“And he let you go with what, a warning?” she asked, sniffing.
“Yes, he did. Bring it on home to me, Tallulah,” he said, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her close. He was so warm, so comforting, doing the perfect thing at the perfect time. They’d touched but not hugged. And she’d been correct when she imagined his smell: the forest, the river. This forever rain with a hint of coolness, an antiseptic flashing pale blue and starry white as she closed her eyes tight.
Client seems patient and relaxed, even in stressful situations. Not easily rattled or overstimulated. Comforts others.
“But I should be the one comforting you,” she mumbled into his sleeve.
“Because of yesterday?”
“We don’t have to talk about it right now,” she said.
“I would’ve given anything for a wife like you because of your openness…your sweet heart,” he said with his voice melting against her ear.
EMMETT
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: i still care about you too
Tallie, I’m glad you wrote me. You know how I feel about hoping we can still somehow be friends although like I’ve said before…I realize that’s a lot to ask. I promise not to talk too much about the baby because I know it hurts you. I am so sorry.
Of course none of this is your fault. You absolutely couldn’t have done anything differently to stop it. Do you hear me when I say this? Do you really hear me? I made these choices and they were completely separate from you. And that was my biggest problem…not considering you the way I should’ve. It was cruel. I don’t think you’re broken. I didn’t get Odette pregnant on purpose. It was an accident.
You do know me. You may feel like there are parts of me you don’t know, yes, but you do know the heart of me. I separated myself…in order to deceive you. I even thought about those damn horcruxes in Harry Potter. It was like that. I split myself. I should’ve said no to Odette from jump. But I didn’t. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to say no. I’m weak. But you do know me, Tallie. You do. Think about all we’ve been through together. It doesn’t just go away. And even if it did, where would it go? One of us would still keep it.
I think you are an amazing woman who deserves far better than me, but I must admit there was an incredibly selfish part of me always hoping I could somehow remain in your life. And your email really lit up that part of my heart. So thank you. I am trying to fix my mistakes…the mistakes I’ve made in this Universe…I’d like to correct them by doing (at least some things) right.
Talk soon,
Joel
PS: I’m coming back to town for Christmas and of course I fucking miss you, Tallie. Of course I do. You were my wife for a long time. I’ll love you forever.
PPS: I hope you have a good time at Li’s party tomorrow.
* * *
Emmett drank a glass of water in front of Tallie’s kitchen sink after she disappeared into her bedroom.
(The police officer had celery-brown eyes. A high and tight haircut, clean-shaven. Gun on his right hip. Last name stitched into his uniform in white: Bowman. His front tooth, slightly crooked. The tip of Tallie’s nose gets hot pink when she cries. Her fingernails are short and painted deep orange. She wears earrings, but no rings. A light confetti of orange and black cat hair on her jeans, below her knees. And she sparks electric…like a woman.)
TALLIE
The orange streetlamp drenched Tallie’s large living-room window with rainy, honeyed light. The gloaming spilled over her houseplants and bookshelves, poured across the floor. She loved that window, the holiness. She sat there in it, watching Emmett sleep. He breathed slow and deep with the ball of his foot pressing the armrest, as if he were kicking to a swim and would splosh the couch to water. She’d told him it was good for him to get extra rest. Tallie spoke with her clients often about their sleep schedules and how important they were to both their mental and physical health.
Like a fever dream, Emmett was on her couch with his backpack tucked next to him, and Joel was in Montana with his hair up in a ponytail, holding his new baby girl. She’d blocked Joel’s number from her phone, but it lived on in her mind alongside the other number minutiae she had memorized. Joel wore a thirty-two thirty-two in pants but could wear a thirty-two thirty also, depending. Joel wore a ten and a half in shoes. Joel had thirty thousand seventeen dollars in his savings account when he and Tallie got married. Joel’s parents’ address was seven zero four. Joel’s brother was two years older. Joel’s birthday was nine nine. Tallie and Joel were married on six six. Tallie and Joel suffered through five failed IVF cycles—numberless injections and hours on the phone with the insurance company, innumerable days in bed, crying, wishing, praying—before they fully believed the unexplained infertility diagnosis. Tallie and Joel were married for ten years and five months. Joel had finally admitted to his affair on ten one, but only after Tallie told him she’d suspected it; she’d caught him texting Odette at two in the morning. Tallie and Joel were separated for the Kentucky-required sixty days, plus four more. They went through uncontested divorce proceedings on twelve four.
Tallie and Joel had gotten married in June in the wildflower gardens by the river, promising I’ll love you forever in front of practically everyone they’d ever known. Joel and Odette had gotten married in December, mere weeks after the divorce. Joel had called Tallie, said they’d gone downtown to the courthouse, told her over the phone that Odette was pregnant.
“Tallie, it was an accident,” he’d said, as if he’d done nothing more than knock a glass of red across a white tablecloth.
“The pregnancy or the marriage?”
Joel was quiet on the phone.
“Marriage doesn’t mean anything to you, Joel.”
What he’d done was catastrophic and brutal. Tallie ended the call before he could hear her cry.
She hadn’t talked to Joel since their last Facebook communication over the summer. They weren’t friends on there anymore. She couldn’t imagine seeing Joel or Odette or their baby pop up on her timeline as she casually scrolled through the photos and anniversaries and recipes and political discussions. She had to be mentally prepared and ready for emotional battle when she looked through Joel’s posts. She’d tried to frame it as a cleansing ritual she eventually wouldn’t need anymore, but she needed it now.
She logged in to Joel’s account on her phone. He’d updated the night before about seeing the latest superhero movie. She and Aisha had gone to see it, too, and Tallie had even gone back to see it again alone. It was perfect candy-coated escapism. But of course Joel picked it apart like he always picked everything apart, even using the word doryphore. No surprise, since Joel was the kind of person who thought the Grand Canyon was overrated. (“I just thought it would be bigger, that’s all.”) Tallie read the whole post, rolling her eyes, wondering if she could pass out from annoyance. She read it again before going to Odette’s page.
Almost everything Tallie knew about Odette she learned from social media. She knew surprisingly little about the details of Joel’s affair, feeling like it was better for her mental health to not have all the answers. Besides, she’d already been haunted by imagining them together—the gruff, chesty sound Joel made when he came, the seashell suck of his ear pressed against Odette’s when he was on top of her. And she’d gotten all she could bear to know from Joel regarding when and where he and Odette had been together: never in their home, always at Odette’s. One compact September-to-October month of clandestine sex, from how Joel told it.
Tallie had been frustrated with herself, half wishing she were the kind of person who wanted him and Odette to die and disappear forever. Or at least the kind of person who could hope for the possible future schadenfreude of Joel eventually cheating on Odette, or their marriage falling apart. But none of that would change what had happened, and she knew the toxicity levels of hating Odette would poison her and her only.
Odet
te had grown up summering in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue with her grandparents. Odette liked romantic comedies and cheesy Christmas movies. Horses and coffee. Skinny casserole recipes, makeup tutorials. She had favorite Pilates instructors and Zumba classes. Sometimes she posted things Tallie fervently believed in and agreed with, too, like climate-action petitions and Taylor Swift videos. It was a dizzying swirl of intense emotions, knowing she and Odette had anything in common besides Joel.
There were photos of him and their baby up and down Odette’s page.
Tallie clicked the picture she looked at more often than the others: Odette in the hospital bed, holding their baby girl, Pearl. Pearl had her father’s nose in miniature, his ebony curls. Joel, in a navy-blue V-neck sweater Tallie’d bought for him, had taken the picture, leaning over to make sure he made it all the way in. She’d loved that navy-blue V-neck sweater and nibbled Joel’s arms when he wore it; she’d wanted to eat that sweater.
Back when she’d seen that they’d named their baby Pearl, Tallie couldn’t get the word pearl out of her mind. It manifested itself and rolled around in her brain like a real solid pearl glinting catchlight. Tallie had imagined she and Joel would have a baby with those same curls—a baby whose tender head she could feel heavy in one hand. Joel has a daughter forever, Tallie had found herself thinking. Joel had done something hugely permanent with his life, changing everything. Sometimes it felt like the thought was too big for her head to hold, but she couldn’t let it out until it gave her a headache. Joel could have more children with Odette. Joel could have children with other women. The thoughts would motor around and around in a circle until Tallie exhausted herself.
She was upset by the photo again. Restless and lonely. She logged in to her work email, although she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, and she’d already let her clients know she would be unavailable until Monday. Bored, she wanted to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important. She had several clients who leaned on her for extra assurance when making big decisions and others who would connect when they needed to be talked out of panic, or when a family member or friend or problem or fear they thought they’d previously conquered appeared again, haunting them like a ghost with a grudge. Occasionally a client would email, simply wanting encouragement or permission not to overanalyze things so much.
Being a therapist allowed Tallie to dig into the common sense so easily clouded by mental illness, depression, obsessiveness, anxiety. She encouraged clients struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder to take time-stamped photos of their turned-off ovens and locked doors so they could revisit them during the day. She suggested to one OCD client who worried about leaving her coffeemaker on every morning to unplug the coffee machine or whatever small appliance worried her and take it with her to work. That way she knew for certain it wasn’t left on at home, ripe for fire starting. So much of therapy was practicality and giving people a much-needed pass to relax when they needed to or be weird when they needed to. To free their minds from doing what they felt like they should be doing if it always went against what they wanted to do. To ask questions like why when the client had never considered it.
Tallie scanned her emails, relieved to find nothing urgent, and repromised herself she wouldn’t peek again until Monday morning. She logged in to her personal email account and flicked through a few newsletters before pulling up old emails from Joel. As annoying as he could be on social media, he’d always been short in his emails, even the sweet ones. He wasn’t much of a texter, either. And he was impossible on the phone. During their marriage, they’d always had their best and most important conversations over dinner or while cleaning up afterward. Or on walks, in the car, the bed. Over coffee.
She’d typed Joel into the search bar and clicked on a random message that popped up. It was from two years ago, when he’d gone to Chicago to visit his brother the same weekend Tallie and Aisha had gone on a girls’ trip to Asheville.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: :(
Too late to call and my phone is out in the living room anyway, but I was thinking about you, your body, how good you smell. And I’m in this guest bedroom with this laptop all alone. :( Next time come up here with me.
Your poor, lonely husband,
J
And another from not long after that. He’d forwarded her an article on art deco architecture with pics of the American Radiator Building.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Look
The building we saw from Bryant Park. Next time we go up there, we should do one of those art deco walking tours. Would be so easy to talk Lionel and Zora into going back up with us. Make a whole thing out of it? You’re so fucking fun to travel with.
They’d never gone back up to New York together. Maybe Joel was planning to go on an art deco walking tour with Odette in the future. Maybe she was so fucking fun to travel with, too. He could walk next to her while she pushed Pearl in an expensive stroller. Maybe he’d strap Pearl to a baby carrier on his chest while he and Odette looked up and pointed at skyscrapers stabbing the blue.
It was imagining Joel with Pearl strapped to his chest that really did it.
Tallie hummed something quick and low to herself to stop her thoughts. Emmett rolled over, opened his eyes, and looked at her. Sat up, rubbed his face.
“I never take naps. Not really a nap person,” he said, his deep voice still stretching and waking up.
“Today, you’re a nap person,” she said, thankful he’d distracted her. “Can I get you anything? Food? Water?”
Emmett smoothed his hair and looked around her living room before focusing on the doorway to the kitchen.
“Actually, I’d like to make you dinner. I’d like to go to the grocery store and come back here and cook for you.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I have plenty of food. You don’t have to go out in this mess,” she said, motioning to the blurry, wet window. He leaned forward and opened his backpack, fiddled around in there, and held up money to show her. He handed her five twenties, explaining that it was for lunch and everything else earlier, putting the rest in his pocket.
“It’s the least I can do. If you’re okay with me borrowing your car? I’ll leave—” he trailed off, rooting around again in his bag. He pulled out a small box and opened it. Inside was a ring with a diamond chunk the size of a pencil eraser. “I’ll leave this ring here. So you know I’m not running off.”
“You don’t want me to come with you? I could drive if you insist on doing this,” she said. He slid the ring box across the table so it was closer to her.
“I’ll take care of it. Steak okay?” he asked, standing.
“Sure. Steak sounds great. Oh, and keys. My keys,” she said, remembering her purse on the kitchen counter. She got it, unclipped them, and let her fingertips graze his palm as she handed them over. His grab quieted the jingle.
“Be back in half an hour. Promise.”
“Do you want me to tell you where the grocery store is?”
“I’ll find it.”
He threw his backpack over his shoulder and headed toward the door.
There was no reason to believe him. The ring could be a fake; he could be going to the bridge to jump. He could run off with her car forever, and she’d have to explain to the police that she didn’t know him or if Emmett was even his real first name.
She was trusting him, completely.
A crinkle flattened inside of her.
EMMETT
Fake, scritchy-looking black spiders had their legs wrapped around the lit-up letters of the sign spelling MARKET. From the outside, it looked like they sold only pumpkins and chrysanthemums. Emmett sat in Tallie’s car in the parking lot, mindlessly scrolling through the news on his phone although he hated it. But if last night had happened how he wanted and they’d found him in the water, his face, his story would be splayed across
the front pages. The news was so fucking depressing, and that was part of the reason he wanted to jump. How did anyone survive anything? Anxiety began itching at his neck, and his body ached with grief, a fact he’d gotten used to after years of living with it. “Grief hurts…physically,” his dad had warned him.
Before his vision turned grotesque, he saw Christine and Brenna separately, then together, safe with their eyes closed, pale and sleeping. Reliving it was a cold shock of light before utter darkness, the cage door of his heart left swinging. Emmett put his forehead against Tallie’s steering wheel, focused on deliberate, slow breaths in the engine-off coolness, looking up only when he heard a car pull next to him.
(A white car. A redhead, a black-and-white polka-dotted raincoat. A car seat. The dome light ticks off. A blanket hangs over the car-seat handle, protecting the baby from the rain. The blanket is white with yellow ducks on it. The ducks are smiling.)
* * *
Hitting the produce section first, Emmett picked up a small bag of red potatoes, put them in his basket. A woman stopped her cart beside him, swearing he looked familiar, that she’d seen him somewhere before. He kindly told her he was from out of town before turning away. Being out in the world heightened his desire for the comfort of Tallie’s warm, clean, good-smelling house. He grabbed two steaks, Irish butter, a bottle of red. Stock and cognac for the sauce. He zipped through the wide, smooth seasonal aisle with its masks and motion-detector skeletons jiggling and rattling on both sides of him. Beeped himself through the self-checkout and left without speaking to another human.
* * *
At Tallie’s, he promptly kicked her out of the kitchen.
“You’re probably always taking care of other people. I say probably because I don’t want to come off like a know-it-all, mansplaining your own life to you, but I know it’s true. Look at what you did for me. You didn’t have to do that. So let me do something for you,” he said.
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