by Susan Perabo
And yet she had written to him for seven months after that weekend in Boston. Dan knew this. Dan knew everything. He had made it his business to find out everything, after she had admitted to it. She’d told him one morning in their bedroom, while they were getting dressed for work. He never knew what it was that finally compelled her to spill it, but when she spilled it she spilled it, nearly vomiting out the truth, standing there in her underwear beside the closet, trembling, weeping the ugliest tears he’d ever seen. She’d never kept a secret in their seven years of marriage, maybe not ever in her life, and watching it wrest out of her was like witnessing an exorcism. She said, she blubbered: “I know you’ll want to leave me. I’ll understand.” And then, the filthy cat out of the foul bag, she had gone to work, with no makeup and wet hair, and wearing two different shoes (he noticed this when he looked out the bedroom window and watched her get into the car), and then he went through the house like a goddamn DEA agent, ripping clothes off hangers, digging into every coat pocket, emptying entire desk drawers onto the floor. He would have slit open the couch cushions if he hadn’t suddenly looked at the computer sitting there impassively on the desk in the living room and sat down and typed what—in a moment of desperate inspiration—he absolutely knew was her email password (though he’d never asked), the name of her childhood cat, and there was everything, in a tiny little mailbox icon marked ETC—ETC!—not only the other man’s emails to her but, more damning and far more excruciating, hers to him.
But Dan, broken as he was, did not leave. By going to work Carrie had given him a window, a bay window, of several hours to gather his thoughts. The house was ransacked by 9:30, the emails read by 10:15, reread by 10:35, re-reread by 10:50. He’d called in sick (because you couldn’t call in shit on) to work and there was a whole day ahead of him, brimming with endless possibility. He could pack his bags and leave, yes. He could be three states away—in any direction! he could go wherever he wanted!—by the time she pulled into the driveway. This was the first day of the rest of his life. He was not so old—only twenty-nine. He could begin again, reinvent himself. “I’ll understand,” she had said. But she had conspicuously not said “I’m leaving,” not said “the marriage is over.” She had left the choice to him. She had probably thought he would leave her, probably wanted him to leave her, probably was sitting at her desk pricing flights to Phoenix (this is where the man lived, he’d learned from the emails), preparing for the big, romantic reunion with Michael the tax accountant who had rocked her world in Boston. In the letters there had been phrases like “When we’re finally together” and “I can’t wait until we . . .” as if it were only a matter of time. But Carrie had not left him this morning, had not said she was leaving him, had instead, importantly, crucially, said, “I know you’ll want to leave me.” And now she was at work, fully expecting him to be here packing his things, using this bay window of time to get his affairs in order, to box up the marriage in her absence so she could be free (she used this word in one of the letters: “free”) to go to Phoenix and join Michael the tax accountant who had rocked her world in Boston. She was leaving the ball in his court, lobbing up a big fat fattie across the net, like she used to do when they’d played in college, so he could have his overhead slam and feel like a big man, but guess what? Fuck her! He said this aloud, at 11:13, standing among their lives dumped out on the floor. Fuck her! He’d show her, all right. No way was he going to leave her! He hated her, so he wasn’t going to leave her. And he loved her, so he wasn’t going to leave her. She wanted him to do the dirty work, make it easy for her, open the door to her new life? Ha!
He cleaned the house. He didn’t only clean up the house, he cleaned the house, first tidying his own frenzied mess and then vacuuming and dusting and scrubbing until his fingers ached so much that he couldn’t make his hands into fists. He defrosted the freezer, tightened the rickety porch railing, changed the lightbulb in the garage that had been dark for two years. He showered and shaved and went to the grocery store and bought two slabs of tenderloin and baked potatoes and fresh corn on the cob. He made dinner and set the table and lit the candles and when she walked in the front door he put his arms around her and said, “We’re going to be okay.”
“We are?” she asked.
Now, six years later, Dan stood in his daughter’s room, watching her sleep. She had saved them, softened his rage, centered Carrie’s world. And it wasn’t just that they loved her—of course they loved her, madly—but rather that their love for each other was altered, irrevocably, by her squirming body, lifted from Carrie’s belly (he’d seen inside his wife, seen the startled eyes of his daughter looking up from her mother’s womb) and set stickily and miraculously into his trembling hands.
Chloe was clutching the armadillo, but she slept soundly so it was easy to slide it from her arms and insert, in its place, a red rabbit with a star for a nose. He knew that Chloe had little attachment to individual animals. She had never had the best-loved-bear, no tattered dog she mourned if it were left behind—he’d heard such stories from other dads. They were mostly interchangeable to her, these animals, and she had, it seemed, hundreds of them, all of which she loved for a day or two until another in the room caught her eye. So he put the armadillo on a crowded shelf with another twenty once-loved animals and she rolled over onto the star-nosed rabbit and he went down the hall to his bedroom and his sleeping wife.
In the morning Chloe came into the kitchen with the armadillo balanced on her head. Carrie was packing the lunchbox for preschool and her stomach dropped at the sight of the animal, whom she had seen first thing that morning, tucked on a shelf, only a fraction of it visible, when she’d crept into Chloe’s room to do the same and found the deed already done.
“Look what Michael can do!” Chloe said.
Dan set down his coffee. “Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“Nana sent him,” she said, spinning in circles.
“I know,” he said. “I mean . . .”
Chloe stopped spinning. “Can I take Michael to school?”
“No,” Carrie said, narrowly missing severing her entire thumb while slicing a pear. Or maybe that would be preferable, she thought. Things would have to be done, ambulances called, digits reattached, bloody counters scoured. No one would think about an armadillo.
“How come?”
Carrie shook her head. “You don’t take toys to school.”
“Sometimes I do,” Chloe said. She scooched out her chair and sat down in front of her Cheerios, the armadillo still perched on her head. “For show and tell.”
“Not today, honey,” Carrie said.
“But—”
“Chloe, the answer is—”
“If she wants to take him to school, let her take him to school,” Dan interrupted. “It’s her armadillo.”
“Yay!” Chloe said.
Carrie ran her tongue over her teeth. She’d just be quiet; that was best.
Dan solemnly crossed his arms and addressed the puppet on his daughter’s head. “Now, Michael,” he said. “This is a very serious matter. I have to ask you: Do you want to be in show and tell?”
“He does!” Chloe shouted.
“It’s not for the faint of heart, Michael,” Dan said. “Everyone will be looking at you. You’ll be on display for all to see. Are you prepared for that, Michael?”
“Daddy, he wants to!”
“Do you understand what we’re asking of you, Michael?”
Okay, then, Carrie thought, pitching Baggies into her daughter’s lunch box. All right, then. This was how it was going to be. This was how he had chosen to play it. Okay. Accept. Accept and adjust. This was the price. This was the price you paid. Once, during the months of letters, she had written his name all over her body with a big red marker. She’d done it on her lunch hour, at work, in a bathroom stall, breathlessly, the tip of the pen like the tip of a finger. She had walked around for an entire day with him under her clothes, his name in thick letters on her stomach, h
er upper arms, her thighs. She lay in bed with the word still there, her heart pounding, knowing if Dan turned to her and started something that all might be revealed. She’d been out of her mind, sick with desire. This was the price you paid for something like that.
When she’d come home that day, that terrible day, and found dinner on the table, the house clean, Dan still there, she realized her subconscious plan had gone awry. If only her plan had been just a little less sub she would have surely seen the obvious holes, been able to play out the possible scenarios. She had thought Dan would leave—that was why (subconsciously why, of course) she’d told him the truth—and now he hadn’t left, apparently had no intention of leaving, and now her conscious self was left with the mess made by the subconscious. What was she supposed to do now? “We’re going to be okay,” he’d told her. “You’re going to break that thing (thing!) off, and we’re going to change and be better and happier and stronger people and we belong together and I’m not going anywhere.”
Now she would have to leave him. She had to do it. It was the only thing to do. That night she lay in bed beside him. I’ll do it tomorrow, she told herself. Tonight of course I could not do it because he cleaned the house and made me dinner but I love someone else and that’s not fair to anyone and so tomorrow I’ll leave. The next night she lay in bed, thinking how much she liked her bed, how much she liked her bedroom, actually, how much she would miss it, this room, which she and Dan had painted together because they were too cheap to hire a painter and so there were paint smudges on the ceiling, permanent evidence of their mutual sloppiness. The next night she lay in bed, thinking of how many books they had and how it would be hell, dividing up all those books, how they’d have to sit down for hours, days even, side by side going through everything: Was this his One Hundred Years of Solitude or hers? They’d taken The Contemporary Novel together in college and would have to look through the notes in the book and then they’d both remember what it had been like, sitting beside each other in that sunny classroom with the big windows, twenty years old, none the wiser. The next day the man in Phoenix sent her an email to which she did not respond. Two days later he sent her one that she deleted without reading. The next day he sent another, with a subject line that read:
?
On Saturday one of Chloe’s preschool friends had a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Chloe, with Michael the armadillo tucked under her arm, galloped into the restaurant with the other children and the attending parents. Carrie and Dan sat in the car in silence, until Carrie said:
“Promise me we’ll never have a party at Chuck E. Cheese.”
“I promise,” Dan said. He fake-grimaced. “I hate that mouse.”
“He’s creepy,” Carrie agreed. “More like a rat than a mouse.”
“So what d’ya wanna do?” he asked. Drop-off parties were a relatively new thing in their lives. Dan couldn’t think, now, what they would have done on a Saturday afternoon by themselves, before Chloe. How empty it must have been!—though they would not have known it, with nothing to compare it to.
“We could go have lunch somewhere . . . ?” she offered.
“We could do that,” he said. “People do that.”
When they returned to the restaurant an hour and a half later all the children were in a state of anxious fascination because one of the boys had tumbled out of a plastic tube and was bleeding from the mouth. The birthday girl’s parents, mortified that blood had been spilled on their watch, rushed everyone out of the restaurant so the injured boy could be tended to without an audience of gaping kids and judging parents. Halfway home Dan realized that the armadillo was not with them, had been left behind in their whirlwind departure. A few minutes later he saw Carrie realize it; she turned suddenly to the backseat and then to him, started to say something but stopped, looked again to the backseat, pretending to stretch. Chloe had fallen asleep, slumped awkwardly against her flowery restraints. When they arrived home Dan carried her into the house and lay her on the couch in the family room. When she woke later they all played HiHo! Cherry-O and watched The Little Mermaid and then she went to bed, still groggy from the festivities, still unaware of her loss.
“Michael!”
Dan sat bolt upright in bed, heart pounding. A dream?
“Where’s Michael?”
No. It was Chloe. Carrie stirred beside him as he swung out of bed.
“Daddy?” Chloe called as he neared her room, and he was happy it was him she wanted, his name on her lips, not Michael, not Mommy.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” he said. He sat down gently on the side of her bed and put his hand on her cheek. “You’re okay.”
“I can’t find Michael,” she said.
“Did you have him when you left the party?”
“I did,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “I think I did.”
“Maybe you left him at Chuck E. Cheese.”
She opened and closed her mouth slowly, always the preface to tears. “He’s lost forever,” she said.
He was aware that Carrie was behind him, in the doorway.
“You’ll be okay, sweetie,” he said. “Daddy’s here.”
“Maybe we can find another armadillo, honey,” Carrie said softly.
“I don’t want another armadillo!” Chloe shouted. “I only want Michael!”
But it wasn’t true, not really. The next day, Sunday, without Carrie and Dan even having to discuss it, without a word to confirm they were on the same page, they went to Toys R Us and told Chloe she could pick out any animal she wanted. Any animal. She needed only a moment to decide, choosing a giant giraffe, as tall as Carrie, with leather hooves and ears. Dan got winded carrying it to the car. It was the kind of thing, Dan thought, that a movie star would buy for his daughter, or that a child battling cancer would receive from a charitable organization, one of those toys that a regular child would never get. On the way home Chloe covered its head with kisses and said, “You’re my best friend ever.”
That night they were in the kitchen eating ice cream when the phone rang. Dan picked up.
“Are you missing an armadillo?” the voice on the phone asked.
“I’m sorry?” Dan said.
“This is Lindsay’s mom.” Pause. “Lindsay. The birthday girl.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Lindsay, from preschool. You know, the birthday party. We found an armadillo when we were cleaning up and Lindsay thought it was Chloe’s.”
Dan looked at the kitchen table, where the giraffe stood resolutely—like a tower, really, a pillar of strength, even—between his wife and daughter. A giraffe! Now there was an animal you could get behind. A giraffe was, well, Christ, let’s face it, pretty remarkably goddamn seriously unbelievable. Eating leaves off the top of trees? Are you kidding me?
Chloe lifted her spoon of cookies-and-cream toward the giraffe’s smiling mouth.
“Hello?” said the voice on the phone.
“It’s not ours,” Dan said. “It must belong to someone else.”
The next day at preschool pickup Chloe burst out the door of the four-year-old room waving the armadillo. “Look what Lindsay found!” she shouted. “I left him at Chuck E. Cheese!” She jammed the puppet into Carrie’s stomach and began struggling into her puffy coat.
“Oh my,” Carrie said. She turned the puppet over in her hands. Its eyes were black beads and they glinted in the bright lights of the preschool hallway. “Wow. Look at that.”
“Is that yours?” Lindsay’s mother asked, extracting herself from the clot of waiting parents.
“Ours?” Carrie asked. She was aware of herself blinking too many times—her eyes felt like black beads, too—as she looked at Lindsay’s mother. She didn’t even know the woman’s name. Jane? Melissa? “Is it ours? It is ours, yes.” She nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“Mommy,” Chloe said.
“Well, Lindsay thought so,” the mother said, relieved. “But when we called last night your husband said it wasn’t, so we thought we
’d bring it in today and check with some of the other kids. I guess I should have asked you. My husband would have probably thought the same thing—can’t tell one toy from another, can they?”
“It’s hard for them to keep track,” Carrie said softly, remembering Dan on the phone. “Wrong number!” he’d said, cheerfully.
“Mommy?” Chloe said.
“There’s so much,” Carrie said. “So many things . . .”
Lindsay’s mom scoffed. “Like they even try!” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially, as if she and Carrie had an understanding, shared a history. As if she and her idiot husband were made of precisely the same cloth as Carrie and Dan.
“Dan’s not like that,” Carrie said. “He tries. He—”
“Now, Mommy!” Chloe exclaimed. Carrie looked down at her daughter, who had both hands clasped between her legs. “Right now!” she said.
“Lindsay’s having a baby,” Chloe said at dinner. They all sat at the kitchen table, Chloe flanked by the giraffe—towering—and by the armadillo on the chair beside her, propped up on its tail and resting its paws on the table.
“I doubt that very much,” Dan said.
“She is! In the summer.”
“Maybe her mommy’s having a baby,” Carrie said.
“But Lindsay gets it,” Chloe said.
“Sure,” Carrie said. “Okay. I see what you’re saying.”
“Can I have a baby?” Chloe asked.
Carrie looked at Dan. They had talked about it before, of course. It had always seemed something they would do, when the time felt right. But years had passed quickly—how could Chloe already be almost five?—and they were so busy, both working. It could be a good thing, though. Four. For a while three had seemed right. They’d gotten used to three. They’d gotten used to a lot. But four. Four wasn’t that many. She could give up her cigarette.