A Beautiful, Terrible Thing

by Jen Waite

  —

  MARCO gets out of the hospital today. I am sitting on the couch, holding my knees and rocking back and forth. Nat told me yesterday that when she went to the hospital to drop off pajamas for Marco, she glanced through the sign-in sheet discreetly. The Croatian had been there every single day, multiple times a day.

  “Jenny?” my mom says. “What’s going on? What are you thinking right now?”

  “Marco gets out today,” I say in a nervous whisper. “I know, I just know that they’re going to have sex tonight. They’re finally going to,” I say, staring straight ahead. I bite my thumbnail and continue to rock.

  “Oh, Jenny,” my mom says softly. I think she’s going to reluctantly agree. I brace myself. She comes and sits beside me on the couch. She tucks a long strand of hair behind my ear. “Oh, honey, they’ve already had sex.”

  My head snaps to look at her. I see pity in her eyes as I realize that I am the very last person now to understand. “But . . . ,” I say, “she confirmed it was an emotional affair. She said ‘you know everything now’ and that they didn’t have sex.” My mom looks at me sadly.

  “Honey, a man doesn’t leave his beautiful wife and newborn baby for an emotional affair. For talking. And a girl like that doesn’t have an emotional affair.” My mom bounces Louisa on her knees. “I’m so sorry. I know this is hard for you to hear.”

  “But how do you know?” I ask. “How do you know for sure?”

  My mom hesitates and then says simply, “The bed.”

  “The bed? What are you talking—” I stop speaking as everything clicks into place in my brain. “The bed,” I say again. This time it is not a question.

  I can’t bring myself to discuss this shard of the puzzle quite yet. So I say, “Of course you’re right.” I stand up. “I just need to go upstairs for a minute.” I walk from the room quickly as my mom calls “Jenny” after me. I take the stairs to my bedroom two at a time. I climb onto my bed as my face collapses. I hear an animal wailing. It sounds like it is being tortured. I am vaguely concerned before I realize that the sound is coming from me. My dad is climbing onto my bed before I even know he is in the room. My dad, who shakes his own siblings’ hands firmly at family gatherings to avoid personal contact; my dad, who has not seen me cry since the age of nine when I skinned my knee sliding into home base, wraps his arms tightly around me, and I fall into his chest. He holds me while I sob and wail. Finally, as my noises start to quiet into small gasps, he speaks over my hair. “You’re going to have to decide. Not right now. But someday, you’re going to have to decide not to care about him anymore. As long as you still care, he can hurt you.”

  “But, Dad,” I start to say.

  “I know. I know,” he says, anticipating my protests. “It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be extremely difficult. It’s going to take a long time. It might take a few months. It might take a few years. Probably it will be somewhere in between. You were married. You have a baby. But at some point, you will have to make a decision.”

  I try to hear his words. I try to take in his advice. My dad always gives good, practical advice. I know, even now, hunched against his chest, that I will have to take his advice someday. But all I can manage to say is, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “I love you,” he says, and kisses my head.

  “I love you, too. I’ll be down soon.” My dad’s arms release their grip. The bed creaks. He closes my bedroom door behind him. Suddenly, I am exhausted. Just as my eyes are closing, my phone lights up on the bedside table. I see the name “Marco” from the corner of my eye and snatch my phone off the table. My heart is in my throat as I imagine what his first communication to me will be after his suicide attempt. Maybe, just maybe, with five days alone to think in the hospital . . .

  I swipe the text open.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, but what are we doing for bills this month?”

  —

  A HUNDRED times a day there is a voice in my head that screams Help me. The voice comes from a tiny woman in my chest encased in a soundproof glass column, pounding on the walls, begging for someone to notice her. When I look at the one picture from our city hall wedding that I still have in my phone, the tiny woman goes crazy, her fists beating against the glass over and over again. But I keep her locked inside my chest; the only sign of her existence is the lump that I swallow down as I zoom in on our radiant, bursting-with-happiness faces. She is the reason I can’t leave the house for more than two hours. She is the reason my face will suddenly become very still, causing my mom to ask, “Jenny?”

  “I don’t feel well,” I say to my parents, and wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we silently pack up and leave, a quick, clean exit.

  “How are you feeling?” they ask me on the way home, glancing into the rearview mirror.

  “I’m OK. I just don’t feel good,” I say, and lean my head into the car door. I don’t have the energy to explain that there is a battle raging inside me. I go through the motions with Louisa, but I don’t really see her. I nurse her, I change her, I hold her. But I can’t see her clearly. She is blurry, like the space inside my head now. There is a fog that follows me wherever I go. It is thick, and I long to break through to the other side, but sometimes I find myself clinging to it, laying my head in its warm, fuzzy lap, and letting it lull me to sleep. I don’t know how I get through the days. The moments string together to become hours, and somehow suddenly it is 6:00 P.M. and I am nursing Louisa to sleep.

  Every day I wake up to Louisa’s cries. I pull myself into a sitting position. My head throbs. I sit for a moment and think about where I am and what happened. “I am in Maine with my three-month-old baby living with my parents. My husband is in our home in New York, and he has a twenty-two-year-old Croatian girlfriend.” I repeat this in my head until it sinks in or until Louisa’s cries drown it out. One leg swings over the side of the bed followed by the other. I don’t know how they move, but they do. I reach down and pick up Louisa. I make soft, sweet sounds. I bring her into my bed and nurse her. I try to feel love and warmth, but I feel nothing. I text “nursing, be done soon,” to my mom. I stare at the white wall across from my bed and think, I am nursing our baby, and my husband is with his twenty-two-year-old Croatian girlfriend. I stroke Louisa’s hair and think, Marco. Marco. Marco.

  I hear footsteps on the stairs, and then my mom is peering into the room. She smiles at me, and the corners of my mouth turn up.

  “Thank you,” I say as she takes Louisa.

  “Try to sleep,” she says, and leaves. She sings to Louisa on the way downstairs.

  I lay my head down on my pillow. I close my eyes, but I do not sleep. How could my Marco do this? Did my subconscious know the whole time? Is that why every once in a while I would dream that I had lost him? What happened to my sweet husband, trudging into the living room in flannel pajamas, his hair sticking up all over his head, flopping down next to me on the couch, squeezing his face against mine until I yell, “Your bristles, babe—ouch!”

  I open my eyes and swing my legs to the floor again. I walk to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I walk down the stairs, past the nook where Marco proposed, and into the family room. I turn my mouth up again when I see my mom and Louisa. I nurse her. My mom sits on the couch across from me and asks how I am and if I slept OK. “Yes, thank you,” I say. I give Louisa back to my mom and walk back upstairs. I turn on the shower and step in. I sit down on the floor and hug my knees. My tears and snot run down the drain. How? I think over and over. How did you do this? By the time I turn the knob all the way to the left and the water stops, my face is red and raw. I towel off and then carefully apply makeup in the mirror. I check my phone to see if Marco has texted me. I go back downstairs and sit on the couch and watch my parents with Louisa. I think, Thank God, thank God for my parents. My mom asks if I want to take a walk. We walk around the loop, my mom pushing the bright red st
roller, and she tells me, “He tried really hard for five years, Jenny. He tried really hard to be someone he’s not, and finally he just couldn’t do it anymore. You have to start thinking of him as a deeply, deeply flawed person who tried his best and failed.”

  The hours blur together. In the back of my mind there is always the thought, How? How did you do this, Marco? I needed you. I needed you. I needed you. At 6:00 P.M. I start getting Louisa’s tubby ready. I stand over her at the sink, cupping my hands with water and releasing it onto her body in streams. “Good girl,” I say, and when she splashes and gurgles for the first time, the dull ache that is always there turns into a thousand sharp knives piercing my insides, and I think, You’re missing this, Marco. I wrap her in a towel and bring her upstairs. I put one arm and then the other into her PJ sleeves. I do the snaps as she squiggles. I nurse her until her eyes start to close, and then I let the hot, salty liquid fall from my eyes. I blot her hair dry with a tissue before I lower her into her swing.

  Holly is home, and she’s coming over tonight. When my parents tell me this, I think, Why is she home? But it is a distant, vague thought, and it crumbles and dissolves quickly.

  “J,” she says when she walks in the door, “I know we both have personal space issues, but I’m going to hug you.”

  “Totally legit,” I say, and crack a smile. I don’t know how to talk about the mess inside my head, so I ask her about New York, auditions, Mike. It has been only a few minutes, but this is the longest I’ve talked to someone about “normal” things since I got home, and I realize very quickly that I can’t do it. There is a tidal wave in my chest and it is rising, rising and it is going to crash and my ears start to buzz and my vision becomes blurry. I try to focus on a magazine on the coffee table in front of us, but I can no longer form words and then I am sputtering, “I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t be normal.” Holly is next to me; she wraps her arms around me, and I collapse into her. She is crying too, and I say, “Don’t cry,” and she says, “You don’t deserve this,” and even though my head is full of wet cotton I think very clearly, What an innocent thing to say.

  The girl who believed that good or bad things happen because you deserve them is long gone.

  —

  MARCO’S parents flew to New York yesterday from Denmark. I have been in constant communication with Sofia since the day I left New York.

  “My dad sits and stares, and my mom just cries and cries,” she whispered to me during a late-night phone call. “They are flying to New York as soon as possible. They want to be by Marco’s side.”

  Secretly, I am hoping that they will prevent Marco from spending time with the Croatian. I spend my days robotically caring for Louisa and obsessively checking her Instagram account. The day after Marco was released from the hospital, she posted a picture from inside the trendy, old-fashioned barbershop a block from our apartment. “First trip to the barbershop!” the caption read. During the last months of my pregnancy, Marco started frequenting that barbershop more and more. Only now do I connect the dots between his mounting obsession with his hair and the start of his affair. We walked there every two weeks, hand in hand, my swollen belly leading the way. He kissed me outside the shop before I continued on my way to do the grocery shopping or run errands. “My pretty husband,” I’d teased him before waddling away.

  “Sofia, I hope your parents understand what they’re in for,” I whispered back, telling her about the girl’s picture.

  “Don’t worry, mi amor, my dad will talk sense into Marco. He is a grown man, but my parents won’t stand for him carrying on this relationship.”

  I’ve also started talking more and more with Seb’s mom. As the person in the United States who has known Marco the longest, I am holding out hope that one day she will help me figure out exactly what happened. “Aha, I forgot to tell you this pertinent piece of information that will explain how Marco went from being madly in love with you to sneaking around with his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend right after you gave birth to his baby,” she will say. So far, no dice. Her only, and best, theory is a brain tumor. There is a large part of me that wishes this to be true.

  “I always knew he could be a bit dense sometimes and immature, but I thought he was basically a good person,” she texts. “I didn’t think he was a lying, cheating, Croella-fucking asshole.”

  Nat and her boyfriend started calling the Croatian “Croella,” for Croatian Cruella de Vil, because of her blackened eyebrows and obsession with fur coats. The name has stuck. I refresh her Instagram profile dozens of times a day, sick to my stomach with fear and anticipation of her next photo. She posts multiple selfies a day, and all of her photos now seem to be not-so-subtle digs or clues that she’s with Marco, such as the barbershop photo.

  “Does she really have to fuck your husband while you have stitches in your vagina and then kick you while you’re down? Doesn’t she have the decency to at least be ashamed?” Nat texts me as the pictures come in.

  I walk with my mom and Louisa around and around the loop, talking through everything, still trying to make sense of everything that has happened since January 20. When I feel the familiar tightening of my chest, I head back home, and my mom continues on with Louisa. Sometimes, when Lulu cries and cries, refusing to fall asleep, my parents and I take turns holding her, sliding around briskly in our socks on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, hoping the motion will lull her to sleep. Sometimes, when the anxiety mounts and my heart feels like it’s going to explode, my parents take turns without me.

  The anxiety comes in waves now. Some moments, even some hours, I am fine. Other times I am paralyzed by anxiety and depression and anger. I can’t think. I can’t feel. All I hear is a buzzing inside my head drowning out everything else. My limbs feel so heavy that lifting my daughter seems almost impossible. But I do it anyway. Because what other choice do I have? I take deep breaths. I have to keep breathing. If I focus on breathing I can undo the knot in my stomach enough so that I can keep going. But secretly I wonder, will I ever be OK? Is this a test that I am going to fail? What if I find out that I am actually not strong enough? That the person revealed will be a shriveling, shaking, scared little girl? My daughter whimpers at the toy just out of her reach, and I am shocked back to life. Suddenly, I am on my feet, moving toward her, and the room comes into focus as I bend over her and turn my lips to a smile. I have made it through another panic attack.

  BEFORE

  “DON’T cry, baby, please don’t cry,” Marco said to me, half asleep as I kissed him good-bye. “I’m going to miss you guys so much.”

  “I don’t know why I’m crying. It must be hormones,” I said, gasping through a sob. “It’s only ten days,” I added, and kissed him again. Louisa and I were leaving for Maine with my parents since Marco’s boss was on vacation for the next two weeks. Marco would be working double-duty and was worried that he wouldn’t be able to help at all at home. When my parents told us that they were going to check on the house in Maine and return for my sister’s birthday, Marco had insisted that Louisa and I go with them.

  “I love you.” He closed his eyes.

  “I love you so.”

  The first days in Maine with Louisa were bad. She cried day and night. When she wasn’t crying, I anxiously tiptoed around, dreading the moment she would wake and start up again. Stella came over the third day we were home with a mechanical swing in tow. She lugged it into our parents’ house and triumphantly plopped it down in the living room.

  “This worked every time with Henry. When he was really fussy and nothing else would work, this was the only thing that would guarantee sleep.” She plugged in the swing and hit the number 5 on the side panel. The numbers went up to eight. “Don’t bother with anything lower than four,” she said, snatching a wailing Louisa from my arms. She bounced Lulu for a moment on her six-months-pregnant belly and then lowered her gently into the swing. We waited as the swing gained speed.

&
nbsp; “Are you sure it’s not going too fast?” I asked, my eyes transfixed on Lulu.

  “It’s fine,” Stella replied. “It goes up to eight for a reason.” She stared at Lulu, too. We both waited. The swing went faster and faster. Suddenly, Louisa’s screams began to quiet, and her eyes began to flicker closed.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered. “The swing.”

  “See,” Stella whispered back, staring at Lulu. “Miracle worker. Worked on Henry every—”

  Just then a wail ripped out of Louisa, and her eyes opened. Her face crumpled, and shrieks filled the air.

  “Oh no,” I said numbly. Tears streamed down my face. “It didn’t work.”

  Stella crossed her arms. “Fuck.”

  “Thanks for trying,” I said, scooping Louisa from the swing. “I just don’t know what to do about sleep. I haven’t slept in so long. She wakes up every hour or two hours and sometimes she cries for hours and at night, it’s so much harder and God, I just wish Marco were here—”

  “You need to get more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep, Jenny,” Stella cut in. “Mom, Dad,” she yelled into the family room. “I’m going to tell them to take turns with Lulu until midnight tonight. You go to bed at six. OK?”

  “No, I can’t ask them to do that, Stella! They’ve already helped so—”

  “This is not up for debate,” Stella said, cutting me off again. “Mom! Dad!”

  That night I slept for five hours. Around midnight I woke to footsteps on the stairs and wailing. A soft knock and then, “Jenny?” My mom opened the door and brought Louisa in. “I’m so sorry, I really wanted to get her to sleep before I brought her up, but she’s having a rough night.”

  I rubbed my eyes and leaped out of bed, my drunken stupor of sleep was already replaced by adrenaline pumping through my blood from hearing Louisa’s cries. “It’s OK,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  “Good luck, honey,” my mom said, giving us one last worried look and closing the bedroom door.