“You were snooping on my phone?”
“I wasn’t snooping, Neil. It was an accident. I saw them when I was helping you find your phone, so don’t make this about some invasion of your privacy. Who is Jas?”
“A friend from the gym.”
“A guy friend?”
Neil held up his hands and took a few disgusted steps back. “You know what? I’m done.”
“You’re done? What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that right now I can’t be here with you.” With one final shake of his head, Neil turned around and walked out the door, leaving Camille standing there—alone and trembling.
Twelve
Neil didn’t come home. Camille had lain awake, staring at the ceiling as nine turned to ten and ten turned to eleven and eleven turned to midnight. She finally fell into a fitful sleep somewhere around one, with dreams soaked in anxiety. The terrible kind, where her children were falling into alligator-infested waters and she was desperately trying to hold on to them, but there was only one of her and three of them and no matter how tightly she held on, they kept slipping out of her grip.
She woke at four-thirty with a loud, startling gasp, then lay back down as darkness turned to dawn and soft morning sunlight filtered through their bedroom windows.
It was Sunday morning. The house should be bustling with activity. Everyone should be awake, showering and getting ready for church. Instead, it was just her, alone in the cavernous house. Taylor slept over at Alexis’s. Camille almost always said no when she asked, because Alexis had her own car and she didn’t trust that the two wouldn’t sneak out and drive somewhere in it. How did she know Alexis wasn’t as horrible at driving as Taylor? And where in the world would they be off to past midnight? This time Camille surprised them both by saying yes. She could spend the night.
Then she texted Kathleen, asking if she wouldn’t mind having Austin overnight as well. Kathleen, of course, said yes and wanted to know if everything was okay. Camille hadn’t technically lied when she answered with a vague “mother-in-law drama.” Now she lay in the king-sized bed, immobilized—as though any movement would make this whole thing more real.
Neil hadn’t come home last night.
It was the first time in their twenty-one years of marriage that he hadn’t come home.
It left a panicked feeling in Camille’s chest.
She and her husband weren’t the sort of couple who got into yelling matches. And say one did come, she never imagined they’d be the type who walked away from it.
That wasn’t who they were.
Was it?
She didn’t know anymore, and that—in and of itself—felt like falling into alligator-infested waters all over again. Someone had tossed her off a cliff she didn’t know was there, and she was flailing in midair, trying to stop the whole thing from happening.
How couldn’t she know?
This was the man she’d shared her life with for the past twenty-six years, twenty-one of them as husband and wife. They met her freshman year at Brown, in Economics 101. He was the teaching assistant and the first thing she noticed about him was his fingernails—broad and neatly trimmed and tan, like his skin. She stared at them as he handed her a syllabus, struck by the perfect, pale half moon at the bed of his thumbnail. When he passed, she stared at her own—smaller, less pronounced, but there just the same. The girl sitting next to her—the one who kept twisting the hairs in her eyebrows—had them too.
Lunula.
Camille didn’t know at the time that the white half circles had a name. She only knew that she found them oddly comforting. Because in this, everyone around her was the same. And somehow that commonality made her bold decision six months earlier to attend a college so far from home less foolish.
She had no way of knowing that the TA with the broad fingernails had noticed her that first day too. That while she was wrestling with a strong and unexpected bout of homesickness, he was wrestling with his own set of nerves. Neil had never been a TA before. Back then, he wasn’t yet accustomed to leading a conference room full of junior execs. Camille didn’t notice any tremor of doubt or uncertainty in his voice when he asked his first question, so she had no way of knowing that when she raised her hand, it gave him a boost of confidence that set the tone for an engaged class.
It was a confidence Camille assumed came with him.
Neil Gray—a senior with a rowing scholarship—tall and lean and so much more mature than the freshman boys on her dorm-room floor. She was flattered when he asked if she’d lead an Economics 101 study group. Eager to take up the role as assistant to the assistant. And only partially surprised when at the end of the semester he asked her to dinner at an off-campus steak house. Afterward, he made her head spin with a kiss that obliterated every other kiss that came before. Only a man could kiss like that, and Camille had never been kissed by a man before.
Her friends teased her about their rhyming names.
“You can’t marry him, Camille,” Sloan had said one night as they watched Friends on their small, boxy television. Sloan was Camille’s roommate sophomore year. She had a nose ring and wore her hair short like a pixie. “The two of you are so obnoxiously in love. Add rhyming names to that equation, and you’ll become the butt of every joke.”
Camille had laughed. In truth, she secretly loved that their names rhymed. She secretly loved the idea of the two of them being so obnoxiously in love—their coupledom so nauseatingly cute—that others would poke fun at them in an attempt to cover their jealousy.
Sloan would not sway her. Camille’s heart was his.
And he had promised to cherish it. To love and protect it.
For the past twenty-one years, he had.
Now though, as she lay staring at sparkling dust motes in the stream of sunlight, she wondered if his promise came with an expiration date.
Who was Jas?
The question taunted her.
He never answered it. It was the question that had him throwing up his hands and walking away. It was the question that made the panicky feeling in her chest grow. It expanded like a balloon, squishing her heart to the side.
If only she could rewind time. Go back to last night and forget about what was or wasn’t written on the stupid calendar. Give him a hug when he walked into the house instead of putting on her boxing gloves. Swallow her pride and apologize for forgetting.
What was that verse in Proverbs?
“A gentle answer turns away wrath.”
A gentle answer would have diffused the situation. Neil would have forgiven her, and they could have joined Austin’s baseball team at Maria’s Cantina because Neil could never pass up their queso.
But she couldn’t rewind time. That was one thing her superwoman self hadn’t figured out. The ugly fight that ensued could not be reversed.
The only other one she could remember being as ugly came eleven years before, when Austin was a baby with colic. Camille would be up in the middle of the night, rocking him—wanting to shake him—letting Neil sleep because he had to be at work the next morning, all the while silently resenting her husband. Until one day, all that resentment exploded—word vomit and emotional bile all over her shocked, clueless, could-sleep-like-the-dead husband who wasn’t even aware that Austin had been waking up in the night. He wasn’t aware because she never told him. She never asked him for help. But she shouldn’t have to ask, should she? Neil should know that their firstborn was the exception, not the rule. Babies didn’t typically sleep through the night. Neil should know that she was exhausted.
She had expected him to be a mind reader, a task every bit as impossible as superwoman.
Maybe Neil was right. She was a martyr.
Camille rolled over and placed her hand on the smooth, unrumpled comforter on Neil’s side of the bed.
Where had he slept last night?
The question turned her insides to stone.
A rumbling sound interrupted the dark turn of her thoughts. It was the garage door.
Camille bolted upright so fast her head spun. She threw the comforter off her legs and shoved her arms into her robe, using the sleeves to swipe beneath her eyes so she didn’t look like a raccoon.
She walked into the kitchen just as Neil walked in, his short, thinning hair disheveled. His eyes bloodshot. The sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up his forearms. His tie missing altogether.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“The office.”
“All night?”
He didn’t answer. He shuffled into the living room and took a seat on the edge of the couch.
Camille crept after him, unsure what to say. Afraid to make much noise as he buried his face in his hands and rubbed at his eyes. When he looked up, she was sure he was going to apologize. He shouldn’t have left. It was a horrible thing to do.
But that wasn’t what he said.
“I’m not happy.”
All the breath rushed out of her in a whoosh, as if Neil had punched her in the gut when she wasn’t looking.
He wasn’t happy.
He dragged his hand down his face—his palm scratching like Velcro against day-old whiskers that weren’t usually there. “I haven’t been happy for a while.”
“Okay.” It was a breathless word, because Camille wasn’t breathing.
“I think I need some time. Some space.”
Time.
Space.
He was saying these things—using these words—without meeting her eye. He poured them all on the floor.
“Neil.”
He looked up at her then, with familiar hazel eyes.
“Are you cheating on me?” She waited and watched. Camille had an odd sixth sense about the truth. Her two younger sisters called her the human lie detector. It was a sixth sense that came in handy with a teenager in the house. She wasn’t sure how she did it; she just did. When it came to people she knew, she could always tell when they were lying.
But as Neil looked her in the face and said, “No, of course not,” Camille had no idea at all if he was telling the truth.
* * *
Neil turned her into a liar. When her kids came home on Sunday and asked where their father was, she looked them straight in the eye and said he had to go on a last-minute business trip. Then she locked herself in the bathroom and hyperventilated.
She almost called Kathleen. She needed to talk to someone. She needed to tell a friend that she couldn’t breathe. That she’d been thrown into the middle of The Twilight Zone.
What was going on? How could he just leave?
This was silly. Couples fought all the time. He didn’t have to leave over it. And what about all those things he used to say about divorce? Was it still off the table? She had no idea. He told her he wasn’t happy and then asked for something as elusive and intangible as space and time.
What did that even mean? What did he need space from? Her, or the children too?
The whole thing left Camille alternating between fury and desperation. When the latter hit, she would pace around her bedroom with the phone, wondering if she should call him, beg him to come back. But then the fury would come, and she’d slam down the phone because—forget him. He was the liar. He was a selfish jerk. He wanted time and space? Well, he could have it. He could have all of it in the world. And when he snapped out of it and realized what he’d done and came crawling for forgiveness, she would watch with icy indifference. She would make him feel all the misery and distress she was currently feeling.
The anxiety of it all drove her to WebMD, where she concluded that Neil had a brain tumor. Her uncle Gordon died of a brain tumor when he was fifty-four, and the last year of his life, he hadn’t been himself at all. It was the hardest part of his death—the tumor in his brain stole Gordon’s identity. Her husband must have a brain tumor, and she was sitting there at her computer when she should be taking him to an oncologist and demanding an MRI.
That was when she would pull up his number on her phone and start pacing again.
Call him, you idiot. Call him before it’s too late.
But what if she did and Jas answered?
He never said whether Jas was a woman or not, but she had to be. Otherwise, he would have answered the question. Now every time Camille closed her eyes, she pictured them together.
It made her nauseous.
It made her insane.
And she had to hide it all beneath a smile for the sake of her children.
The whole thing was an out-of-body experience. Watching herself chase after Taylor, who almost left this morning for cross-country without a water bottle. Watching herself answer text messages about tonight’s public meeting at the high school. Watching herself drive Paige to swimming lessons. Watching herself sit beside Austin on a bench in the shade while he explained scientific laws as his sister worked on her backstroke in the pool. Last week he’d swapped his Bermuda Triangle book for one about Isaac Newton.
“That means that an object in space could go forever and ever and ever, without stopping, because there’s no gravity to act against it.”
“What about when it reaches the end of the universe?” she heard herself ask.
“The universe doesn’t end, Mom. It’s expanding.”
“Into what?”
Austin shrugged and then shut the book. “When’s Dad getting back?”
The panic hit so hard then, she nearly gasped out loud at the uncertainty of it all. The unknown. She was the object floating in space, untethered by the one thing she’d counted on as surely as she counted on gravity.
Her husband being there.
Thirteen
Kathleen gave Camille a wide-eyed, slightly accusatory look as she moved closer, squeezing past a row of knees. The gymnasium was packed with bodies and simmering like a pot about to boil. It was hot and cramped, and Camille felt light-headed. She’d never suffered from claustrophobia before, but at the moment everything seemed to spin and shrink at the same time.
“Where have you been?” Kathleen asked.
“Fighting with Taylor. She wanted to come, but I needed her to stay home to watch Paige.” Camille took the empty foldout chair Kathleen had saved for her. They’d been set in rows on the gym floor—extra seats in addition to the bleachers.
“All the legislators are here.”
Up front, the Crystal Ridge School Board sat at a long table, each member with a separate microphone and an identifying placard. The board president, Keith Staley—a hefty man with sweat marks already under his arms—nervously pulled at the whiskers in his goatee while Kathleen’s second cousin, Jill Yvech, stared icily at the men in suits lining the front row.
“Jill said they wanted to share the floor tonight, but the board won’t let them.”
“Why not?”
“Because everyone is livid, and the board wants someone to wag a finger at. Rick says it’s like a nasty divorce and we’re the poor children stuck in the middle. That’s why he’s not here. He deals with enough drama in his day job. He didn’t have the energy for more. All he cares about anyway is football, and we’re pretty sure Cody’s spot is secure. Where’s Neil? Is he working late again?”
The question incapacitated her.
Because she didn’t know.
She had no idea if Neil was working.
She had no idea where Neil was at all.
He left. He just left.
“Camille?” Kathleen leaned away from her, her brow knitted together in appalling concern, as though Camille might at any second throw up all over the gym floor. “Is everything okay?”
Neil left me.
The words stuck in her throat, impossible to say out loud. They didn’t belong to her. She wa
sn’t someone who got left by her husband. That was Let-Herself-Go Lorraine, who lived off a diet of fast food and wore the same three baggy shirts on repeat, one of which had a hole in the armpit.
Or Drama Queen Connie, who was so mortifyingly honest about her marital problems on Facebook it made everyone uncomfortable. It made everyone want to look away. Only they couldn’t because Drama Queen Connie was a train wreck. Nobody had been surprised when she announced that her “loser of a husband walked out and was refusing to pay alimony.”
Camille wasn’t like that.
She did Pilates at the YMCA two times a week. She was surprisingly good at Zumba. None of her clothes had holes in them, and the only things she posted on Facebook were cute pictures of her children.
And still…
Neil left.
What was she going to tell the children? Everything inside her froze into sharp ice at the thought. Paige would cry and cry and cry, and Austin would bury himself in violent video games like Call of Duty and become a terrorist, and Taylor would find a way to blame Camille. She would act out. Maybe she’d start having sex. She’d get pregnant and wouldn’t be able to run track in college, and somehow she’d blame Camille for that too. Only it wasn’t Camille’s fault.
All she’d done was forget to pick up her mother-in-law.
Neil, on the other hand, was most likely having an affair. It was the only explanation. Men didn’t leave for something so arbitrary as happiness, did they? She was sure men didn’t care about happiness unless they found someone who made them extraordinarily happy.
But that couldn’t be it either. Neil wasn’t a cheater. And if he were, it was further proof that he had a brain tumor. For crying out loud, his conscience suffered whenever Camille sampled a grape in the produce aisle. How would it survive an affair? She imagined him kissing another woman in the way he used to kiss her. How long since he’d kissed her like that?
Kathleen snapped her fingers in Camille’s face.
No One Ever Asked Page 8
