Acts of Contrition

by Handford, Jennifer

  “And neither do I. Don’t question my love for Sally,” he says. “That’s never been the issue.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know you love her. I’m sorry I said that. This is no time to make things worse. I have no business laying into you now, or anytime, for that matter.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that they’re not your family.”

  At dinner I drink three beers and I’m nearly drunk. For about half an hour I relish the cloudy space I’m occupying, where I’m not constantly examining faces and scrutinizing comments for subtext. I relish being altered, how it makes the plum sauce on the moo shu pork taste richer, sweeter, how it makes Aunt Elaine’s eyebrows seem cartoonish and drawn on, how it warms my cheeks and wraps its arms around me like an electric blanket. Tom drives us back to Colleen’s. I fall asleep in Sean’s recliner in my clothes, the underwire of my bra digging into my ribs, a chenille blanket tucked into my sides. I’m lucid enough to consider getting up to go to the bathroom, to run a toothbrush across my teeth, but I can’t move, literally cannot move, like I’ve swallowed cement.

  At three o’clock in the morning, I wake up. My tongue is fuzzy and my eyelashes are goopy, stuck together. I tiptoe to the bathroom, put my mouth under the faucet, and drink what seems like a gallon of water. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and use the toilet.

  I stand there in the dark hallway outside the bathroom, wondering where everyone is. I imagine the aunts are in the guest bedroom with the two twin beds, and Tom and Patrick must be in the family room on the sofas. I sneak into the family room and see Tom sprawled on the leather sofa. Patrick isn’t on the other one. Maybe he went back to his house. I consider lying down on the vacant one, but first I kneel next to Tom, run my fingers through his hair, over his shoulder. He opens his eyes, looks at me, and pulls back the blanket covering him to make room for me.

  Inviting me in.

  I am a woman dying in the desert, and Tom has offered me water.

  I slip in next to him, my back curved into his stomach, his arm over mine. I lay there, wide awake. I know Tom is, too. I can feel his eyelashes flutter on my hair. Neither of us says a word. We just breathe, frozen, as if turned to stone by Medusa’s glare. I have an itch on my nose but I don’t dare scratch it. The slightest move might be enough to break the spell, to bring Tom back to his senses with a tidy and formal “Okay, then, you’d better get back to your recliner.”

  Finally, I hear Tom doze into sleep. I close my eyes, too, and drift off, for the first time in nearly five months, in the embrace of my husband’s arms.

  As I’m getting ready to leave the next morning to drive back home, I learn that Tom plans to stay another week, to see his father through a string of follow-up visits, physical therapy, and a meeting with the nutritionist. When I ask Tom why he needs to stay so long, why Patrick can’t do what Tom’s planning to do, he shrugs, and I realize that he doesn’t really have an answer other than not wanting to come home.

  He walks me to the car.

  “Do you have any stuff?” he asks.

  “Just my purse,” I say. “I kind of left right away when your mom called.”

  “Give the kids a kiss for me,” he says.

  “I can’t wait to see them. It feels like it’s been a lifetime.”

  “Two and a half days with my father can do that.”

  I smile, slip into the driver’s seat, start the car. Tom pats my forearm resting on the window, a slight rub. “Okay, then,” he says. “See you when I see you.”

  The old Tom would have given me a list of safety precautions, would have reminded me to fill up the tank before I hit the highway, would have made sure that my cell phone was charged and the spare tire was in good shape. The old Tom would have programmed the GPS, warned me against creeps at the rest stops, would have made me promise to call the second I got home. The old Tom would have kissed me good-bye.

  I’m only a block away when I start to bawl: fat, giant, soaking tears that make my chest heave and leave me fighting for breath. I rub at my face, smearing mascara. Blow my nose and cry some more. The old Tom would have cautioned me against driving while having a nervous breakdown, but the new Tom is rationing his compassion and affection, doling it out in scant pieces, storing up the rest in case there’s another war.

  When I enter our home, the kids are schizophrenic. At first they tackle me—literally tackle me—with hugs and kisses until I’m splayed on the floor with four suckerfish feeding on me.

  “Mommy, Mommy!” Danny pleads. “It’s you!”

  “You’ve been gone forever!” Dom cries.

  Sally cups my face with her hands and turns it in her direction, so that she has my full attention. “Mom, I read a 527-page book in two days!”

  Emily weaves her head under her sister’s arm until her mouth is an inch from mine. “Mommy, oh, Mommy, you are a beautiful sight!”

  This devotion, this uninhibited gush of pure love, this dam breaking is followed almost as vehemently by a chorus of “We don’t want Nana and Pop to leave! Can they stay? Do you have another trip to go on? Pop was just going to play a game of checkers with us. Nana was going to make snickerdoodles.”

  That night I let my parents take care of me along with the kids. Mom cuts me a gigantic wedge of lasagna and I eat it in a matter of minutes. I wash it down with a glass of pinot and then use my leftover bread to sop up any sauce left on my plate. Other than a little Chinese food last night, I realize I’ve barely eaten in two days. My full stomach pushes against the buttons on my pants. I slouch into my chair with another glass of wine. I tell Mom and Dad the whole story, about Sean and the heart attack, about how Colleen broke down when he wasn’t looking, how Tom flew to Ireland and back in a matter of seventy-two hours.

  Mom fills me in on the kids.

  Later, after the kids are in their rooms and on their way to a good night’s sleep, I settle in next to Mom and she asks me how it really went. I tell her about Tom, how he’s still mad but how he and I shared the sofa last night. A smile pours across her face like sunshine and her eyes glisten. “See!” she says. “He’s coming around.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Humble

  TOM RETURNS HOME FROM VIRGINIA Beach with his shoulders relaxed and his fists unclenched. I take that as a good sign. It seems that our relationship is veering in the right direction, a few degrees of leaning, a tilt. It certainly hasn’t yet turned a corner; we’re still degrees and degrees away from forming a U-turn back to our old life, but the blinker is on. That first night we settle into bed, the gap that usually occupies the space between us is smaller, more a backyard than a football field.

  The next night, I take a chance and place my hand on top of his as we watch a Seinfeld rerun in bed. A few nights later, I pull his head onto my lap and rake my fingers through his hair. The following night, we make love for the first time since last summer.

  “I’m sorry,” I cry afterward. “I’m so sorry for all of this hurt you’ve been put through. I’m so sorry for everything. I’m mostly sorry about the lie, how I carried it all of these years. How I didn’t trust that our relationship was strong enough to survive it. I just want to be sure that you know that I am sorry to my bones.”

  “I know you are,” Tom says. “And I know that marriages have recovered from worse. We’re still a family. We can rebuild.”

  “I know we can,” I agree, so thrilled to hear those exact words.

  “We stand a chance,” Tom says. “But Mary, I’m different now. I’m changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  “What we went through,” he says. “What it meant to our family. There’s no turning back. It’s part of us now. We can’t pretend that it’s not. We can move forward,” he says, “but there’s no going back.”

  We hold each other throughout the night, but once again I feel anxious. What I want more than anything is to go back to exactly how things were, our state of being, our familyhood, our constancy. But I know Tom is ri
ght. Whether I accept it or not, our world has been bombed. We’ve been through a war, and now we’re battered veterans, covered in scars, traumatized, but also maybe stronger. This thought bubbles inside me: the irrevocability of it all, my wish for things to stay the same, the knowledge that it is no longer an option. By three in the morning, I drift off to sleep. I dream of bombs and ashes and every bit of life turning to dust, and when I wake up with a start, I wonder if I will ever feel peace again. With my heart thumping in my chest, I place my hand over it and stare at the ceiling. For the briefest moment, I gain the sense that there is life sprouting from this death, buds peeking through the soil of our ruin. The road back has been destroyed, and the road forward is riddled with land mines. But the truth has laid a new path, cobblestones spaced in leap lengths apart. Maybe, I think.

  As affirmation, and confirmation, and validation of life, the morning sun sneaks through the blinds and I hear the birds chirping. When the children-grenades bomb on our bed, there is an explosion of love and bonding that we haven’t shared in months. There is no separation between Tom and me. We are a pile of people, crisscrossed kindling, indomitable. A pile of sticks that together cannot be broken. We’ll make it, I think.

  The following Sunday we’re seated in the pews of St. Andrew’s. We’re a few minutes early, so I crane my neck around to check out the line for confession. Only one lady. I ask Tom if it’s okay if I slide out for a second.

  When the light turns green I slip into the box. “Hello, Father,” I say, making the sign of the cross. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  “What are your sins, my child?”

  “I’ve housed a lie that has hurt my husband, but he and I have worked through the deception. Now I wonder about my daughter. She, too, was part of the lie. What responsibility to the truth do I have to her?”

  “Your responsibility is to be her mother. A child should not be concerned with adult matters.”

  “What about when she’s older?” I ask.

  “When she’s older, you’ll make decisions based on who she is then.”

  The days that follow are anything but normal. Tom and I attempt to get back our normal footing, but our house—our life—is booby-trapped at every turn, land mines buried just below the surface. On a Saturday morning the girls are playing Monopoly and Emily storms away in a huff.

  “She’s a cheater!” Emily yells, accusing Sally of stealing money from the bank. “A cheater!”

  “Am not!” Sally counters. “You’re a liar!”

  Tom and I issue uneasy chuckles, try to settle the girls down, but the words cheater and liar are now loaded, as inflammatory as racial epithets. They’re hard to ignore. They hover, and make Tom and me even more sensitive to each other. I want Tom to act like old Tom, mussing my hair, coiling his arm around me, snapping a towel at me, but the new Tom is polite, says, “Excuse me,” asks for items to be passed, misses jokes.

  And I’m the same. Tom and I are a pair of damaged goods that have been repaired, but we’re far from whole. Look close and see the cracks in our foundation. We’ve been glued back together, but we’re not strong.

  At night we flip on the television to watch a show. Every channel is a drama or comedy about a cheating husband, a wife stepping out, a ludicrous string of lies knotted with betrayals and deceits.

  Then the news: photos of Landon, the upcoming election. Coverage is thick.

  By the time our heads hit the pillow each night, we’re exhausted. Exhausted from trying so hard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Make Amends

  ON JUNE 15 SCHOOL LETS out. A day later, with our minivan crammed with suitcases, coolers, and boogie boards, and with Tom’s and my hopes for a healing and restorative vacation, we head south to Hatteras Island, the serene coastline that washes up the edges of North Carolina.

  After renting for years, we finally wrote the check for the down payment and bought a small house only about a hundred yards from the beach. Tom found the place one morning while he was out jogging and drove me and the girls by it later that day.

  “Where?” I asked back then, my eyes darting in every direction. “Where’s the house?”

  Tom pointed it out. Shrouded in overgrown bushes and sea grasses, the house sat pitifully. Its windows were covered with plywood, and its roof sagged, as if tired of providing shelter.

  “Seriously, Tom?”

  “Can’t you see the potential, Mare? A little work, and it’ll be great.”

  “Maybe they’ll pay us to take it,” I said, but Tom just slung his arm around me and squeezed me tight. “You’ll see.”

  That first year Tom made four trips down, twice with his brother and twice with my father. Collectively they repaired the roof, painted it, mowed down the jungle of bushes and grasses. By the time we arrived as a family the following June, the dilapidated shack we’d seen the summer before had emerged as a cozy cottage. Not quite a swan, but certainly no longer the ugly duckling.

  That was a nice summer. The girls were four and five years old and Patrick was better than ever. He had been sober for nearly two years, had met Kathy, his soon-to-be wife, and was employed as a project manager for a thriving housing company at the peak of the real estate market. It was a happy time for Tom, having his brother strong and healthy, working on the house side by side with him.

  Patrick and I even became close that summer, as I welcomed Kathy into our lives, became her friend, and helped her plan their wedding. Patrick appreciated my gestures, and he and I entered a period of truce, a détente that lasted until a few years later, when the bottom fell out of the housing market, and he lost his job and went on a bender, ending up on our doorstep—belligerent and cursing like a mean drunk in front of our two young daughters.

  Each night at the cottage we rolled out and opened sleeping bags, Tom and I lying on our sides, Sally and Emily wedged firmly in the cave of our curves. We’d tell stories of the nights when they were born, how the moon was bright, or the sky was a magical shade of blue, or how there were oodles of fireflies. “More,” the girls would beg, and Tom wouldn’t disappoint, embellishing the embellished stories even more until he’d spun a blanket out of chocolate and pillows stuffed with marshmallow, all because our darling daughters had entered the world, deserving no less. They’d fall asleep with smiles on their faces and I’d think about what it would be like to be carefree, truly free from my cares, and I would fall into slumber, too, pretending it were so.

  Today we make it to the house by one o’clock in the afternoon. The kids are ready to get out. Before the girls’ feet even hit the driveway, they’re already begging for the beach.

  “We’ll go,” I say. “I promise! Just give me a few minutes to get situated.”

  “I have to pee,” Dom says, holding his crotch, doing the pee dance.

  “Follow me,” I say, grabbing the plastic shopping bag that holds the extra roll of toilet paper, just in case. I sit on the edge of the tub while Dom cheers on his wee-wee—“Come on, potty! You can do it!” I can hear the girls storming through the house, remembering, reacquainting themselves.

  “Look at all of the board games!” Emily exclaims, as if she’s just been given front-row tickets to The Phantom of the Opera. Board games! At home the girls scowl at me when I suggest a board game. At the beach it’s like tasting soda for the first time.

  I hear Tom humming, pulling the blinds, and adjusting the thermostat. Even before our crisis, At the Beach Tom was an infinitely more relaxed version of Everyday Tom. I’m praying that this trip has powers, a touch of ambrosia that bestows permanence to our marriage.

  Dom finishes, washes, and then heads to his bedroom with his brother. The room is nearly the size of a walk-in closet, but it holds a bunk bed, which in the boys’ estimation is the equivalent of a roller coaster. Both climb the ladder and lie on their bellies, arranging their dinosaurs on the top rim like protectors of a fortress.

  Once the girls have made their rounds, they’re back at my feet b
egging for the beach. And while the mom in me would rather tinker about the house, unpacking and cleaning, getting the kitchen organized and planning dinner, I know it’s not fair to make the kids wait. The first trip to the beach is akin to Christmas morning. The anticipation is electric, and nothing will ground them until their toes are wet.

  Tom sees me scrambling to get the cold food in the refrigerator. “I’ll take them,” he says. “If you want to hang back.”

  My heart constricts. Post-crisis Tom is too polite, too helpful. He gives me a wide berth and I despise it. I want old Tom, my husband who would holler at me to hurry up, who would tell me that the beach was waiting, that I could organize the fridge later. I want old Tom, my husband who took liberties with me because he had the confidence to do so, a confidence that came from the propriety of knowing I was his alone.

  “No way!” I say in a voice that’s meant to sound perky but just sounds false, like I’m trying too hard. “I want to go, too.”

  So we pack up our totes and head down to the footpath that leads to the beach. The distance to the sand is just tolerable. Any farther and the kids would complain. Any closer and we wouldn’t have been able to afford the house, shack or not.

  Once we crest the grassy dune, Sally takes off running, plowing straight into the waves, as grateful to feel the water on her skin as a dolphin that had been drying up on the shore. It seems like it was only a few years ago when she was still holding tight to Tom, lifting her legs, clinging to his body, adhered to his chest like cellophane. Now she enters the water alone, full of too much confidence and too little fear. I have just recently read an article about the development of children’s brains: how their propensity for risk grows faster than the reasoned logic to temper it. That’s where we are with Sally: the invincible stage.