God, Tom is good at this: holding a meeting, setting an agenda. No wonder he manages a team of twenty engineers.
“I agree,” Landon says.
We all sit down at the picnic table. Tom and me on one side. Landon on the other. My handbag is sitting heavy and open at Landon’s end of the table. I watch him twiddle with the strap like he’s nervous.
“The first ground rule is for us to always put Sally first,” Tom says. “No matter what selfish motive we might have for something, we all need to agree that the only person who matters is the child. Agreed?”
“Of course,” Landon says.
“Definitely,” I agree.
“The second ground rule is that we must never threaten each other. Arguably, we all have something to lose here. We of course don’t want Sally learning the truth at a time other than our decided timetable. You, Landon, of course have your career to lose. The last thing a new senator would want is to be revealed as a man who fathered a child and then never saw her, correct?”
“Undeniably,” Landon says, his mouth moving in tiny, nervous twitches.
“And you wouldn’t want too much exposed about your father in Tucson,” Tom says. “About his finances…how he spends his money.”
My eyes widen as I stare at Tom, because whatever he’s alluding to is news to me.
Landon has paled. His mouth still twitching, he nods. It’s clear he understands Tom’s information. “I thought ground-rule number two was we don’t threaten each other,” he says.
Tom nods. “It’s important for us to understand one another from the start, I think. For us to agree that we all have skin in the game. None of us wants to live with a gun to the head, correct?”
“Yes,” Landon says.
“The third ground rule,” Tom says, “is that you—Landon—must not call Mary. When you call her, it disrespects our marriage and makes me angry.”
Landon’s face pulls tight. He diverts his eyes, fiddles with his tie.
“Okay, Tom,” Landon says.
“Let me just say it again: You calling Mary is bullshit. Don’t call her, Landon. Ever.”
“I won’t.” Landon’s eyes widen, like he knows the knockout punch is coming.
“Okay,” Tom says, something settling in him. When he speaks again, he does so almost gently. “All that said, Landon, I believe you when you say Sally is in your thoughts. I can see how she would be.”
Landon looks up at him, still shaking off the last series of punches. He seems confused by this detour in the conversation. “It’s…been hard,” he stammers. “Ever since I saw her at the Christmas parade. I…yes. I think about her a lot.”
“And yet you’re not ready to know her?” Tom says. “You’re curious, but you’re not ready to reveal yourself as her biological father. Is that correct?”
“I wouldn’t in any case without your and Mary’s permission, but even if I had it, I couldn’t,” Landon says. “Not now. Not in my position.”
Tom nods. “The way I see it, we have six years. You have a job to do as a United States senator during those six years and we have a family to raise—Sally especially, as she’s on the brink of being a teenager. I’m sure we have some challenging years ahead of us.”
“Okay,” Landon says. “So what are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that we table this discussion until then. Clearly, with this being a new situation for all of us, none of us can claim to have the answers right now. As time goes on, each of us will probably waver in our positions. Six years from now, Sally will be seventeen, on her way to college. Then we’ll gauge her emotional maturity, see if it seems to be a good time. It might be. It might never be.”
“And now?” Landon wants to know.
“And now,” Tom says, “we’re willing to post photos of Sally on Facebook for you to see. A number of times a year, so that you can see what she’s up to. So that you can follow her growth.”
Landon sits back as though stunned. “You would do that?” he asks, and when his voice cracks and his eyes well with tears, I look away because seeing him cry is going to make me cry, too.
“Yes, Landon,” Tom says. “We’re willing to do that. I would suggest—from a security standpoint, seeing that it’s my line of work—that you not comment on the photos. That might pique a curious hacker’s interest.”
“I won’t,” Landon says. “I’ll just look.”
Tom stands up, pulls out his business card, and hands it to Landon. “Send an e-mail to me at the address on this card, and I’ll let you know which Facebook page to submit your friend request to. And if you need to get ahold of us, call me, not Mary. She’s no longer your friend, Landon. She’s my wife. I need for you to respect that. If you do, I’ll be more than fair. We’ll work through this together.”
Landon stands, wipes his eyes, and holds out his hand for Tom to shake. “I’m grateful, Tom. I’m truly grateful.”
“Okay,” Tom says. “Let’s all get on with our lives now.”
We watch Landon walk away. When he’s gone, I turn to Tom, fall into his arms, and kiss him on the mouth. “I love you,” I say. “I love that you are calm and even and reasonable and capable of making anyone—even Landon James—feel better for knowing you. I love the way you handled that. I love that you made it a win-win for everyone. I love…I just love you, Tom.”
He nods but takes me by the arms and moves me away from him. “I love you, too, Mare,” he says, his eyes drilled into mine, “but this isn’t a done deal. I am now complicit in this deception, and whether I wanted that burden or not, I now carry this truth—this truth that Sally doesn’t know—along with you and Landon. I don’t like it. I don’t like that she believes one thing but the truth is something else.”
“But you are her truth,” I say. “A father is the person who raised her. How would it be different if she were adopted? What does the DNA have to do with it?”
“Nothing,” Tom says. “All I’m saying is that we’re not finished with this business. At some point we will need to make the decision to either tell Sally who her biological father is or make the decision to keep it from her.”
As we stand and prepare to leave, we see Landon walking back in our direction. Tom and I look at each other questioningly, then back to Landon as he reaches us.
“I slipped a bookmark into your purse,” Landon says. “For Sally, because she likes to read.”
I open my handbag and dig around until I feel something thin and stiff. I reach for it, peer into my bag. Laminated in plastic, it’s a picture of the Library of Congress. Down the length of it is a list of great American authors: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Frost, Hawthorne, Hemingway. A tassel in blue and red springs from the top like a firecracker. I exhale slowly, rub my thumb smoothly across it.
“I’m grateful for our deal,” Landon says. “I don’t want to start out on the wrong foot. I don’t want to sneak anything, even a bookmark in Mary’s purse.” The entire time Landon is looking at Tom, not me. Landon admires Tom’s strength, I know from experience, because the times when I was strong were the times when Landon wanted me the most.
“We’re square,” Tom says, and in unison they nod at each other, until Landon finally turns and walks away.
Tom reaches for the bookmark and we start down the path. When we pass by a trash can, he tosses it in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Grace
ON PALM SUNDAY WE SIT for one of the longest masses of the year as the priest and congregation work their way through the Passion of Christ. Ironically, it’s Emily’s favorite. She sees it as a script, a play with parts, and is thrilled when the crowd gets to pipe in with its condemning voice: “Crucify him!” Sally’s fooling with the strip of palm she was given as we came in. Each year she tries to remember how to fold it into a cross, some origami procedure I vaguely remember from my childhood. I watch her brows knit together, her chin jut defiantly, and now that the truth is out, it almost seems unreal that I kept the secret for as long as I d
id; that Tom never looked at his oldest child and saw the resemblance to the man I’d known for a decade. But why would he? Why would any of us see something we weren’t looking for? Why wouldn’t we see only the things we wanted to see: her amber hair, her athleticism, her stubbornness—all just like Tom’s.
I look over at Tom, send him a look I imagine I’ll be giving him for the rest of my life, something that blends together sorrow and grief and love and gratitude, something that conveys that his brokenness is my doing and I know it.
I know now that God provided me with everything I needed, if only I had seen: clues manifest in Patrick—the addict; Tom—the savior; Teresa—the faithful; even Landon—my temptation. Had I allowed myself to work the twelve steps—to admit my powerlessness, to find hope, and to surrender—things might have been different. I clung to Landon when I should have let go, should have known I could jump from the cliff when the water was out with the blind faith that it would rush back in time, should have believed that something better was waiting for me. I lied to Tom because I didn’t trust he would love me through my failings. And I continued to lie because each time I took inventory of the store, it was so full I couldn’t stand the thought of going under. But I should have. I should have trusted.
On Good Friday I spend a couple of hours in the pews of St. Andrew’s working through my tangle of thoughts. Notions that once seemed unbearable, forbidden, strictly prohibited, settle in my brain with a soft maybe. Now that Tom knows about Sally, now that Landon has a sliver of a presence in our lives, now that everything is out in the open with the adults, I begin to ponder, consider, the possibility that Sally might someday know the truth.
All those months, I prayed for it to get easier, for our life—Tom’s and mine—to revert to normalcy, for my life to be exactly as it was. But that life was a lie and in my selfish quest to maintain it, I failed to open myself up to the possibility of change. Different might be uncomfortable, unknown—but perhaps better. And maybe from our destruction, we could be remade. As if Sally, with her Greek myths and Bible stories, was trying to warn me all along: All life comes from death.
The truth is, these children aren’t really ours anyway. If I’m lucky, I’ll have Sally for another decade before she launches herself into her future of many decades without me. Someday something in her might alert me that she would be open to hearing the truth. Someday she might hate me for the truth. And then there might be another day, months or maybe years later, when she might forgive me for the truth. I know now that I’m not the custodian of it. Tom has taught me that. It is its own entity, a beast full of steam and vigor of its own that I—a mere mortal—cannot house. We can move forward, but we can never go back.
Easter morning the kids are pumped with excitement over their baskets spilling with candy and with the electric rush of the egg hunt. Tom has hidden a hundred eggs around our house and in the yard. The four children rush around in a frenzy, searching behind sofa cushions inside the house, deep into the bushes outside. I instruct the girls to overlook the obvious ones, to let their brothers find those. By the time the four of them have collectively found about ninety of the eggs, they’re stalled. Tom has hidden some in tricky places and Sally, the competitive one, is getting mad. She insists on a hint and grumbles when Tom shakes his head no. Emily couldn’t care less about finding all one hundred eggs. She’s tired of looking and wants breakfast.
By the time we’re finished, we’re running late. Mass starts at ten thirty and it’s nearly nine forty-five, and the kids are still in their pajamas. Tom’s rushing the boys onto the toilet, and then I’m dressing them in their Sunday clothes and sticking a toothbrush in each of their mouths. For the girls, we zip and tie and help buckle stiff sandals, order them to scrub their teeth, and slap brushes in their hands to bring in the car. By the time we’re headed in the direction of St. Andrew’s, I’m sweating through my silk camisole, too hot to apply makeup to my perspiring face. We rush into the church and find that it’s packed. The twice-a-year folks have crammed the pews and we’re lucky when we’re able to find a small stretch of wall to lean against.
A cool current of air breezes by me, snaking up my blouse, reaching the back of my neck. Slowly, my breath moderates. The choir starts in on the Gloria and my breathing slows even more. I look across to Tom, the kids, and my shoulders drop. The readings, the response, the Gospel, and all of a sudden I’m lifted to stand straighter, to leave the support of the wall behind me. A shiver or a shudder slithers through me and ends with a teardrop free-falling onto the strap covering my leather sandal.
All those years I believed that I was living with my back up against the wall, that the truth was holding me down, but that was never the case. The truth wasn’t pinning me down, I was pinning it down, pushing it mercilessly against the wall with my hand over its mouth. For ten, twenty years I’ve been making deals, bargaining, negotiating. If Landon loves me, I’ll give him another year. If I’m allowed to keep my secret, I’ll be the best wife and mother ever. If Tom forgives me, everything will be all right. But I could no more wrestle the truth than I could tame the seas. I know that now. I accept that I am powerless. And for the first time in decades, I feel strong.
I won’t be entirely free until Sally knows the truth, and that is years away, if ever. For now, I’ll use these years to get ready—to prepare myself for that conversation and its consequences, to lean on God with childlike faith, and to make amends to all in my family, who have forgiven my trespasses.
READERS’ GUIDE
Q. What was the genesis of this novel? Did a particular character or situation come to mind first?
A. My favorite books are those written by writers who love the “ordinary,” Anne Tyler, Sue Miller. I’m the same way. I’m most interested in characters who are not spectacular in any manner, other than the remarkable ways in which they reveal themselves. I had been thinking about my Mary character, kind of seeing her in my mind: a woman steadfast in her longing for marriage and children, someone who valued a traditional, moral life. But, of course, what does that mean? No one is without fault, so the idea of placing good Mary in a life built on a lie was intriguing to me.
Q. At the heart of this book is the moral dilemma of telling the truth versus burying it deep within a marriage.
A. When husband Tom learns of Mary’s infidelity, he asserts that he has never once lied to her. Mary counters, “That’s only because you’ve never had anything worth lying about.” Thus the philosophical question: Does everyone have a breaking point? For Mary, offering the truth for its own sake wasn’t enough to risk what she held most dear: her husband, her family, her happiness.
Q. You named the book Acts of Contrition, and certainly there is reason for Mary to feel contrite. How did the title come to you?
A. The title came easily. If Mary were sorry—for the sake of it, because she did wrong and was regretful for it—then her contrition might have been “perfect.” But Mary was seduced by the good life: her husband, her children, and the life she built with them. In a sense, she made a deal with the devil. So she was contrite, yes, but the reader wonders about her contrition. Certainly it was imperfect. She was more concerned about getting caught, about losing what she had, than about coming clean for the sake of it. Is this to say she was a bad person? Absolutely not. It’s to say that she was human.
Q. Why do readers connect with Mary’s dilemma?
A. I think Acts appeals to women who love reading about marriage and motherhood, and the undercurrents of domestic life that are often messy and rife with secrets. And certainly the juxtaposition of the tumultuous love affair that consumed Mary in her twenties against the reliable, steady ship of a marriage that occupied her in her thirties is something with which women can relate.
Q. Mary is one of four daughters. Catholic, Italian, connected closely to her siblings and parents. How did you imagine those characters?
A. When I was little I had a great friend, and she was Catholic, Italian, the youngest of four gir
ls. I used to love going to her house, seeing her mother at the stove cooking sauce, her father pushed back in the recliner after work, and the drama of four girls filling the entire house. In my mind, it was a happy house built on strong foundations. I thought it would be the perfect life for Mary.
Q. You use Tom’s brother, Patrick, as Mary’s mirror, in a sense—and Teresa, her sister, as Mary’s foil. And there is a definite theme of addiction that pours through the text.
A. Mary struggles with Tom’s brother, Patrick, because she recognizes how much alike they are. Patrick is addicted to alcohol, but Mary is no less afflicted; she’s addicted to people. And both rationalize their way out of their addictions. There is a big reliance on bargaining and negotiating one’s actions. I was also drawn to the AA 12-Step program and the similarities it bears to the Act of Contrition prayer. Both require that we take a certain inventory of our lives, admit to our wrongs, and “cash in” the chips we rely on to justify our behavior.
Q. Tom questions Mary’s “order” for dealing with the lie, specifically that she told Landon first, rather than him. Later Tom wonders if her reason for doing so was because she was hoping Landon would woo her away. Did Mary hope for that?
A. I really don’t think so. Mary felt that her order was to tell Landon, get his word he would stay out of her life, and then go to Tom. I don’t believe she was hoping to be swept away. I do believe she was possibly more comfortable with Landon than with Tom, seeing that she had known Landon for so long and relatively speaking, had known Tom for only a short while. But ultimately, I don’t think Mary had a keen understanding about her reasons for doing things. Like most of us, sometimes we just act, without full consciousness of our motives. That’s the muddy gray area that is so fun to write about.
Q. Do you think readers will criticize Mary for steadfastly stating that her life’s ambition was to be a wife and mother?
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