Acts of Contrition

by Handford, Jennifer

  “You can’t let this hurt me, Landon.”

  “I’ve got my eye on a US Senate seat. You think I want a scandal on my hands?”

  There is a pause across the phone lines. I listen to Landon breathe. I lift my chin to slide the impending tears back into place, exhale slowly.

  “The last thing in the world I want is to hurt you, Mary,” Landon says in a tone I heard only occasionally throughout our relationship, a tone that soothed me, like crawling into his arms after days of not hearing from him. “God knows I’ve hurt you enough.”

  I look down and watch two fat teardrops fall onto my thighs.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I ask because I have no clue.

  “Just go about your normal life,” Landon says. “There’s a chance this photo will never see the light of day.”

  In the grocery store I walk through the fluorescent-lit aisles in an equally fluorescent daze, buying two dozen cupcakes I don’t need. At home I check on the kids and then crawl into bed with Tom. I curl into my husband, and instead of paying attention to our Seinfeld rerun, I pray for forgiveness for my decade of sins, and try to breathe through lungs that are too small for this crisis.

  That day at the Mayflower, the day the photo was taken, I went into DC to meet Landon.

  We settled into two overstuffed floral chairs in the lobby.

  “I can’t believe you called,” he said, struggling to cross his long legs in the too-soft chair.

  “I wouldn’t have, obviously,” I answered, rocking Sally’s carrier with my foot, a mom skill I had already acquired in three short weeks. “If it wasn’t important.”

  “How are things?” he asked. “How’s marriage? Motherhood? You look great.”

  I looked fat, actually, having gained fifty pounds with Sally, and still holding on to a good thirty of them.

  “It’s great,” I said. “Tom is a great guy and I can already tell that he’s going to be the best father.”

  “That’s good, really good,” Landon said. “I’m happy.”

  “Great, good,” I repeated. It seemed that our combined vocabulary had been reduced to good and great. “Is there somewhere more private where we could talk? Maybe down a dark hallway, the ice room, the laundry facilities?”

  Landon gave me a look like he didn’t know if I was joking or not. “There’s a room,” he said, haltingly. “I mean, my firm keeps a room here. For clients. We could go up there.”

  “That’d be great.”

  Sally had started to fuss. I unbuckled her and lifted her out of her carrier, reached down to grab for the handle.

  “I can take that,” Landon said, reaching for the handle. “Or her, if you’d like.”

  “I’ll hold on to her,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I held Sally against my chest, put my mouth on her velvety forehead, and inhaled her powdery scent as I followed him up to the tenth-floor room. Inside I went to the window, pulled the heavy fabric and then the sheer lining, looked across Connecticut Avenue, and strained to see the tip of the Washington Monument.

  After we talked, I strapped Sally back into her carrier and stood in the hallway while Landon closed the door behind us.

  As I revisit the scene, snuggled against my innocent husband in our marital bed, my fevered brain recalls him for me: the guy with an ice bucket at the end of the hall, loitering at the vending machine. The photographer. As Landon leaned in and kissed my cheek, neither of us would have seen him snatch our secret in his shutter.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Defects of Character

  IT’S EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, AND the six of us are already in the kitchen, our central gathering post. Today is Sally’s tenth birthday, but none of us is too concerned with it at the moment. We’ve hugged her and squeezed her and covered her face with kisses, branding her with wishes for the best birthday ever. But right now we’re focused on her soccer game at nine o’clock, and the fact that I have forgotten that we’re the “snack family,” the ones responsible for bringing halftime and after-game goodies. Sally’s sending me plaintive messages. “You never forget these things. How could you have forgotten?” she wants to know, in her most accusatory tone. Easy, I want to tell her. Riddled as I am with anxiety over the photo that might clobber me—clobber us all—surely forgetting to stop for Gatorade and Doritos packs could be overlooked, couldn’t it?

  I rummage through the cupboard and find a box of Thin Mints from last year’s Girl Scout Cookie drive, a few apples in the crisper, and some powdered lemonade. Sally seems satisfied.

  It’s chaotic and loud and we’re all knocking into each other. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, reminding myself to relax so that the mayhem doesn’t overwhelm me. Because aside from the craziness and the fact that there isn’t a square inch of clean space on the counter and I’ll have an hour of serious cleaning to do later, all is well in my life. At this moment in time, all is well.

  With five minutes to spare we make it to the soccer field and Sally barrels out of the van and runs off to her team. Tom unpacks the back while I help unbuckle the boys. A few minutes later we’re settled on the sidelines and it’s turned out to be a nice morning, crisp and clear with a deliciously warm blanket of sun wrapped around us. Emily has run off to play with another player’s sibling and the boys are collecting acorns under a nearby tree. “We did it,” I say to Tom, letting my eyes settle on him for the first time this morning. His face is rough with morning stubble, and I can’t help but reach for his chin and rub at his whiskers.

  Tom looks at me briefly, then stares ahead. “Boy Wonder is everywhere.”

  My heart seizes like a fugitive finally boxed in, thinking that Tom knows about the phone call, the photo, the unnecessary cupcakes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s running for Senate, Mary. Big news. It’s everywhere.”

  “The primary,” I say. “I doubt he’ll get anywhere.”

  He shakes this off.

  I glance over at Tom to gauge his mood. Tom has never met Landon but hates that I dated him for so long, hates that I chose to spend six years of my life with the type of guy who couldn’t step up. No doubt wonders what it says about me that I did that. Tom’s quiet and kind, and Landon’s cocky and confident, and though Tom’s qualities are head and shoulders above Landon’s in the virtues department, I know that every man aspires to possess Landon’s swagger, his ability to walk into a room and command attention.

  Tom stands, reflexively, to cheer on Sally. “Come on, Cougars!” he roars. “Let’s see some D!” He sits again and shakes his head. “I need to work with her more in the backyard. She’s so close to nailing that corner shot.”

  “She loves when you work with her.”

  “Anyway,” Tom says. “I could do without seeing his nauseating face all over the television.”

  I thought—or hoped, anyway—we’d moved on. “I doubt he’ll win,” I say dismissively. “Who’d vote for him?”

  “He got your vote for a lot of years.”

  “Got my vote?” I say, eyebrows raised.

  “You held on for dear life.”

  “Oh, yeah. He was a real life preserver.”

  He shrugs. “You saw something in him that made you stick around.”

  “Agreed,” I say. “It’s true. I did think I saw more in him than was there.”

  “But it took you ten years to figure that out.”

  “I dated him for six years.”

  “You knew him for ten years. Wanted him for ten years.”

  “Oh, please.”

  I force myself to take a breath. We’ve had precisely this conversation twenty times or more, but it’s been so long since the last time, I let myself think we were done with it.

  “So I was a little slow,” I say. “A little dense.”

  “He must have been a smooth operator,” Tom says.

  “A smooth operator,” I say in a funny voice, mocking his choice phrasing, attempting my strategy of making light of it. “Listen to yo
u.”

  I met Tom only three months after I had broken up with Landon for good. I was playing softball for my law firm’s team on the fields not far from the White House. Our team was short players that evening so one of my colleagues, a lawyer named Joe, asked his friend to fill in, a good-looking guy who happened to be Tom. I noticed him immediately as I warmed up, stretched my calves, windmilled my arms to loosen them. He looked like he could crush a softball in his fist, but when he smiled, everything about him changed. His whole face brightened, radiating warmth, sending laugh lines fanning from the corners of his eyes.

  By the time the first inning was up, Tom had asked me my name, offered me a water bottle, and helped me widen my batting stance. He said that he had seen me earlier, walking to the field. I hadn’t noticed him. As he stood behind me with his arms shadowing mine, I remember thinking, I feel heat. My heart was thumping and my palms were sweaty and I was flush with gratitude that I was capable of responding to another man, that Landon James wasn’t my only hope. Maybe fate had taken me on a ten-year detour to get here.

  By the end of the game, Tom had offered me a ride home, a ride that I accepted, but not before we stopped for a two-hour dinner and dessert. By the time he walked me to my door, a soothing calm had infiltrated every grain of my being. I would be okay. I would get over Landon. Tom called the next day and we saw each other every day after that. By the end of the first week, there was already an unspoken recognition that we were now a couple.

  In those early weeks and months of dating, Tom and I poured out our every secret, talked of exes, skeletons in our closets. There was an urgency in getting to know each other, as if we were running against the clock. We’d found each other when we were thirty years old, not twenty. To make up for lost time, we skipped the stage of dating where we shared parts of our history in small doses—a sprinkling here, a scattering there. Why waste time dipping toes in the water when clearly a cannonball approach was so much more effective?

  So in our early days and months together, we lingered in restaurant bars, slumped in the vinyl booths of all-night diners, and told each other every detail of our lives. Tom told me of his brother and his struggle with alcohol, his father and his indiscretions, his mother’s stoic response to it all. And I told Tom about my family and Landon—but from the start, it was Landon he was most interested in. He would urge me on, frowning, as he dug deeper. Without giving a thought to the repercussions, I told Tom everything: how super intense Landon was—for a while he’d be all in, and then he’d cool off, leave me hanging for weeks, wondering what went wrong. How it was a rush for him to be so into me, and such a huge withdrawal when he stood back. Tom commented that I sounded like his brother, the addict, and I admitted to him that I couldn’t argue with that. Then I committed an even greater sin: I told Tom about the things we did, the places we went, how we watched every episode of The West Wing, how we’d meet for late dinners at Old Ebbitt Grill, how we’d linger over brunch, reading the papers. What I took as interest in my emotional history was really Tom on a reconnaissance mission, gathering damning bits and details about my relationship.

  I still believe Tom’s motives were honest and that he truly was trying to learn about me, but the information festered in him, jabbing at him like a thorn in his side and then, later, like a dagger. Telling Tom too much about Landon was a mistake I learned too late. Much became taboo: political TV dramas, late dinners, lazy brunches. My past had preemptively tainted my future. Once the information was told—that my relationship with Landon was at once needy and passionate, and then distant and cold—there was no retracting it.

  Now, from time to time, Tom holds it against me, as if our marriage—a steady, reliable ship—is lacking in comparison to the tumultuous force majeure that was Landon and my relationship.

  I squint into the sun to find Sally on the soccer field. “I’m sorry you have to see him,” I say, for lack of anything better.

  “Please don’t apologize, Mare,” he says without looking at me. “It makes it sound like you’re complicit, like you have a part in this. I’m not looking for you to be sorry about anything. I’m just saying, you know?”

  “I know,” I say, leaning in close to him, “but I am sorry, sorry that I brought baggage to our marriage. You could have married someone else, someone who hadn’t dated Landon James for six years, who hadn’t known him for a decade.”

  “So what?” Tom says. “That was before we met. You have nothing to be sorry about after we met, right?”

  Tom has a genius for reeling me into a trap like this, a claw clamped onto my foot so that I can’t move, a place where I have no choice but to lie more.

  “I feel bad,” I say, “because it doesn’t end with him. My relationship with him ended, obviously, but he’s still around. That’s what I feel guilty about.” I dodge and skirt, avoid answering Tom’s question directly. “What else can I do but apologize?”

  Sally’s teammate passes her the ball. She dribbles it to the outside, her brows knit in concentration, fists clenched tight. A few more steps and then she shoots, sending the ball sailing over the goalie’s head, wedging it into the corner of the net. Sally falls to her knees in victory. Tom stands and roars. “Yeah!! That’s the way!”

  I watch as Tom and Sally exchange a look, common nods of their heads. Their backyard practice has paid off. When the crowd calms down and the game resumes, Tom’s in an entirely different mood. Sally’s goal was the perfect distraction, the perfect head fake. Tom’s ecstatic, and doesn’t give a damn about Landon James. I know we’re back on the same side.

  After soccer we head to Cracker Barrel. Tom’s parents are in town for the day, up from their condo in Virginia Beach, and since it is Sal’s birthday, they wanted to meet for breakfast. When we arrive, Colleen and Sean Morrissey are rocking comfortably in the wooden chairs that fill the spacious deck, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. The kids run to them, fall into their laps with hugs and kisses, competing with stories to get their attention.

  Tom’s mother, Colleen, is lovely. She’s supportive and generous and always has a kind word of encouragement for me. Whether she’s praising my parenting or laundry skills, she gushes compliments at me as though my proficiency is groundbreaking, as if she herself has never raised kids or gotten a chocolate stain out of a white blouse.

  Colleen wears her hair in a perfectly highlighted flip, her acrylic nails are always painted and glossy, her jewelry is a flawless complement to her country-club ensemble. Colleen’s on Facebook, she texts on her iPhone, she takes spinning classes and does Pilates, she works a master Sudoku puzzle in pen. At the age of forty-five, she earned an online bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Five years ago she joined the pink-ribbon crusade when she got and beat breast cancer inside of a year.

  And for reasons unknown to me, she’s remained devoted to her husband of forty-five years, a man who drinks too much and, according to Tom, has stepped out on Colleen more than once. To look at Sean, it seems unfathomable. To look at him, to know him, he seems like the quintessential family man. He’s the guy who carries a photo of each of his five grandchildren in his wallet. He’s the guy who pulls out his brag stack of photos for just about anyone to see. He’s the guy who will call occasionally, just to say “I love you” and “I’m proud of you.” Without reserve, he cried at Tom’s and my wedding, the births of our children. He refers to me as his daughter, as if the “in-law” part is just a pesky appendage that serves no use.

  Sean is decent-looking, with the same amber waves as Tom, though his face has turned ruddy from too much whiskey and his midsection is a tight medicine ball. He’s funny and affectionate and hangs on your every word, shaking his head back and forth in amusement, scattering heavy doses of “Oh my!” and “Who would have thought!” and “Isn’t that the best!”

  In the beginning, I almost didn’t believe Tom. “Are you sure?” I’d implore. “Are you sure he really had affairs?” Even though I was a firsthand deceiver, it was still hard to beli
eve that betrayal could be so perfectly disguised within such an affectionate man.

  Sean struggles to keep his whiskey consumption under control and, in twisted measure, he claims success compared to his father, a guy who took his first swallow every morning with breakfast. Similarly, Sean’s father claimed success compared to his father, Tom’s great-grandfather, who was the real-life version of the archetypal drunken Irishman, stumbling out of Dublin bars after drinking away his entire week’s wages. The spiral of alcoholic DNA stopped swirling with Tom, not necessarily because he wasn’t susceptible but because he stayed away from the hard stuff just in case. For as long as I’ve known my husband, he’s never once had a drink of whiskey. The occasional beer, a glass of nice red wine with dinner, that’s fine, but Tom knows better than to lean too far over his family’s Irish cliff, for fear of falling to his death.

  With an abundance of grace, Colleen has tolerated and endured Sean’s drinking and infidelities. This baffles me because Colleen doesn’t seem the type to put up with crap from anyone. This is a woman who, in the midst of chemo treatments for her breast cancer years ago, asked the doctor to up the doses just in case the cancer had any idea of coming back. She wanted to send a strong message. I’ve never come close to being able to reconcile the incongruence, to puzzle the two pieces together: how Sean could be loving and loyal, and at the same time unfaithful. How Colleen could forgive the unforgivable.

  “It had to have killed your mother,” I once said to Tom. “She must have felt so betrayed. Her entire life a lie.”

  “I’m sure,” Tom agreed.

  “Did he ever explain himself?” Always wanting to dig deeper, fascinated by the nuances of moral judgment.

  “He said that it had nothing to do with Mom, that he loved Mom more than ever, that the affairs were separate.”

  “I just can’t grasp it.”

  “There’s more to the story,” Tom said. “Technically, the times when Dad stepped out, he and Mom were separated.”

  “You’re kidding me.” Sean and Colleen were a package deal to me; I couldn’t fathom the two of them apart.