Together Alone

by Barbara Delinsky

  She drew in a hard breath, egged on by the dislike she felt for her husband just then. “Well, I’m doing it now, Doug. I’m telling you to go to hell. I want a divorce. And don’t tell me you won’t give me a cent, because I have paperwork to show a judge that I’ve been lied to and cheated on for years. I have proof of the existence of assets I never knew about. I’ll come out of a divorce far better off than when I went in.”

  “No, you won’t. Women never do.”

  “I will. And if I don’t, so what? You aren’t the same person I married. I don’t want you anymore.” Her eyes went to his luggage. “That means tonight, too. I don’t want you warm from another woman’s bed. You can check into the Grannick Lodge. Or drive back to Boston. There shouldn’t be any traffic tie-ups this time of night.”

  “You’re kicking me out of my own home? Try again, Emily. You can’t make me leave.”

  “No?” She was angry enough to bluff. “One call to the police, and you’ll be spending the night in jail.”

  He made a disbelieving sound. “On what charge?”

  “Assault. Battery. Threat of bodily harm.”

  “I have never theatened you with bodily harm.”

  “Right,” she said without a stitch of remorse, “but I’ll claim that you have until Monday morning, when I formally file for divorce, and when I do that, I’ll get a restraining order keeping you away from this house.”

  “I own this house.”

  “And I live here, far more than you do. Any member of the Grannick Police Department will testify to that. Besides, you own another house. Go stay there. Be with the little boy you’ve wanted for nineteen years. Be with his mother. Let her wash your socks for a change. I’m done.”

  She stormed to the front door and opened it wide, intent on pointing him out, but once started, the words wouldn’t stop. “Our marriage has been over for years, only neither of us could admit it. But, God,” she put a hand to her chest, “there’s a relief in saying it now. Our marriage has been a strain. I never realized how much, until now. I’ve been grasping at the remnants of what we had once, but they’re so tattered and torn that I barely recognize them, and they aren’t even what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What I want doesn’t matter. What I don’t want is feeling small and inadequate and guilty all the time. I’m tired of making excuses for your absences. I’m tired of trying to please you, when you won’t be pleased.”

  “I’m not that hard to live with.”

  “You are very hard to live with!” she cried, because he was doing it again, making her feel wrong, and she was tired of it! Then she realized he was goading her. So she leveled her voice and steadied her gaze. “Leave, Doug. I’ll be talking with Shep Hubbard on Monday. Have your lawyer call him. If you want to stop by for some of your things tomorrow, call first.”

  He stared at her for a long time. When she refused to look away, refused to blink, he said, “You’re tough.”

  She sighed. “No. But I’m learning.” She gestured him into the night and stood back while he passed.

  twenty

  EMILY SPENT SUNDAY MORNING EMPTYING Doug’s den. She had a frenzied need to be active, and couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. His den was symbolic of the life he had made without her, and she wanted it transformed.

  She crated up Doug’s books and papers, emptied desk drawers and file cabinets, and began carting boxes to the garage. Brian drove up halfway through, his tires crunching on the dusting of snow that had fallen at dawn and frozen where it lay. He scooped Julia from the Jeep and tucked her inside his parka so that only her face showed. “What are you doing?” he called, walking into the garage.

  Emily wiped her hands on her jeans. “Cleaning.”

  “Need any help?”

  “Nope.” She wiggled her fingers at Julia. Julia wiggled her nose back.

  Softly, Brian asked, “Are you okay?”

  Emily nodded.

  “Are these his?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He grinned. “Please. Let me help.”

  She gave him a nudge and left her shoulder against his arm. “You’re bad.”

  “Just selfish. I miss you.”

  She missed him, too. But her hands, her mind, her needs just then were focused on Doug. So she simply leaned in closer for a minute, before stepping away.

  “Really,” he said, serious now. “I can carry boxes.”

  But she shook her head and sent him off. She needed to do the work herself, needed the exertion, the therapy of it. She made trip after trip to the garage, until the whole of his office, minus furniture, was relocated there.

  Back in the house, staring at bare shelves, a naked desk, and all the machines that she would need for her work, she marveled at her nerve. She had never dared defy Doug—had never before had conscious cause—but it felt good. This was her declaration of independence. It went a small way toward boosting her self-esteem.

  Cleaning the room went another small way, as did gathering her own possessions, previously stashed in random out-of-the-way places, and neatly arranging them in drawers and on shelves. She brought an elegant old lamp from the basement, one that she had bought at an attic sale years before but that Doug had hated on sight, and stood it on a corner of the desk. She nailed her diploma to the wall. She filled the shelves with her favorite books, and set up photographs of Jill and, yes, Daniel. She stood a copy of the book she had written face out at eye-level.

  By then it was four in the afternoon. She had fully expected Doug to have come by for clothes, papers, something. Naturally, because she expected it, he wouldn’t do it.

  So, wearing leggings, thick scrunchy socks, and a huge sweatshirt, rolled several times at the wrists, she sat at the desk and made chronological piles of the contents of her large accordion-pleated folder.

  There her discipline ended. She couldn’t concentrate the way she needed to. Her mind drifted. She kept looking off toward the yard and rehashing the week.

  The back door slammed. “What in the hell did you do with my things?”

  Her stomach cramped. For a split second she regretted what she’d done. Then she thought of the woman, the child, the townhouse, the country club, and the repeated lies and denials, and she tucked her legs under her and tipped up her chin.

  Angry Italian loafers slapped across the kitchen floor and into the hall. “Emily?”

  She sat back in the chair and waited. He knew where she was.

  Within seconds, he was at the door, looking very Armani, in slacks, a sweater, and a jacket with the collar pulled up just so, but fired up and, to her satisfaction, a bit unsettled. “I nearly drove into the garage just now! Do you have any idea what would have happened if I had? I’d have lost reams of files and damaged the car. Don’t you have any brains? Why in the hell did you put my things there?”

  She’d had many a curious moment in the hours just past, wondering what it would be like, seeing him for the first time after she’d asked for a divorce. If he had shown up all apologetic and sweet, shocked to his senses, wanting to try to work things out for Jill’s sake, she might have had a qualm. His outrage solved that problem.

  Why had she put his things in the garage? Because there was a poetic justice to it. The garage was where he kept his most prized possessions, wasn’t it?

  She tucked her legs up. “I thought it would be a help. Now all you have to do is load them in the car.”

  “All? Christ, you messed everything up! I’ll have to re-sort every goddamned thing. Those were important papers you were tossing around!”

  She didn’t know how important they could be, stashed in a room where he hadn’t spent any significant time in weeks. “Relax, Doug. I didn’t ‘toss’ anything around. I put things in boxes, exactly as they were organized here. Everything’s labeled. Nothing’s been lost.”

  He put his hands on his hips and snorted, then shook his head and snorted again. “You are incredible.”

  Emily wa
sn’t asking if that was good or bad. She knew what he would say, and didn’t want to hear it. She had sworn off masochism. “If you came back for clothes, help yourself. I haven’t touched them.”

  He stared at her for another minute, before letting his hands fall to his sides. “How did Jill come to see me on Friday?” There was no anger now. Just concern.

  Emily softened. How could she not? Jill had always been her own major worry. She wanted Doug to be sensitive to Jill, and for that, he needed the truth. “She saw you there once before.”

  “When?”

  “Last spring. Pre-frosh weekend. She was walking down the street with girls from the school and saw you on the front stoop. With them. She kept telling herself it wasn’t you, but it haunted her. Then she saw how we were together last weekend.”

  “How were we?”

  “Distant. She’s a big girl, Doug. She sees. She understands.”

  “Did you talk with her about it, after last weekend?”

  “Only Friday, after Marlborough Street. She was upset. I tried to smooth things a little.”

  “How?”

  “I told her there might be explanations for what we saw. I said she had to talk with you. You’re her father. She won’t have another one in this life.”

  “Does she hate me?”

  “Maybe a little. But love, too. She’s confused.”

  “How will she react if I call her?”

  “I don’t know. But the longer you wait, the harder it will be. She’s wondering what place she has in your life. She needs to know you love her. She needs to know you care about how she’s taking this.”

  He scowled for a long minute, then grunted and looked away. Wearing his elegant clothes like a shield, he wandered around the den, glancing from bookshelf to bookshelf to wall to lamp, taking stock of every change she had made. She wondered if he noticed the pictures of Daniel. She wondered if he noticed her book. She wondered where he had spent the night.

  “You move fast,” he finally said.

  She hugged her knees. “I always had to go looking for space when I wanted to do something for myself. You had your own space. Jill had her own space. I never did. Now I do.”

  “To do what?” he asked, craning his neck toward the desk.

  “Organize my thoughts.”

  “Thoughts on what?”

  She looked him in the eye. “Daniel. These are the notes I made over the years.”

  “About Daniel.”

  “And me. My feelings about what happened. What it’s like to lose a child that way.”

  “If you’re writing a book, you’d better let me know. My lawyer’s going to want to know if you’re earning any money.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Will you be?”

  “You’d be in a better position to tell me that,” she said. “You kept better track of the money I made on the last book than I did. To hear you, it was next to nothing, more a hindrance than a help.”

  “Slander me in your book, and I’ll sue.”

  Such an inflated ego. Such a distrustful mind. “I’m not interested in writing about you.”

  “Won’t it be inevitable? Our marriage is falling apart because of Daniel. The two are closely related. You can’t go into any kind of depth on one, without mentioning the other. Why do you want to write about Daniel, anyway?”

  “Because he happened.”

  “But how can you relive it?”

  “How can I not? He was my son. We never did put him to rest.”

  “Buried him, you mean.” He turned to the window, slipped his hands into his trousers pockets, and stood there for a long time before, quietly, reluctantly, self-consciously saying, “I’ve been thinking about Daniel, too. I guess it’s natural. I’ve been driving around, all the places I swore I wouldn’t go. I keep telling myself to get the hell outta here, but it’s hard.” He grew silent again, staring out the window, his back stiff. Finally, he took a breath. “It’s like I’m being disloyal to Daniel if I leave. Pretty stupid, huh? The kid’s not here to see what I do.” He paused, then added in a low voice, “But it’s like he is.”

  Emily knew what he meant. That knowing forged the first truly honest connection between them in years. “This is where we saw him last,” she offered, because it was the only explanation she had. “It’s our only link to him—Grannick, this house, our marriage.” She focused on one of the pictures of Daniel. “Is he why you didn’t ask me for a divorce yourself?”

  Doug didn’t answer.

  “If you hated me so much,” she added. “If I was a constant reminder of what you lost, I’m surprised you didn’t leave me years ago.”

  He shifted a shoulder. She took it for an admission. There was some solace in knowing that she wasn’t the only one whose life’s course had been steered by a ghost.

  Doug turned, his face tired, for once unadorned by pride, resentment, or machismo. “Where does it end?”

  Seeing him then, vulnerable as she couldn’t remember him being before, Emily had every opportunity to regret what they were about to do. And she did regret it, but only in an intellectualized way. She regretted his suffering. She regretted leaving Daniel in the car that day. She regretted the failure of her marriage.

  But she didn’t regret that she wouldn’t be planning her life around Doug’s short stops home. They had grown painful. For nineteen years, her life with Doug had been defined by Daniel’s absence, every step aimed at compensating for the loss, apologizing, doing penance in the most subtle and subservient of ways. Leaving that life was a first step in putting Daniel, finally, to rest.

  Where did it end? She shrugged and shook her head, as anxious for that ending, but befuddled, as he was. Then a sound came from the direction of the kitchen, and she looked sharply toward the door.

  The footsteps were quieter this time around. Sneakers hit wood far differently than loafers did. Within seconds, Brian had a hand on the doorjamb. “Am I interrupting anything?”

  Emily’s insides rocked. She felt the familiar warmth that came with Brian, along with an awful awkwardness.

  Doug folded his arms over his chest and put a hip to the window sill.

  “We were just talking,” she told Brian, then, frightened for Julia, asked quickly, “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine. I’m putting together an order for pizza. Want some?” He extended the invitation to Doug with the arch of his brows.

  Doug didn’t say a word.

  “Maybe another time,” Emily said.

  Brian rapped his hand on the jamb. “Okay. But if you change your mind, give a call. Julia will probably sleep for another half hour. I’ll go when she wakes up.” With a hand up to Doug, he was gone.

  The back door had barely made its distant slap when Doug turned curious eyes on Emily and said, “It didn’t take you long.”

  “What didn’t?” she asked, though she knew what he meant. She knew exactly what Brian’s entrance looked like, thank you, Brian. It looked familiar and practiced.

  “Hooking up with him. Boy, you took me seriously when I said I liked him.”

  Emily unfolded her legs. She didn’t know who to be more irked at, Brian for setting the scene or Doug for playing it out. “You have no right to make accusations, Doug.”

  Looking smug—leering, even—he pushed off from the window. “Tell me you’re not sleeping with him.”

  “What I’m doing, or not doing, is none of your business.”

  He approached the desk. “That’s why you’re kicking me out, isn’t it? You’re sleeping with him. Funny, I was thinking about that last night, too. I couldn’t understand why you did it so quick, with no discussion, no fore-warning, nothing. I came home, and, boom, you wanted me gone. Now I know why.”

  Emily felt a flare of anger so hard and strong that she flew to her feet. “You—know—nothing,” she seethed. Forget Brian. She would deal with him next. Right now, she was furious at Doug. “I wanted you gone when I learned that you have a whole othe
r life, a whole other family, a whole other set of possessions that you’ve been supporting while you cry poor-mouth to me. And there was nothing sudden about it! You’ve been carrying on with her for at least four years and nine months, and all the while our marriage has gotten weaker and weaker. Sudden?” she cried, caught up in the fury. “Forget sudden! I’ve been asking you for months what’s wrong, what you want, why we can’t be together, and you couldn’t give me the truth. I went so far as to suggest counseling, because I did want to save the marriage. Sudden? There’s nothing sudden about this. I tried to make it work. I tried hard. So what did you do? You said you wouldn’t waste the time or money on counseling. Far better to be a member in good standing at the country club.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  “Of a country club membership?” She would have laughed, had she not been so angry. “Not quite. What I want—wanted, past tense—was a meaningful marriage. I wanted a companion. I wanted to spend time with someone who cared, but you didn’t. You don’t. You’ve been lying to me for years, so that you could spend time with your mistress and her son.”

  “He’s my son,” Doug said.

  “Yes, so you told me last night. And I kicked you out. You can call that quick if you want. I call it appropriate.”

  “Appropriate, my foot. You wanted me out so you could shack up with the cop. Did he choose the colors for the bedroom?”

  Emily bristled. “I chose them. Neither he, nor any other man but you, has ever seen that room. It’s mine, and only mine, and I plan to keep it that way for a while. Know what I’ve discovered in the last few weeks?” She thumped her chest. “There’s a me in this world. There’s an individual inside this body who isn’t anyone’s slave. That individual is tasting freedom for the very first time in her adult life.”