“I love you girls so much,” I say. “You have no idea how much I love you girls.”
“Mom,” Sally says. “We know.”
Then I go to check on the boys, who are nestled together watching Toy Story. At the sight of me, they stand on the bed, so instinctively it makes my heart lurch, and climb their way into my arms. They sing their “I Love Mommy” song, and because I can’t stand the thought of my gigantic bed without Tom, I carry the boys into our room and allow them to sleep next to me.
I worry the beads on my rosary, let my fingers slide down to the cross. I finally see how deep my betrayal goes. This isn’t just about us as a family, or Tom and me as a couple; I’ve rocked the foundation of Tom’s core belief system. I’ve forced him to question his faith.
When Tom returns home the following Friday, the boys leap into his arms and the girls coil around his waist. He stands there like a pillar, supporting each of them. The first time we make eye contact it’s held for maybe a second, and I swear that I see the glimmer of a smile in his eyes, but then he looks away.
“Did you bring us anything?” Dom wants to know.
“Bring you anything,” Tom jokes. “Now why would I bring you anything?”
“Come on, Dad,” Danny says.
Tom unzips his computer bag. “Let’s see, I have shower caps for the girls and bars of soap for the boys.”
“Dad, really,” Sally says. “We know you’re joking.”
“Okay,” Tom says. “Let me look again.” This time he pulls out giant lollipops for the boys, inside each of which is a real scorpion. The boys ooh and aah, daring each other to eat his. And for the girls he pulls out little cardboard boxes, with silver-and-turquoise earrings inside.
“Thanks, Dad!” Sally and Emily cheer.
“What about for Mom?” Danny wants to know. “Did you bring her anything from Arizona?”
“Mommy always says not to spend money on her, so this time I listened,” Tom says. “You guys want to go play a game of H-O-R-S-E before dinner?”
The four children and Tom slip into their coats and then rush outside. In no time I hear the bouncing of the basketball, the jeers and cheers of the kids, the words of encouragement from Tom. And once again, I’m left inside the house, alone.
What once seemed unfathomable—a tangible divide between Tom and me—has now become our reality. It’s unnerving how quickly reality shifts, the pace at which we all adjust to new circumstances. Just weeks ago, we were a family, embarrassingly loving, demonstrative family members who crossed all boundaries of personal space to get closer to one another. We were once a family that crowded onto one sofa to watch a television program even though there was ample seating elsewhere. We were leg drapers, arm wrap-arounders, food, drink, and joy sharers. Now there is a force field around Tom and me, a barrier cloaked in polite indifference. Who we were has been replaced by who we are—actors in a commercial, portraying a happy family.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Above All Things
THE DAYS ARE OBLIVIOUS TO my crisis, and with perfect predictability they continue to pass. February and March push through, one cold front after another. Snow, then ice, then snow covering ice. It’s cold outside and it’s cold inside, the way Tom and I live alongside each other with no warmth. I walk through my days with the icy-cold shrapnel of my past pressing into my chest.
Tom has found a nifty loophole to being home. He spends each weekend in Virginia Beach with Patrick, who is now sober and back at work. With Tom’s help he’s opened a handyman business, offering services from cleaning gutters, painting, and roofing to building decks and sunrooms. He’s swamped with jobs and Tom has become his partner, helping him with the labor as well as managing the money aspects of the business.
When Tom started his routine of leaving for the weekends, the kids were intolerable, wailing for him to stay. But kids adapt and by the fourth weekend they were used to it, and they no longer pitch a fit when he leaves. When Tom returns and takes the kids to dinner at Friendly’s on a school night just for the hell of it, they burst with excitement, as giddy as children of divorce who only see their dad every other Sunday. The scarcity of him has increased his value like that of a sought-after commodity.
Each time he returns home, I look for signs of forgiveness. But he continues to be the same: cold and distant and nowhere near forgiving me. He wakes up early, returns from work late. On Friday night he packs his bag for the weekend.
It’s Friday now and because Tom’s packing and I’m folding laundry, I offer him a stack of T-shirts from the load. He takes them without looking up.
“What are you and Patrick working on this weekend?” I ask.
“A deck,” Tom says, slapping the T-shirts into his duffel bag.
“How is Patrick?” I ask.
“Fine.”
“Kathy and Mia?”
“Fine.”
“Do you need anything else?” I ask, offering him a pair of jeans and socks.
“Whatever,” he says.
“Well, do you or don’t you?” I ask, balancing the jeans and socks in my hand.
“If you don’t feel like putting the laundry away, just give me my stuff.”
“Screw you,” I say under my breath.
“What?” he says.
“I said screw you. I was asking if you needed clean clothes, not trying to get out of my wifely responsibilities of putting laundry away.”
“My bad,” he says.
“So this is it?” I say. “This is our life. This is how it’s going to be. Forever!”
“Don’t know.”
“You know, Tom. It is customary for the punishment to fit the crime. Don’t you think you’re being a little cruel and unusual?”
“I don’t,” he says, zipping his duffel and leaving the room.
I race down to the basement. Tonight I won’t be there when Tom leaves our house, helping him disengage from the children. Let him peel the children off his own legs. Let him say good-bye to them. Let him close the door on their four beautiful, wide-eyed faces. I’m done helping him leave us.
In the basement I head into the back room that’s full of exercise equipment. In the corner hangs Tom’s punching bag from college. It’s heavy and as immovable as a side of beef—and daring me to give it my best shot. I assume a stance with my left foot forward and draw back my right arm, then make a fist, remembering how Tom once showed me, with my thumb on the outside, dummy, not the inside. I punch at the bag. It hurts like hell, the pain shooting all the way into my shoulder. I pull back my arm again. Ready, aim, fire. Again, again, again. I punch with my right hand, then my left. In seconds I’m hurting and dripping with sweat, but the pain is welcome, sharp and bracing like being smacked by a wave, not dull and aching like the incessant rub that’s left me raw. My knuckles are red and some of the skin is peeling off. I punch again, harder, harder. I want to see blood. I punch once more, fall against the wall, and spin with the room as I suck on my knuckles. I can’t decide if the throbbing hurts or feels good, my lines are now so blurred. I know that later it will hurt more. Everything always hurts more later.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
To Do Penance
ON ASH WEDNESDAY WE ENTER Lent, a period that forgives darkened pasts and welcomes in a future of light. We sit for Mass and receive a smudge of dirt across our foreheads from last year’s burnt palms, to signify that we are all sinners; that we are repentant creatures. We participate in the Holy Eucharist and head into Lent with pure hearts. Only my heart is anything but pure. It’s burdened and dark and damaged and neglected. With each day that passes and Tom and I share a house but not our lives, I feel my heart grow even tighter, like a hand clenched in an arthritic fist.
My emotions open and scab over and reopen again, like wounds that cannot heal. I continue to ache for Tom’s pain, but I also feel like I’m worthy of forgiveness. Short of public humiliation or wearing a scarlet A, I feel that I’ve expressed a more than adequate level of sorrow. What I
need now is to be absolved of my wrongdoing. What I need now is for Tom to stop beating me up every day with his creepy politeness and icy distance and offhanded jabs. If God can forgive me, then why can’t you? I want to scream at Tom. My insides are so bruised, I’m surprised my skin doesn’t shine purple.
I wake up every morning, like the littlest kid in the schoolyard, defenses up, feet dancing, dukes flying. Each day I’m ready to say, “Enough!” I’m ready to call Tom out, insist on a little respect, demand a trace of dignity, for God’s sake.
But then I see Tom, and though he’s still flaming mad, he’s also hurt, a hurt that has built a home in his eyes. I see it, even when he’s playing with the kids. That’s the only time I get to look at him these days. When he doesn’t know that I’m watching. And when I do—see him—all my toughness turns to fluff, and I’m gooey and sorry and reduced once again.
When we at last celebrate Easter, a calm that is closer to apathy spreads through me the way tiny drops of water seek thirsty roots. I continue to be sorry to my bones, but I can’t fall on my sword another day. I need a break from hurting.
The days continue to pass and the kids are busy in school. Sally is reading Anne Frank and writing a paper of her own for her composition class. She’s chosen to write about Daisy, our dog, and Sally’s fear that she’ll someday die. I speak briefly with her teacher, who assures me that this is typical, that this is the age when children start pondering the death of family members, pets. It’s the age when children learn that sad and bad things can happen: sickness, the loss of a parent’s job, a move to another school. Her teacher tells me, statistically speaking, that this is the age of divorce. Many parents make it to the ten-, twelve-year mark and then call it quits. In the blink of an eye, children go from a stable two-parent family to splitting time with Mom in one place, Dad in another, often a stepparent not far behind. Unfortunately, her teacher tells me, it’s the end of an innocence in many regards.
I listen, nod, and process the notion that Tom and I seem quite likely, or almost certain, to contribute to this sad statistic, our solid family tree splintering into two, the strength we’ve found in numbers gone forever.
To think that Sally is growing up, that she has dipped not just a toe but an entire foot in the waters of a mature life. To think that she comprehends, on some level, that a girl like Anne Frank had feared for her life, that a holocaust was reality. I don’t want Sally to have these thoughts. I don’t want her to worry about sad and bad things. I don’t want her to know that six million innocent people were killed just because of who they were. I don’t want her to know that terrorists are capable of flying planes into our skyscrapers, that creeps lurk behind corners, that her mother’s indiscretion could rob her of her two-parent childhood. I want her childhood to be pure and perfect. I want her to have 100 percent confidence that her parents will always be here and her grandparents’ door will always be open, with them welcoming her in with the smell of sauce on the stove and bread in the oven.
But then I think, well maybe a little dose of reality is a good thing, because clearly Sally’s life won’t always be cannoli at Nana’s and a game of H-O-R-S-E with Dad. Surely the time will come when something bad will happen: a friend will get hurt, a family member will be stricken with cancer, her dog Daisy will die. Surely the time will come when she will learn a truth that will hit her so hard it will flip her inside out. My thoughts blur and render—back and forth—at the reality of this. And then a thought I’ve never wholly allowed myself to consider bubbles to the surface: Sally might someday learn the truth about Landon James.
Emily has said good-bye to the ancient history of the Greeks and Romans, stepping eagerly into the Middle Ages, an era that appeals to her with its lords and ladies and colorfully dressed minstrels. She’s learning about the rise of Christianity, the role the Church played in people’s lives, providing for them in the way the city-state no longer could. One night she’s regaling us with the characteristics of a castle, how there are layers and layers of defense: the moat, the stone, the tower, the keep. “Why do you think they needed so much protection?” she asks. Sally answers before Tom or I have a chance to sugarcoat a response. “If you hold the keys to the kingdom, you’re a target,” she says flatly, drawing a finger across her neck in a cutthroat gesture. “People want what others have, and they’re willing to fight for it.”
My girls, and their capacity to learn, floor me. I marvel at their ability to memorize lengthy poems by Longfellow and Kipling, just as easily as they can reduce fractions and measure angles. I don’t remember learning, when I was in the third and fourth grades, what they’re learning. I remember practicing swearwords in the bathroom with my friends, talking about boys, and holding a stick to my mouth, pretending to smoke a cigarette like bad Sandy in Grease. My girls are so mature, so smart; their capacity to take in so much hits me hard. The pride I feel for their accomplishments is excessive, like water boiling.
And the little guys. They’re learning to hold their pencils correctly, write in giant block letters, identify the days of the week, the months, the seasons. They proclaim their jobs each day. “I was the weatherman!” or “I was the book selector!” I adore that they’re small, and it pains me in a certain way that they long to be big like their sisters. I want to tell them to slow down. “Just wait!” I want to holler. “You’ll be there soon enough.” But the way they emulate their older siblings is too adorable to interrupt.
“We need to do our homework, too,” the boys will say, pulling out their workbooks and crayons, sliding their chairs next to their sisters, basking in their oldness.
Then I do the math. When the boys are ten years old—the age Sally is now—the girls will be fifteen and sixteen. Then I want to cry, thinking that by the time the boys are oohing and aahing over Roman torture and gladiators being thrown into the ring with lions, my baby girls will be begging their father to teach them to drive, rolling their eyes at me every time I say no, and confiding in their girlfriends their darkest secrets. A few years later, they’ll be on their way to a college dorm room, dragging with them an overstuffed duffel and a hot pot. The thought that Tom and I and our children might weather these years separately—two homes, joint custody—makes me ache.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Restore Sanity
TOM
I NOW UNDERSTAND THE APPEAL of alcohol. It shouldn’t be a revelation, but it is, as I’ve always done my best to keep my distance. If you drink enough of it, it dulls the pain to a manageable level. If you drink more than enough of it, it makes the pain go away altogether. For two months now I’ve been driving down to Virginia Beach on the weekends. Patrick and I work all day Saturday and Sunday, cleaning gutters, building additions, finishing basements. By six o’clock my back feels like metal rods have rusted inside it, my feet throb, and my arms hang like heavy strips of wet blanket, but there’s something intensely satisfying in seeing progress. Something measurable.
Patrick and I are getting along great. We’ve switched roles. He’s taking care of me for once. He’s strong and sober and back together with his family, and I’m the brother who crashes on his sofa. Most nights, after Patrick and I have cleaned up from our day’s work, Kathy cooks a nice dinner and the four of us sit on the back porch, eating, drinking iced tea. It’s wild seeing Patrick so put together, taking care of his family. Mia cracks me up. She squeals and giggles when I tickle her tummy, reminding me so much of the little guys right now, but also of Sally and Em when they were five years old. God, it’s like it was yesterday. Walking them to school on their first days of kindergarten. Mia makes me ache for my kids, but being away for the weekends is the only salvation I have.
After dinner I usually tell Patrick and Kathy that I’m going for a walk. Patrick offers to come, and I always say no, spend some time with your family. The fact that I’m gone for hours isn’t exactly crafty on my part. Patrick must know that I’ve gone for a drink. I never say so, and feel guilty as hell that I do it, when he’s t
rying so hard to stay sober. But hell, this is my time of need, and if I can’t get a drink or two every night, the crappiness of the situation will bury me.
Each night I head in the same direction. Straight down the boardwalk to Sandy’s Bar, a dark dive with pool tables and a jukebox.
There’s a bartender there named Chloe. She wears tight, cutoff jeans and a halter top. One time I asked her if she grew up around here, and she took it as an invitation to tell me her life story. She’s never been married. She’s a single mom of a five-year-old daughter. The father of her child hit the road at the sight of the first ultrasound. He came back once, Chloe told me, held Ava—their child—and then shook his head, saying that fatherhood wasn’t for him. In high school Chloe wanted to be an artist. Sometimes she draws sketches of the bar patrons on the back of cocktail napkins and gives them to the guys like a parting gift.
Chloe doesn’t know a thing about me. It’s almost like she senses that it’s better not to ask. The way she rambles on about her life is exactly what I want, exactly what I need. By any standard she’s had a tough life, yet she’s always smiling, always bubbly and cheerful, like she’s just grateful to have made it this far.
By the time I get to Sandy’s tonight, Chloe’s outside, pulling the door closed with a heavy thud.
“Closing up already?”
“You’d never believe! Our water went out,” she says. “We had no choice but to close. They promised we’ll be set by tomorrow.”
“You have the night off then?”
She looks at me with a sidelong glance, and I realize what I said could be misconstrued. “I do!” she says cheerfully.
“Well, have a good night,” I say. “See you tomorrow.”
“Yes, definitely!” she says. “If they deliver the water, anyway.”
“It’ll be fine,” I say, smiling. “See you.” I start to walk away.
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