by Mina Hardy
I saw their texts. All of them. Ping, ping, ping, one after the other, until I managed to get to the settings and turn off the account. Using my arms hurt. Finding out Val was sleeping with my husband was worse. I don’t remember knowing before I read those texts … yet somehow, I was not totally surprised.
It explained why I hadn’t been able to get in touch with her about the accident, why she hadn’t visited or even checked in. I didn’t tell Jonathan I’d found out. Just home from surgery with busted-up bones, missing memories, exhausted and sick, how could I have been expected to deal with this too? Short answer, I could not.
I.
Could.
Not.
I still can’t. Seeing her at the Blue Dove last night, I’d been unable to stop myself from reaching out. If I could pretend I didn’t know, then she could pretend it wasn’t true. Right?
I’ve seen Val lie. I know she can do it straight-faced, not so much as a blink to give her away. She was not lying to me at the Blue Dove, and if she was telling the truth, that means this is far more complicated than I already thought it was. I remember that I no longer love him, but I have no recollection of ever planning to actually leave him. Is this how our marriage ends, just like that? How can it?
Weeping, I stand beneath the water until it goes cold.
I manage to get a towel around my waist. I take my comb into the bedroom to sit on the edge of the bed while I drag it through my wet and unwashed hair, but again, I can’t lift my arms high enough. I’m dry mouthed from the pain and shaking from the effort.
All I want is to have clean hair and a good night’s sleep. It’s almost eleven at night, but my husband is still not home. Harriett’s lights are on. I know she suffers from insomnia. I know she almost always waits up for his car to make sure he got home all right. She never says anything about it, and I’m sure he doesn’t know, but I do.
Harriett is always coming over the to the main house unannounced, but this is the first time I’ve ever done it to her.
“Diana,” she says when she opens the door. Her platinum hair is done up in her curlers, covered with a triangle of fabric. Without makeup, her face is soft and pale and not young, but younger looking. “Come in. What’s wrong?”
“I wanted … I wanted to wash my hair …” My voice shakes with sobs. I want so much more than that, but I don’t know how to ask her without telling her everything about Val and Jonathan. The carnage and ruin that has become my life. Once it’s said, I won’t be able to take it back. The end of my marriage will be real, and I will have to face it.
I’m just not ready.
Marrying Jonathan had been settling. I’ve known that for a long time. Harriett had spoken so glowingly of her son, a good man, a fine catch, and I’d been at a low point after the loss of my father, so I’d let her set us up on a date. One date had turned into two. I had found him, if not intriguing, at least unobjectionable.
And then we were married, and I’m not sure how or why, except that I loved his mother and I’d been alone for a good long time, and he asked. In the end, that’s what it comes down to. Jonathan asked, and I thought that if he was the kind of man I’d never be able to rely on, well … then he could never let me down.
I’ve cried in front of Harriett before, but it’s been a long time. No matter how frustrated I’ve been since the accident, this is the first time my emotions have up and run away with me. I may have forgotten a good four months of my life, but I haven’t forgotten how many times I’ve leaned on her in the past.
“Oh dear. Come in. Come in.” She stands aside to usher me in. I yelp when she puts an arm around my shoulders. “I’m sorry!”
“Can you please help me?”
Harriett nods. “Of course. Yes. Come into the bathroom, and I’ll get you all set up.”
Her apartment has an open floor plan, lots of space, and the bathroom is set up specifically to accommodate someone with limited mobility, including a sink at the right height for hair washing. The place was clearly built for someone who needs assistance … or will. For someone who means to live there until the end of her life.
I close my eyes and lean back in the chair to let the back of my neck rest on the sink edge. It’s a little uncomfortable, but I’m willing to put up with it. Harriett tucks a rolled towel beneath me without a word. She runs the water warm and sluices it through my hair. Her fingers work in the shampoo. She uses a pitcher to help rinse. Then condition. Finally, she combs through it, apologizing every time she hits a snag. There are a lot. My scalp is stinging by the time she’s finished, but it feels so much better.
“It’s close to midnight,” Harriett says. “You should get some sleep.”
“Thank you, Harriett. So much.”
“You know I’m always here for you, Diana.” She walks me to the door. The outside lights are off next door. Jonathan’s finally home, but neither of us mention the late hour or where he might have been this whole time. She has to know he wasn’t at work.
“Goodnight, Diana. I’ll be over in the morning.”
You don’t have to rises to my lips, but I pinch off the words before they can escape. She doesn’t have to—that’s exactly it. But she will anyway.
In my kitchen an empty plate sits on the counter, smeared with gravy and mashed potatoes, a few strings of pot roast from the sandwich I’d had when I got home, tipsy from my night out with Trina. I thought I had put it in the dishwasher. Leaving it out is something that Jonathan would do, not me. I’m too tired to make the gymnastic effort required to clean it up now.
The sound of the television from the den tells me Jonathan hasn’t even made it upstairs, which would explain how it’s possible he has no idea I wasn’t home when he got there. I creep down the short hallway to the den and peek in at him. He’s in his recliner, remote in hand but head tipped back and mouth open. He’s snoring. After my mother left, my dad used to sleep in the living room on the couch with the television running constantly, but that had never been my husband’s habit … at least, not before he started needing a reason to hide what time he came home.
I should wake him up, encourage him to come to bed so he doesn’t have a sore back in the morning, but I don’t. Truth is, I don’t want him in the bed with me. Not even if he takes a shower, which it doesn’t look as though he’s done, which means he’s come back into this house with my former best friend’s touch still all over him. I want to wake him up then. I want to shout in his face. Accuse him. Let him know that I know the truth. Tell him to get out, go back to his mistress. I want to laugh in his surprised face when I tell him I know all about her.
But I don’t, do I?
I don’t know when or why it started. I don’t know my part in it. All I have is that yawning void in my memory, and my cowardice and inability to face any of it.
I do not confront my husband. Instead, I shake a few pain pills from the bottles in the kitchen cupboard. Harriett has helpfully left them all opened so I don’t have to fight with the childproof lid. I hope they will quiet the ache of my knitting bones and let me get back to sleep. I go back upstairs to bed and get under the covers. I situate myself against the pillow and, motionless, feel the pain in my bones ease enough that I should be able to sleep. There might be more nightmares if I do, but I close my eyes anyway. The dreams are better than staying up for hours thinking about all the ways someone who loves you can betray you … or how you can betray the one you love.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Valerie
LAST DECEMBER
Diana and Jonathan have had a holiday party every year for as long as they’ve been married. I’d made it to all of them, even when I still lived in Brooklyn. I never thought I’d come back to the town I grew up in, much less move back here, but my dad was dying. I was all he had. I didn’t want to be, but that’s how it worked out.
That night, I left him behind with the hospice worker. I could still smell the lingering stink of his sickness on me, beneath the soap and deodorant and perfume, but
my sparkly red dress and matching heels made me feel better. I’d put my hair up. I wore a pair of my mother’s diamond earrings, the ones my father told me I’d never get to have because I was a “gold-plated little whore.”
“Don’t think I don’t know,” he said. “I know what you did, you and that girlfriend of yours.”
Joke’s on you, Dad. I took these earrings right from my mother’s jewelry box before I left home the first time. I’d had them for years. They sparkled for me as much as they ever did for her.
As always, when I pulled into my best friend’s driveway, I took a moment to look at her house and think how far we’d both come. Or at least how far I’d gone before coming back. I was living in the childhood home I’d run away from as soon as I turned eighteen, and Diana lived in a nineties-built mini-mansion her husband had been gifted by his mother. As soon as my dad died, I’d be out of this piece of shit little town again. Diana … well, she was stuck here for good.
Through the windows of the in-law apartment above the detached garage to the left of the main driveway, I saw Jonathan’s mother in her kitchen. Harriett Richmond made the cookie platter every year, and since I was a little early, I took a minute to stop at her door to see if she needed help. She must have ducked outside while I was locking my car, though, because before I could knock, we startled each other as she came around from the back of the building.
I caught sight of a scowl before her expression smoothed into confusion. “The catering should be delivered next door.”
“I’m Val,” I reminded her. “Diana’s friend.” We’d met a handful of times, for example, every year at this party. I tried not to be offended she didn’t remember. Or that she thought I was “the help.”
“Oh yes. Did she send you over to fetch me?” Another flash of a frown slid across the expertly applied crimson of her lips.
“No. I just saw you through the window, and I thought maybe you’d need some help with the cookies.”
Harriett blinked. “The cookies?”
“You make the cookies every year for the party … don’t you?”
“Oh. Yes. Well, yes, I do. From scratch. I was just getting them ready. But I don’t need any help, honey. You go on ahead to the party.” The older woman smiled, showing me a bit of lipstick on her teeth. She smelled of smoke. Cigarettes, not wood stove or campfire.
It had been a warm winter so far, but as I made my way across the driveway toward the main house, a few snowflakes skittered down from the dark skies and salted my bare arms. I hadn’t bothered with a coat.
Diana opened the door and looked past me for a moment, perhaps catching sight of her neighbor/mother-in-law. She greeted me with a grin and a long hug. I could smell the wine on her breath, pungent, fruity. I wanted some immediately.
Diana breathed into my ear. “He’s making me craaaaaazy.”
“Wine?” I patted her on the back.
We’d always told each other we weren’t going to get married. That we’d live together in a male-free commune. Wine afternoons and no sleepovers with boys allowed. Just us girls, making sure to have each other’s backs. I hadn’t seen her since that day last September when she’d told me about buying her car, but nothing much seemed to have changed.
“This way.” Diana took me by the hand through her two-story foyer—in her house it was a foy-ay, not a foy-er.
The family room was decorated for the party with plenty of candles and string lights, but no tree this year. Diana always put one up for her husband’s sake, even though she’d given up Christmas for herself years ago. I wondered if she’d ever told him why.
She saw me looking to the corner where it was usually placed. “He didn’t do it this year, so I didn’t either. I warned him if he didn’t take care of it, we wouldn’t have one. I guess he doesn’t care, at least not enough.”
“Nobody else will either,” I assured her. “Not so long as there’s plenty of food and booze.”
“Harriett will.”
“Well, I guess she could have come over and put up a tree, then, right?” My quip was meant to be light, but a shadow flitted across Diana’s face.
Not even a frown could turn my beautiful friend ugly. She would always be “the pretty one,” and I would always be jealous.
I let her lead me to the bar set up in the kitchen. A full spread of liquor and wine. She poured me a glass of white. Then one for herself. Not from the bottles she had chilling in festively colored buckets, but the special white she saved only for herself. And for me.
“Pinkies up,” we said at the same time, and clinked our glasses together.
The party got into full swing. There was plenty of food, including the platter of cookies sprinkled with colored sugar that Jonathan’s mother brought. I hadn’t eaten all day, but now a single plate of barbecued meatballs and cheese with crackers was too much to finish. I tried to pace my drinking, but the wine, even when I switched to what had been put out for the regular guests, was crisp and chilled and trickled into every crack and crevice. Filling me up until I feared I might overflow.
Every time someone from high school tried to get me to talk about the good old days, I wanted to throw up all over them. They’d never left home because they loved it here so much they chose to stay, or they had left but were home for the holidays because they loved it here so much they missed it when they were gone. I was the only one who didn’t want to come “home.” The only person who seemed to hate this shitheel town, and here I was. Trapped again.
But I put on the face of someone who loved it there. I bragged about my job, the old job, the one I’d lost two weeks ago because of all the time I’d had to take off since my dad got sick. I talked about my amazing life in the city, not mentioning that I’d lost my apartment there, that I was in debt I couldn’t repay, that I’d broken up with my last boyfriend because he wanted someone who was “wife material.” I laughed and held up my ringless hand when they asked if I was married, did I have kids. Maybe a cat or a dog or a parakeet?
“No, no,” I said. “Too smart for that.”
Some of them envied me, and some of them pitied me. I told myself I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought, but I must have, because every conversation was another slice, a digging cut, until my insides were a handful of fluttering ribbons. I was drunk. I should’ve gone home. I’d given up smoking a few years ago, but I wanted a cigarette.
Christmas is a hard time of year for a lot of people, and this year it seemed I was one of them. The lights, the festive music, the sparkly red dress, the wine and food and people laughing at the party—all of it left me feeling down and dark. This wasn’t sadness. This was despair.
I want, I thought as I pushed my way out the French doors in the kitchen and onto the deck, as I stumbled toward the garbage pails set at the back of the in-law apartment. I want, I want, I want.
I want … to die.
It was not the first time I’d had the idea that ending my life would be better than living it, but it had been a few years, at least, since I’d last entertained that idea. As soon as the thought rose to my mind, though, it felt right. I got calm. Outside, under the steadily falling snowflakes, I tipped my face to the dark sky and let the chilly flakes coat my face for a moment before I brushed them away.
I had a choice. I always had a choice. I did not have to stay here, in this life.
I didn’t have to have a life at all.
When the call from the hospice worker buzzed my phone, I let it go to voicemail. I waited for a minute or so, giving her time to leave a message. I read the transcription of it without listening. I already knew what she was going to say.
“Sorry.” A male voice interrupted me, and I turned the phone downward so the light wouldn’t show him my face. “I didn’t see you out here. You okay? Val?”
I turned, already weary, but it wasn’t Tom or Jim or Steve from high school; it was Diana’s husband. Jonathan. His black and silver hair glinted in the shaft of light filtering from his mother’s kitch
en.
“Needed some air,” I said. “Great party, though.”
Jonathan leaned against the back of the apartment and pulled a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Sure.”
“Can I have one?”
Without a word, he shook the box to give me access to one of the cigarettes. Then he offered the lighter. The first drag was heaven. The second buzzed my head. I took my time before drawing again.
“Don’t tell my mother I’m out here smoking,” he said in a low voice, but with a chuckle.
“What about your wife?”
“My wife,” Jonathan said, “doesn’t give a shit if I get lung cancer and leave her a widow.”
It was the sort of thing I should tell him wasn’t true, except I’d heard Diana bitch about him enough to know that maybe it was true. I stayed quiet and smoked my cigarette. I stabbed it out against the side of the garbage can, then lifted the lid to toss the butt inside. The can was full to the brim with trash, and the most notable thing on top was a set of those plastic containers from the grocery store that hold baked goods. Sugar cookies, according to the label I glimpsed. I let out a laugh. So that’s what she’d been doing. That old bat made such a show of her “homemade” treats, and all she did was pick them up in bulk from the market.
“What?” Jonathan asked.
“Never mind.”
“I guess I should get back inside,” he said without moving.
I watched him. “I should get home. My dad’s sick. I should see how he’s doing.”
Both of us stayed still.
“Is it just me,” Jonathan asked after a moment, “or are most of my wife’s friends … assholes?”
I shook my head. “It’s not just most of them.”
“You’re her friend.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “and I’m also an asshole.”
“No, you’re not,” Jonathan denied with a laugh. “At least, not like they are.”
“You don’t even know me!” My protest was a little too loud and could attract attention if anyone else had decided to come outside. I looked around automatically, but we were still alone.