by Lisa Barr
“Honestly, I feel like he cheated on me,” Samantha says with a side glance as she begins to drive.
“Exactly,” Lauren murmurs from the backseat.
I stare out the passenger window and see my reflection in the glass. Gabe didn’t just break us, he broke all of us. “The thing is, I know Gabe didn’t cheat because he hates me or that we had a crappy marriage.” My voice is faint, barely there. “Maybe I didn’t give him enough attention, maybe we fell in love too young and he didn’t have experiences outside of me, us—and he wanted to—”
“Jesus Christ—stop right there!” Samantha shouts, holds up her hand as she drives, staring straight ahead. “Whatever you do, do not cave to Gabe wanted this, Gabe needed that, Gabe had to have, you know Gabe. Poor Gabe, the cheater. Maybe that’s the whole fucking problem, Soph. Not enough attention? Seriously? You couldn’t give him more attention if you tried. He is a self-centered midlife-crisis prick. You know what I think?” She doesn’t wait for a response. “I think that you, Sophie, are allowed to go batshit crazy raving mad. Do not minimize your own pain and do not make excuses for him . . .” As usual—which she doesn’t say, but I hear it anyway.
I turn to Samantha’s taut profile. Her lips are pursed and her hands are now perched firmly at ten and two. “Just so you know, I’m not a total wuss—while I was in the Uber coming home, I actually contemplated stabbing him to death tonight with one of those damn Cutco knives you guys made me buy.”
“Not the Trimmer?” Lauren, hand over heart, feigns alarm from the backseat, trying to lighten up the situation.
“Yes, the Trimmer!” I turn back toward her and I can’t help it, I do the imitation. “ ‘Slice, dice, and chop with ease . . . This knife will make you feel like a professional chef in your own kitchen.’ ”
We laugh hard despite ourselves. We all have the identical set—but the Trimmer is considered Cutco slicer royalty. We all endured the same annoying thirty-minute spiel from the same teenage rep—the son of one of Lauren’s neighbors. As I look at my besties, my laughter stops in midgiggle and I feel instant panic course through my body. Worse than killing Gabe will be leaving him. Worse than leaving him will be being without him, being alone.
Forty-three times. There’s no way back from that.
“WHERE ARE WE GOING?” I ASK, NOTING THAT WE ARE NOT HEADED TO EITHER Samantha’s or Lauren’s house, rather onto the highway ramp going north.
“The beach,” Samantha says.
“The beach? What, are we in high school?”
She laughs. “Sometimes I think we never left high school. But the beach was always our happy place, right?” Samantha shoots a glance at Lauren in the rearview mirror. They clearly have a plan. They must have formulated it on the way to my house. I turn and catch Lauren smirking. I know that smile.
“What is up?”
She reaches into her purse and presents what looks like a flash drive with a cotton-candy colored skin. “Well, I brought treats. You can thank my daughter for this. I found it hidden in Caitlin’s underwear drawer the other day with packets of pods stuffed inside socks. As if I wouldn’t find it? Put it this way, she lost her phone for the next few weeks, and now we are the proud owners of her Juul.”
I giggle despite myself. “This is so high school. Let me see that. I heard about those. Are they even legal?”
“Been on the market for several years—apparently, getting FDA approval in a few months. You know my daughter. There’s not a trend she doesn’t beat.” She hands it to me and I smell it.
“Fruity.”
Lauren rolls her eyes. “Mango to be exact.”
We pull into the empty Highland Park beach parking lot, and I change into the Lulus that Samantha had brought for me. She opens the trunk, grabs a blanket, three flannel shirts, and a large picnic basket (always prepared).
“You seriously put all this shit together in five minutes?” I look at my best friend and shake my head, the most anal-retentive person on the planet. Prepared even for a marriage collapse.
“Actually, I did it in less than three. Take this.” Samantha divides all the goods, and we walk down the familiar winding stone steps toward the beach, which is completely deserted and slightly ominous. Yet none of us cares that it’s dark. We’ve got bigger issues on our minds.
Once we arrive at the bottom, we all kick off our shoes, like the old days. The summer breeze soothes my skin and the sand feels cool and comforting between my toes. The water is glassy and calm, a blackish blue tint as the moonlight shines against it. I loop my arms inside both of theirs gratefully. This. Them. Us. All for one, one for all. No matter what. Always. What was I even thinking? I don’t have to do this nightmare alone.
My eyes pool with tears. I can’t believe that just a few hours ago we were all sitting at a trendy downtown restaurant enjoying good wine and celebrating my birthday. My life was still the same: good, comfortable, dependable, oblivious. I was not this cheated-on, pathetic, totally lost, watered-down version of me.
Samantha scrutinizes me closely, reading me as always. “You are not alone, nor are you going to deal with this alone, okay. And there’s nothing wrong with you. So get those thoughts out of your head.”
“No fucking way will you go through this by yourself,” Lauren chimes in.
I stare at the two of them, and weirdly, I wish I could sculpt them right now. The staunch maternal care embedded in their hooded eyes, their clenched determined jaws straining with worry, the unconditional love seeping through their skin, their timeless beauty. Forty-plus could easily exchange with thirty, especially under the starlight that is casting a misty glow around them like an Instagram filter.
“You guys . . .” I manage.
“That was pure hell, hands down the worst night ever,” Samantha announces, as we each take a corner of the blanket (Samantha takes two), and lay it gently on the sand. “We love you, Sophie. We’re not going to let you fall. You know that, right?”
I nod as I sit on the blanket, and over the soothing echo of the waves, I can practically hear those same words uttered so many times throughout the years. Samantha and Lauren shouting out at the top of their lungs, “We love you, Sophie!” when I graduated Northwestern University with honors, right after the dean had explicitly told everyone in the auditorium to please hold the applause until the end. The same embarrassingly exuberant shout-out when I was twenty-three and had my first art exhibition in the River North art district and was being introduced by the uppity gallery curator. And again, when I gave birth to Ava after eighteen hours in hard labor, no drugs. They were there in the delivery room—not Gabe, who had taken a coffee break—cheering me on. They delivered my daughter and both handed her to me.
Ava. Oh god. How am I going to break this to her? Gabe is her hero.
“What am I going to do about Ava?” I desperately search my friends’ faces for answers. “And something is definitely up with her. She called me this morning from Paris to wish me a happy birthday and her voice was trembling, like she’d been crying.” I curl my legs to my chest and hug them tightly against me. “Do you believe this fucking mess?”
Samantha, never one to water down the truth, shakes her head and says, “Ava is going to take it hard.”
Not surprisingly, Lauren, who is lying stretched out next to me on the blanket, sits up, and softens Samantha’s comment with a more compassionate stance. “Whenever I’m in a bad place, it always seems that one of my kids is in an even worse place. If I have a bad cold, they get a fever. If I break a finger, they break an arm. It’s like I’m not allowed to wallow in my shit because I have to take care of their shit. And their shit always trumps my shit.” She grabs my hands tightly. “But tonight, Soph, is about you, okay. You. You’re off mom duty for just a teensy bit. You will deal with Ava, and knowing you, like a pro. It’s okay to do that—to take care of you sometimes.” Her voice waxes tender. She knows full well that my world revolves around Gabe and Ava. She and Samantha always give me crap about it.
My hands feel limp and clammy inside hers, but safe. We stay like that for a few more moments of contemplative silence. Lauren smiles at me, raises a mischievous brow. “Should we try the Juul?”
I laugh. “Why not.”
As Lauren figures out how to use the Juul—a first for us—Samantha pulls out all of her tricks from the picnic basket: a bottle of wine, Cheetos, double-stuffed Oreos, and strawberry licorice.
“Cheetos?” I say. “That’s so eighties. No one eats Cheetos or Doritos anymore. Everything is multigrain, quinoa, seaweed, or chia. Cheetos are for those who drink Big Gulps from the 7-Eleven.”
“And those have like seventy-two grams of sugar,” Lauren adds.
Samantha flashes her a look. “How do you even know that?”
Lauren’s eyes pop defensively, always self-conscious about her weight. “I’m not the one who brought Cheetos.”
“Well, Eric eats this shit. This is stolen from his secret stash hidden on the top shelf in the garage behind his tools, where I make him hide it from the kids since we’ve gone organic. There’s Hostess CupCakes and Ding Dongs in there too. You would not believe the crap he has . . . but I figured this was an emergency.”
Samantha hands me the corkscrew and I open the bottle of wine and raise it high overhead. “Well then, fuck Gabe and fuck organic.”
“Fuck Gabe and fuck organic,” they shout in unison, and we partake and pass around the Juul, the Cheetos, and the wine.
Lauren shoves an entire fistful into her mouth, the neon orange crumbs decorating her mouth like lip liner. “I have not eaten these in years. Beyond . . .”
I grab a handful and shove it in as well. “Oh my god.” I then swig hard and raise the bottle overhead. “Here’s to Gabe’s forty-three—fuck Ashley Madison.”
“Fuck Ashley Madison!” they scream in harmony, my back-up singers.
Samantha, wasting no time, digs into the Oreos, ripping apart the wrapping as if she were Pablo going through the kitchen garbage bin. “I don’t mean to be a cold bitch, but let’s be clear here. No one—I mean no one—has to find himself forty-three times, period. And that’s just the number of women that we know of.”
“Too far, Sam, too far,” Lauren says, as she licks off her Cheetos’d fingers.
I put down the bottle, holding it between my legs, and stare at Samantha. Damn her. Always a straight shooter—so much so that at times, like right now, her truths are too sharp, bordering on callous. Lauren has always been so much better at smoothing things over, making light of the heavy, softening blows. Not Samantha—she goes for the jugular, especially when she articulates what no one else wants to say aloud: Did Gabe’s cheating begin and end with Ashley Madison, or were there more lovers?
I stick the wine bottle in the sand, stand, walk to the edge of the water, and stare out into the abyss. So many women. How could I really not have known? Or smelled it on him? Seen the guilt in his eyes? Heard the tremor in his voice when he’d lie as to why he came home later than usual? Or even, the most basic, why was he showering twice a day? I thought I knew everything about Gabe, anticipated every move of his. How the hell didn’t I see this?
I shake my head. Maybe I did . . . There was that flirty fitness trainer with the boobs at the club. That new waitress with purplish streaks in her hair at our local bar who seemed to know Gabe way better than she should. There was the pretty divorced nurse who always seemed to be lurking around every damn time I popped in at the hospital to surprise him with lunch.
Samantha is right. No one has to find himself forty-three times. Perhaps I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to see it.
I hug myself tightly. But now I do. Now I want to know it all, every single thing I missed. I turn around decisively, head back to the blanket. “I’m sorry to break up the party, but you guys need to take me home right now.”
Samantha’s dark eyes open wide. “What? Don’t go back there. I have a big mouth. No filter. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not you. But you’re totally right. I have been a blind fool.” I glance down at my feet wet with sand, look up slowly. “We all know Gabe cheated. It’s on an Excel sheet, for Christ’s sake. But now I need to know how badly he cheated. Was my whole damn marriage a farce?”
I bend down and pick up the almost empty bottle of wine and cast it into the lake as though it were a shot put. I’ve never littered once in my entire life, and in middle school I’d even organized a community garbage pickup for extra credit, but right now who I was, what I did, no longer matters.
Samantha and Lauren exchange yet another round of concerned glances. I’ve chalked up six of those since we got to the beach. But they know better than to mess with me right now. Not like this. Unhinged, in shoot-to-kill mode. They also know that a party-sized bag of Cheetos and a demolished package of Oreos is not going to fix this.
They both leap to their feet, wipe off the sand from their yoga pants. Samantha, on a typical day, would never have left the beach without folding the blanket perfectly, but now she sweeps it up in one fell swoop under her arms. She then points to the emptied Cheetos bag and the finished Oreos. Lauren obeys her silent command, stuffing the trash inside the picnic basket. We all trudge up what seems to be one hundred stairs in collective silence.
ONCE WE PULL INTO MY DRIVEWAY, SAMANTHA QUICKLY LOCKS MY DOOR WITH her childproof switch accompanied by a stern you’re-not-going-anywhere-without-telling-me-the-plan look in her eye.
“Well?”
“I’m going to confront him,” I tell her. “And then I may just kill him, but first, I’m going to give him an opportunity to tell the truth. All of it . . .”
“I should never have opened my big mouth,” she laments. Lauren nods.
They suddenly appear young and scared. It’s not their fault. “You guys are my lifeline. Thank you for tonight. The beach, the Juul, and especially the Cheetos. I just need to know what I don’t know.”
“And then what are you going to do?” Samantha demands.
I shrug. “I have no fucking idea.”
Samantha reaches over the wide leather armrest between us, and pulls me in close into an uncomfortable embrace, which feels more like a headlock. “Call if you need me to pick you up. I will keep my phone on my pillow. Anything. I’m here for you.”
I can still smell the Jo Malone on her. Lauren tenderly squeezes my shoulder from the backseat.
“Okay,” I respond as I grab my rolled-up blue dress at my feet, my voice so tiny and lost as I stare at my house through the car window with dread. Nothing is okay.
Chapter Four
I ENTER MY HOUSE THROUGH THE GARAGE, EXPECTING PABLO TO JUMP ALL OVER me, but he’s not there waiting, as usual, in the laundry room. He must be upstairs with Gabe. I then head into the kitchen, look around. All the lights are off. Except for the outside lights. I peer out the glass patio door. In the past, I would have reveled in the soft radiance shining over my Tuscan garden. Several of my sculptures, which are illuminated, are scattered among the flowers and the trees. But now my prized garden and all the extra touches mean nothing. Everything has changed. Holding my breath, I lean back against the kitchen table for support.
Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just go upstairs now and deal.
As I slowly head upstairs, I note that my bedroom door is ajar and all the lights are on. I walk in, pause near the bed, when I see Gabe inside the closet reaching for something on his top shelf. How fitting—the night ends where it unfolded, back in the closet with the rest of Gabe’s secrets.
Move. Go. Now. My inner Lou Gossett Jr. commands.
I make a beeline into the closet past Gabe, past his going-out clothes, which are in a heap on the floor next to the hamper. No surprises there. He stops what he’s doing when he sees me and freezes in place. We face off. He’s wearing his old army-green cargo pants and his favorite University of Wisconsin Bucky Badger T-shirt, clearly having gotten comfortable for what is about to be the most uncomfortable night of his life. Pablo (named after Picas
so), stands in the middle of us, as though trying to decide who he’s going to follow—the Cheater or the Cheated On.
Realizing that I’m holding my high heels and have my birthday blue dress still hanging over my arm, I drop it all at Gabe’s feet. We both look down and stare. I then kick the dress childishly, punting it across the closet as Gabe watches. Pablo runs to retrieve it, and drops it back at my feet. He wants to play. I shake my head, then pick up the dress and turn to Gabe. With a strength and a rage that I never knew existed before tonight, I rip the dress in half in front of him. Unplanned and dramatic, but highly satisfying.
“Sophie.” His eyes tear up.
“Gabe.” Mine are as dry as the Sahara, protecting the Niagara Falls looming behind them. But I can’t lie to myself. The dam is about to break, like everything else inside me.
How do I do this? Do I hit him? Slap his face? Gorge him with my stilettos?
He deserves all of it, but the truth is, I’m still in shock. This is so new to both of us. We have fought plenty over the years, but stupid boyfriend-girlfriend fights, then normal marital fights—I did this, you did that, how could you forget, why didn’t you, what the hell is wrong with you? fights. But never, not once, an our-marriage-is-over fight. Not even a you’re-sleeping-on-the-couch fight. I have nothing from the past to work with—no reference material, no precedent—except for the ghost of Gabe’s mother, whom he despises (as do I), who was always mean and bitter. She was a passive-aggressive fighter. She let you know exactly how she felt through her eyes. I know Gabe would rather me throw things or even jab him with my high heel than stare with Gloria Bloom’s bullet-laden eyes. I ponder my myriad choices quickly: Screw him, he gets his mother.