Alone

by Michelle Parise

  This isn’t happening.

  But it is. Scattered all over the snow is everything inside of me, torn up and then spit out by this hyena of a man. Right there, at the most awful moment of my life, I suddenly recall a dead moose I saw in a national park once as a teenager — it was nothing but bones in the snow, and fanned all around the bones was its hair.

  “Why is it like that?” I asked, and the Park Guide said the wild dogs tore into the moose fast for meat, spitting the hair out while they were tearing it to shreds. This is the image I think of in those first few moments of shock. I am just bones in the snow, everything has been torn out.

  The next day I call our real estate agent. Staring right across the dining table at The Husband, I say into the phone, “We need to sell the house. We need to sell it this week.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FALLOUT

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  It’s been three days since The Bomb dropped. I’m driving home from work. I’ve slept maybe two or three hours the past few nights, and then only with the help of sleeping pills and whiskey. The pain in the place where my heart once was is something awful. I drive straight to the liquor store and buy a bottle of Southern Comfort.

  I’m thirty-seven years old and this is the first time I’ve ever bought a bottle of booze for the express purpose of drinking it alone. I’m pretty sure everyone in the store can tell there’s something wrong with me. I carry the bottle out by the neck, no bag, nothing.

  Even though it’s February, there’s some kind of freak weather system happening that’s mirroring the freak weather system in my marriage. It’s really warm out, and everyone is walking around in T-shirts looking slightly confused and unsure. The windows in my car are rolled down as I pull out of the parking lot, making a right turn onto a major street without looking first.

  I cut a car off, and the guy is not impressed. He immediately starts honking, and since his windows are also down I can hear him screaming at me. For the next few minutes he follows close behind me, honking the horn and yelling. I am shaking so hard. I can’t handle his anger because I am nothing but thin threads of a person over here. The bottle of Southern Comfort rolls on the passenger seat. The liquid sloshes along with the angry horn-honking. I can’t wait to get home so I can drink it. I think of how only one month ago The Husband and I were on vacation, on a beach dancing close, talking about how we were going to do better, how this year was going to be ours. We kept calling it our “second honeymoon.”

  At the next light, the guy I cut off pulls up beside me, tires screeching. He’s about sixty years old, with long dreadlocks that hang past his shoulders, his car covered in a thin film of winter. He leans out of his window and practically into mine, shouting, “You want to kill yourself or something? You want to kill me? You don’t have a family? You don’t care about my fam—” He stops abruptly. I see his face fall. He can tell something’s wrong with me.

  “I’m so sorry, I thought I had enough time to turn …”

  He shakes his head to stop me, his face now completely softened with empathy and concern. “Little lady, are you all right?”

  “No. No, I’m not all right.”

  The light turns green but we continue to sit there, our cars blocking the only two lanes as we look at each other through open windows. The cars behind us start honking but neither of us moves. His face is so kind and he says, “Lord, look, whatever it is, little lady, whatever it is, it is going to be okay, I can tell you that. Can you hear me say this truth?”

  I nod my head. I’m shaking so hard and I want to just rest my head on his shoulder and cry. I want to ask him what I should do. I want to ask him if he knows why we have the capacity to be so cruel to the ones we love. I want him to tell me I will survive this, and how. The cars honk angrily but he doesn’t even flinch. He looks me right in the eyes and says, “Believe me, you are going to be okay. You are going to be okay. Say it, too.”

  “Okay,” I somehow manage and at this, my heart is reminded of its existence and begins to pump a little. I will be okay because he said so, and look, now my heart started working again! He drives off slowly and so do I.

  Life is unpredictable. Sometimes, it can be so cold your bones can’t stand it, and then there’s a freak warm spell and next thing you know you’re walking around in a T-shirt, confused. Sometimes you dance on a beach with the one you love and he tells you this will be the best year of your marriage. But a month later he won’t come home because he spent the night with someone who has already been a part of your marriage for a long, long time, just no one thought to tell you. Sometimes a total stranger believes in you more than the person you love most.

  I go home and play house with my daughter and The “Husband.” When he puts her to bed, I take the bottle of Southern Comfort into the backyard with me and drink it in the freakishly warm February air. “I am going to be okay,” I say out loud to the patio table and chairs. “I am going to be okay.”

  STATIC

  It’s still the early days of the shock and awe. I’m numb inside. I’m electrified and not in a good way. I’m numb and electric all at once. I’m the way your finger feels when you stick it in an electrical socket, that buzzing tingle alongside the dull pain.

  I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I can’t do anything but walk around like a zombie, the kind that’s being slowly eaten by a human, the human she loves most in the world. I drink alcohol. Lots of it. As soon as Birdie is asleep I open the cabinet doors and take whatever there is and drink it straight up. I do this over and over, every night for two months until many bottles are drained. I smoke cigarette after cigarette in our backyard, staring out into the night. I’ve never been a smoker or a drinker, but suddenly here I am, an old country song come to life, drinkin’ and smokin’ my heartbreak away.

  Let’s be clear, this isn’t just heartbreak. For those of you who have felt it, you know the word heartbreak doesn’t even scratch the surface. You know like I do that there’s no word that comes close to describing what happens to you in that moment when you first find out about betrayal.

  The way your mind and body are just a piece of paper the person you love has casually tossed a match onto. The way they stand there as you burn, staring, dumbly, as you turn into a heap of ashes. The way they blame you for being paper in the first place, when all along you should have known they were fire.

  In a heap of ashes, I go to work every day. Instead of an hour on the bus and subway, I start driving our car downtown, and paying for ridiculously priced parking. It cuts my commute down to only twenty minutes, and this, my friends, is my first post-apocalyptic gift to myself. I drive each morning in a hung-over, sleep-deprived daze. Sometimes when I park the car I can’t remember how I got there. Sometimes I cry the entire way there. Sometimes at a stoplight I stare blankly at the human life going on around me. Everything I thought was real, isn’t.

  My head is messed up, my guts are rotted. The place in my chest that used to house my heart feels like it’s collapsing under the weight of a woman I met fleetingly once. A woman who knew my husband so much more than I ever realized or could have guessed. Now she’s like a thousand-pound weight on my chest, squeezing every ounce of blood out of my heart like it’s a tomato.

  Still I go to work every day. I sit at my desk but I don’t actually do any work at first. I cry in front of my computer, even though I am the boss. My co-workers stand around helplessly offering me Kleenex. I make them cry, men, women, young and old, the single ones and the coupled. They’re all devastated to see me like this, to hear my grief. Sometimes I sleep in people’s offices, sometimes an endless parade of people come to my desk to see me, a receiving line of pained expressions. It’s as if my husband has died. But he hasn’t. I hate him and love him in such desperate, equal measure.

  All day and night, I think about them having sex. I can’t get it out of my head. It’s on a sick and tortuous loop that makes me wince, that twists the inside of my empty stomach into knots, makes me bury
my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I’m losing weight so fast that people notice after one week. By week two I’ve lost almost twenty pounds, a thing I didn’t even know was possible. One day I run into a woman who works in my department. She sits far enough away that she hasn’t heard the crying or seen the parade of concerned people. She stops me in the hallway and shouts enthusiastically,

  “What ARE you DOING lately? Whatever diet it is, I NEED to do it!” I can’t get a word in, and she continues, “I don’t care WHAT it is, you HAVE to tell me! Because you look FANTASTIC. Like, AMAZING. You are totally GLOWING! Every time I see you, you are SKINNIER and SKINNIER! So what is it? I HAVE TO KNOW!”

  Finally, she stops and I say, “Well, it’s the Shock and Grief Diet, just whiskey and cigarettes. I really don’t recommend it.” I feel awful when I see her face fall as she quickly apologizes for intruding. There’s no way she could have known. I say it’s okay a hundred different ways and then right there in the hallway at work, I spill the whole story, beginning a sustained period of oversharing that yes, obviously, continues today.

  Fifty times a day I say “My husband had an affair” to anyone who even looks at me. Co-workers, the ladies at our daughter’s daycare, other parents in the neighbourhood, a homeless man, the pharmacist. I just say it, plainly like that, the same way I would say, “I’ve had a cold for a few days.” I can’t stop telling people. I want them to know what’s wrong with me. I want them to know this shell of a person used to be vibrant and real, and now I’m a ghost and this is why. This is why. My husband had an affair, you see?

  By the way, I really don’t recommend the whiskey-and-cigarettes diet. No matter how effective it is.

  One of my colleagues is a lifesaver; she sits right beside me. A long time ago the man she loved hurt her badly, and she hasn’t been the same since when it comes to men. The Husband’s behaviour only strengthens her conviction — if he could do this, then it’s true that all men are selfish assholes. This breaks my heart. I don’t think all men are assholes. People can be assholes. Some people lie to themselves, so much so that after a while it becomes easy to lie to others. I say this to her, but it sounds like I’m defending him.

  Meanwhile, she’s a godsend at work — picking up all the tasks I’m not doing, leading the team for me, acting as my proxy in meetings and taking care of things so I don’t have to. I’m eternally, shamefully grateful. She tries to make me eat solid food, but I just can’t. So each day she buys me one of those giant smoothies that have protein and fruit in them. It takes me all day to finish one, but that juice basically saves my life. She saves my life. She frets and cares for me until I can function again. I feel blessed that the HR gods have given her to me by chance, sitting her next to me when I need her most.

  In my spare time, I obsessively Google my husband’s name and the name of the woman. I try to find out everything I can about her. But frustratingly, she’s a digital ghost. I don’t know what I’m trying to find, but I keep searching anyway. Nothing in my life makes any sense and I want to understand it, I want it to come together in front of me like a completed puzzle so I can say, “Ohhh.” So I spend hours trying to piece together the events leading up to the end of our marriage, pinning down dates and times using calendars. I hack into his phone to look at texts and emails. I don’t know why I’m doing this now, after The Bomb has dropped. And anyway, there’s a very small trail to go on, but I triangulate events like a good journalist, writing them all into my notebook, trying to piece it all together. An expert in emotional forensics.

  Everyone, including my psychologist, begs me to stop this behaviour. “Even if you could get all the dates right, you will never have the whole picture,” she says to me. “It doesn’t matter if he slept with her on December twenty-third or not. You have to let this part go.”

  I say to her, “I know, I know.” But inside I think, It does matter, it does! It matters if he slept with her on December twenty-third. He was married on that day, and all the days. So it does matter. Why can’t anyone understand that?

  One of my aunts, who I’m very close to, writes to me every other day. Every time I see her name in my inbox, I feel a tiny bit closer to reality. Her emails have the linguistic effect of the healthy juice my friend brings me. She writes short messages to say she’s thinking of me, to say she understands the complexities of what I am feeling, to remind me I am strong. She’s the only person who consistently checks in on me this way and she keeps it up for almost a year. In these early days it means the most to me.

  One day later that summer, she tells me a story about a friend of hers who caught her husband right in the act. He’d gone alone to her family’s cottage, which was isolated on a small island. She decided to surprise him and meet him there a day earlier than planned. She rowed the boat from the shore to the island cottage and walked inside. There was her husband, completely naked with some woman, on their cottage bed.

  In the ensuing confusion and shouting and tears and everything else we can all imagine, my aunt’s friend did the best thing I have ever heard. She took the mattress right out from under them. The mattress! She hauled it right out the door, over her head, and onto the rocks. Then she poured kerosene on it and lit it on fire. Right there, right then. They were on this small island, remember? So there was nothing to do but to stand there, all three of them, and watch as that mattress burned.

  I do nothing quite so dramatic. I don’t take him to court, we don’t have a custody battle, no bed on fire, nothing. I just slowly spiral down, away from myself, deeper and deeper into grief and straight into the arms of that monster, Loneliness.

  SCISSORS

  I don’t light a mattress on fire, but eventually I do find a way to burn myself. Grief hits me hard. And it’s the kind of grief people aren’t comfortable with. Everyone understands you if you’re grieving the death of a loved one. We’re patient with that sorrow. But grieving a marriage? No one has time for that. The grief of betrayal? Everyone expects you to just get over it. So your husband cheated on you. You have to let it go and just move on.

  Let it go and move on. If only it were that easy. Instead, grief consumes me. I walk around with a bullet wound that never heals and bleeds another woman’s blood. Months later, after we move out of the house and into separate places, I grieve the life I suddenly have, abandoned and alone. The life I didn’t ask for, the life I never wanted. And I grieve in a way that still surprises me. I turn to men to fill the emptiness. I turn to strangers. I go out all the time — dancing, drinking, and going home with hot young guys I will never see again.

  I want it that way. I’ve only ever been in long-term, monogamous relationships. I’ve never had, or wanted, a one-night stand. Sex has always been tied to love for me. But love made a fool of me. Love betrayed me. So I throw love into the trash, and myself along with it. I seek out sex. Only. But I am lifeless with these guys. I feel nothing when we’re together. It feels the same as washing dishes, or slowly cutting out a difficult pattern with scissors — blank mind, concentration on task, and absolutely zero human emotions. A flame might flicker sometimes, but only for a second, and then it’s gone.

  There is nothing fulfilling about having one-night stands with strangers. It fulfills the objective, sure, and sometimes it is amazing or surprisingly sweet in the moment, but my heart is always doing something else while it’s happening. My brain is also gone. I imagine I’m just a blow-up doll. Or a corpse. I don’t look or act like one, but I am dead inside. Afterward I think, That’s it, that’s the last one, I can’t do this, I can’t do this. I can wait until true love comes again. I can stop all this and try to heal.

  I think, Maybe I can get into watching a TV show like a normal person. Instead of going into bars to find temporary affection, I can wear yoga pants and binge-watch seasons of Scandal and eat ice cream. Or whatever it is people do alone at home. I resolve to start being present in my life again. So I write a list out on a cue card:

  Stop feeling sorry for myself.
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  Find comfort in something that isn’t sex. There must be something, right?

  Stop wishing for things and people I can’t have.

  Start taking care of myself.

  It doesn’t take. I carry that cue card around with me, but I don’t do any of those things. Instead, I keep meeting new guys and cutting out difficult patterns with scissors, feeling nothing. All of that nothing, to dull the something that once was.

  Above my bed is a piece of art I bought at a coffee shop soon after the separation. The Ex-husband and I would meet there to “hand over” Birdie. She’d arrive with one of us but leave with the other. And although we didn’t need to, we’d always linger, drinking espresso and flirting.

  The shop had all this art for sale on the walls, these beautiful line drawings on blocks of wood. One of them was just a big pair of scissors. It was called Because of Love. I bought it immediately and hung it over my bed. You know, of all the men that have passed through this bedroom — no one ever said anything about those scissors. Until, of course, The Man with the White Shirt.

  One day soon after we meet, he’s lying there looking at it, his dark eyes heavy with the afternoon. So I ask him what he thinks it means, these scissors called Because of Love. The Man with the White Shirt doesn’t hesitate. He says, “The scissors are so you can cut away things left behind. To make room for love.”

  And my heart burns bright white heat for him.

  THE DEER

  In the immediate wake of The Husband’s destruction, a disturbing trend emerges. All of the coupled women we know suddenly become suspicious of their husbands and partners. They snoop in drawers and hack into cellphones. They look for clues on Facebook. Some even go so far as to point-blank question their men.