The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

  “Find the mouse bones,” Bib said. Porcupine was still fussing some, little complaints really. “You should sing,” Bib said.

  “Sing?”

  “Porcupine likes the song about the screen door.”

  “The screen door?”

  “You know: The screen door slams and Mary’s dress sways. He likes that song.”

  “‘Thunder Road’?”

  Bib shrugged.

  “Does the pellet stink?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Bib said, still leaning over the pellet.

  Porcupine fussed some more so I started humming Bruce Springsteen into his pink ear.

  “Are you here because my grandma is going to die?” Bib asked.

  “Um, no,” I said.

  “People come by a lot because she’s going to die. She’s my other mother,” Bib said. “I have two.”

  “You’re lucky,” I said, “to have two mothers.”

  “And now I’ve got a father too. Sonny.” Bib still hadn’t touched the pellet. She was just staring at it. “Do you think that someone will open Grandma up when she dies? She’s giving her body to science.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But that’s a nice thing to do.”

  “We’re just bones and stuff.”

  “But there’s more to us than that,” I said and I squatted next to her pellet. “We’re imagination and love and dreams. Aren’t we?”

  Bib looked up at me. I hadn’t realized it but she’d been crying. Her face was streaked with tears. “I can’t cut open my pellet,” she said.

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “You know, we are bones, and the bones can be used by scientists, or they can fade away. But all of the other things that we are—imagination and love and dreams … that lives on even after we die.”

  Bib looked at Porcupine’s dimpled knees and squeezed one of them with her gloved hand. “Where does it all go when we die?”

  I pointed to her heart. “Inside the people we’ve loved.”

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Barn owls have very good hearing. They can hear animals that are under the snow. Females lay four to seven eggs at a time.” Porcupine started to cry. We both looked at him. “You stopped walking and singing,” Bib said.

  “You’re right.”

  I stood up and paced and sang “Thunder Road” while Bib put the pellet back in its box with the tweezers, the mask, and the gloves. Porcupine rested his fleshy cheek on my chest. His body went slack with sleep. Bib and I sat on the edge of the deck, and I distracted her with stories from my childhood, growing up in a yellow house on Apple Road with the climbing tree over the driveway and the crazy Fogelmans next door, and my father who believed in talking fish.

  “Talking fish?”

  “Yes. They have languages. We just don’t understand them.”

  “Maybe everything has a language we don’t understand.”

  We sat there and watched the fireflies blink in the grass and told each other what we thought they were saying.

  “That one’s saying Come here! Come here!” Bib said.

  “And that one’s saying, Can’t you see I’m busy?” I said. “Oh, and that one there is saying, I miss you! Why are you so far away?”

  “That one’s saying, Stay with me forever at the summer house. Stay, stay, stay.”

  And I loved that firefly. I wanted to stay, stay, stay.

  LATER, WE ALL ATE dinner in the living room gathered around Vivian’s bed—Jennifer was sitting in an armchair balancing Porcupine, Bib was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I was standing. Elliot was feeding her sweet potatoes.

  “Open the wedding gifts!” his mother said.

  “Not now,” Elliot said. “We’ll do it later.” I already felt guilty about the gifts and didn’t want to open them either.

  Elliot and Jennifer started talking about a childhood prank—taking the rusty water from the toilet at an old ski lodge they used to go to and trying to get other kids at the lodge to believe it was iced tea and drink it.

  “You drank it once,” Elliot said to Jennifer.

  “I never drank it,” she said. “That other kid did. What was he? Canadian?”

  “I’d never drink toilet water!” Bib said. “I’d never even try to make Porcupine drink it!”

  “Of course you wouldn’t, Bib. You are the perfect child,” Vivian said with a placid smile. “Those two had to learn to be good. You were born that way.”

  They talked and talked while Vivian took small spoonfuls of sweet potatoes. Finally, she lifted her hand in a gesture of no more. She tugged on Elliot’s sleeve and he leaned down so she could whisper in his ear.

  “Okay,” he whispered back, nodding. “Okay.” And then he ushered us all from the room. He put his arm around Jennifer and started to talk to her about morphine levels, and they drifted away from me for a few minutes.

  I cleaned up the kitchen while Jennifer talked to hospice on the phone while nursing the baby, and Elliot put Bib to bed.

  When he walked back downstairs, he looked like he’d almost fallen asleep himself. His hair was mussed and his eyelids heavy. I was drying the shrimp pot. Jennifer had gone in to talk to her mother. He was exhausted but he was smiling—a soft, tired smile.

  I pointed to the photo of him on the wall, the one of him as a sulking teenager. “Look,” I said. “Proof!”

  “Proof of what?” he asked.

  “Elliot Hull, the brooder.”

  He laughed. “Look at that hair, and those madras shorts. What was I thinking?” He shoved his hands in his pockets, looking distracted.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He smiled. “I promised you a fleet of rowboats. Do you want to go for a night ride?”

  “Does Jennifer need you?”

  “Not now,” he said. “I asked her if we could disappear. I reminded her that we’re newlyweds.”

  I remembered the kiss again, the sweet tenderness of his lips and how Vivian had said “Love, it’s unmistakable.” I felt like a newlywed—anxious and flushed. Was love—real love—unmistakable? “Can anyone deny newlyweds?” I said.

  “Not in good conscience,” Elliot said.

  The lake was quiet except for a couple of kids on a far-off dock holding sparklers. Elliot sat facing me in the rowboat, the kayak paddle resting in his lap. We were so close that our knees overlapped, my knees inside of his. The rowboat was drifting. The lake reflected a bright fat moon.

  “You have a good family,” I said.

  “They are good,” Elliot said, looking up at the sky.

  “Did you ever reconcile with your father?” I asked, remembering how hurt he’d been in college, realizing for the first time that he was angry at his father and had good reason to be. As far as I could remember, he’d left the family for another woman and barely played a bit part in Elliot’s life after that.

  “I wrote him a letter a few years out of college, and I told him what a shit he’d been, but that I still loved him.”

  “Did he write back?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding his head roughly. “He was very cordial. It was a nice letter. We still don’t really speak.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, and then he looked at the kids on the end of the dock, spinning their arms around so that the sparklers made lit-up hoops in the air. “You surprised me in there with my mother, answering all of her questions. You didn’t like answering questions like that in college.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No, you didn’t,” he said, sounding a little put out with me.

  I thought of the two of us standing in the freezing shallow end of the university pool. Elliot had asked all of those questions that I didn’t have answers for. “You asked difficult questions, and I was just a kid. I wasn’t ready.”

  “Are you ready now?”

  The question sounded loaded. I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t know.”

  “Should I ask you again?”

 
“Ask me what?”

  “Ask you the question that made you grab my face in the bar and stop speaking to me?”

  “I don’t remember the specific question,” I said, but my heart started beating more quickly, as if some part of me did remember, if not the words then the feeling—like the time my apartment was robbed before I met Peter and was living alone: not so much frustrated that things were stolen as much as feeling invaded, imagining the thief going through all of my things.

  “You don’t?”

  I shook my head, glanced up at him and away again.

  “Do you want me to tell you?”

  I didn’t, but I couldn’t admit that I still wasn’t ready—for what, I wasn’t sure. “Tell me,” I said. The breeze off the lake was cool and I wrapped my arms around myself and tucked my chin to my chest.

  “Early in the day, while we were lying in bed, it dawned on me that you were in the car when your mother got in her accident. I don’t know how or why, but it just struck me as the reason why you were so afraid in the water, why you’d cried in the pool. I pushed you on the subject, and you got mad. You finally admitted that I was right, but told me not to talk about it anymore.”

  “And then you talked about it in the bar.” I remembered this now. We’d gone with a group of people, but as was usually the case, we’d ended up alone, in a corner talking, just the two of us.

  “Today my mother asked you if you’d forgiven your mother for dying. But I didn’t think of it that way. You didn’t act like someone who couldn’t forgive your mother. You acted like someone who couldn’t forgive yourself.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, holding on to the side of the rowboat, which seemed like it was bobbing now more than drifting.

  “You really don’t remember any of this? Do we have to have the argument again?”

  “I guess we do,” I said. “Because I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I asked you if you felt guilty, like it was your fault your mother died.”

  “How could I have felt guilty? It wasn’t my fault. I was five years old. I was a kid in a car.”

  “That’s what you said then too. You said, ‘Five-year-olds don’t feel guilt about something like that. They don’t understand.’ And I said that you got smarter, though, and one day you did understand, didn’t you? You had to have understood.”

  “Understood what?” I asked, still gripping the rowboat.

  “That you lived and she didn’t, that someone came in and saved you—a stranger, a driver on that same road, and he saved you first, and ran out of time to save her. He had to make a decision and he picked you.”

  Elliot was right, and I knew it as soon as he said it. I thought of his mother’s speech—that children became a parent’s worthy murderers. It struck me as honest because it was true. In my case, it had seemed literally true. After the trip to the nursing home where the elderly auntie had let it slip that I was in the car with my mother at the time of the accident, and after I’d had that confirmed by Mrs. Fogelman next door, a few months went by as this new truth settled in through my skin, into my bones. And then there were a few years when I would imagine the stranger who saved me as I was going to sleep. I remembered the version of that stranger now, stopping his car and running into the water, and then finally diving underwater to save me—but not my mother. I was quiet.

  “Gwen,” Elliot said. “Are you okay?”

  The kids had new sparklers now, two in each hand. They seemed to be shaping letters in the air, but I couldn’t read them. I looked at Elliot. He touched my hand still holding on to the lip of the rowboat, trying to keep my balance. “And what did I say to that?” I asked. “Go on.”

  “You said, ‘Fuck you.’”

  “Ah, well, I was quite the wordsmith back then,” I said, but we were beyond this kind of lightness. “What else? Finish the story.”

  “You said to my mother this afternoon that you haven’t forgiven your mother because you haven’t started to blame her yet. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. What’s it to you?” I thought of the owl suddenly, the barn owl responsible for making Bib’s pellet. I thought of the mouse being swallowed whole and alive.

  “Is it because you’re still blaming yourself?”

  Elliot’s eyes were wet and shining. Mine too felt teary. The breeze was coming up quick off the lake. “Tell me the rest of your story,” I said. “At what point did I slap you?”

  “You didn’t slap me …”

  “When did I grab your face?”

  Elliot looked down at his hands. He was reluctant to go on with the story. He put a hand on each of his knees. “You said you were fine with your mother’s death and I should be too. You told me not to fucking psychoanalyze you. But I said you weren’t fine with it. And you weren’t. Are you fine with it now?”

  The rowboat had made a slow half turn. I could no longer see the kids on the dock—only the black expanse of the lake. I had never been a very good swimmer. I wondered if the rowboat tipped, would I be able to make it back to the Hulls’ dock? How had I gotten all the way here with Elliot Hull in a rowboat? I had a tidy life in which no one asked any important questions, no one pushed me to reveal anything that I didn’t want to reveal, no one went rooting through my past to find out why I was the way I was—no thieving, all safety. “When did I grab your face?” I said again.

  “You asked me why I was going through all this,” Elliot said. He was almost whispering now—his voice hushed and pained and strangely tender. He looked beautiful, the dark lake at his back, the wind rippling his shirt. “You asked me why it was so fucking important. I told you it was so fucking important because I wanted to know you better than I knew myself, because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you because I love you like that.”

  I looked at Elliot. That was the part that I hadn’t been able to withstand, that had been so unbearable, so unforgivable. It wasn’t that he had rifled through my childhood, my psyche. No. The reason behind it all—his love, his bold-faced confession of his love for me—that is what I couldn’t accept.

  I grabbed Elliot’s face—gently this time. I held his face in my hand and then he leaned forward, jostling the rowboat, and kissed me, and I let him kiss me and I kissed him back—the rowboat turning slow circles in the lake.

  I WOKE UP IN THE morning in Elliot’s bed from his childhood summers, alone. I’d slept there, fitfully, alone too. Elliot and I had kissed in the rowboat on the lake, but those were our rules at sea. When we reached the Hulls’ dock and we’d gotten back on dry land, he said, “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have done that. I know that it has to end here. I know that.”

  But, of course, it couldn’t really end. Elliot was in love with me and I was in love with him, although we hadn’t said it aloud in uncertain terms. This was our predicament, and it was worse than having an affair, wasn’t it? Although it wasn’t as wrong as an affair, maybe, because what we felt for each other was out of our control, it made everything more complicated.

  And when I woke up in Elliot’s bed from his childhood summers—Elliot having slept in one of the armchairs in the living room so that he could tend to his mother if she needed someone in the night—I felt the compulsion to run, the instantaneous guilt and dread. I knew that I had to go home as soon as possible. I had to see Peter and return to my own life, and try to make the best of that life.

  The room was spare—some soccer trophies, a desk, a bureau—but it did have a landline and an old rotary phone with its spiral cord. It was nine o’clock in the morning. I dialed my home number, and looked around the room as it rang. There were books in here too, of course, adventures and fantasies and a few that seemed schoolish, math especially, as if he’d been forced to bring some work along in the summers to make up for a deficiency.

  Peter didn’t answer. I listened to my voice on the answering machine. I’d have to change it. My voice sounded too automated, too cold, as if I didn’t really care whether people left a mess
age or not. I hung up on myself.

  I dialed Peter’s cell. It went straight to voicemail. I wondered if he’d picked up another shift. I said, “Hey, Peter, there’s no good reception out here. I’m going to be home by midafternoon. I don’t want to waste the day. I hope you’re around. We could go out to dinner maybe? That Thai place? Okay, talk to you later.”

  I got dressed quickly and walked downstairs. Bib was in the small den, watching Sponge Bob. Porcupine was in his Excersaucer nearby, pulling on a red plastic flower. The house smelled like bacon. Jennifer was in the living room, filling a glass of water from a pitcher, talking to her mother. Jennifer looked up.

  “Good morning!”

  Vivian faced me. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth,” she said. “Will you please come and open these presents! They’re taunting me.”

  “Yeah, when are we going to free those poor toasters?” Elliot said. He was standing at the end of the hallway, holding a spatula. He read my expression, which must have been anxious, and added, “This afternoon, maybe! I’ve got bacon to burn.” He dipped back into the kitchen and turned on the fan. I could hear its loud, low whir.

  “Just a minute,” I said and I followed Elliot into the kitchen. “Elliot,” I said in a quiet voice.

  He was laying bacon on a plate covered in a folded paper towel. “You can’t go,” he said.

  “I have to.”

  “Nope. I’ve already decided that you should stay through dinner, at least. Take an evening train.”

  “I have to go. Your mother will understand.”

  He stopped, put down the spatula, leaned against the counter. “I’m not worried about my mother right now. I don’t want you to leave like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like running away,” he said.

  “I have a real husband. A real marriage.”

  He picked up the spatula and tapped it nervously. “But, see, I’ve been thinking. We could …”

  I cut him off. “I can’t destroy a marriage because of a kiss on a rowboat.”

  “It was more than that. This isn’t the beginning. This is the middle. You know that.”