Family Pictures

by Jane Green

  “I do.”

  “And can you point him out to us?”

  Raising a hand, she points quite clearly, aware that Maggie’s expression has morphed from one of fury to one of distress.

  Maggie, on the stand yesterday, sits motionless, the picture of the wronged wife. Sylvie, portrayed in the press as the Other Wife, glances over at her from time to time, seeing how she is biting her lip, wiping tears from her eyes, playing the sympathy card with everything she has.

  The court case is oddly dull. Far less dramatic than anything on television, it is less painful, less theatrical, other than sobs and sniffles, dramatic nose-blowing coming from Maggie.

  “And how did you find out about the existence of Mrs. Margaret Hathaway?”

  “I found out when a debt collection agency showed up at my door.”

  “And when did your daughter find out?”

  “My daughter found out,” Sylvie says softly, “when she and Mark’s daughter met and befriended each other. Eve went back to the family home in Connecticut.” Sylvie looks over at Eve, sitting next to Angie, who holds Eve’s hand tightly, giving Sylvie an almost imperceptible nod.

  Sylvie brings her attention back to the lawyer.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “Can you repeat the question?”

  “How did she inform you she was aware of another wife?”

  “She told me after I picked her up from her trip to New York. And Connecticut.” At this, Mark turns to look at Eve, and Eve looks at him. Merely looks. No judgment in her eyes, no pain, just looks at him as if he is a stranger, holding his gaze until he finally breaks it and turns back, as Sylvie feels a wave of anxiety.

  Eve can’t keep hiding her emotions, can’t use food, or anything else, to numb herself to her fears. Looking at Eve, in this courtroom, Sylvie knows this was a mistake.

  Damn. Why didn’t she trust her instincts and not allow Eve to come? And what is the fallout from this likely to be?

  * * *

  “I can’t believe that bastard turned to stare at Eve,” Angie hisses as they walk down the corridor during the recess for lunch. Eve walks behind, texting, her attention glued to her iPhone as Angie steers Sylvie through the crowds.

  “This way.” She turns down a narrow corridor. “The press are swarming in the front, so I got us sandwiches in an office down here. You were great! I was so proud of you.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “But I wanted to kill that bastard when he turned and stared at Eve. Did you see? What the hell was that about?”

  “I saw,” Sylvie says. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him. I looked at him today and felt I was looking at a stranger.”

  “I had the same feeling. I always adored Mark, but I feel nothing other than hatred when I look at him now.” Angie shakes her head as they stop by the women’s bathroom. “I’ve got to pee. Damn middle age. I have a bladder the size of a pea these days. You coming in?”

  They both push the door open as a flush is heard in one of the stalls. When the stall door opens, Maggie is straightening her shirt. She walks out, stopping in horror as she realizes who has just walked into the bathroom.

  “Great,” Angie sighs. “I can hold it. Come on,” and she starts to pull Sylvie out.

  “No, it’s okay.” Sylvie puts a hand out to stop her friend before turning to Maggie, who is standing at the sink and taking a deep breath. “Maggie, I am sorry. I’m sorry for everyone involved. This is a horrible mess. I know you blame me, but I hope you believe what you heard in the courtroom today. I never knew. I never would have gotten involved had I known about you. Nor did I take him back afterwards. I felt sorry for him and offered him a roof. That was all.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Maggie says bitterly. “None of it matters. My life is ruined, and whether you knew about me or not, it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t met you. How can I not blame you? You may not want to admit it, but it’s all your fault, like it or not.”

  Angie steps forward. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You think Mark did this because Sylvie has some kind of hold over him? Do you not understand that the man you were married to is a liar, a cheat, and a thief? Not to mention a complete fraud. Have you not been following the news? This isn’t just bigamy, lady. This is grand larceny and fraud. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else, because he operates on lies. Blaming my friend is crazy. Blaming anyone other than him is crazy.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Maggie, in full New Salem superior mode, manages to look down at Angie, despite being several inches shorter.

  “I’m her sister,” Angie lies confidently. “And my best advice to you, sister, would be get over the blame and get on with your life.”

  “I’m not your sister,” Maggie sneers. “Get on with my life? How am I supposed to get on with my life when I have three children, a house that I am being evicted from in three weeks’ time, and no goddamned money?” Her voice rises, her patrician accent disappearing as her Astoria roots creep in. “How am I supposed to get on with my life when my friends have all deserted me and I can’t walk down the street without everyone whispering and laughing. How am I supposed to carry on when I have nothing? Nothing!”

  “Try doing what the rest of us do.” Angie gives a withering shake of her head, ignoring Sylvie’s hand on her arm as she tries to stop her. “Try working for a living. Get off the fucking pity pot and get a job. Stop blaming everyone, and start figuring out how you’re going to live.”

  “You have no idea!” sobs Maggie. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me—”

  “You’re right,” Angie says as Sylvie finally pulls her into the hallway. “Thank God.”

  “I wish you luck.” Sylvie turns just as they leave. “Maybe think about starting again somewhere. Somewhere they don’t know you. Build a life somewhere else—”

  “And get a damned therapist!” Angie yells over her shoulder as they walk out. “Do you think there’s any chance that vending machine has vodka in it?”

  45

  Sylvie

  “And how do you find the defendant?”

  The judge asks the question three times for each of the charges.

  “Guilty.”

  “Guilty.”

  “Guilty.”

  * * *

  Sylvie waits alone in the cell, her back straight in an uncomfortable steel chair, pulled tightly in to a table, one other chair the only other piece of furniture in the room.

  She is dreading seeing Mark. No longer angry, she feels, mostly, disgust. There is little he can say that will change her mind, but his lawyer played the sympathy card well: How could she deny a man going into prison for ten years the chance to see her one last time?

  The door opens and he is brought in. He holds his hands out for them to unlock the handcuffs before he sits at the table, his lawyer in the corner as chaperone.

  “Thank you for coming to see me,” he says. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.” Sylvie, uncomfortable, doesn’t know how she is supposed to be with him.

  He closes his eyes for a second. “I want to try to explain.”

  “Really, Mark. I’m sorry for everything you’re going through, but I don’t care—”

  “But I do,” he interrupts. “That’s the point. No matter what you believe, I still love you, and I needed you to hear that.”

  “Why?” she laughs bitterly. “So I’ll wait for you to get out of jail?”

  “No. Because I needed you to know that this was real.”

  Sylvie stares at him in amazement. “Are you out of your mind? How could this possibly be real when you had another wife and other children? When everything was a lie? There’s something wrong with you, Mark.”

  “I never wanted to hurt anyone. If you really want to know the truth, I never loved Maggie. I married her because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and my parents wanted me to, and I didn’t know how to say no. By the time I realized I had made a mistake, I didn’t know how to ge
t out, and I couldn’t leave the children. I wouldn’t leave the children. I never expected to meet someone else, I never expected to fall head over heels in love with someone the way I did with you.”

  Sylvie glares at him, not softening in the slightest. “So you decided to have an affair, and then marry me, for Christ’s sake! Why marry me? Why do any of it?”

  “Because I was terrified of losing you. I loved you, love you,” he corrects himself, “and I love Eve. I’m terrified for her. I’m terrified of what she looks like, how thin she is. Sylvie, I can see all her bones, and she’s blank. It’s like—”

  “Please don’t,” Sylvie says. “I am with her doctors all the time. Please don’t talk about Eve when you don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just … I couldn’t imagine life without you, without both of you, and I knew I couldn’t ever tell you the truth. The only way I could see of keeping you both was to make a commitment.”

  “To commit bigamy.”

  “I never thought of it like that,” Mark insists, his eyes filling up. “And you are so different from Maggie. Life was always so simple with you. I felt more alive with you than with anyone else.”

  “Which is why you robbed Peter to pay Paul?” Sylvie’s voice is blank.

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t intend for that to happen. I thought I could do it once to dig myself out of a hole, then use the next order to set things right. I never thought, never intended—”

  “Stop,” Sylvie says gently. “Enough.”

  He looks at her and reaches out a hand just as the door opens, the guard signaling they are done. “I love you,” he says, pleading with her to take his hand. “I’m sorry. Please believe me.”

  Sylvie looks at his hand, then ever so briefly brushes it with her own before standing up. “I know,” she says. “And I do.”

  Part Four

  JUNE 2012

  46

  Maggie

  There is a trick to opening the passenger door of the big old Wagoneer I bought soon after I moved here, but I haven’t quite managed to master it yet. The “FOR SALE” note described it as Metallic Cinnamon, but it’s very clearly orange, and having a fancy name for it doesn’t make it more valuable. Neither does the sticking door.

  It opens perfectly from the inside, but not from the outside, unless, the previous owner explained, you pull up, twist slightly to the left, and quickly pull out. Or something like that. I don’t remember, those early days being such a haze. On beautiful days like this, I’m happy to keep the window open, flinging my purse through the window to the passenger seat.

  The purse itself is somewhat incongruous, although I’m probably the only person for miles who would know that the tan leather tote, now bashed and worn, ever-present on my shoulder, is Hermès, one of the few relics of my former life. It was a bag I tried to sell, along with everything else, but it sat in the consignment store for months, until they phoned for me to collect it.

  Most of our stuff had been sold before the creditors came to collect. When they arrived to take inventory, seizing everything of value in an attempt to recover some of the money Mark owed, they were—thank the Lord—unaware of the antiques and clothes scattered around various homes and consignment stores in Fairfield County.

  I was terrified they would demand the cash from the sales, so when we moved up here, I just piled the kids into a rented car and left town without saying good-bye to anyone. One day I was there, and the next gone. Who would have even missed me?

  Up here, in Old Saybrook, it is a very different kind of life. A simpler life. A country life. A life that celebrates warmth, and honesty, and human connection. A life that would never think to worship at the altar of money or success.

  The Wagoneer was parked on a front lawn, with a Sharpie’d note advertising it for sale in the front window. It was bright orange, with wood trim, and I was filled with nostalgia every time we walked past. It made me think of The Brady Bunch and David Cassidy, and being a child, and thinking that everything in the future might be happy, fun, filled with perfect people who handled all painful situations with laughter and the help of an always-smiling Alice.

  “Let’s just ask.” I found myself walking up to the front door one day as Grace groaned, the idea of the car horrifying her, the idea of this whole new life, so far away from everything she knew, the betrayal that she was having to deal with every minute of every day, horrifying her.

  An hour later—the elderly owner didn’t stop talking—Chris drove the car down the driveway as Buck and Landon—who had remained at Grace’s side those first few months—whooped and cheered. Even Grace forced a smile.

  “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Chris high-fived Landon while I shook hands with the owner, and they both fought to drive it home, declaring it the coolest car ever, and that they would now out-retro even the most trendy, retro kids.

  “It’s the color,” Chris had definitively stated. “Orange! Man, that is the color! That’s what makes it so cool!”

  “It’s not orange,” I insisted, and continue to insist to this day. “It’s Metallic Cinnamon.”

  * * *

  Later that night, Chris was still on a high, which had been amusing until around seven, and was now wearing distinctly thin.

  “Chris,” I sighed as the reality of driving a huge, orange, painfully old car brought the reality of my life into stark and rather depressing relief. “Can you please stop talking like a hipster and start talking properly?”

  “Sorry,” Chris had mumbled, the reality of his life sinking in at the same time, as each of the boys went up the stairs to their bedrooms in our tiny, rented house.

  Two years later, I can’t believe how life has changed for all of us. Chris, now working for a publisher in New York, no longer talks like a hipster; Grace is managing to pay her way through NYU by working; and I have come to love the Wagonneer. I’ve named it, or her, Paula, after Paula Deen, because the car is big, loud, and makes people happy. Not the residents, who are used to the car, but the summer tourists who flock to the village during the summer, who have been known to stop me on the way out of the grocery store in order to take a photograph.

  After throwing the purse through the window, I walk round the car and get in, vaguely aware that I really need to take it to the gas station to use the vacuum inside—the floors are a diary of Buck’s preschool, postschool, pregame, postgame, permanent snacking. Crumbs, wrappers, empty to-go cups that have somehow found their way to the floor by the rear seat, where they roll around, the last drops of whatever milk shake, or Frappuccino, or smoothie he had now forming a shiny patch on the rubber mat, sticky to the touch.

  To think this used to be my idea of hell. It’s about as far away as you can get from my Range Rover of old, the black showing every speck of dirt on the outside, the matte black carpets cleaned at least twice a week, the car wash detailing it whenever I wanted. Which was often.

  If my friends could see me now.

  But they don’t see me now. And they weren’t friends, however much they continued to pretend. For a while, there were attempts to get in touch with me—e-mails and phone calls from Lara or Heather—but my continued lack of response eventually sent them away.

  At the traffic light, I look over at the phone on the passenger seat. I’m pretty detached from the phone these days; there’s nothing so urgent, it can’t wait. I’m not exactly deluged with calls from A-type committee members, insisting I sort out a problem. Thankfully, I’m no longer the recipient of gossip—friends calling to do a postmortem on the party we all went to the night before, lamenting, in horrified whispers, the job the decorators did with their living room, and for so much money.

  I look at the screen and frown. There is a missed 203 call. New Salem? It isn’t a number I recognize, but nevertheless it is still unsettling, an unwelcome reminder of a past I’m trying so very hard to put behind me.

  Swinging off the road, I pull the car slowly past the grand old mansion, along the worn gr
avel driveway to the carriage house in the back. I gather the mail on the stoop of the porch just as the phone rings. Presuming it’s Buck, I answer without looking, flicking through the mail distractedly, realizing in that split second before pressing the ANSWER button that this is a 203 number. It’s too late.

  “Maggie? Maggie? Is that you? Is this still your number?”

  “Yes,” I say, putting the mail down on the small ironwork table, found at the dump and resprayed by Chris to a steel gray. “Who is this?”

  I once read that you should train yourself always to smile when talking on the phone. It makes your voice sound more welcoming, and it was, for me, a habit that became entirely unconscious, a habit that was broken in a second, on the day I found out my husband had another family.

  I no longer bother to smile when picking up the phone, unless it is genuine and I am feeling particularly happy about something. I no longer care about social graces, or what people think about me, or needing to make a good impression. None of those things matter. Not when your whole world has been turned upside down.

  “Maggie!” The voice at the end of the phone gurgles with laughter. It is familiar, but I can’t quite place it. “It’s Lara!”

  I say nothing. What am I, after all, expected to say? Lara the Liar is how I have thought of her these past two years. Lara who secretly bought all my most precious things, bullying the estate saleswoman into accepting far less for everything than she ever should have done, hiding them until I was safely out of the way.

  Lara, who pretended to be my friend while publicly berating the “two-faced” women who “swooped in like vultures.”

  I never told Lara I knew. I saw her when I had to—mostly when she dropped in unannounced after I stopped picking up the phone to her or calling her back—but she knew something was wrong, and if she didn’t know for certain, she must have figured it out when I left without saying good-bye.