Minus Me

by Mameve Medwed

  Dr. Revere hands her a sheaf of orders for the lab. “It will take about a week for the test results. I will call you as soon as we have the answers.”

  She rattles off her cell phone number, her home number, the number of the shop. She asks him to read them back to make sure they’re correct.

  “Your inability to carry a baby to term could be caused by a number of things—many, as I pointed out, very treatable.” He flashes his chipmunk teeth at her. “Do not give up hope,” he repeats.

  Annie grabs a tissue from the box on his desk. She pumps his hand. Loudly and profusely she thanks him. Silently she thanks St. Gerard.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They arrive in Passamaquoddy at six. The car drops Annie at home before driving Ursula to Ambrose’s house. He’s cooking her a special welcome-back-to-Maine dinner, she informs her daughter. “What are your plans?”

  Annie shrugs. “I’m sure Sam has made some.”

  She doesn’t tell her mother that she texted him an hour before with their ETA. Busy at the shop, he texted back. Be home late. Sandwiches, milk, and eggs in the fridge. There were no xs and os, no can’t wait, not even a signature.

  In a way, she’s glad for some time alone to decompress, to unpack her bag, hang her new frocks in the closet, line up her new cosmetics on her half of the bathroom sink. Who’s she kidding? She wants the chance to snoop. She’s anxious to take the measure of the enemy.

  He’s left the lights on. A good sign, she hopes, that there’ll be no replay of his fury the night she got her hair lopped off. A cursory glance around the first floor reveals her mother-in-law’s afghan folded at the end of the sofa, not on the rug where she and Sam used to practice Kama Sutra maneuvers; there’s one mug in the kitchen sink without—she checks—a lipstick blot along the rim. She looks more closely. Nothing seems out of order.

  A light is blinking on the answering machine. She presses play. It’s Gus of Gus’s Gas announcing that the cable Sam ordered has arrived. She listens to two weeks’ worth of old messages: appointments about the annex, a rescheduled city-planning meeting, a bowling date with the geezers, political solicitations, a notice about class assignments posted online, Megan hoping to switch her hours, quotes from suppliers, and then this—a young, lilting voice: Hey, Sam, just wanted to say that Isabel is real thrilled with the awesome teddy bear. It’s wicked cute. She’s working on a thank-you drawing. You are the best.

  The kernel of hope Dr. Revere lodged in her heart now shrivels and dies.

  She trudges upstairs. She sniffs the sheets for a trace of something else buried in the toothpaste-and-sweat-and onions-and-lemon scent of Sam. The familiar smell of his body pitches her into a reverie of longing for times past. She collapses onto the mattress. She clutches the pillow, all the while searching for makeup smears and inexplicable strands of hair. She doesn’t recognize this cliché of a crazy, jealous wife. In fact, she hates herself.

  In the bathroom, she checks the shower for foreign shampoo and soaps. Sam’s not that stupid. If he were up to any hanky-panky, he would never carry out such deeds under their marital roof. Not that Sam would ever initiate any infidelity. She blames the new hire—who would have taken advantage of both the absence of Sam’s wife and Sam’s anger at his abandonment.

  She goes back to the bedroom and inspects her underwear drawer. The manual is still there, untouched beneath the intact shield of camisoles and bras. Her most recent supplements, paper-clipped or stapled, creased and tattered, lie just as she left them, a messy tumult of messy emotions.

  She opens the door to their closet. She notices three snappy oxford shirts and a navy blazer with the price tags still on. She crouches down next to the shoe racks. Stuffed behind one is a shopping bag from Passamaquoddy Toys and Games. Inside the bag are several packages gaily wrapped and tied with pink satin ribbons. Though not quite lipstick-on-the pillow evidence, these gifts signal—what? That Sam’s winning the favors of the new hire though her child? That Sam’s winning the favors of the child through her mother? Either way, little Isabel will have to create a lot of drawings as thank-you notes for so much bounty.

  The timing couldn’t be worse, not that the timing could ever be good for such a betrayal. Don’t give up hope, Dr. Revere said. What does Dr. Revere know about maternal emptiness or marital mishap?

  She thinks of Ursula. Who must now be sitting down to Ambrose’s lovingly prepared meal. Lobster and champagne, Annie predicts. Not a waxed-paper-wrapped Bunyan and a half gallon of milk. There will be fresh flowers on the table and fresh sheets on the bed. Not last week’s linens, however cherished their unlaundered pheromones. No doubt Ambrose will have tucked away photographs of his late wife, better hidden than the toy-store loot now in plain sight behind the Birkenstocks and moccasins.

  Has she sunk so low that she envies her own mother’s AARP romance?

  In the kitchen, she takes out the sandwich. She doesn’t bother to put it on a plate. After days and nights of gourmet menus, she couldn’t wait to devour her go-to comfort food. Now she can barely look at this culinary reminder of all that she and Sam have achieved; the careful tiers of salami and pickles curdle her stomach. She shoves it back into the refrigerator and finds a half-drained bottle of wine. She fills a glass. Like a soldier anticipating the encroaching battle, she waits for Sam.

  * * *

  By the time he arrives, she’s finished the bottle and has uncorked the next. Even so, her senses stay on highest alert, tuned in to the sounds of a switched-off motor, the scuff of boots against the welcome mat, the jangle of keys, the creak of the hall closet. She’s slathering on a new layer of lipstick when he comes into the kitchen. She jumps up and opens her arms.

  He stays in the doorway. “You’re home,” he says, stating a fact.

  Uh-oh. So much for the joyous return of the native. She drops back down onto the kitchen chair. She tucks her elbows against her ribs. “That might be a reasonable assumption,” she replies.

  “There’s quite the fancy black number hanging in the closet—a coat I’ve never seen before.”

  She remembers Ed Duvall’s wife’s incriminating fur, divorce papers stuck in its pocket. “A gift from Ursula,” she explains.

  “What happened to your green parka? The one you’ve worn forever?”

  She shrugs, loath to admit the garment was so scorned that Ursula wouldn’t pass it on to her maid. “Time for a change.”

  He shakes his head. “Too many changes.” He points to the table. “I left you a Bunyan.”

  “So I saw. Thanks.”

  “And the drive back?” he asks, making polite conversation.

  “Uneventful. Ursula hired a car.” She sips the wine. “How are things at the shop?”

  “Fine,” he says.

  “Megan?”

  “Fine.”

  “And the new person?”

  He doesn’t answer, his attention focused on a stack of mail.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “Fine?”

  “Good enough.” He starts up the stairs.

  She follows him. “Sam,” she entreats, “we need to clear the air.”

  He stops. “Not now, Annie.”

  “I have to explain …”

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “But there is. A lot. Just give me a chance.” She holds on to the banister. She forces herself to sound both cheerful and casual. Fake it till you make it, Rachel would advise. “Aren’t you glad to have me home?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Let me put it this way: I was sad when you left. Yes, okay, actually miserable. And surprised—well, shocked—that you didn’t want me to come get you.” He climbs another step. “Especially when you were sick. When you said you were sick,” he amends.

  “But I was. From even before New York …”

  “Come on, Annie. I live with you, remember. I would have known. And now I do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It felt more than
strange—suspicious, even—that you rejected the comfort of your own husband.” He studies the gas-and-electric bill. “Do I really have to spell it out for you?”

  “I guess you do.”

  “If that’s what you want. All right. I assume you came home because it didn’t work out.”

  “It?” she parrots.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “Sam, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re getting to be as good an actress as Ursula,” he says. “It must have rubbed off during all that time you spent with her.”

  “Sam!”

  “Come on, Annie. I’m not that thick. There is only one reason for you to leave me and the shop and your home for all that time, ostensibly to be with your mother—”

  “Ostensibly?”

  “—your mother, whose company, may I point out, after half an hour, drives you up a wall.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh yes I do.”

  “You have no idea. I was sick,” she pleads again.

  “So you’ve already said. What was it? Bronchitis? Tuberculosis? Ha! I know when someone’s faking it.” He turns to her. Fury knits his brows and twists his mouth. “You look pretty healthy to me. I’m sure Ursula is an expert coach. As you also said, you needed a change. Who is he?”

  “Sam, there never …” She stops. She’s such a fool. How can the truth be worse than what he’s now accusing her of? “Just listen,” she shouts.

  “No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” He takes the stairs two at a time. “Frankly, I feel sick myself. I’m getting into bed. I refuse to hear another word.” He slams the door.

  Annie’s heart pounds against the wall of her chest. Stunned, she staggers back down the stairs to the living room sofa. She unfolds the afghan and wraps herself in it. No matter how many tight, mummy-like layers bind her body, she can’t get warm. So much for her noble wishes to spare Sam a dying wife; so much for her desire to handle things on her own. It’s her fault. All she wants is to run up to him. Fling her arms around him. Go back to how they used to be. Instead, released from a death sentence and offered the flickering possibility of a child, she feels no joy but only the continuing and agonizing need to protect Sam. From her own lies. From hope.

  It’s hopeless. She remembers their last fight over her haircut and her Ralphie-induced lateness. This one, she’s pretty sure, will not end in a bouquet of roses and a loving note of apology. How does she argue her case against such a wrongful conviction? And what’s the point? After all these struggles, and with the best of intentions, this is what it boils down to: a soap opera starring Arabella Stevens-Strauss as a loyal wife, failed mother, stalwart citizen, and phoenix risen from the ashes of a misdiagnosis, who has fled to New York for a wild love affair. Aided and abetted by her mother. At the end, she returns, a woman spurned. Hester Prynne without the consolation of Pearl.

  Could anything be more ridiculous? And yet … She finishes the wine. She sticks the glass in the sink. He will never forgive her.

  On second thought, can she forgive him? Maybe he’s accusing her of what he himself is guilty of. Displacement, Rachel would label it. Perhaps he’s decided that if their marriage is bad enough for him to wander, then, symbiotic pair that they are, she must be looking elsewhere too.

  She gets her laptop from the front hall. She brings it back to the kitchen table. She strains to hear any sound of Sam in the study, in the shower, in the bedroom. Each activity has its particular noise: the faucet when he brushes his teeth, the desk chair sliding in front of his computer, his shoes dropping one by one at his side of the bed, the sprung-spring sigh of the old mattress, the window creaked open for a gust of freezing fresh air, the good-night snap of the turned-off light. But everything is silent. Hushed. The stillness, an admonitory finger wagging bad girl. Oh, Sam.

  She clicks on the document. Oh, Sam, she writes, what have I done? Why don’t I just force you to hear me out? I gave up too easily. Meg Ryan would keep at it. She’d run into the street in a bathrobe and chase after an angry Tom Hanks.

  Here’s what I’d say to you, in my bathrobe on the sidewalk playing Meg Ryan: I thought I had cancer and was afraid you couldn’t live without me. I worried you’d be so deeply affected you’d get sick yourself. Stupidly, vainly, I was sure you couldn’t go on alone. I tried to tell you and was relieved when that didn’t work. I felt I had to protect you. I went to New York—to see doctors, NOT to have a love affair.

  And once the lung cancer diagnosis was dismissed, I saw a fertility specialist. And there is a possibility … probably remote, but I might have some kind of syndrome that could be corrected. So we could try …

  Or, rather, we could have tried. I didn’t tell you that either, as I didn’t want to get your hopes up. The doctor will call at the end of the week.

  I can’t make you stay with me out of guilt. I can’t live the kind of lie I’ve discovered not only my mother but my father also lived. And here I am, deceit, like my bone structure, built into my DNA.

  Of course you’re angry. It’s not a surprise that you feel justified in keeping things from me. It’s my fault, Sam, that we’ve moved so far apart. I abandoned you. I don’t—can’t—blame you.

  Is there a way to find each other again? I wanted you to need me, felt you always needed me. But, irony of ironies, it’s me who needs you.

  She’s crying now, yelping sobs that make her chest heave and her ribs ache. She can wail as loud as she wants. Sam can’t hear. Sam won’t hear. The last time she cried this hard—the last two times—were when her father died and when she and Sam lost their child. They both wept together then. “We still have each other,” Sam pledged. “No matter what, we will always have each other.”

  What to do next? Should she sleep on the couch yet again? Perhaps she needs to claim her rightful place in their marriage bed.

  She sticks her just-composed, just-printed entry into her pocket. In the hall, she opens up the unopened suitcases, still standing where the car service driver dropped them. The first thing she sees, tucked between her folded clothes, is “Eight Hours in Manhattan (With Ursula).” On some dark day in her Maine assisted-living quarters, when she’s old and feeble, when Ursula has moved on to that great theater in the sky, it might be a hoot to read of her adventures with her mother. Why not add these pages to the manual; they could serve as comic relief, as a travel diary, as a restaurant-and-shopping guide and, most important, as testimony for the defense. Her defense. After all, what better evidence than her minute-by-minute account to prove the impossibility of squeezing a lover into such a jam-packed schedule?

  Of course, there’s no longer a purpose to the manual. Any after-I’m-gone incentives are now irrelevant. But still, it has helped to write everything down. Words on paper are an attempt to make sense of things, to explain herself to herself.

  Soon enough she’ll stop. She may find it a relief to discontinue this chronicle of hard times, however unresolved and uncompleted the final chapter. Her attempt to impose logic on something as illogical as life has become an exercise in futility.

  Now she searches the luggage for the gossamer nightgown Ursula bought her in Bergdorf’s. She strips off her clothes and pulls it over her head. She checks her reflection in the mirror. Who is she kidding? Sam? Herself? She looks like a child playing dress-up. Like an actress in costume for a bedroom farce. Or—she gulps—a woman having an affair. What’s more, the scar over her lung is clearly visible above its skimpy neckline. Not that Sam won’t eventually discover this incriminating evidence himself. She traces its faded red ridge. Or maybe he won’t. She slides out of the nightgown and tucks it back into its tissue-paper nest. She’ll give it to Rachel, who can carry off seductive froufrou—and may actually have need of it.

  Underneath a pile of socks, she finds a stretched-out T-shirt printed on the front with Passamaquoddy Little League, on the back Annie’s Samwich Shop, Proud Sponsor of The Clamshells. As official bene
factors, she and Sam attended all the games, lugging folding chairs and thermoses. “In the future, we’ll watch our own kids play,” Sam said, “while turning into those obnoxious, rah-rah parents columnists write cautionary editorials about.”

  Now Annie sticks her finger through a hole in the T-shirt’s seam. With good reason, Ursula must have dismissed this item as worthy of neither a maid nor a Salvation Army donation box. She slips into it, soft and familiar and perfect for sleeping. Correction: for someone who once had no trouble sleeping.

  She remembers to remove the printout from her jeans pocket and tiptoes up the stairs. Gingerly, she turns the knob to the bedroom door. The room is dark except for the slice of streetlamp shining through the crack between the drawn shade and the window frame. She can make out the shadowy hump of Sam on his side of the bed, face turned toward the wall. She moves to the bureau, where she slides open her underwear drawer. She adds the new pages to the others, spreads her camisoles on top, and pushes it shut.

  Sam is hogging the covers; her exposed fraction of the bottom sheet feels like a glaze of ice. She tugs at a corner of the blanket, releasing just enough to cover one breast, one elbow, one hip. The hulk that is Sam rises and falls with each breath. “Sam,” she whispers.

  No response.

  She inches closer. She stretches a toe under the covers until she finds his ankle. He flinches. She pulls away. She moves her head next to his pillow. She can smell his hair. Though she longs to nuzzle his neck, she can’t risk such a gesture. She turns onto her back, arms tight against her side—a familiar position, like slipping under a scanner or sliding into the MRI tunnel, immobilized, hammers pounding above her, trying not to press the panic button clutched in her right hand.

  Trapped.

  “You’re doing great,” the technician coached from her distant, glassed-in booth, spinning her buttons like a DJ spinning platters. “Try not to move. Only ten more minutes. Think pleasant thoughts. Summer. A beach …”