I drew myself as upright as I could, under the circumstances. “The roof just got blown off of my life because a woman from your past showed up and pretended to be my friend, cultivated a friendship with me deliberately. She stalked us. You know that, right? And now she is screwing up the world I had ready for my baby, so I would really like to know precisely what I’m dealing with here.”
“But these questions. Why do you need to know about our relationship? You think she wants me? She wants to get back together, after fourteen, fifteen years? That’s crazy.”
Our relationship.
“How would I know what she wants? She lied to me every time she opened her mouth. I don’t honestly think that I’m the one who’s crazy here, but I’m sorry for putting you in the position of having to defend her.”
Teo shook his head. “Stop this, Cornelia.”
“Finish your story.”
“We dated, if you can call it that.”
“You slept together. Obviously.”
“We spent two, maybe three nights together.”
“Consecutive nights?”
“Are you really asking me that?”
“So what happened?”
“Nothing happened. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember it that clearly, but I think I just told her that I felt like it wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Why?”
“She was smart and interesting, but not, as it turned out, in a way that actually interested me. She was angry and sort of—dislocated. And sad. And I just didn’t like her that much.”
“In other words, you had meaningless sex with her and then dumped her.” Even through my haze of anger, I knew this was going too far.
“Yes!” Teo said this so loudly, I jumped. “I’m an asshole, okay? Is that what you want to hear? So it wasn’t a shining moment. So I fooled around with someone I couldn’t see a future with. Did you never do that? I was twenty-two. But, hey, it looks like I’m going to be made to take responsibility for my actions, so you can feel good about that.”
His anger was so justified that it blew mine out like a birthday candle. He was right; there was no reason for me to know all of this. He had been answering my questions in good faith, when all I’d been doing was punishing him.
“I’m sorry, Teo. I get mad when I get scared. Forgive me.”
Without meeting my eyes, Teo said, quietly, “I know you’re scared. I hate it that this is hurting you, and I will do whatever I can to help you. But you know what?”
“What?”
“This is happening to me, too.”
Shame engulfed me, then, because until Teo stated this very obvious fact, it hadn’t been obvious to me at all. I got up from the chair and sat down on the bed a few feet from him. I was too ashamed to touch him.
“I didn’t even ask you how you felt,” I said, bleakly. “Oh, Teo.”
Finally, he looked at me, with a ghost of a smile. “You still could.”
“How do you feel?” I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t asked. I was afraid to know the answer.
“You know the way you looked at me when I said I’d take you home?”
“Oh, God. I’m sorry for that, too. I was—beside myself.”
“You looked at me like you didn’t know me. Like I’d turned into someone else.”
I started to apologize again, and he reached out and put his hand over mine on the bed. “It’s okay. I only bring it up because that’s how I felt when I found out, like I didn’t know who I was.”
“Do you feel like that still?”
He hesitated, then smiled. “I know I’m the guy who loves you, which is a lot to know.”
“Good.” I knew he wasn’t finished. Just stop there, I thought. That’s everything.
“But all this time, I’ve had a son. A son.” A shimmer of awe slid across his face.
“Don’t say that,” I whispered, harshly, the world blurring with tears.
“How can I not say it?” His voice hardened. “She should have told me.”
“What would you have done?”
“I don’t know, but she should have given me the chance to figure it out.”
I pressed my hands to the sides of my head. “No, no, no.”
“I need you. I need to be able to talk to you about this.”
“I can’t hear you wanting a different life. I won’t listen.”
Teo grabbed both of my hands and held them in his. “A different life? Cornelia. Look at me.” Reluctantly, I looked. “Do you really think I could ever not want you and our baby?”
It was a low moment, a desolate, howling-wind moment. I heard wolves at the door. Because the question wasn’t sarcastic. It wasn’t rhetorical. That this man I had loved my entire life was asking me this, with urgency and seriousness, scared me as nothing else that day had scared me. For a few dizzy seconds, our life felt so provisional, pieced together out of plywood and glue.
“How did we get here?” I asked Teo.
“Answer me.” He tightened his grip on my hands. His face flushed in the manner it always did: twin dark pink swatches burning down the centers of his cheeks, from the top of his cheekbones to a centimeter above his jawline. A memory flew at me: Dev’s face, flushing in precisely that way.
“No. You love us. I know that.” I pulled my hands away. “But I just want things to be the way they were. I want you to want that, too. And you don’t, do you?”
“But things can’t go back to the way they were.”
“Of course they can’t. But I want us to be together in wanting them to.”
It was a petulant, childish thing to want. I see that now. Maybe I even saw that then, but it didn’t make me want it any less.
Teo took a long time to answer. Finally, he said, carefully, “Listen. I love the life we woke up with, too. And I don’t know how to be anyone’s father except Penny’s. But I missed out on Dev’s entire childhood, and I can never change that. Is it so bad for me to feel like I’ve lost something?”
Remember, fifty-six hours. Just because I wasn’t mad at Teo anymore didn’t mean I was about to exhibit a shred of nobility.
“You should feel what you feel,” I said, turning my face, “but right now, I can’t hear about it.”
Teo stood up and walked out of the room. I didn’t watch, but I closed my eyes and saw him anyway: his back in his white shirt, moving away.
After this, we entered a kind of fugue state. Time crawled. Day bled into night. Teo and I coexisted in a muffled, airless stupor. He got someone to cover for him at work. We didn’t answer our home phone. We marked time in none of the ordinary ways; mealtimes dissolved, clocks went blank. We lived under lockdown. Inmates, contagious ward patients, bugs in a jar.
This gray isolation was punctuated only twice, early on, the first time by Toby when he came to pick up Clare. While Clare got her duffel bag, Toby grinned nervously, shifting his weight from foot to foot like a boxer.
“No offense, but you guys look like the walking dead.”
“It’s been a rough day,” said Teo.
“Crisis mode, huh?”
“You could say that.”
“Clare can tell you about it,” I said. “But, Toby, if you could resist sharing it with the rest of the family?”
“Oh, yeah, gotcha. Total discretion. Because, not that you and Teo are fighting, but if you are? Mom would totally take his side. Dad, too, probably.”
“Thanks, Tobe,” said Teo.
“Dad would not,” I said. “And we’re not exactly fighting.”
“Cool,” said Toby.
Clare came down the stairs with her bag. I smiled at her. She hugged me, and then Teo.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “We’ll work it out.”
I felt Teo’s eyes on me as I said this.
“Man, am I glad to hear you say that,” hooted Toby. He swiped the back of his hand across his forehead in mock relief. “Phew. I mean, look, no pressure or anything? But relations
hipwise, you guys are, like, the benchmark. Everest. The Taj-freaking-Mahal. The apex to which the rest of us aspire.”
“That’s not pressure,” said Teo.
“Do you really want to go with this incorrigible?” I asked Clare.
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling a wan smile, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
Toby and Clare walked out the door, but before it completely shut behind them, Toby came back and clamped me in a wrestling-hold hug.
“Seriously,” he whispered in my ear, “you need anything, you tell me.”
Tears were rising in my throat, so I just gripped his shoulders and nodded.
Toby stepped back and smiled at both of us. “Par example, if you need me to kick his ass, I’ll do it.” He hooked his thumb at Teo, who shook his head and smiled. To Teo, Toby added, “Or vice versa.”
“I wouldn’t tangle with her if I were you,” said Teo, wryly.
Toby balled his right hand into a fist and pounded his chest. “Big love, kids,” he said, and left.
The second visitor was Piper. She arrived at seven P.M. on the dot, a vision in eye-blue Nike running shorts and teeth-white sneakers, ready for our evening walk, about which I had completely forgotten.
I considered hiding out, waiting for her to leave, but I knew she could see both of our cars in the driveway, and Piper was an undeniable force, a steamroller. She would knock on that door until the crack of doom. I opened it, and although I had just opened it for Toby a few hours earlier, I felt like Boo Radley or a vampire, knocked backward by sunlight.
“Good God,” gasped Piper, recoiling, “you look terrible.”
“Hi, Pipe. Nice to see you, too. I’m sorry, but I really can’t go walking tonight.”
“Tell me about it. Walking? You look like you should be hooked up to an IV.”
I had to smile at this.
“Teo and I have sort of been through the wringer today. I’ll tell you about it, later. We’re having some—problems.”
Piper shot me a skeptical look. “Problem problems or you-and-Teo problems?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you have a problem by regular standards or by glitch-in-your-perfect-marriage-that-no-one-else-would-even-notice standards.”
I considered this. “Regular,” I said, finally. “Global. Galactic.”
Her demeanor softened. “Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Can I help?”
“No, but thanks. We just have to muddle through it right now.”
“I see.” She hesitated, then said, “Just don’t—” She broke off, which moved me. I knew that eventually she would say whatever she had to say, no matter how cutting, but her second thinking, as partial as it was, stood as a testament to how far we’d come.
“What?”
“Just don’t do anything stupid, Cornelia.”
“I appreciate the support.”
“I support you. I do. A hundred and ten percent. But any idiot can see that you and Teo are something special. Destined.” She made a disgusted face and flicked her hand a few times, as though the word “destined” were a cloud of gnats. “Whatever. You know what I mean. If you guys can’t make it work, there is no hope for the rest of us.”
First, Toby. Now, Piper. For the years we had been together, I had lived easily inside the shine of my and Teo’s reputed specialness. But suddenly, it felt a little smothering.
“Everest,” I said, blandly.
“What?”
“Toby told me more or less the same thing.”
“Well, good for him. Now do yourself a favor, and listen to us.”
Left alone, Teo and I wandered foggily around our house, each bubble wrapped in our own separate broodings, but bumping into each other now and then, mainly to exchange words that only deepened our unhappiness.
Some examples follow. Supply your own details and modifiers and tones of voice. When in doubt, go caustic.
In the living room:
“I’m only circling the wagons, Teo.”
“I know you are. I guess I’m wondering who gets to be inside the circle and who gets thrown to the wolves.”
At the kitchen table:
“Why now? Why did Lake hunt you down now, after all these years?”
“You know about Dev’s rough year and all that testing he had done. She wanted money to send him to a special school. But it was more than that.”
“She told you it was more than that or you just intuited it?”
“I didn’t intuit it because she’s a stranger to me. Remember? We don’t have an unspoken connection. She told me. It hit her all at once that it was a mistake, cutting Dev off from everyone, taking him to that town. She panicked. She felt like she was blowing it. She wanted help.”
“So she stalked you. Correction: she stalked me in order to, later, stalk you. Preliminary stalking. Laying-the-groundwork-for-further-stalking stalking. Right?”
“Why ask me? You’ve got it all figured out.”
In Teo’s study:
“Let’s just leave. Run away. Please, Teo.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“If Clare hadn’t gotten us over there, you still wouldn’t know.”
“But I do know. So do you.”
“She’s got Rafferty now. She’s not alone anymore. Let’s just go away and raise our baby, and pretend this never happened.”
“You want me to walk out, be the person Dev accused me of being.”
“He’s lived without you for this long. He’ll be all right.”
“You wouldn’t love me if I were that person.”
“I would!”
Silence from Teo.
“What you really mean is that you wouldn’t love me if I were this person.”
“I love you because I know you’re not.”
In the dining room:
“What are you going to do, Teo?”
“What am I going to do. What is Teo going to do. What is Teo’s plan of action. That’s the question at hand, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what the hell happened to ‘we’?”
Silence from me.
“I got us into this mess, so how am I going to get us out of it? Is that how it is?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
There was all of that. All of the above. And also this.
In the bedroom:
Teo behind me, one hand resting on my shoulder, the other on my belly. Me leaning back into his chest. Feeling our baby move, feeling him feel our baby move.
And this.
In the kitchen:
“Remember the summer we played touch football every single night, all of us?”
“Even in the rain.”
“Remember when you left for college and I wouldn’t say good-bye?”
“Yes.”
“It was because I didn’t want you to see me cry.”
“I knew that was why.”
“Remember when you taught me how to swim? Remember the first Christmas we spent with Clare?”
“Cornelia. I remember everything.”
He slept downstairs on the sofa. Not because we couldn’t bear to be close to each other, but because sleeping in the same bed, our bed, with so much pending, so much unresolved between us was unthinkable.
On the second night, before I went upstairs, this happened.
Teo said, in a heartsick, ragged voice, “I know this isn’t what you bargained for when you married me. I wouldn’t blame you if you left.”
I didn’t answer. I hardly heard. The dismal sentence added itself to the general dismal hum of everything we’d said to each other that day. I trudged up the stairs without another word and went to bed, and even though the sky outside was still light, I fell into a pit of bone-deep exhausted sleep. Two hours later, I shot out of this sleep like a woman shot out of a cannon, panting, my pillow soaked, my body shaking, my heart sledgehammering under my ribs. I wa
nted to fly out of bed, but I was so heavy. I was waterlogged and drowning. I thought my clomping down the stairs would have woken anyone, but Teo must have been as bone tired as I had been because when I got to him, he was still asleep.
The streetlight sifting through the living room curtains carved shadows into my husband’s face, painted his goldenness over in grays and whites, and the stillness of him shot me through with icy fear. Teo looked dead. I wanted to fall on him like rain, wash away every unkindness, everything from the last fifty-six hours that hadn’t looked like love. Softly, I kissed his neck, his temples, the center of his chest, the palms of his hands.
“Wake up,” I whispered, “Teo, wake up.”
“You’re here?” His voice was hoarse in the dark and only half awake.
“You’re not allowed to think I’d leave you. You hear me? Or that I wouldn’t have married you if I had known. I’m sorry. I love you so much, and still, I made you feel that way.”
“Cor.” He ran his fingers over my face. “I’m sorry, too. I missed you.”
“I left you alone with everything. But I won’t do that anymore. I promise.”
For a little while, we became nothing but being together. Hands and breath. Gravity and weightlessness. Murmuring and mouths and skin.
“I want to see you in the light,” he said, finally. His mouth on mine, he reached backward for the lamp and turned it on.
“Checking to see if I’m really who I said I was?” I asked.
“I was pretty sure it was you. My beautiful wife.”
“I’m enormous,” I reminded him.
He smiled. “If this were a movie, you’d go into labor right now.”
“Well, thank God it’s not, then. Because I have a new question for you. For both of us.”
“Okay.”
“What are we going to do?” As soon as I said it, I understood its power, this single, simple question, what I had spent the last two days stumbling toward. I asked the question, and what had frightened me so much was suddenly no longer a threat. It was something for us to do together, to make part of us. Teo was right. Everything turned on the word “we,” a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all.
“I don’t know. But we’ll work it out.”
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “In the interest of full disclosure.”
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