The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

“To make sure that you were okay.”

  “Am I okay?” I asked.

  She patted the box’s lid. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I.”

  THE SNOW CAME AND went, leaving muddy ice frozen in shady patches on the front lawn. I sat in the flickering glow of the television, but I didn’t watch it. I knitted, and while knitting sometimes the yarn would go blurry, and a tear would roll down my nose onto my busy fingers, and I would cry for a while, but keep working.

  Why did I keep knitting? I felt oddly useful, like a small machine, and though my heart felt rather dead, my hands didn’t. They kept making, creating. The skeins of yarn took shape one stitch at a time.

  And the photograph sat in its frame propped on the end table. Sometimes I stole glances at it. Sometimes I’d pick it up and take in the details again—the rippling water, Jennifer’s plump baby face, Vivian’s long, elegant legs, Elliot’s bowed knees and swim trunks, the muddy fishing rods. But usually I simply knew it was there, keeping watch. The photograph was mine now. It had not only found me through Vivian’s generosity and Faith’s thoughtfulness—love and friendship—it had also seemed to come home.

  My father made my meals—his usual inelegant dishes. He watched television, sitting beside me on the sofa. At one point he told me that I looked flushed. “Do you want to take your temperature?”

  I shook my head.

  Sometimes he would point to the TV screen and make some benign comment like, “Will you look at that?”

  I’d look up and stare and nod, but not really absorb it. I was tired, mainly, exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept for years.

  One afternoon I fell asleep, and woke up to a knock at the front door. I called my father, but he didn’t answer. I looked out the bay window. His car was gone. Instead there was a blue pickup truck parked at the curb and a man I’d never seen before standing on the stoop. I looked back at the truck. A small figure was moving in the passenger’s seat, but I couldn’t make out the person. In the back of the truck, there was what looked to be a cello in a black case.

  He knocked again then stood back from the house with his hands in his pockets and looked at the upper windows. He started walking back to the truck, but then the passenger froze, then rolled down the window.

  It was Bib.

  Her bony frame and small pinched face appeared. She stuck her body out of the open window and waved to me. She’d spotted me there, watching. My heart swelled. Bib! I was so glad to see her I felt like shouting her name and running out into the yard.

  The man turned back around, and I decided this must be Sonny, Jennifer’s husband, the drummer. Why was he toting a cello? I wasn’t sure. But Bib took my breath. Bib was here. Bib had appeared and was now kicking open the passenger door and swooping toward the house, arms outstretched, like one of those nesting eagles she was so afraid of. Maybe she would lift me off the earth, not like a twenty-pound sheep to eat, no. Maybe she would lift me right up off the earth, to save me! Just like that!

  I ran to the door, opened it wide, and stepped onto the cold stoop in my bare feet. The sun blinded me. Bib was tripping toward me. She hugged me around the waist so hard I had to grab the wrought-iron handrail.

  After a moment, she said, “We’ve got an invitation for you. You have to come! It all went to sleep!”

  “What went to sleep? What are you saying, Bib?”

  “It all went to sleep! The bad stuff is sleeping!” she said.

  “She’s trying to tell you that Vivian is in remission,” the man said.

  “That’s amazing!” I said, and I thought of Vivian, revived, sitting up in her bed, her cheeks pink. Was she eating again? Was she reading now to herself, books she loved? I felt more than a wave of relief. I was flooded with it. “Is she doing well? How does she look? Is she still weak?”

  “She’s gaining back her strength, slowly but surely. She’s stunned all the docs. They’re not sure what to do.”

  I shook my head. I was speechless. I thought of how she believed in miracles, but only because, as she put it, she didn’t have a choice in the matter. I imagined her in a field with an enormous rake of her own, her own brand of bravery.

  “The doctors are embarrassed because they were wrong!” Bib said.

  Sonny introduced himself, striding forward, hand outstretched. He was barrel-chested, bigger than I’d expected, but handsome and warm.

  We shook hands. “I figured it was you,” I said. “I’m Gwen.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ve been sent on a mission to find you.”

  “And we did!” Bib said. “We did find you!”

  “Actually, Bib did,” Sonny said. “Elliot said you might have gone to your dad’s house, but he only knew that he lived in town, and he’s not in the phone book.” He glanced at the front hedges, as if he knew he was getting close to a subject about which he shouldn’t have known as much as he did—how I left my husband and retreated. I was surprised to hear Elliot’s name, though I shouldn’t have been, but some part of me clung to his name—I loved hearing it on someone else’s lips. “Bib remembered everything you told her about growing up—the name of the street you grew up on and the color of the house and the name of the neighbors, who had their name on their mailbox, which helped. The Fogelmans.”

  “Wow, did I tell you all of that?” I asked Bib.

  “When I was crying,” Bib said. “To make me think of something except crying.”

  “Nice house,” Sonny said.

  “Do you want to come in?” I asked, hopping from foot to foot to relieve the stinging cold on my feet.

  “No, no. That’s okay,” Sonny said. “We don’t want to intrude—”

  Bib cut him off. “We have an invitation for you!” Bib said. “To the lake house! We’re having an un-funeral.”

  “An un-funeral?”

  “Vivian’s idea,” Sonny said. He pulled a white card out of his jacket pocket then. “She wanted to make sure this found its way to you.”

  “So you’re on a mission from Vivian?” I asked. I’d assumed that Elliot had sent them.

  “Yes,” Sonny said, reading the hint of disappointment in my voice. “But I know Elliot would love to see you there.”

  “Come! You have to come! We’re having un-lilies and un-cake and un-eulogies! It’s going to be un-sad!”

  I looked at the invitation, turned it over in my hands. Elliot. Elliot. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll think about it. I’ll try.”

  My father came home, carrying a stack of papers under one arm and his ancient leather briefcase—another widower’s item, like his bathrobe, something a wife would have replaced a decade ago—and found me sitting on the sofa, holding the invitation and its white envelope.

  I knew that I couldn’t let myself go to the un-funeral. Not yet. I was still sorting through loss. I knew it would take a long time. But right now, before I took another step forward in my life, I needed to find the deepest loss, to un-earth it, hold it up to the light, in the open air, to see what I could find there.

  “I want you to take me to the bridge,” I said.

  He sensed my urgency. “Now?” he asked.

  “Yes, now.”

  We drove for about fifteen minutes out of town and finally we were winding along back roads. We were silent in the car. My father has always been respectful of grief, in his way.

  Eventually I saw a stone bridge up ahead, the river running beneath it. My father pulled over onto the shoulder so deeply that my side of the car was blocked by brush. It was impossible to use the door. He left his door open and I slid across the seat and got out that way.

  It was bitterly cold. A wind was whipping up off the river, which was choppy under the bridge’s lights. I waited for some feeling to overtake me—some memory of that night to rise up in stark realism. I waited to feel closer to my mother, to understand her, to have some sudden insight.

  None came.

  I looked at the bridge’s sturdy pilings and the water below. “How was it p
ossible?” I asked. “It’s all so impenetrable now. No one could possibly drive into the water.”

  “They’ve made it quite safe, haven’t they?”

  I stood there, staring down into the water then up at the sky. My cheeks were stiffened with cold. “Your theories on love are all about safety,” I said.

  “My theories on love? I don’t have any theories on love,” he said modestly.

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “You loved her and you lost her, and from then on, you decided to be careful with love. You couldn’t ever really hand it over with an open heart, not even fully to me. You closed up shop,” I said.

  He looked out across the river, his eyes shining with tears. “I wish I’d done better by you,” he said. “You just reminded me of her so much …”

  I knew it must have been hard. I knew it even then when I was a child, which is why I’d never pushed him before to talk about any of this. I’d never pushed him before I met Elliot, in fact. It was beginning to dawn on me how much Elliot had changed me, how he’d opened something up inside of me, and now I needed answers. “You taught me to only be able to accept love like that, in small doses. You taught me to be afraid of overpowering love—the kind that, if you lose it, that loss can destroy you.”

  He shook his head angrily. It was the first time I’d seen my father really angry in as long as I could remember. He grabbed my arm. “No, Gwen,” he said. “I don’t believe in that kind of love. I’d do it all again. I’d fall in love with your mother a hundred times over. The way I loved her, that was the way to love.” He looked away and let his hand slide from my arm.

  “But it destroyed you,” I said. “Didn’t it? Look at your life!”

  Just like that his anger was gone. He smiled weakly and shook his head. Did he know what his life looked like to people on the outside? “I keep on loving her,” he said, “because I’m afraid if I stop, I’ll forget her. And I can’t ever let that happen. But I don’t believe in, how did you just put it? Love in small doses? I don’t believe in loving safely.”

  There was a distant horn. We both looked up. The wind kicked up my hair. I brushed it out of my face and held it back with one hand. “What kind of love do you believe in?” I asked, in almost a whisper.

  “The overpowering kind.” He paused and then said, “You’re right. I do have theories on love, but I never told you them.”

  “I assumed them, and I was wrong.” We were lit for a brief moment in the headlights from an oncoming car. It passed. “I got all of them backwards.”

  “I guess so,” he said, shuffling one of his shoes in the roadside gravel. “Are you really in love with Peter?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “He cheated on me and I hate him for that, but it was always love in small doses with him. From the beginning.”

  “Are you in love with someone else?” I knew this was a nearly impossible question for him to have asked. He would consider this, under normal circumstances, to be more than prying. It would seem like barging in, doors flung open wide, holding a searchlight on someone’s private life. But he knew that things were different between the two of us now, and we had to ask hard questions. I didn’t realize how desperately I’d wanted him to ask me a question like this, intimate and direct, until this moment.

  “I’m in love with Elliot Hull,” I said.

  “The professor of philosophy? The thinker?” He smiled.

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said. “Life is a tangle.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “I suggest you not play it safe,” he said.

  THERE WAS A STIPULATION printed on the invitation to the un-funeral: Attire: Casual, Un-black. That Saturday I woke up early and put on a pale blue dress. I found my father working at the dining room table.

  “Are the cusk eels talkative this morning?” I asked.

  “You’re dressed. Are you going out?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you going to talk to your thinker?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  He got up then and hugged me. It was a great big bear hug that tipped me almost completely off the ground. It was so big that I felt like I was made of air, like I was just a little girl. It wasn’t the hug of someone who gave love in small doses—but more like someone who’d chosen not to live that way anymore. I felt like I’d gotten something returned to me, something lost so long ago I didn’t even really know it had once existed, but it felt right and good and mine.

  The un-funeral was going to be a catered event at the lake house, starting at noon. I headed east, and in a few hours I was making my way down the same dirt roads that I’d ridden along with Elliot in the convertible. I didn’t know what to expect from an un-funeral, from Elliot, from myself. I wasn’t even convinced that once there, I would be able to get out of the car and walk up to the door. How would I start to tell him something if I didn’t really know what that something was? Was I ready for Elliot Hull—to love him and be loved by him?

  I slowed down as I approached their long driveway, which was already lined with parked cars. I was surprised by how very many cars there were, but it was a party after all. What had I been expecting? A quiet moment alone with Elliot in the rowboat? I was coming unprepared. I didn’t have a symbolic rake to hold in a field, and I was desperate to see Vivian healthy, growing stronger, but I couldn’t envision it.

  I sped past the entrance and drove until I came to a gas station. I pulled into a parking space and, while resting my hands on the wheel, I took some deep breaths. I watched people come and go—three kids on dirt bikes, a hassled young mother with a baby who was pulling on a wisp of the mother’s hair, a few construction workers, and all the while, the man behind the counter, looking at the ceiling-hung television set to Court TV.

  I realized that I had unfinished business. I couldn’t see Elliot until I’d talked to Peter. I didn’t need permission to see Elliot—permission was no longer a part of our marriage. And I didn’t need release from the marriage itself—that would take time, wouldn’t it? Emotionally, it would take years. What did I need? Maybe only to hear Peter’s voice—a sober admission of the truth?

  I opened up my cell phone and dialed. It rang once and he picked up. “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  “Gwen,” he said. “Are we on speaking terms now?” He sounded contrite.

  “I couldn’t listen for a while there. You could have spoken all you wanted, but I knew I wouldn’t have been able to hear it.”

  “And now?” he said.

  “Try me.”

  There was a pause. “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too,” I said.

  “Don’t say it in that voice.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d used a certain voice. “What do you mean?”

  “You say it like you’re sorry for the whole relationship.”

  “And what are you sorry for?” I asked, staring into the convenience store, its rows of shelves, packed with brightly colored junk.

  “For that mess with Helen. It was stupid. It was idiotic. It meant nothing. I was just acting out.”

  “Acting out? Doesn’t that mean you were rebelling? Were you rebelling against me?” I felt like he was casting blame.

  “That’s not what I meant. Idiotic and stupid. That’s what I meant.”

  “And by that mess with Helen, you mean sleeping with my best friend?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I do.”

  “I’m not sorry for the whole relationship,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, sighing. “You don’t know how good that is to hear—”

  I cut him off quickly. “But I’m not coming back.”

  He wasn’t ready for this. He started rambling. “Let’s have lunch. Let’s talk this out. We should go to therapy. Faith says that therapy can work wonders—or just lunch, if that would be easier.”

  “No,” I said, thinking: I’m a w
oman in a field with a big rake, and I’m done. It’s over. I’m finished.

  “We can salvage this. We can get back to the best of what we were together.”

  If I was a damaged girl who made a damaged mistake, I didn’t want to make the same mistake just as I was beginning to feel stronger. “I want more than the best of what we were together.”

  “What?” he said. “We had something great. You want more than that? We were perfect together.”

  “Some version of me was perfect with you, but it’s not the version of myself I want to be.” The man behind the counter was looking at me now. Maybe he’d been keeping an eye on me for a while, wondering if I was coming or going or casing the joint. “I’ve got to hang up now.”

  “No,” Peter said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I refuse to accept this,” he said. “I absolutely refuse.”

  And then I hung up.

  By the time I made my way down the driveway, the cars had thinned out. Votive candles in bags lined the front walkway. A few kids in puffy jackets were running on the lawn. I found a spot and parked.

  As I walked up to the door, I saw Bib, wearing a ski hat and boots. The frilly white of her dress bounced around her stockinged knees. Her cheeks were bright red from all of the chasing. I didn’t want to interrupt her.

  I gave a knock, hearing the clamor of voices and laughter inside. When no one came to the door, I let myself in.

  The hospital bed was gone. In its place were a few people holding glasses of what looked like cider. Sonny was among them, as was the woman that I’d seen in Elliot’s car. I startled at the sight of her and took a step backwards. Was he still seeing this woman? Had he lied to me? I felt flushed. I had my hand on the knob ready to turn back. It wasn’t too late. No one had seen me, not even Bib in the yard.

  But then I heard my name.

  I looked up and saw Sonny charging over. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “I wasn’t sure either.”

  “Miranda,” he called to the woman. She looked up. She was elegant, holding her glass of cider, smiling. “Come here. I want you to meet Gwen.”