How to Be Second Best

by Jessica Dettmann

  Dedication

  For my mother Carol and my grandmother Mims.

  Two of a kind, and two of the kindest.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  I am in the kitchen making tea for my husband’s current wife. He’s my ex-husband, not my husband. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to calling him that.

  His wife’s name is Helen and she is very particular about her tea. No bags. No caffeine. The water slightly off the boil. Not really resembling tea in any way.

  Helen’s very comfortable in my kitchen. She’s draped her leggy frame all over one of the mismatched wooden chairs and she’s absent-mindedly running her hands through her smooth, gently waved blonde hair.

  ‘Have you got something with dandelion?’ she asks. ‘It’s amazing for bloating.’ She pats her flat belly.

  Instinctively I glance down and tighten what remains of my own stomach muscles. It’s disheartening how little effect that has these days.

  I start taking everything out of the pantry, stacking boxes and packets on the counter, pretty sure that somewhere in there is a box of what appear to be dried lawn clippings. I find it — ‘Lactation Tea’, the label says, but that’s surely rubbish.

  I brew a pot of sticks and leaves. It smells like what happens when you get too enthusiastic at the fruit and vegetable shop and it all turns to brown soup in the crisper.

  Helen waits calmly — calm is her default mode — her hands now folded and resting on an alarmingly thick document she has prepared for me. It’s all about how I am to care for her daughter while she and my husband, who’s now her husband, are in Ubud next week, having massages and aha moments and sex.

  It’s kind of her to be so thorough. I mean, if we didn’t have daughters the same age, I might not know what it takes to keep a three-year-old alive. Yes, that’s correct, our daughters are the same age. They are half-sisters, born three weeks apart.

  Helen’s daughter, Lola, came first. I didn’t know about her until after my daughter, Freya, was born.

  In movies, a woman often finds out her husband has been unfaithful when he calls her by the wrong name in bed. I discovered it when my husband called our baby the wrong name.

  I was lying on the sofa, the first evening home from the hospital. Tim, our three-year-old son, was asleep in his bed. Before me on the coffee table was a plate of runny brie with crackers, and a glass of wine I didn’t really feel like drinking.

  Troy had several hundred pieces of the new double stroller laid out carefully on the carpet, and he was poring over the instruction manual.

  Freya wasn’t feeding as easily as her big brother had. As I wrestled my nipple into her tiny shrieking mouth, her father reached over and stroked her little soft head. His eyes were still on the page explaining how to adjust the height of the pram’s handle. He wasn’t even remotely up to the point of adjusting the pram’s handle.

  ‘There you go, little one,’ he said. ‘Have a big drink. That’s right, Lola, darling.’

  ‘Lola?’ I said. ‘Who’s Lola?’

  Lola, as anyone knows, is a showgirl’s name. Lola is a sociopath in a children’s book and TV series, sister of Charlie, one of the great long-suffering brothers of literature. People called Lola hang out in bars where the champagne tastes like cherry cola.

  Lola hadn’t ever been on our list of potential baby names.

  Troy might have got away with it too, explained it as a slip of the very tired tongue, except he was so exhausted, what with being the proud and terrified father of two newborns living one suburb apart, that the strain of the lie was too much.

  If he hadn’t also been trying to assemble a double stroller at the time, a task that could undo just about anyone, he might have had the wherewithal to keep his mouth shut.

  But as it was, he just sat there on our living room floor, surrounded by small plastic bags containing seemingly identical but actually distinct and crucial bits of dark grey plastic, and told me everything.

  When he’d gone out that afternoon to buy milk and bread with five-day-old Freya in the BabyBjörn, he’d actually taken her to meet her three-week-old big sister. That was why he’d forgotten the milk and bread.

  For a long time afterwards the part of this that I couldn’t stop thinking about, the part that made my heart feel as if bits of it were peeling off like flakes of rust, was the idea of him walking up our street. Past the cafe where we bought our coffee every day and our breakfast every Saturday, past the bakery, the chemist, the bottle shop and the newsagency, through our life and out the other side of the suburb to his other life.

  Afterwards I did wonder if he’d taken Lola for the same walk when she’d come home from hospital. Did Ron the newsagent come out to congratulate him? Did Natalia the chemist wave to him? Did they think that baby was my baby? How could he lie to those people? How did he think he was going to get away with any of this?

  There hadn’t been much thought involved, as it turned out. Just a lot of emotion.

  He had fallen in love, he told me, with his twenty-six-year-old Pilates instructor. Troy was forty years old. The cliché hurt almost as much as the betrayal.

  I’d thought we were immune to that sort of thing. We used to laugh at the men we’d see driving to the beach in European convertibles — menoporsches, we’d called them — with their over-long grey hair blowing in the wind as they dangled one arm over the bare brown shoulder of an unfeasibly attractive woman half their age.

  How could he be considering joining their ranks? It made no sense.

  ‘But love doesn’t make sense, Em,’ he’d explained tearfully that night. ‘I never planned to fall in love again. I’m already in love. I love you. God, I didn’t even know you could be in love with two people at once. Did you know that, Emma? It’s actually possible.’

  I didn’t know that.

  It’s hard to explain how elated he was, and how somehow at the same time that this news was lifting me up and repeatedly smashing me onto rocks, filling my lungs with sand and horror and grief, I was also riding the wave of his excitement.

  I didn’t take the news lying down, you’ll be pleased to hear. Hell had nothing on my fury that night. He kept trying to explain it all to me, as if it was ever going to make sense.

  ‘I wanted to tell you about her, about this connection I’d made, because, Em, you know you’re everything to me. We’re a team. It was the weirdest thing in the world to keep this amazing thing that was happening in my life from you. But I didn’t know what “it” was, you know? I couldn’t tell if it was okay or not okay. It was intense.’

  ‘Well here’s a tip for the future,’ I spat back at him. ‘If you have to describe your relationship with a woman who’s not your wife as “this amazing thing” and you wonder if it’s okay or not, then it’s probably not fucking okay.’

  For the next few hours, Troy told me everything that had happened. In far too much detail. It was like he was high.

&n
bsp; And it was when I realised he sounded like he was on drugs that I made a decision. This was an addiction. He was addicted to this woman, or the feelings or sex or the serotonin and dopamine, or some hideous combination of all of that.

  You don’t abandon someone because they are an addict. I mean, not right away. You help them. You support them through whatever they’re going through, and hope they’ll come out the other side and you’ll get back the person they once were.

  It sounded crazy, what he was telling me. You can’t love two people at once, not in the same way. That’s the sort of bullshit that cheating husbands feed their idiot wives. No one in her right mind would believe that.

  Or can you? I didn’t know how much I could love until I met Troy, so who’s to say the capacity isn’t there to feel that love twice? (Although it did seem far more likely that this was all the love hormones talking.)

  ‘It’s like your children,’ he said, as he sat beside me on the sofa, his eyes wide and so bright, gripping both my hands with his. ‘Remember when Tim was born? Do you remember we used to say he’d have to be an only child because there was no way we could love another baby even close to how much we loved him? But we do! You do! I do! As soon as we saw Freya we loved her just as much and didn’t that completely blow your mind, Emma?’

  That did make sense. In a way. I can remember thinking that he must have been falling in love with both baby Freya and Lola at the same time, shortly after falling for Helen, and so obviously he suddenly had an unshakeable belief in his boundless capacity for love.

  So he was in love with both Helen and me, it seemed. He hadn’t gone looking for someone because he’d stopped loving me. That was a positive. But he was planning to go live with Helen and Lola. That wasn’t as good.

  I asked him about that decision. About why, if he loved both of us so much, he was choosing her over me.

  ‘Em, I can only do this because you are extraordinary. You can do this,’ he said, stroking my snotty, tear-stained face. ‘I’m going to live with Helen because I know you’ll be fine. You are the strongest person I know, and the best mother, and I wouldn’t go if I didn’t think that. Helen’s not like you. She is totally freaked out about having a baby. I don’t think she’d manage on her own.’

  As compliments go, that one took quite a few goes over with the orbital sander and the truth turpentine to reveal that it was, in fact, not a compliment at all.

  Perhaps I can blame the oxytocin for the way I accepted what Troy said that night. I was devastated, completely in pieces, but what he said left me feeling, somehow, quite noble and strong.

  And to the outside world, that’s how I have remained for the three years from that day to this. While behind closed doors there was more screaming into pillows, crying and rending of breast than I had foreseen would occur in my daughter’s first months of life, outside I held it together.

  In a staggering display of magnanimity, I helped Troy, who was floating on a cloud, to pack his bags and move in with his new family, into Helen’s house in Grace Park, the next suburb east.

  Together we explained to our families, including poor little baffled Tim, that Troy was going to have an extra family, and that while Daddy still loved us, he also loved Helen and baby Lola now.

  As far as break-ups go, ours went beautifully, for Troy. He didn’t have to move into the nasty red-brick block of flats overlooking the train station, known locally as the Home for Disgraced Husbands. The place that does short-term lets and smells like microwaved lasagne and regret.

  Instead he got to go a couple of kilometres down the road to a charming cottage with windows full of shiny dangling crystals and a back garden that fairly jangled with wind chimes, complete with a repurposed swimming pool full of lotus and waterlilies that Helen called her Serenity Lagoon.

  Three years down the track, they are married and I am not. I am a single mother.

  It has taken me three years to fully accept that what Troy told me that night was, largely, complete bullshit. Three years. Was I in shock? Can shock last that long? I truly can’t believe I fell for it. I think Troy believed it, though, because it made things a fair bit easier for him, and I suppose for a while it made things easier for me to believe it too.

  It meant that after he left, I helped him with his new baby. He was right about Helen not being a natural mother. She was pretty alarmed by all that went along with having a tiny baby.

  She didn’t cope very well with sleep deprivation, Troy told me, and instead of screaming back ‘Welcome to the fucking club,’ I decided it was no big deal for me to stop by a few times a week, when Tim was at preschool and I was going for a walk anyway, and pop Lola in the other side of the double stroller with Freya. (I had ended up assembling the double stroller.)

  Long walks with two babies are much the same as long walks with one baby, with maybe a few extra stops to change nappies and feed one with a bottle and one with a boob. While I walked the babies, Helen could catch up on sleep.

  Looking back, I can only assume it was my own chronic sleep deprivation that made this arrangement seem like a reasonable idea.

  Before any of us knew it, Lola and Freya had bonded and they were happier together than apart. Tim liked them both, as much as any three-year-olds like any babies, and once Helen resumed teaching Pilates, it just seemed to make sense to everyone for Lola to come to me when her mother was at work.

  Outsiders assume it takes a staggering amount of goodwill and personal largesse for me to care for my husband and his new wife’s child like this, and that assumption, though wrong, is fine by me. If people want to think I’m a wonderful person for minding Lola, they’re very welcome. Frankly, I’d rather they thought that than the truth, which is that I am a pushover.

  Once the girls turned two, and Tim started school, the arrangement did actually start to make practical sense for me. It’s easier to entertain two toddlers than one.

  One toddler wants to do whatever you are doing. Two of them just need you to provide a Milk Arrowroot biscuit for each hand and apple slices at regular intervals. You have to keep enough of an eye on them that they don’t accidentally off themselves, and adjudicate the odd skirmish. Other than that they don’t want you involved much at all. That works for me.

  So I never went back to work full-time. Troy gave me more than than he legally had to in our divorce settlement. I got our house, our nearly-new car, and a pretty generous chunk of child support each month.

  At the time we split, I was grateful. The money meant I didn’t have to face the fact that my own earning power had withered since Tim was born. Troy had, back then, been adamant that one of us should stay home full-time with our baby. ‘Babies need one of their parents,’ he always said. ‘Why bother having kids if you’re just going to let some daycare worker raise them?’

  When Tim turned one, it became apparent that what he meant by ‘one of their parents’ was me. ‘Think about it,’ he argued. ‘Practically your whole salary would go on childcare costs. Why put yourself through all the stress of daycare when you can just do a bit of work from home while he naps?’

  When I look back, I don’t understand why I didn’t point out that no, in fact my whole salary wouldn’t go on childcare costs, because only fifty per cent of the price of the care would be mine. Neither did I see it as strange that he believed the stress of daycare would be my burden alone. I just looked at our life, and saw that Troy’s business was starting to take off. Of course I couldn’t expect him to be the one to take days off when a sick child couldn’t go to daycare. He seemed right: I should stay at home another year.

  By the time Tim was two, we were trying for another baby, so again, it made no sense for me to go back to work. Besides, by then I no longer had a job to return to, and I would have had to negotiate some sort of part-time role. It all seemed a bit hard. Troy’s business was booming, too, so I just kept on as I had, doing the odd editing job here and there, when I could fit it in.

  Weirdly, after all the shit with
Helen went down, and I washed up on the shore of my new life, somehow clutching three kids instead of two, I found it easier to work, because the girls entertained each other.

  These days I feel like if I could do the minding-Lola part without having to deal with her parents, that would be ideal.

  It’s been a gradual process, realising I am no longer loved by Troy. A bit like a piece of clothing fading until one day you refer to your smart black jumper and the person you are talking to looks confused until they figure out that you are gesturing to the tattered, threadbare grey thing tied around your waist.

  I mean, how do you even know if you are loved or not? He certainly hasn’t told me, since the night he told me about Lola and Helen. But there have been looks, kind words. Initially, when we weren’t used to not touching any more, he’d rest a hand on my waist as we tucked one or other of the babies into the stroller. And there were a few hello or goodbye kisses where we accidentally defaulted to lip contact, and I still felt the spark I always had.

  It seems absurd that such tiny physical gestures sustained hope in my heart. But the heart can be fairly idiotic. It believes what it wants to believe. Maybe it does it to protect you. Maybe I wouldn’t have survived if my heart had shattered that night. Maybe the only way for me to get from there to here was a very gradual acceptance of Troy’s betrayal and his rejection of me.

  But whether you’re lowered down gently or dropped from a great height, the end result is the same, ultimately. You find yourself on the cold hard ground of reality. I’m just splattered into fewer pieces.

  Tonight, in my cluttered kitchen, as Helen sips her tea, there’s really no point any longer in my pretending that I’m anything other than just a very gullible woman scorned.

  Helen clears her throat and starts reading out her manifesto.

  ‘So, no screen time, obviously. That includes all devices. No parabens in her bath products — I mean, I’ve packed the things she can use but I know you sometimes like to throw all the kids in together so—’

  ‘Helen, it’s okay, I can go through that. You don’t have to read it alou—’