The Truth Is a Theory

by Karyn Bristol

  It was cold out on the sidewalk, and Megan—trying to hail a cab—was shivering and small against the honking headlights of the city. Allie put her hand on Megan’s shoulder, and Megan turned and collapsed into Allie’s arms, her shivers becoming great, shaking sobs.

  “Oh Allie,” Megan said, her words choppy and hoarse.

  “I’m right here, Meg. I’m right here.”

  ————

  Later, after Megan had cried herself into a trembling and exhausted quiet, Allie tucked her into a taxi. As she sped away from her friends, she realized that she’d forgotten to tell them that she was pregnant.

  ————

  Back inside the restaurant, the three women stared at each other, shell-shocked. Around them music danced; wine flowed; diners chewed, chatted, laughed. The waiter sauntered over and asked if they were ready to order.

  Zoe waved him away. “I’m not sure I can eat right now.”

  “I’m not sure I can even speak right now,” Allie said.

  Tess fiddled with her necklace.

  Sorrow and concern circled the table like vultures.

  “I need to get out of here,” Tess said. Her chair screeched backwards. “I’m about to jump out of my skin. I just need to be home right now,” she glanced at her watch, “and there’s a train leaving in 15 minutes that I just might catch.”

  Allie leaned over and gave Tess a quick hug. “Go,” she said, and then she looked wearily at Zoe. “I think Zoe and I are right behind you.”

  Tess stood up. “I have a morning meeting tomorrow. Does anyone want to go to the hospital early?” Tess glanced at Zoe, let her gaze rest on Allie.

  “I can’t go until around 10,” Allie said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Zoe said. “Eight o’clock?”

  Tess hesitated, then nodded. “Great.”

  ————

  Tess sprinted for the train in her black heels, bumping into briefcases and shoulders as she ducked and weaved through the crowd of commuters heading for Grand Central. The fact that there was another train in 25 minutes did nothing to assuage her panic; if she didn’t make this train, the world was going to end. She leapt on just as the doors started to slide closed, and sank onto one of the few remaining red vinyl seats. Beads of sweat trickled down her temples. She almost cried with relief.

  Gavin, Juliette. Like a mantra chanted over and over, the two names chugged in time with the rhythm of the speeding locomotive. They were a powerful magnet pulling her away from the devastation and pain of Megan’s news, home to the safety of Gavin’s arms and Juliette’s sweet chatter. They were the only salve that could nurse the creeping mold of nausea and worry taking over her heart. Maggie. Megan. This was surreal. How can that little girl be so sick? How are Megan and Jared dealing with this? She stared out the window at the dark buildings racing by and knew that if anyone on the train looked at her crosswise, she would dissolve into tears.

  Juliette would be sleeping with them tonight.

  She checked her watch again; 30 more minutes. Gavin wouldn’t be expecting her home this early. She imagined his smile as she walked in the door. She closed her eyes and let her thoughts drift with the white noise of the train.

  New house, fresh start; it had been Gavin’s idea and Tess had been overjoyed at the forgiveness inherent in it. When he walked out a year and a half ago, Gavin had closed the door behind him calmly and deliberately, which Tess found more frightening than a raging slam; anger was temporary, resignation much more permanent. Another interminable minute later, she had heard the more final swoosh of the elevator door in the hall.

  What have I done?

  She sat frozen at the kitchen table for hours, dazed by the quiet after the explosion, her cold, cloudy coffee in front of her and the dawning of a new day filling in around her. The ticking clock, like the lonely beat of a heart monitor in ICU, was the only sign of life in the apartment, until she heard Juliette shout out, demanding that she move, that she focus.

  She didn’t call anyone. She didn’t go to work; she canceled the nanny. She only left the apartment for groceries. She couldn’t even face the teenage cashier with the green smock and bored affect; instead she pretended to fumble in her purse for her credit card—“Where did I put that?”—while the girl tapped out a tune on her silver braces.

  Shame rotted deep and heavy in her core; the sour taste of bile fermented in her mouth.

  Gavin called every day to speak to Juliette, and every day Tess rushed to the phone and blurted out an apology instead of hello. His tone of voice terrified her—it was ashy, dead; not hot fire.

  She never asked him to come home. She couldn’t think of anything appealing enough to offer him.

  A week later, Gavin called and told Tess, “Get a sitter to take Juliette. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  ————

  Tess showered, made coffee, stashed Juliette’s toys and the dirty laundry and her towers of magazines in a closet and threw her weight against the door.

  The elevator in the hall groaned and then stopped.

  The apartment door banged open.

  “Now I’m mad.” Gavin stomped past her and into the kitchen, marching with a sound. His every step matched the thumping in Tess’s heart.

  “Gavin, I’m—”

  “I don’t want to hear that anymore.” He clenched his fists. “I want to hear why.”

  “Why.” Tess stood in front of him, feeling tiny in the face of his anger. The makeup she had brushed on suddenly made her feel plastic. She had the urge to wipe it off with her hand. “The easy answer is I thought you were with Zoe.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “And the hard one?”

  She sighed, sunk into a chair. “The hard one is that I gave up on us. Everyone else’s ‘What’s Gavin doing with her?’ made me feel smaller and smaller. And it got to the point where I couldn’t remember the answer.”

  Gavin sat down in a chair across the table and looked directly at her. “You never talked to me.”

  Tess hung her head.

  “That’s the worst part,” Gavin said.

  They sat in silence.

  “But I didn’t talk to you either.” Gavin looked away. The kitchen clock ticked into a long pause. He sighed heavily and looked back at her. “Tess, before we were engaged,” he dropped his eyes to the table and then it seemed like he consciously dragged them back up to meet hers. “I cheated on you with Zoe. I know I told you that a week ago—years too late—but I slipped it into our fight, and didn’t tell you the way I should have, the way I wish I had. What I wish I had said, what I want to say now is: it was wrong. I was wrong. I loved you and I slipped into a thing with Zoe like I’ve slipped into so many things in my life, without the courage to say ‘I want something different.’ And I am just so sorry, Tess.”

  They let the silence fill the space between them. Tess reached out her hand to laid it over Gavin’s.

  “Wait, there’s more,” he said. He eased his hand out from under hers and put it over his mouth. He breathed in and then exhaled slowly through his fingers before dropping his hand onto the table. “Back then—and again, this was before we were engaged,—Zoe got pregnant.” Tess looked up at him, wide-eyed. Gavin continued, “She told me it was Bob’s, remember Bob? But I wondered, just a little bit, if it was mine. I wondered if she was just trying to let me off the hook, and to help you too. All these years, I had this tiny, shard-of-glass worry that the horror on my face when she told me she was pregnant had chased her into a lie. A life and death lie. Afterwards, every once in a while, when I moved a certain way, that shard of glass would cut me with the thought: I let her go through with the abortion, I let her believe that I believed the baby was Bob’s.” His voice wobbled, cracked. “Because I couldn’t bear to lose you, our life. Tess, I love you so much.” He cleared his throat, shook his head. “The baby real
ly was Bob’s. But that doesn’t change the fact that I was afraid to really ask.”

  Tess and Gavin sat across from each other, still and silent.

  “So you weren’t crazy to think there was something going on with Zoe,” Gavin said. “And part of me feels like I deserve what just happened with you and Rob.”

  Tess reached across the table and touched her fingertips to his. “Gavin, come home.”

  ————

  During the next several months, both Gavin and Tess rode an emotional rollercoaster, and various pillows and blankets moved from the bedroom to the couch and back again as they relaxed into the warmth of forgiveness and exploded in bitterness and blame. But they buckled in, they fought through it, until finally, all the pillows and blankets stayed resting on their bed, and the couch became once again, just a place to sit.

  ————

  Allie and Zoe lingered at the restaurant in the wake of Tess’s hasty exit. Zoe itched for a martini; she licked her lips and then pressed them against each other, her fingers twitched on the tablecloth. She lit up another cigarette and ferociously sipped her Pellegrino.

  The two friends leaned over the unused silverware, grief and worry soaking their every syllable. They brainstormed ways they could help, but while their ideas attempted strength, their gestures—hands running through hair, nails mindlessly scraping cuticles, cigarettes rapidly moving up and down—highlighted helplessness. After a while, they needed to move, needed the night to just end so that they could at least do something, even if it was only showing up at the hospital in the morning.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Zoe said as they walked out.

  “I guess so. Are you?”

  Zoe nodded. She noticed Allie’s eyes held hers for two beats too long. “What?”

  “You’re not going to drink tonight, right?”

  “No, Mom.” She held up a pack of cigarettes. “I’m armed and ready. And, seriously, if Megan can face this, I can stare down a bottle of vodka, seductive as it may be. I’m going straight home; my apartment’s clean. I’m okay.” And she smiled because she knew she meant it.

  ————

  Allie unlocked the back door, stepped into the bright kitchen, and lobbed her keys onto the corner table. As an answer to the crash of metal against the smooth wood, she heard Madaket’s toenails click-clacking towards her across the tile floor.

  Allie stooped down to scratch her dog’s blond head, and then aimed towards the den where she expected Dana would be eating pizza and watching TV. All was quiet in the big house except for the low drone of the television, and Allie was longing to sink onto the couch next to Dana and weep with Megan’s story. Before she rounded the corner however, long, bell-bottom denim legs slunk towards her. “Hey, Ms. Sexton. How was your night?”

  Allie stopped. “Hi Carrie.” She glanced at her watch with a furrowed brow. Why was the 16-year-old babysitter, who had come to cover the hour between Allie’s six o’clock departure and Dana’s seven o’clock arrival from work, still here? “Is everything okay?”

  “The kids were great.” Carrie smiled. “I had to read Gillian like 10 stories—Madeline over and over again. I think I can recite it now. But they’re both asleep.”

  “Good. Actually I meant, where’s Mr. Sexton?” Allie felt foolish asking, as if with that one question, she was exhuming the state of their marriage for this teenager.

  “He called around seven from work. I guess something came up, and he asked if I could stay and put the kids to bed.”

  Allie frowned.

  “It was okay; not a problem. I just did my homework here.”

  “What time did he say he’d be home?”

  “Around 10. He said you wouldn’t be home until after that.”

  “Thanks Carrie. I really appreciate it.” They walked back into the kitchen and Allie dug around in her purse for some money. “Are you okay walking?”

  “It’s only three houses, Ms. Sexton.” She smiled at Allie as if she had gray hair and a cane. “I’ll be fine.”

  After Carrie left, Allie stood alone in the clean kitchen among the organized Calphalon and gleaming appliances and felt a black, moonless loneliness engulf her. She leaned onto the granite counter and put her head in her hands; she was surprised that no tears let loose. Fatigue stood on her shoulders and kept her wilted over the counter, her eyes wide open but shuttered to sight. She was so numb, so immobilized, that for the first time, the absence of energy around her was not frightening. She couldn’t feel anything; she wasn’t sure she was even breathing.

  Her grumbling stomach broke into her tomb, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything except for a piece of bread at the restaurant, and she opened the refrigerator and then closed it, already intimate with the contents without having to look, and knowing that the leftover Scooby-Doo macaroni and cheese was not what she was looking for. The murmur of the television beckoned from the other room and she was drawn to it as if it was flannel pajamas and a cup of warm milk. She collapsed onto the couch and flipped through the hundreds of channels. No sarcastic banter or dramatic affect grabbed her attention, but she stared at the changing channels, hypnotized by the rhythmic color shift. She finally clicked the TV off after a kitschy used-car commercial broke the spell. With a heavy step, she climbed the stairs.

  She wished she could crawl into bed with Matthew or Gillian, to hold them close in the hope that their smattering of freckles and sweet soapy smell would begin to close the cavern that had opened up inside her chest. But she was afraid that once she curled them into her arms, the dark, stormy sobs that had been threatening since she left the restaurant would thunder and wake their peaceful slumber. So she placed a tiny, tender kiss on each of their baby-soft cheeks, and hesitated in their toy-filled kingdoms a little longer than usual, allowing the rise and fall of their breath to become her own.

  She exhaled into her king-sized bed and curled up into the fetal position, listening in the dark for the swoosh of a car in the driveway. The earlier longing for Dana was being slowly supplanted by the caustic wounds of old times—wounds that always lay patiently waiting for a hapless new hurt to infect; wounds that ensured that new arguments weren’t as much about the here and now as they were about the unraveling of their togetherness in general.

  You’re never here. Even when you’re home you aren’t here.

  The bullet points of tonight’s offense ricocheted through her mind. The kids had been looking forward to some time with you, what the hell was so important at work? I hardly ever go out, couldn’t you have tried to get here on time tonight? It felt sneaky somehow that Dana had called Carrie after she had already left, as if he had only changed the plan once Allie could no longer have any input.

  Underneath her gathering rage she could hear his defense: I couldn’t help it, it was a last-minute thing. The kids were fine with Carrie. I assumed this was a good night to stay late because you weren’t home either. Still further beneath that, Megan’s news festered, scorching a hole in her heart, fueling her anger with hot kindling.

  How long had it been since she’d cried in Dana’s arms? How long had it been since they had shared something more than logistics, more than the Sexton household breaking news of the day? She wasn’t sure what happened first, had they stopped talking, or were they never in the same place long enough—physically or emotionally—to hear each other?

  Allie tossed and turned for an hour, her fury spreading from a small pill on her tongue to venom boiling in every muscle, every joint. Her body was rigid under the covers.

  She clenched her fists as the floorboards on the stairs slowly creaked, one by one, like Dana was an old man making sure of his footing, leaning all his weight on one leg before taking the next step. He paused in the bathroom, turned on the light. She heard the water, the swish-swish-swish of a toothbrush, the clatter of a few Advil shaken out. Then the click of the light. />
  “You’re home early,” he said as he pulled back the sheets and sank onto the bed. “How was your night?” He fluffed his pillows and crashed down on them, turning on his side towards her.

  Part of her wanted to move into him and bury her head in his familiar chest and wail that her night had been horrible, that she was sick with worry about her friend and about Maggie; dump out the poison she was feeling into the space between them that had once been so intimate and sacred, and most of all, healing. But that crawlspace had over the years become a widening gulf, a gulf that could only be crossed with a running leap and a good deal of faith, and she just couldn’t find the strength, or the faith, necessary to initiate the hurdle.

  What’s changed that makes reaching out for each other so daunting? I need you. Please. If I jump in here, will you catch me?

  But in the end, or rather in the five seconds it took her to dismiss the tiny butterfly of chance—one of many that often fluttered in between them—the chasm felt too deep, the leap too huge, and the other part of her ambivalence stepped forward. Without turning over, she said in an even tone, “It was okay.” She paused. “You were at work?”

  He sighed. “I realized I was way behind in some reports. It seemed like a good night to tackle them, you were out anyway. It was either stay late or get there at the crack of dawn.”

  His reply was reasonable, but she wasn’t feeling particularly reasonable. Anger kept her rooted in place, her back still to him. “And you just realized this tonight? Why didn’t you tell me this morning?”

  “I thought that I could get more done during the day.” He injected levity into his tone. “So, why are you home early? Did you guys have a fight?” He forced a chuckle.

  “Would you have told me Carrie stayed late if I came home after you?”

  “I’m not hiding anything, for Chrissake. Of course I would have told you.” He paused. “What’s going on with you?”

  She turned over to face him and spat her words at him. “What’s going on with me is that Maggie has cancer. Megan’s a wreck and I’m terrified for them. They’re facing the most unimaginable nightmare.” She shot up in bed.