The Light We Lost

by Jill Santopolo

But Kate got me thinking: Sometimes my life with Darren did feel stale. And stale can lead to something worse if it goes unchecked.

  lxvi

  That winter, a few months after Liam turned two, our whole family got sick. It was the kind of horrible cold that had Violet out of kindergarten for a week. She was listless and clingy and my heart just about broke every time that she coughed, a deep rattle in her tiny chest. Your heart would’ve broken, too, Gabe. She was so sad and pathetic. Annie wouldn’t leave her side. Darren wasn’t feeling well either, and on top of that a deal he was handling at work wasn’t going as smoothly as he’d expected, so he was short-tempered—with the kids and with me.

  After four days of that, Violet and I were curled up together on the couch with Annie watching Sparkle On! and Liam was on the floor with his favorite wooden trains. Darren was pacing the apartment holding some company’s financial report in his hands, reading while he walked. During his third or fourth circle into the living room he said to me, “Liam’s nose is running.”

  “There are Boogie Wipes on the kitchen table,” I told him.

  He stopped walking and looked at me. “I’m working,” he said. “You’re their mom.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, as Violet rubbed her own drippy nose against my sweater.

  “I’m working,” he said again.

  I stared at him. Sometimes he came out with these things that made me think: Is this really the person I married? Not often, but it happened. It was usually about childcare, about my role in the family as a wife and a mother.

  Without another word, I got up off the couch, lifting Violet with me, got the Boogie Wipes from the kitchen, and wiped Liam’s nose.

  Later that night, I woke up to the sound of Liam crying. We’d just switched him from a crib to a bed, but he still hadn’t figured out that he could get out of it by himself in the middle of the night. I looked over at Darren. He was half awake too.

  “Liam’s crying,” he said, his eyes barely open.

  “I hear him.” My head felt like it was filled with cotton.

  “You’re going?”

  It wasn’t really a question. “Mm-hm,” I said, getting out of bed.

  When I got to Liam’s room, Violet was standing in the door frame. “He woke me up, Mommy,” she said, following me inside.

  “Me too,” I told her, as I lifted him out of his bed. “Why don’t you go back to sleep?”

  “Can I stay?” she asked.

  I was too tired to argue. “Okay,” I said, then turned to Liam. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  Upright, in my arms, Liam’s cries turned to a whimper. I wiped his face, which was covered in snot. “Too hot,” he said, his breath still shuddering.

  I put my lips against his forehead, the way I had with Darren so many Christmases ago. But I was sick too, and my lips weren’t reliable. I took his temperature. 101.4. I sighed.

  “Okay, buddy,” I said. “You don’t like this part, but it’ll make you feel better.”

  While Violet watched, I syringed Tylenol into the back of Liam’s mouth and then stuck his sippy cup between his lips. He was too sick or too tired to put up much of a fight. He swallowed, then coughed. “I know, baby,” I said. “Being sick is no fun.”

  “Sick is no fun,” he echoed, his lower lip trembling a little.

  Violet coughed, covering her mouth with her elbow, like she’d learned at kindergarten.

  They looked as miserable as I felt. “How about we all sleep together tonight?”

  She nodded and climbed into Liam’s bed. I slid in next to Violet and propped Liam’s head on my shoulder, hoping the elevation would help him breathe.

  “Love you, Mommy,” he said, as his eyes closed.

  “I love you too,” Violet said, as she snuggled against my other side.

  “I love you both,” I told them, “to the stars and back.”

  And I thought about you, then, Gabe. I hadn’t in a while, but lying there I remembered the day, not quite a year before, that we baked cookies and you fixed my washing machine. I remembered the feeling of what could have been. And I wondered how you would have reacted to two sick kids. Would you have gotten out of bed and told me to sleep while you comforted a crying child? Would you have wanted them in bed with both of us, a family of runny noses and fevers? You wouldn’t have expected that it would all fall on me, that I’d be the one wiping faces and syringing Tylenol. I know that for sure.

  That night, with my babies in my arms, I dreamed about you in Darren’s place. We were making waffles for Violet and Liam. You were wearing that ridiculous crown. We were all in matching Christmas pajamas.

  When I woke, I chalked it up to a fever dream. But, really, it was much more than that.

  lxvii

  That year, 2013, sometimes felt like a year of disillusionment. I seemed to disappoint Darren constantly with my choices. And he disappointed me with his reactions. And his expectations. It was small things—Violet started first grade at a new school and he thought I should go in to work later so I could walk her there in the mornings instead of Maria. I got invited to speak at a conference in Los Angeles, and he wanted me to turn it down because it meant I’d be gone for six days, which he thought was too long for the kids to be without their mom. He was still trying to turn me into the woman he’d imagined when he made that inane checklist. But he was not my Pygmalion. I was not his Galatea.

  I’m being unfair, though. We had fun times too. We spent two weeks at a beautiful house in East Hampton in August and invited Vanessa and Jay and the triplets to join us for a week. The kids had a great time swimming and building sand castles and digging holes deep enough to stand in, and Darren and I were better together out there, without work getting in the way. We took Violet and Liam to their first Yankees game in September and had seats right behind home plate. Austin Romine signed a ball for each of the kids, and they talked about it for weeks afterward. We hosted our first Thanksgiving and invited Darren’s whole family and mine, and everyone got along wonderfully. On the balance, we were fine, but we weren’t great.

  Which is probably why when I saw a woman’s name—Linda—appear on Darren’s phone the week we were both off from work between Christmas and New Year’s Day, my mind immediately went to an affair. The way people interpret a situation often says more about them than it does about the situation. Like how during our five-year reunion, when I saw that woman with her hand on your arm, I assumed she was your girlfriend, or at least someone you were interested in taking home that night. We see everything through the filter of our own desires and regrets, hopes and fears.

  When I saw Linda with no last name, my body flushed hot and cold all at once. I’d never imagined Darren would cheat on me. He seemed too stable, too solid, too loyal. So I set out to prove to myself it wasn’t true. I scanned through my mental Rolodex for Lindas—someone from his office, from college, from the gym—but came up blank. Then I went onto his Facebook page to look for Lindas. The only two I could find were a cousin who lived in New Mexico and a college acquaintance’s wife who lived in Philly. I took a deep breath and decided it could be either one of them. I should give him the benefit of the doubt, even though leaving off a last name in a contact entry felt like a deliberate choice, like there was something to hide.

  “Have you spoken to your cousins recently?” I asked over a dinner of macaroni and cheese and chicken cubes we were eating with our kids. For some reason, Liam preferred to eat meat in cubes, so that became our default shape. Personality-wise, he reminds me a lot of my brother.

  Darren shook his head. “I should call them, though, and wish them a happy new year.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I should do that too.”

  So it wasn’t Cousin Linda.

  “What would you think about going out to Philly for a day with the kids this week?” I asked. “Have you been in touch with any of your college guys ther
e? We haven’t seen them in a while.”

  Darren shrugged. “It’s a long trip, and really I haven’t spoken to any of them since Josh got married last spring. Are we getting to that point where we’re trading in our old friends for newer models?”

  I took a sip of the Merlot I’d poured us both, even though it didn’t really go with the mac and cheese and chicken. I never like white wine in the winter. “What do you mean?”

  Liam was building his chicken into a tower. Violet was eating her mac and cheese one noodle at a time.

  “Just that we’ve been spending most of our time with people in our neighborhood who have kids our kids’ ages. I can’t even remember the last time we saw Kate and Tom and their girls, and they’re only an hour away in Westchester. Maybe we should make plans with them this week.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I’ll give her a call.”

  “Auntie Kate?” Violet asked. “Do you think she’ll have new dress-up clothes I can wear with Samantha and Victoria?”

  Samantha was a year and a half younger than Violet, and Victoria was six months older, but the age differences didn’t seem to matter as much now as they had when the girls were smaller. “I think that’s quite possible,” I told her.

  She nodded and went back to her noodles.

  I’d struck out with the Lindas.

  Two weeks later, though, Darren left his phone at home when he went to the gym. After staring at it for fifteen minutes, I picked it up and decided to find out, once and for all, who Linda was. I typed in his unlock code—our anniversary—and his iPhone buzzed and shook its dots at me. The hot-and-cold feeling that had flooded my body when I first saw Linda’s name returned. I tried Violet’s birthday and then Liam’s. Then Darren’s. Then mine. Nothing worked, and I knew that if I put in a sixth wrong code, the phone would be disabled. But truly, I didn’t have a sixth guess anyway. Linda’s birthday? I put the phone down on the coffee table, where I’d found it.

  I thought about telling Kate my suspicion but felt like too much of an idiot. There was no real proof. Besides, she and Tom were working through their own issues. The last thing she needed was to be dealing with mine, too. But even though I didn’t feel like I had enough evidence to warrant a phone call to Kate, I was still afraid to ask Darren why he’d changed his phone code. Who Linda was. Why she didn’t have a last name. Because once I knew he was cheating for real, there was no going back—the hurt, the betrayal, the arguments, the tears. I shuddered at the thought of living through that, of what it would do to the kids, to me, to all of our lives. It was easier to pretend things were fine.

  I kept my ears open for the next few months, and noticed three or four times that he’d be talking on the phone in the hallway as he came home from work, but would say good-bye before he entered the apartment. Could that have been Linda?

  He worked a couple of Saturdays in March. Linda?

  He went on a golf weekend with some friends from the office. Or did he?

  I barely slept those six months. I would lie next to him, wondering how he could sleep so soundly while he was keeping such a horrible secret, while he was betraying me like that. I couldn’t get the images out of my head, him in some other woman’s arms. Sometimes I’d imagine her as a blonde, sometimes a redhead, sometimes a younger version of me. No matter how I pictured it, it was terrible. I ate less. I drank more. I wondered why he’d given up on us. What made him do it.

  Sometimes I wanted to hurt him as badly as he hurt me—physically, emotionally, anything to show him what he was doing to someone he’d promised to love until the day he died. Sometimes I just wanted him to tell me that he was sorry, that he’d leave her, that he loved me still and would love me forever; sometimes I thought that was all it would take for me to forgive him everything. My heart felt like a yo-yo, or maybe like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing from one side of the table to the other. Through all of it, though, was this overwhelming feeling that I’d failed somehow. I hadn’t been sweet enough or smart enough or a good enough wife. That it was my fault he was doing this. I was paralyzed by the idea of that failure.

  I think that’s why I didn’t tell anyone, really. Once I said it out loud, it became real. Our marriage had failed. We had failed. I had failed.

  Darren and I weren’t having sex as often as we used to—maybe once or twice a month—which had become the norm after Liam was born. I didn’t even bother with birth control. Once I saw Linda’s name on his phone, though, there was this paradox of being so upset with Darren that I didn’t want to touch him at all, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give him a reason to fall into someone else’s arms. A few months into my spiral of suspicion, when I was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, torturing myself with mental images of Darren zipping up some other woman’s dress, fixing her collar, sliding on her shoes, I reached my hand over to his side of the bed and slid it under the band of his boxer briefs. He was already falling asleep.

  “Not right now,” he muttered, as he rolled farther away from me.

  I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. The rejection hurt, physically. How could he want some stranger, but not me?

  I questioned everything he did or said in my head, my hurt and mistrust growing, but didn’t bring anything up out loud. The only good thing about believing Darren was cheating was that when I fell into a fretful sleep and dreamed about you, I didn’t feel guilty anymore.

  I started reading your Facebook page more that spring. I liked more of your photos. Even commented on an article you posted. Did you notice? Did you wonder why?

  lxviii

  Timing is everything. That’s something I’ve learned. With work, with friends, with romantic relationships—with us in particular.

  You were in New York for a long weekend in mid-June. The AP was sending you to Jerusalem after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Hamas. You’d told them you wanted a breath of America before you dove into a new country and a new conflict, and they said okay. You were a pretty well-known photojournalist by then, so I guess the Associated Press gave you what you wanted. You’d been in Ukraine and then Moscow. I don’t know how you did it—a new country every few months, sometimes every few weeks. Or did moving around like that help? Make you think about your mom less, what you didn’t have less?

  When you e-mailed me that you were landing on the thirteenth and asked if I would be able to get together, I wrote back yes, without even clearing it with Darren. I decided he didn’t deserve to be consulted. He was keeping secrets from me, so I could keep secrets from him.

  Darren had been talking about bringing the kids to see his parents out in Jersey, and I suggested he do it that Saturday without me—that I could use a day to relax, get my nails done, have lunch with some friends, and his mom could help him with the kids.

  “Sounds good,” he said. “And maybe next Sunday I can go play golf?”

  “Deal,” I told him, wondering if golf meant Linda. I’d initially felt guilty that I’d lied to him, or at least omitted my plans with you from my explanation of the day, but when he said golf, I shrugged off my guilt. My omission felt justified.

  I texted you that morning: How about we meet in Manhattan? Darren has the kids for the day in New Jersey. Manhattan was our borough, after all.

  Great, you texted back. How about Faces & Names? Is that still around? I’m Googling.

  I laughed while I waited for your follow-up text.

  It is. See you there for lunch? Noon?

  Sounds good to me, I wrote. Then I went and got a manicure and pedicure so my lie to Darren would be partially true. I’d never lied to him before—not like that. And I didn’t like doing it. But making part of it true helped.

  It took me half an hour to figure out what to wear to see you. It was sunny and in the seventies—ideal weather—so I could go in any direction I wanted: dress, skirt, pants, capris. I settled on something simple. Jeans, black T-shirt, ba
llet flats, some jewelry. I did my makeup the way I used to when we were together, with a black line at the base of my top lashes. Did you notice?

  I walked into Faces & Names, and you were already there, sitting on a couch next to the fireplace.

  “They won’t turn it on for us,” you said. “They said no fires in June.”

  I sat down next to you. “They do have a point.”

  I took you in. Your hair had grown back, your dimple was there, but your eyes looked weary, tired, like they’d seen too much.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I might be getting too old for this,” you answered. “I was just thinking about that. I’m not looking forward to this assignment, and that’s the first time that’s happened.” Then you looked at me closely. “Are you okay?” you asked.

  I hadn’t said a word to anyone for months, but with you I felt safe. Besides, you weren’t in my regular life; there wasn’t anyone you’d tell. Darren and I wouldn’t become gossip at preschool drop-off.

  “I think Darren’s cheating on me,” I whispered. I tried to stop the tears, but I couldn’t. You held me to your chest. You didn’t say anything, you just held me. And then you kissed my forehead.

  “If he is, he’s an idiot,” you said. “And he doesn’t deserve you. You’re smart and sexy and the most amazing woman I know.”

  You kept your arm around me as I ordered an apple martini and you ordered a whiskey—for old times’ sake. I leaned against you as we drank them. And ordered a second round. Your body felt so good next to mine. I remembered that fever dream I had, where we made waffles in our Christmas pajamas, and I wondered what it would be like to come home to you every day, your compassion, your strength, your understanding.

  My brain started clouding.

  “I need food,” I told you. “I’m not used to drinking this much, this quickly.”

  We ordered fried mozzarella bites and a plate of mini Cuban sandwiches. Things I hadn’t eaten in years, but devoured, trying to soak up the alcohol. Even so, when I stood up to go to the restroom, I had to use the top of your head for balance.