Four: Stories of Marriage

by Nia Forrester

  Then he kissed her lower. Beautiful.

  And lower. Beautiful.

  She never used those lotions and creams again.

  Shawn bowed before her now, running the flat of his palms upward along her legs around to her inner thighs, pressing them apart. Riley trembled a little and her hips lifted, just a fraction of an inch, off the bed. He kissed her between her legs, the way he did when he kissed her mouth and listened to her coo, and keen and try not to cry out. The sun was rising, and soon, their house, and children would as well.

  Mrs. Park would open the front door and call out a greeting, Tony would arrive with his tools of the trade and fresh proteins from the butcher. Maybe a cleaner would show up as well. Dennis, his driver would send a text message, and the security detail would change from night to daytime personnel.

  Even the shades in their living room, set on timers, would rise as if on their own accord. And before breakfast was over, a messenger would arrive from So Def with documents for Shawn to review and sign.

  They were almost never alone.

  But here, for now, they were. And the only sound was Riley’s raspy, rhythmic breaths. They quickened in pace until she came with a sharp cry, and for a moment, all breathing seemed to cease.

  Shawn rested his head on her thigh and felt her hand on his head, her finger raking across it. He heard Riley’s tremulous sigh and knew she was crying, so he moved up and pushed himself inside her, pulling her arms up and around him so she would hold him. He embraced her as well, close, tight while he rutted inside her until he and she were both spent.

  Afterward, he rolled free, and they lay side by side, neither of them speaking. After a moment, Riley sat up and then, attempting to stand, gasped. Shawn lifted his head from the bed, and watched as she limped toward the bathroom, went inside and quietly shut the door behind her.

  Cullen and Cassidy were difficult that morning. As if they could sense a pall hanging above their home, nothing seemed to make either of them happy. Cullen decided in the middle of breakfast that he no longer liked eggs and wanted “the same pizza” instead. When Shawn told him he had to have the scrambled eggs Tony made, he gagged as he ate it. And when told he had to eat it anyway, started hollering for his mother.

  Riley, still in the bedroom or maybe even in the bathroom where Shawn had left her, didn’t emerge, so Cullen just cried louder.

  Finally, when Mrs. Park had them both ready to go, Cass said she instead wanted her momma to walk her, and then Cullen who still hadn’t gotten satisfaction since the egg incident joined in. Though they initially had different problems, Shawn marveled at how both his kids arrived at the same solution—they wanted Riley.

  Join the club, he wanted to tell them as their nanny herded them down the hallway and out the door. I don’t know how to make shit work without her either.

  “Rough morning, man?” Tony laughed, looking up from chopping bell peppers and onions.

  “Yup. But even the rough ones are good ones with those two,” Shawn said.

  “I hear that,” Tony said nodding.

  Shawn realized then that though Tony had been working for them a while, he didn’t know if he had kids of his own. He had been working for them long enough that Shawn felt too embarrassed to ask now.

  Riley would know. She would know their names, their ages and how they were doing in school. She would buy them birthday presents and make sure Shawn’s name was on the card as well. And if Tony happened to mention that one of them was home with the flu, she would tell him to take the day off and go make them chicken soup.

  “Riley eating too?”

  “Don’t know,” Shawn said, realizing now that it was already past her customary hour for leaving for the office. “Had a little accident last night.”

  “What kind of accident?” Tony froze for a few seconds then looked up, his expression searching, almost suspicious.

  “Broken glass,” Shawn said slowly. “She cut her foot.”

  Tony resumed slicing vegetables. “Might want to take her to get that looked at,” he said. “Those can go deeper than you think.”

  “Maybe I’ll go check on her,” Shawn said.

  “You should.” Tony looked at him again.

  Shawn stood and headed toward the master suite. Apparently, his chef thought “had an accident” might be a euphemism for him having done something to his wife. Maybe clocked her in the face or something. The kind of brutalizing that people thought rappers were always doing to their women.

  He pushed open the door to their bedroom and was immediately sorry he hadn’t been quieter. Riley was lying in the center of the bed on her side, curled into the fetal position. She hadn’t even taken off the damp towel after her shower, just laid back down and went to sleep. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Shawn worked the towel from around and beneath her, planning to cover her instead with the cool, dry sheets. But something gave him pause. There were fresh bruises on her hips and buttocks, small, purplish and moon-shaped indentations of fingers that had held her a little too roughly. His fingers.

  And there was also her foot. She had removed the band-aid and gauze for her shower and not replaced them afterward. The wound lay open, pink, and vulnerable.

  After going with the security guys to pick the kids up, Shawn took them to Gramercy Park. As one of the only private parks in New York City, and admissible only with a key, it was his and Riley’s go-to spot when they wanted to take the kids to play outside. There were no gawkers inside the confines of Gramercy Park, or at least none that gawked openly. It was an exclusive, locked botanical reserve that Shawn never would have known existed until the realtor told him and Riley that keys were available for purchase, for qualified buyers.

  The cost—a few hundred dollars a year—was well within their reach. But Riley was of course scandalized that what should have been a public space was only accessible to the wealthy. Not so scandalized though that she didn’t acknowledge how cool it would be to be able to come to a place like this, in the middle of New York City that was both beautiful and secure. It only became cooler once they had two little ones.

  Cullen and Cassidy, already very much city kids, knew that once they were within the gated two-acre area, they could run free without their father or a nanny holding their hands. Today was no different. As soon as Shawn unlocked the gate, they darted past him and toward the grass.

  He had always imagined that when he had kids—if he had them—they would grow up in a sleepy suburb, as unlike the places where he grew up as possible.

  But Riley liked that they lived in the city and felt it would make any children they had more resilient teenagers and adults. She had given more than passing thought to things like the values they should give their kids, the experiences they should expose them to, the responsible global citizens they should try to cultivate. Hell, Shawn just wanted them to have nice things, including a nice home, school and community.

  We need be more thoughtful about it than that, Riley told him, her voice passionate. Otherwise we’re going to raise little assholes, Shawn. And I don’t want to raise little assholes, do you?

  Coming from a place where people sometimes raised children casually, carelessly or not at all, listening to Riley had enlarged his thinking about what it meant to bring another human being into the world. Not just the ego of it, but the responsibility of it. Before Cullen was even born, she’d made him want to be a better father, a better man, and just … better.

  Sinking onto a nearby bench, Shawn watched as Cullen took his sister by the hand and led her to a bush over which a cluster of yellow butterflies hovered. Cullen was almost three when they brought Cassidy home, and Shawn still remembered when they posed them for that obligatory first sibling picture, Riley putting Cullen to sit on the sofa and then resting baby Cassidy on his lap.

  Cullen had looked down at her and grinned, then looked back up at them with big eyes.

  Is she mine? he’d asked.

  Yes, baby, Riley had answered right away. She’s y
ours. She’s yours, and mine, and Dada’s, so we all have to look after her.

  At that, Cullen nodded solemnly. He’d been looking after his baby sister ever since.

  Keeping an eye on them, Shawn reached for his phone and called the one person who always helped him reconnect with this wife’s heart and mind when he felt a little distant from both. Lorna, by rights, should have been a nightmare of a mother-in-law, but when he and Riley were going through one of the toughest times imaginable, she’d shown him who she truly was, and he had never forgotten it.

  The phone rang only once before it was answered. But it wasn’t Lorna, it was Malcolm.

  “Hey, Shawn,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Nothin’ much, just thought I’d check in with Lorna, see how y’all are doin’.”

  “We’re good. She’s outside arguing with a contractor about that deck we’re building out back. Saw it was you and figured she wouldn’t want to miss the call.”

  Shawn heard signs of Malcolm moving around, probably walking the phone out to Lorna.

  “How’s it going over there? How’s Riley and the kids?”

  “Good. Good,” he said, knowing that he probably didn’t sound too convincing.

  Shawn had always liked Malcolm Mitchell. From the minute he met him, he knew he was a good match for his challenging mother-in-law. He was exactly the kind of overly-cerebral man who could go toe-to-toe with her in the brains department, but also had a subtle swagger that identified him as someone who hadn’t always lived a life of the mind and could, if the situation called for it, throw down as well.

  Women like Lorna Terry needed to know that her man wasn’t just a lover, but a fighter as well—intellectually and otherwise.

  “Hang on a second, Shawn ...”

  There was some rustling and then the sound of Malcolm’s voice calling out to ‘Lo’ then her yelling something back. After a moment, Malcolm was back on the line.

  “She’ll be a minute. So … tell me what’s good.”

  Not much, lately, he wanted to say.

  “Oh, you know. Getting back to work, been going to the studio these last couple of weeks.”

  “Cool. Can’t let the creative muscle get too weak from lack of use, right? Anyway, you might find this interesting. Asked the kids in my freshman class to write a paper about the last cultural revolution and one kid turned in a paper about hip hop as the last original American art form. It was pretty good.”

  “Did you give ‘em an ‘A’?” Shawn laughed.

  “Nah. It wasn’t an ‘A’ paper. It was an ‘A’ topic, but the execution was lacking a little something.”

  “I bet I could’ve pulled an ‘A’.”

  “I bet you could’ve,” Malcolm said. “So, look … how’re things really? With you and the family?”

  “Why d’you ask?”

  Malcolm made a sound like someone ruminating over whether to say something that he wasn’t sure he should.

  “You know … Lo likes to … think out loud sometimes. She might have mentioned something, a call from Riley. One of those daughterly distress signals.”

  “What was she distressed about?” Shawn asked, sitting forward.

  A few feet away, Cullen was tugging the petals from a flower one by one and putting them into his little sister’s cupped hands.

  “Honestly I don’t know all the details. Something she wanted to tell you about, wasn’t sure how to do it. Something like that. Like I said, I’m not sure what the details are. But here’s why I mention it …” Shawn heard Malcolm walking away. Lorna’s voice in the background became dimmer. “Lo and Riley … they’re … complicated.”

  Shawn barked out a laugh. “Yeah,” he said.

  “And the thing you have to remember about complicated women, especially women like the ones we’ve got, is this: they’re both highly emotional and highly intelligent. A very … combustible combination, you know what I mean?”

  Yes, he did.

  “But what’s worse is that while they feel things deeply, they don’t trust those feelings. What they trust is what they think, what they believe. They trust … ideas, thought. Not feeling.”

  “True. But …”

  “No, stay with me a minute. This part is important. Because they think so damn much, they try to bring reason to emotion. But as smart as they are, what they will never get—and I mean never—is that emotion has no reason. But that doesn’t make it wrong. Lack of reason is not inherently wrong. Are you following me?”

  Shawn exhaled silently. What he was following, was that he could totally see how and why Malcolm Mitchell was a college professor.

  “When Lo was falling for me, I could feel it. I could feel her feeling it. But I’d look at her and I’d see those little gears in her mind turning and churning and asking, ‘should I love this man?’, ‘what does it mean if I do?’, ‘how does this change my life?’, ‘what does this mean about who I am?’ The feelings were to her, something she had to problem-solve. Isn’t that nuts?”

  Shawn laughed. “Little bit.”

  “But I’m onto her now, and every single time we fight, and there’ve been plenty, believe me. Every single time, I have to remind myself that maybe, just maybe my woman is not really at war with me. The war is between her thinking and feeling selves.”

  “That’s some deep shit, man.”

  “Oh, it is. But it’s also gospel,” Malcolm said.

  Shawn thought about that for a few seconds, and in it, he recognized some of his wife. As if he had read Shawn’s mind, Malcolm continued.

  “Riley has a little of that, Shawn. Scratch that. She has a lot of it. You ever see a baby, maybe five, six months old and they look up at you with old eyes? And you can tell they’re learning, listening, soaking up information?”

  Cassidy, Shawn thought. Cass was like that.

  “I’d bet anything, Lorna and Riley were those kinds of babies,” Malcolm laughed. “Anyway, my point is. I don’t know what’s happening with you and Riley, but a piece of unsolicited advice? Just remember that even when you speak to her with your heart, she’s hearing you mostly with her head. And that’s the part of herself she listens to most as well.”

  “Are you talking about me, Malcolm? I thought I heard my name.”

  Just as Malcolm’s message had begun to penetrate, Shawn heard Lorna’s voice, louder and closer to the phone.

  “Nope. Just shooting the breeze with Shawn ‘til you got here.”

  The next voice Shawn heard was Lorna’s, launching in with the many reasons she wished she’d learned to build things with her hands, the main one being that she wouldn’t have to deal with contractors.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Enough about me. What’s going on?”

  “Not much,” Shawn said. “Just sitting in the park. Watchin’ my kids play.”

  20

  There was never going to be a good time for this. But there would be few times that were worse than just after they’d had a fight. And not just any fight, but the kind that was an existential threat to a marriage.

  Riley waited until after dinner, when the kids were in bed, and Tony had cleared, cleaned and said his goodnights. Shawn was home because she knew he was a little bruised as well from the words they had exchanged the other night. He hadn’t breathed a whisper about going to the studio—either his in the loft, or the one downtown—and it was probably because he felt it, too, the unsettled twitchiness that accompanies every deep rift in a relationship. The ones that make you wonder whether this might be ‘it’.

  She found him in the den, picking up toys and tossing them into the large red bin that Riley bought at Target for that purpose. The red bin was comically incongruous in its chic surroundings. They had bought and decorated the apartment shortly after they got married, when life was different, and they hadn’t even begun to think about children. It still looked like a place where only adults lived and entertained.

  Except for the enormous red bin.

  Without speaking, Rile
y pitched in, dragging Cass’ stuffed giraffe out from between cushions, plucking Cullen’s Lego pieces from under the coffee table, and unwinding a Barbie doll’s hair from an expensive pen that was doubling as a curler. She and Shawn worked in silence for a few minutes until everything was done, and then he hoisted the bin up, taking it down the hall to stuff it into one of the closets there.

  Riley waited, sitting on the sofa. Her heart was thundering in her chest. If he was angry, she wouldn’t blame him. It was way too soon to even have a conversation about this, but she had to; there was a built-in deadline that she had imposed on herself.

  When Shawn returned, it was clear he had no intention of joining her for a little sit-down. In fact, he was about to walk past her and toward the bedroom without saying anything until she stopped him by saying his name.

  He stood there for a moment, then turned, though slowly, unwillingly.

  He didn’t want to talk to her, that much was clear. His anger was still a hot coal despite the sex, despite him staying home. He had taken the kids out after he got them from school, and Riley had no idea what they’d done with the time until Cass started chattering about the park and ice cream. He only ever went to Gramercy because the park was private, and there was a small, overpriced “ice creamery” nearby that he sometimes took the kids to, which Riley pretended not to know about since her “rule” was not to give the kids sweets that were by-products of cow’s milk.

  The ice creamery was Shawn’s thing, and she was fine with it. Fathers needed to have unique relationship rituals that they shared with their kids.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I wanted to … Could we sit?”

  He looked wary for a moment, then came back into the den and sat across from her. He leaned forward, knees square, elbows resting on them and hands clasped between.

  “I don’t know how to …”

  “Riley …” He shut his eyes for a moment. “Just say it. Whatever it is, just say it.”

  His voice was abrupt. Impatient. And for a moment, she felt a flash of anger. The way she remembered it, there was plenty of fault to go around for where they were right now. Not all of it was hers. But she needed to focus. The question of fault they would deal with later.