Alone

by Michelle Parise

  I tell them all the same thing: “No, no, your guy isn’t like that. Your guy wouldn’t do this to you.” But they all shake their heads and say, “I’ve never known any couple more into each other than you two, so if he did this to you, then anyone can!” It’s a losing battle. I feel awful that our horrible situation has caused a ripple effect of suspicion.

  “That’s not my responsibility,” The Husband says with a dismissive shrug when I point this out to him, and I shrink back from his finely sharpened edges, his refusal to see his actions as having any impact. But listen, if a deer walks out into the road, and then just stands there because it’s too stupid and afraid to do anything, when someone hits it and causes a huge multi-car pileup, it isn’t the deer’s responsibility that cars were smashed and people were injured. But it is the deer’s fault, isn’t it? The deer in fact caused all of the harm, can we agree on that?

  The deer is, we all know, a lucky bastard that somehow came out of it unscathed, but still just as stunned. So, the deer can go right ahead and lie to itself all it wants about the damage it caused. That doesn’t make it untrue.

  WHY I’M TELLING YOU THIS

  The Deer believes he has no responsibility for the impact of his actions, but he does want me to know it will be my fault when Birdie finds out he had an affair, because I told our family and friends. But what was I going to do? Lie about it? A fact is a fact. When Birdie finds out, it will be because there’s something to find out.

  Maybe you think it’s wrong for me to talk about it so openly like this. That sharing this story is selfish and indulgent and will cause her harm. But I want to tell you this story, share these ugly truths alongside the beautiful ones, because life isn’t one-dimensional. It’s nuanced, and subtle, and full of contradictions.

  We surprise ourselves constantly, all of us. I want Birdie to know that. Her parents are fallible. Her parents have darkness and light. Her parents love her more than anything and continue to raise her together. We bought homes across the street from each other, for her.

  We didn’t go to court, for her. She deserves to have her father in her life, and that’s why I made those decisions. When Birdie finds out about his affair, it will be because he had one, not because I’ve told this story.

  Birdie will learn about the bad choices I’ve made, too, the way I dealt with the grief, but I’m not ashamed. She’ll know I’m proud of who I am. I’ve considered it. A lot. What it means to tell you all this. What it is to talk about life, the messy and stupid as well as the beautiful. Regret and redemption. The dark moments don’t have to define us, but they do help shape who we are. And that’s why I talk about it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LEFT AND LEAVING

  NEIGHBOURS

  Every night after The Bomb, I go see our close friends who live up the street. We met when our daughters were babies, and now they’re about to have baby number three. We jokingly call ourselves “The Commune” because of the way we share everything — tools, dinners, kids’ clothes. The husbands, both scientists, make beer together, with elaborate setups in our cold cellar. We take vacations with them, and weekend camping trips; we spend every New Year’s Eve together, and all of our birthdays and kids’ birthdays.

  They take the news especially hard. I cry and cry in their living room, drinking all their wine, while my friend The Chemist, paces. He can’t understand how The Husband could do this to me. He’s so angry. And he gets angrier each time I protect The Husband, each time I justify the things he’s done. His wife, The Practical One, my dear, dear friend, sits beside me in tears and so pregnant. The due date was the same day The Husband dropped The Bomb, but the baby hasn’t come yet. I am shamefully grateful for this, because I need her more than anyone else right now.

  Each day passes and the baby holds out. On the fifth night, as I cry on the couch, I apologize for the millionth time for bringing my sadness to their house just as they’re about to have a baby. The Practical One shushes me and says, “I think she’s waiting so I can be here for you.” I whisper to her giant belly, Thank you.

  Once she is born, I don’t want to infect their house with sadness, so I move on to other neighbourhood friends. I go out almost every night, crying at the house of whoever will take me. I sit in their kitchens and drink their rum, their gin, their anything. I go through all their Kleenex. The husbands all have angry tight jaws as I cry with their wives. He was their friend, but he maybe was really just a stranger.

  Meanwhile, for the whole two months until we move out, The Husband stays home every night. I will lose my mind if he goes out and he knows it. That I have already lost my mind is beside the point. That he managed to have an ongoing affair mostly in the daytime? Also beside the point. We never discuss it, but we both seem to know it — The Husband is living in undeclared martial law.

  IRISH BLOOD, ITALIAN HEART

  “I’m selfish,” he says, for the fiftieth time, and she smashes the dining table hard with her hand and yells, “Fine, but is that good enough for you then? Because if not, what are you going to do about it?”

  I want you to meet my best friend in the world. She’s at the dining table with us, and she’s angry. Her boyfriend sits beside her, and we look at each other with the same arched eyebrow that says holy shit, she’s good.

  Let me just pause for a second to tell you that my best friend is one of the toughest women I have ever known. Irish blood, Italian heart. She takes shit from no one. She’s passionate and loyal, fiercely so, but she’s also sensitive. It’s as if The Husband has done this to her. And she’s letting him have it, crying as she says, “What. Are. You. Going. To. DO ABOUT IT? Because you can’t just keep saying you’re selfish, but also say you’re a good father. You can’t just say you’re selfish, and be fine with that while your wife gives you joint custody, lets you stay in this house, doesn’t take you to court. So what are you going to do for her?”

  For her? For once in his life, it looks like someone has genuinely given him an idea he’s never thought of before. He turns and looks at me, but I am so scared of what is happening at this dining table, so shocked that someone is defending me, that I’ve become a small, airless thing and I can’t even look at him.

  I feel like I’m back in grade 6 when I was the new kid at school, and a group of girls circled me at recess to beat me up because a popular boy liked me. At the time I thought I could take one of them for a bit, but I had no chance against four, when out of nowhere strides Irish Blood, Italian Heart, at twelve years old, already a head taller than the other girls. She walks right into the circle and stands in front of me like a giant shield. She tells the girls that if they want to beat me up, they need to go through her first. They back away, and the two of us have been friends ever since.

  Now here she is, twenty-five years later, defending me again, only this time with tears streaming down her face. “You owe it to her,” she says, pointing across the table, jabbing the air in my direction. “You owe it to her to do something now, not just sit there with your hands in the air saying, ‘I’m selfish, oh well!’” Her words hang there for a few seconds, her finger still pointing at me, as she stares at him, blue eyes blazing.

  When they go, my heart sinks on the driveway. My defender is gone. I stand there and stare at the grey March sky, the giant trees in our backyard bending with the wind, the years. I go back inside and he is there, still at the table, like he’s been freeze-dried. He looks up and says, “She had a lot of good points. A lot. What am I doing for you?” I look right into his shiny dark eyes, and I see him for just a moment, at twenty-six years old, staring across a café table, telling me he loves me. I see all the joy and pain we shared for twelve years.

  I see now in his eyes: remorse.

  This affair was something he did for himself, so yes, he was selfish. And so far all he’s been saying is, “I was a shitty husband,” so it’s still been about him. But from this moment on, over the next month until we move out, he actively tries to make this easier on me. Ir
ish Blood got through to him, somehow. Protected me again.

  LEAVING HOME

  All of the boxes have either red or blue stickers on them. So does the furniture. Blue sticker — his moving van. Red sticker — my moving van. The Husband hired the same company to move us both. Do I still call him my husband?

  Finally, after two months of living in the house together, the day has come to move out. This is really happening. We are really, truly separating. We greet the movers together, and explain the red and blue system. We joke and talk with them and give them bottles of water. After about an hour, one of them asks, “You’re moving to two separate places? I never would have guessed that.” Then he shrugs his shoulders, commends us for our organization (“I love this sticker system!”) and goes on with his work.

  Our two separate places are actually across the street from each other, but it’s a big city street. We’ve decided to live no more than a five-minute walk apart, for Birdie. But it’s for us, too. We still think of ourselves as a team. We even went to Ikea together to pick out furniture for our new places. It must have looked like we were moving in together, but we were moving out. As the men come in and out, emptying our home, we stand together in the kitchen. With every box, every chair, they clear out our life together until all of our things, divided carefully into red and blue, are in two separate trucks outside.

  When the trucks drive off we stand there on the front porch for the very last time together. We hold hands. We hug. “I’m starving,” he eventually says, and kisses my forehead. We get in what is now designated as my car (no red sticker though, haha) and go have lunch together.

  It’s a chain fast-food place — the sun outside blazing, uncharacteristically hot for April. Not a person in the place would guess that they’re looking at a couple whose marriage is over, a couple that has just separated all their things into two trucks. No one would know that one betrayed the other so deeply and unexpectedly, it sent the other one into a state of shock so severe she has stopped eating food altogether, started drinking and smoking, and is now dependent on sleeping pills to get her through each night.

  Here she is though, that ravaged wife, having a laugh with him as he tears into a hamburger, king of the world. She pretends to eat french fries. For a few minutes she’s forgotten the eviscerating pain. She’s at the point now where for at least five minutes of each hour, she doesn’t automatically think of him having sex with the other woman. This is a huge improvement over the preceding two months, where any time her mind went even a little bit idle, images of the two of them would flood her brain, stab her in the heart, and shred her insides.

  Every day for those two months, lacking sleep and basic nutrients, she went to work, and then came home. He would have dinner waiting as always, and the three of them would sit at the table just like they always had. The evenings were status quo — bath time and books and tucking in. Once their little girl was asleep, they would meet at the big wooden dining room table, the one they had dreamed together of having one day. The one they bought on sale after they were married, the wife sitting on top of it to ward off other bargain hunters while The Husband tried to find a store employee.

  Every night for those two months, they’d meet at that big wooden table. They’d have a drink together, or three. They’d talk or cry or fight or fuck, sometimes all four. They’d go through files, make lists and assign tasks. They’d pack and pack and pack, the boxes climbing alongside the heartbreak. For two months, that dining room table was ground zero.

  Together they’d mythologized that table, imagining how one day their daughter would spend evenings doing her homework on it, how as a teenager she’d bring her first young love there for dinner. The Husband and Wife liked to do puzzles together on that table, host dinner parties at it, do their taxes on it. Each Hallowe’en she laid newspaper on it and they would carve pumpkins and talk and laugh while separating the seeds for roasting. And it was there, against the rustic teak, that they divided twelve years of accumulated possessions, dismantled twelve years of love and memories, unearthed twelve years of lies and secrets.

  It took two months to sift through twelve years, to separate, to say goodbye. To put red stickers on, to put blue.

  The only piece of furniture we fought over was the table. Everything else we divided up easily. But oh, the table. I held onto that piece of wood like it was the marriage itself.

  THE THING ABOUT TRUTH AND TRUST

  Did I really, truly, trust my husband when we were married? I’ve wondered myself; you aren’t the only one. The answer always comes back to me as yes.

  When we met, I knew — because he told me — that he’d cheated on each of his serious girlfriends before me. He knew that although I hadn’t ever cheated in the traditional sense (sex), I had fallen into deep emotional relationships with other people while in each of my serious relationships. I always had someone else lined up and ready to go. But here’s how we rationalized it: those days were over. We were young then! We were wilder, we were still experimenting, we weren’t mature. Now, we rationalized, now we’re in our mid-twenties and this is different.

  Most importantly, now we were making a vow. A vow of marriage, of solidarity, of unity. A contract that not only implied trust, but was predicated on it. Without trust, there was nothing. This is how I saw it anyway. After I found out he had been lying to me, all of that evaporated. I didn’t know what was real. That’s the thing about trust. It’s only good until it is broken.

  That he broke it was a fact. The details remained — and remain — fuzzy. He lied a lot that day when he dropped The Bomb on me. You can’t blame him; he was in a panic. He lied on top of his lies, trying to minimize the hurt, not realizing that lying more wasn’t the way to do that. At first he said it was only one time. He’d only slept with her one time, the night before, the night he didn’t come home to me and Birdie. Then he said actually he’d slept with her two times, the other being the night of the grade 12 commencement three months earlier. He maintained it was only those two times. Finally, he settled it. They’d been having a full-blown sexual relationship for three months. Not a one-time mistake, but a series of deliberate choices.

  Over and over again, they would get into our car and drive to her condo. They’d walk together from our car to her building, go inside, and have sex. His wedding band, her free spirit. He’d shower, because of course later that night, he’d be having sex with me. He’d leave to pick up Birdie from daycare. He’d get dinner started. I’d come home from work. Over and over again, for three months he says, he went between her place and ours. The place that was his wife and daughter. Three months.

  I didn’t know what to believe. I had already departed from this world and was lost in a vortex of unmanageable pain. He spoke to me but it was like I was floating above us. I could see me crying and shouting. I could see us fighting and fucking and calling the real estate agent.

  Nothing was real. Those days and weeks and months were underwater. But this is where we left it. My husband had an affair for three months because that is what he says is the truth. The trouble is, how do you trust the truth when it comes from a liar’s mouth?

  And this is the thing about truth and trust. The thing I have to live with every single day. Was the affair really three months long? Was it a year? Two? Was it the whole marriage long? Were there other women and other times? Twelve years is a long time for a really good liar to lie.

  How do I trust anything he says ever again? How do we raise our daughter together if there’s no trust? The only way to co-parent effectively was to trust him, right away, right after his string of lies was revealed. I had to trick myself into trusting him so that we could raise Birdie together. But I wonder sometimes if trust has a different meaning for me now. Now, it’s a lot less about certainty and more about faith. Now, I have to just go on what he says. I have to believe in him. I have to. That’s the only way any of this works.

  PAIN SCALE

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?�
� asks almost everyone. Why do I put up with the not-boyfriendness of The Man with the White Shirt.

  The way he says he loves me, the way he acts so crazy about me, the way I am his best friend and he’s mine. The way we seem like the most matched couple except we aren’t, because he can’t, he doesn’t know how, he doesn’t think he wants it, even though he says he can’t live without me. So yeah, they ask me why I put up with this, because they’re worried. They don’t want to see me get hurt, be crushed again. I get it, but they don’t have to worry. Let me tell you a story.

  One night I had a really late soccer game, and we had no goalie, and since I’m the captain, and also a defender, it made sense for me to play in net. Except I’m, like, barely five foot two, so it really doesn’t make any sense for me to be a goalie. On this night, a guy shot the ball so hard that when I made the save, it dislocated my thumb, bending it in the most unholy, unnatural position. I howled so loud that everyone playing stopped. It was excruciating, excruciating pain.

  When I got to the emergency room, the triage nurse took a look at it and asked me to rate the pain on a scale from one to ten, where ten is the most painful thing I’ve ever felt. “Uh, four?” I said. She looked at me with disbelief. “Four? Are you sure?” The thumb looked like a swollen, twisted Joshua Tree dangling off the end of my hand.

  I said to her, “Well, I’ve had a child, so if going through labour is ten, then this is just a four. Maybe five?” Boy did that nurse laugh! She laughed and laughed. “I’m going to go ahead and write nine,” she said.