“Have you seen him? Have you seen him since that night?” Pins poked at my chest. I shook my head back and forth until a stabbing pain in my neck stopped me. I forced my eyes to momentarily stop their downpour and meet his.
“I told you. It’s over.” I couldn’t breathe. His face was scrunched and angry. She kept her focus on me and it felt as if they were both zapping me with lie detector beams.
“I know you’ve been emailing each other,” he said, the rage and jealousy resurfacing.
“But I stopped. I swear. And I haven’t seen him. I’m not going to see him, ever again.” The words caught in my throat and some kind of strange animal sound came out along with the uncontrollable sobs. Carly turned back to Rick.
“Can you answer the question now? Are you willing to do the work with Beth and with me?” He moved back toward the love seat with slow deliberate steps and sat down close to me.
He took my outstretched hand and turned it over, stroking the ring that symbolized our union. The same ring that his father gave his mother all those years ago. The ring that she wore for their long and miserable marriage. The ring that we had to settle for because we were too young and broke to buy one for ourselves. The ring that I had always secretly feared would curse our marriage since it came from one that was such a catastrophic failure.
He wrapped his large hand around mine and keeping his eyes on the ring, he said, “We should have replaced that a long time ago.” Then he turned back to Carly. “Same time next week?”
Chapter 33
I stood staring at Jack napping in the old toddler car bed, which he had taken to much more easily than I could have imagined. He was excited to share a room with his big brother, and though Sam pretended to be put out when we forced him to give up his privacy, I often heard him cheerfully whispering stories or singing songs to Jack at night after we put them to bed.
In the kitchen, as I was making a cup of tea, I heard some kind of commotion coming from across the street. I stepped out the front door, under the guise of grabbing the newspaper lying in my driveway. There stood my neighbor Lisa, the one whose voice I should never have heard over my baby monitor just a few months earlier. She had a baby on her hip and two preschoolers hanging on to her legs as her husband sped off in a dark blue BMW convertible with a large moving van following behind. The children seemed to be pleading with her and I could see tears running down their faces. I couldn’t hear their little voices, but her shrill words were unmistakable, even with the distance between us. “I told you. He’s not coming back. Not ever.” She pulled one of them forcefully by the arm and the other scurried along side her back into the house. I pretended not to see or hear anything as I went back into my own home, with a dull ache in my chest. I promised myself I would find a way to reach out to her, and to the children.
Lifting the blackened roses from the vase on the dining room table, I pondered the random nature of Rick’s recent romantic gestures. He was still angry at times but with Carly’s help, and plenty of knock-down-drag-out all nighters while the kids slept at my parents’ house or mother-in-law’s place, things were starting to open up. The one thing I hadn’t expected to happen so quickly was the release of his emotions, like floodgates had been lifted. It was scary sometimes but also exciting. I never knew what to expect. One day he might snap at me for some small infraction and the next he would apologize profusely and tell me I was the love of his life. But all that was to be expected during this phase, as Carly reminded us regularly. I much preferred the unpredictability and volatility to the silence and distance we had before. And we were communicating again, maybe not as flawlessly as all my textbooks would have us do, but it felt like a real start. Carly still refused to give us any prognosis about whether she believed we could make it as a couple, but she encouraged us to keep doing the work, assuring us that only good would come from it, whatever the final outcome.
Sipping my tea at the table, I replayed the events of the past months in my mind as I often did, stopping on different parts each time, analyzing and looking for new nuggets of meaning to explore with Carly. I was coming to know myself better than I ever had before and though the road ahead was long, I felt energized and ready for the journey. I tried to recall the last time I spoke to Jill, remembering how I worried and stressed about how to end our friendship. As with so many things in life, no worry was needed. After telling her that I had cut all ties with Dave and was in therapy working on my marriage, she just sort of faded out of my life.
As I took a last slow sip of tea, a recent conversation with Shelly came to mind.
“You should write a book about your experience, Beth. You could do it. I think it might help you, and it could help other people too.”
Of course I reacted as if the notion was preposterous. I didn’t know the first thing about writing a book, and when on earth would I find the time? But still, the seed she planted had been growing somewhere deep in my subconscious. And on that day, when for some reason Jack took a longer than usual nap and I didn’t have any papers to grade or laundry to do, I sat down at my computer and to began to think about writing the story of what happened with Dave. At first I couldn’t figure out where to start. Then it came to me. Ah yes, it all started in the morning, I remembered. The morning I started to feel the fire burning inside me.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Is This All There Is? Page 19
