’
Tim looked at me then, and my heart lurched slightly. Or maybe it was my stomach. Those blue eyes, so very bright. That open, trustworthy face. For some reason, I remembered then how much I’d loved it on the rare occasions he’d danced, because he did it so badly, and with such glee. I remembered how I’d used to laugh and laugh …
Everything can’t be a lie, I assured myself. Not everything.
‘Is it true?’ he asked, his voice quiet. But his gaze stayed steady on mine. ‘Everything she said … The baby. Is it … Did I do that?’
It had been two weeks since I’d last seen Carolyn. Two weeks since we’d had that quietly shattering conversation, and I’d worked overtime to convince myself I’d forgotten all about it. Tim was doing so well, recovering so quickly, that it was easy to get wrapped up in that and act as if that were all that mattered. It was easy to live in crisis mode; it was easy to arrange my life around his schedule, to play the doting wife. It wasn’t even an act, entirely. The doctors had advised us to let him ask the questions rather than bombard him with information he wouldn’t be able to remember and which might upset him, and maybe I’d gone too far with that. Maybe I’d tried a little too hard to climb back into my marriage and hide there.
Just as I’d told Carolyn I wanted to do. Why was I surprised that she’d taken matters into her own hands?
‘Yes,’ I said now. ‘I think you did.’
‘Okay,’ he said. He shook his head slightly, which made me notice that the blonde hair he liked to keep short was longer now. Bordering on the very far edge of unruly. The Tim I knew would have hated that. ‘Wow.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Wow.’
I stopped pretending that I was accomplishing anything with the blankets, and sat down in his visitor’s chair. A little heavily. The rehab centre was much roomier than the hospital, and his entire windowsill was cluttered with flowers and cards, a whole town’s worth of get well soon wishes. I reached over and straightened one of the cards. And then I accepted that I was nervous. And that I wasn’t sure I wanted to have this conversation.
And as I sat there and waited to see what he would say next, I wondered why. Why was I waiting for him? Why was I even here? Why was I floating around my own life, waiting for other people to solve it?
‘I know I can’t remember everything,’ he said slowly. He laughed slightly, like he was aware of the understatement there. ‘But I’m kind of shocked. I always thought that if someone was going to cheat, it would be you.’
Um. What?
‘What?’ I scowled at him. ‘What did you say?’
‘I don’t know, I kind of thought you’d be the one to cross that line,’ he said again, in that conversational way, as if what he was saying wasn’t completely fucked up. As if it didn’t make a mockery of everything I’d suffered these past months.
‘Sorry.’ My voice was definitely on the hostile side. ‘It was all you. Doggy-style – did she mention that part? I saw it with my very own, until-that-moment-totally-faithful eyes.’
The room was silent.
‘Until that moment?’ Tim asked. He laughed, and it sounded rusty that time. Or, possibly, a little bit forced. ‘Does that mean that afterward you weren’t faithful?’
I immediately felt guilty. And was then furious with myself. If anyone should feel guilty, it certainly wasn’t me. No way.
‘I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,’ I said, squeezing my eyes shut for a second as if that could contain the sudden blooming headache. ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Tim. Why don’t you tell me what you remember? Because you really did have an affair with Carolyn and she really is pregnant with your child, and any line-crossing in our marriage was done by you, not me. Is that clear enough? Does that help?’
‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ he said. ‘That’s the last thing I want. Really.’
He settled back against his bed, and folded his arms beneath his head, and I couldn’t help studying him as he lay there. He was a good-looking guy. A little scrawnier at the moment than he usually was, and a bit more pale. But still attractive. It wasn’t so much his individual features but the sum of them put together. He had charisma. He was the kind of guy who made you want to do things for him – want to please him. Notably unlike Alec, who was hostile and often rude. If not downright surly.
Not that I was making comparisons.
‘Good,’ I said now, feeling annoyance like adrenalin pulsing through me, making me feel jittery and wired. ‘Let’s not fight.’
‘You look different,’ he said after a moment, studying me. He pointed at his hair, as if to indicate mine. ‘I mean, you look the way you did when I met you.’
I didn’t know if there were layers of meaning there that I should attempt to excavate. I decided against it. I reached up and ran a hand along my hair, which grew like a weed and was now nearly to my shoulders, every new inch making me feel less like the wife he’d betrayed and more like the woman who’d chosen him very deliberately all those years ago. A crucial distinction.
‘If that’s your way of telling me I look younger,’ I said, ‘thank you.’
‘You’ve been so good to me,’ he said quietly. ‘You were all I wanted when I woke up. I was completely delirious and you were the only thing that made me feel any better.’
‘I’m glad I could be here for you,’ I said, and that wasn’t a lie. It was perfectly true. It was just that there were complications surrounding that. Shouldn’t it mean something that I was willing to put it all aside at a time like this? Shouldn’t that prove what a good person I was, unlike Carolyn – what an excellent and longsuffering wife? I shouldn’t be the one he left. It was so unfair.
It wasn’t that I wanted a medal. But a kinder word or two wouldn’t hurt, either.
‘Sarah …’ He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘I don’t think we were happy.’
I felt myself deflate. I wondered if it was visible. And when I was small again, I felt the rest of it: shame. Regret. Humiliation. And that panic.
‘Did Carolyn tell you that?’ I asked, battling to remain calm. ‘It seems a little convenient.’
‘She told me a lot of things,’ he said. ‘But the part about us, the things I remember …’ His blue eyes were intent on mine, and perfectly clear. ‘Do you think we were happy? Really?’
‘I was happy,’ I said simply. Wasn’t I, back then? Or anyway, I’d never been unhappy. What was the difference? I raised my hands slightly and let them fall to my lap. ‘I know it would be so much easier if I could say everything was terrible, but it wasn’t. Not for me. And if you weren’t happy, you never told me. You let me walk
in on you. And then you raced right ahead into the divorce like it was a foregone conclusion.’
‘Carolyn says you refused to listen,’ he said. ‘To even entertain the conversation when I tried to have it with you. She thinks you wanted—’
‘Carolyn is, to put it mildly, an unreliable source,’ I pointed out, interrupting him, and trying not to bite his head off. He was still a patient. He was still recovering. He looked weak, and I had to remind myself that this was all a mystery to him. He wasn’t trying to hurt me – he honestly couldn’t remember. But it was hard. ‘And I’m not sure you should use your pillow talk with her as evidence against me when you’re the one who can’t remember anything.’
He let out a breath, as if it hurt, and I was so angry with him and trying so hard to keep it locked inside that I didn’t even ask him if he was okay.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked, frowning like he was truly confused. By me. Carolyn struck again. ‘Why are you helping me, if it’s not out of some kind of guilty conscience?’
I stared at him, shaken. More shaken than I wanted to admit, much less share. I knew I didn’t have a guilty conscience. Not even about Alec, not really. But I wasn’t exactly pure of heart, either, and that was the part that was getting to me.
‘Because you’re my husband.’ I shook my head, realizing only then that I was much too close to tears. Again. ‘That meant something to me, Tim. Even if it didn’t mean anything to you. Obviously.’
I met my father for coffee in the cute little independent coffee shop in the village a day or so later, at his request. He looked ill at ease and severe, scowling at the selection of pastries in the glass case as if he suspected a trick.
‘They’re just croissants, Dad,’ I said, trying to be reassuring, and ordered one. ‘They’re not going to hurt you.’
He ordered plain coffee, black, and closely monitored the barista behind the counter as if he anticipated some kind of bait and switch, as if he suspected he might be given a latte instead and be expected to make do. We settled down at one of the empty tables and marinated for a moment or two in the familial awkwardness. I thought about the meetings I’d had to have with the local lawyers still handling our case load, and with the ever-loathsome Annette. I’d finally admitted the truth to myself: the law I practised at Lowery & Lowery bored me. I had no desire to defend drunk drivers. In fact, I kind of hated them. I’d have thought that revelation might have come with a trumpet or two, at the very least. Instead, I was having a notably non-Parisian croissant in a Rivermark coffee house with my remarkably uncomfortable father. Six of one, half dozen of another, I told myself.
‘I’m sorry you won’t come to the house,’ he said after a while. ‘I wanted to see how you’re doing. Your mother’s feelings are very hurt, you know.’
‘I’m sure they are,’ I said. Not nicely.
‘She’s doing the best she can,’ Dad said, that stern note in his voice. Defending her, as ever. Well, maybe he had to. ‘This situation between you girls is very tricky.’
I should have expected that. The tricky situation bullshit that people trotted out because they didn’t want to tell me to get over it to my face, and they were uncomfortable that I couldn’t seem to do it on command anyway. That I had feelings about what Carolyn had done to me. Very tricky, indeed.
‘It’s not that tricky,’ I replied. I wasn’t even angry this time, or not very. I sounded well-rehearsed to my own ears. Or maybe that was real weariness with all of this, finally taking me over. ‘All you and Mom had to do was try to be a little compassionate to both your daughters. And maybe a little less openly supportive of the one who caused this whole thing. I get that you couldn’t do that. It’s fine.’ I fiddled with my cup. I drank so much coffee these days, sitting in hospital rooms and trying to combat my largely sleepless nights, that I wondered if it was running in my veins instead of blood. ‘But I’m obviously going to have a lot of feelings about that, Dad. I’m going to feel abandoned. And that’s not something a lasagne dinner is likely to cure.’
‘This bitterness can’t be good for you, sweetheart,’ he said gently.
You would know all about that, I thought but kept myself from saying. My mother had made a career out of her own bitterness. She let it infuse every last part of her life. She had never so much as voiced a single syllable that didn’t drip with it, as far as I knew. And she seemed perfectly fine with her life, didn’t she? So did my father, for that matter. And on some level, I got it. There was a grandchild in the mix now, or would be soon enough. I was sure they told themselves they were taking the long view, and maybe they were. If I squinted, I could almost see where they were coming from.
And maybe, in time, I would get to a place where that stopped hurting me so much. But I wasn’t optimistic.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ I told my father then, and I even smiled. ‘Some days I think it’s all I have left.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Lianne said, scoffing. We stood in her cosy kitchen, basking in our Wednesday afternoon coffee date. Or anyway, I was basking. She was mad, and rapidly getting even madder. ‘You can’t keep waiting on him hand and foot while he’s lounging around musing about what you did to the marriage. What the hell?’
‘I feel like that’s where I need to be right now,’ I said with perfect calm. Because I really was calm. Possibly psychotically calm, but I didn’t like to judge. ‘I think there’s probably a really limited amount of time left where I can be his wife, Lianne. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking advantage of that while I can.’
‘That’s maybe the single most depressing thing I’ve ever heard you say,’ she retorted, her voice thick with feeling. ‘What are you thinking?’
But I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t want to think.
‘I spent months and months doing nothing but thinking,’ I told her, my voice shaking, the myth of perfect calm shattered that quickly, ‘and what good did it do, Lianne? What came of it? So I’m not thinking anything.
I’m living through this. One day after the next.’
‘Sarah.’ Her voice was something like worried, like she’d lost me. I didn’t want to hear that tone in her voice. I didn’t want to see that expression on her face. I wanted all of this to be over. I wanted the decisions to be made already, and dealt with. I wanted to fast-forward to the end, wherever that was.
‘I’m fine, Lianne,’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly happy.’
Or I was close enough for it to count, and who cared if that wasn’t all the way there? I ignored the face she made.
‘Why is the way I’m happy never good enough for other people?’ I demanded. ‘Why doesn’t the fact that I say I’m happy, or was happy, ever matter? Maybe this is the exact amount of happiness I’m capable of.’ I spread my arms out, taking in the world, this situation, my life. Everything. ‘Maybe this is exactly what I want.’
‘Then congratulations,’ Lianne said dryly. And a little bit sadly, which I chose to overlook. ‘You sure have it.’
When I got home I stood in the kitchen for a moment, feeling unbearably restless. Like there was a drumbeat underneath my skin: an impossible itch. Like I was breaking out in hives, except no matter how many times I inspected my skin, I wasn’t. I didn’t want to know what it was, I told myself. I didn’t want to know what it meant.
And yet I found myself in the attic, digging through old boxes and strange parcels I couldn’t identify, getting dusty and dirty, and I kept right on going. Finally, I found it. I dragged the big box out into the upstairs hallway, and ripped open the cardboard without caring that my hands looked chapped and grey from the cold and the dust.
There they were. My old travel journals and guidebooks. All the notes I’d taken about the places I’d wanted to go, the things I’d wanted to see. Botswana and Budapest. Prague and Sydney. All of those dreams of mine, hidden away in a cardboard box with my backpacker’s pack at the bottom. I pulled it out, smiling slightly. It was a dark green and had all of those clips and buckles, all of which s
eemed strange but all of which worked beautifully when you were living with the pack on your back. When it was your moveable home and you had a hundred different needs for each and every clip, depending on where in the world you found yourself. I picked it up and carried it downstairs and laid it out on the coffee table in the centre of the living room. I had wanted to carry what I needed with me, and find what I wanted in the places I wandered. And instead I had chosen to nail myself into place. To stand still. To represent drunk drivers and fill a house with pretty things that anyone could buy in the same stores I’d visited. I wanted more. I wanted … bigger.
I fingered the shoulder straps of my once-beloved pack, and I understood that I had felt more like myself while I was lost somewhere in the world than I ever had when I was here, being dutiful. That I had put myself aside to be this very specific kind of adult, adhering to a very specific set of rules. Lawyer hair and appropriate clothes. A polite smile.
Maybe Brooke had been right. Maybe smooth and sensible really was settling.
Maybe I’d been wrong about that, too.
Later, I wrapped myself up in my thickest comforter and stood out on the deck that jutted out into our barren, wintery backyard. It was dry and cold, and the wind picked up as the sun set. But still I stood there, watching the stars come out and the moon rise. Watching the night settle over the world.
It got colder and colder, and I didn’t move; I pulled the comforter tighter around me. As if I were keeping my own quiet vigil far up here on this ridge, where no one could see me. Where no one would know. And it was fifteenth January, and even as I stood there, shivering and teeth chattering, Alec was on a plane somewhere. Over the ocean maybe, or all the way to Africa already for all I knew. But gone. Always gone.
