The Other Mrs (ARC)
Page 19
The city around me was bedazzling. There were lights ev-
erywhere. In the distance, streets buzzed, buildings gleamed.
I stayed there all night. Will never came for me. Because our
life together wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. We had good
days, we had bad.
There were days we were a match made in heaven. There
were days we were incompatible, completely out of sync.
Our time spent together, no matter how good or bad it may
have been, came with the realization that he would never know
me as he knew Sadie. Because what the other woman gets is an-
other woman’s table scraps, never the full meal.
Moments with Will were hidden, rushed. I learned to steal
my time wisely with Will, to make moments happen. I went
to him in his classroom once, let myself inside the room when
it was empty, took him by surprise. He was standing at his desk
when I came in. I closed and locked the door behind myself,
went to him. I hitched my dress up to my waistline, shimmied
onto his desk, parted my legs. Let him see for himself that I had
nothing on underneath.
Will stared down there a moment too long, eyes wide, mouth
agape.
You can’t be serious, Will said. You want to do this here? he asked.
Of course I do, I told him.
Right here? he asked again, bearing down on the desk to be sure it could hold the both of us.
Is that a problem, Professor? I asked, spreading my legs wider.
There was a twinkle to his eye. He grinned like the Cheshire
cat.
No, he said to me. It’s not a problem.
I bounded from the desktop when we were through, let the
dress fall back down my thighs, said my goodbyes. I tried not to
think about where he would go from there. It’s not easy being
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the other woman. The only thing there is for us is disdain, never
sympathy. No one feels sorry for us. Instead they judge. We’re
written off as selfish, scheming, shrewd, when all we’re guilty of
is falling in love. People forget we’re human, that we have feel-
ings too.
Sometimes when Will pressed his lips to mine, it was mag-
netic and electric, a current that charged through both of us.
His kiss was often impassioned, fiery, but sometimes not. Some-
times it was cold and I would think that was it, the end of our
affair. I was wrong. Because that’s the way it is with relation-
ships sometimes. They ebb and they flow.
One day I found myself speaking to a shrink about it. I was
sitting on a swivel chair. The room I was in was tall with floor-
to-ceiling windows. Heavy gray drapes bordered the windows,
stretched from ceiling to floor. There was a vase of flowers on
a coffee table between us, oversized like everything else in the
room. Next to the vase were two glasses of water, one for her
and one for me.
My eyes circled the room, went searching for a clock. Instead
they found shelves of books on mental illness, emotional intel-
ligence, mind games; graduate school diplomas.
Tell me, the shrink said, what’s been happening.
That was where the conversation began.
I shifted in the chair, adjusted my shirt.
I cleared my throat, fought for my voice.
Everything alright? the shrink asked, watching as I shifted in the chair, as if getting comfortable in my own skin.
I told her everything was alright. I wasn’t shy. I never am. I
kicked my feet up on an ottoman, told the woman before me,
I’ve been sleeping with a married man.
She was heavier set, one of those women who carry the weight
in their face.
There was no change in expression other than a slight lift to
the left eyebrow. Her brows were thick, heavy.
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MARY KUBICA
Her lips parted. Oh? she asked, showing no emotion at what I’d said. Tell me about him. How did you meet?
I told her everything there was to tell about Will. I smiled
as I did, reliving each moment, one at a time. The day we met
beneath the tracks. His hand on my wrist, saving my life. Cof-
fee in the coffee shop. Us leaned up against a building, Will’s
voice in my ear, his hand on my thigh.
But then my mood turned sour. I reached for a tissue, blot-
ted my eyes. I went on, telling her how hard it was being that
other woman. How lonely. How I didn’t have the promise of
daily contact. No check-in phone calls, no late night confes-
sions as we drifted to sleep. There was no one to talk to about
my feelings. Alone, I tried not to ruminate on it. But there are
only so many times you can be called by another woman’s name
and not get a complex.
She encouraged me to end the affair.
But he says he loves me, I told her.
A man who is wil ing to cheat on his wife, she said, will often make promises to you that he can’t keep. When he tel s you he loves you, it’s a form of entrapment. Cheating spouses are masters at manipulation, she said. He may tell you things to keep you from ending the affair. He has both a wife and a lover on the side. He has no incentive to change.
It wasn’t her intent, but I found relief in that.
Will had no reason to leave me.
Will would never leave me.
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Sadie
I lay there half asleep, shaken from a dream. In the dream, I was
lying in a bed that wasn’t mine, staring up at a ceiling that was
also not mine. The ceiling above me was a trey ceiling with
a fan that dropped from the center of it. The blades of the fan
were shaped like palm leaves. I’d never seen it before. The bed
sagged in the middle so that there was a trench my body slipped
easily into, making it hard to move. I lay in the strange bed,
trapped in the crevasse.
It happened so fast there wasn’t time to wonder where I was,
to worry about it, only to realize that I was not in my own bed.
I reached a hand across either side of it, feeling for Will. But the bed was empty other than me. My own body was cocooned in
a blanket beneath the quilt and I lay there, watching the inert
fan above me, illuminated only by a streak of moonlight that
came through the window. It was hot in the bed. I wished that
the fan would move, that it would send a rush of air to my body
to cool me off.
And then, suddenly I was no longer in the bed. I was standing
beside it, watching myself sleep. The room around me became
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MARY KUBICA
distorted. The colors began to fade. All at once, everything was
monochrome. The walls of the room warped to odd shapes,
trapezoids and parallelograms. It was no longer square.
I felt a headache coming on.
In my dream, I forced my eyes closed to stop the room from
changing shapes.
When I opened them
again, I was in my own bed with an
image of Morgan Baines in my mind. I’d been dreaming about
her. I can’t remember the details of it, but I know for certain
that she was there.
Before he left the bedroom awhile ago, Will kissed me. He
offered to drive the boys to school so that I could sleep in. You had trouble sleeping last night, he said, and I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a statement. I didn’t have trouble sleeping per se,
but my dreams were so vivid I must have tossed and turned in
my sleep.
Will kissed me on the head. He wished me a good day and
he left.
Downstairs now I hear the rustle of breakfast being served, of
backpacks being packed. The front door opens and they’re gone.
Only then do I sit upright in bed. As I do, I see my nightgown
lying at the end of it, no longer on me.
I rise to my feet, the covers sliding from my body. I discover
that I’m naked. The realization of it startles me. My hand goes
inadvertently to my chest. I’m not averse to sleeping nude. It
was the way Will and I often slept before the boys started tod-
dling into our room when they were young. But it’s not some-
thing I’ve often done since. The idea of sleeping naked when
there are kids in my home embarrasses me. What if Otto had
seen me like this? Or worse yet, Imogen?
The thought of Imogen suddenly gives me pause, because I
heard Will and the boys leave. But I never heard Imogen leave.
I tell myself that Will wouldn’t leave before she did. He would
have made sure she was gone first, headed to school. Imogen
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doesn’t always make her comings and goings known, which tells
me now that she’s not here, that she slipped out quietly long be-
fore Will and the boys did.
There’s dried sweat beneath my arms and between my legs, a
result of the inequitable heat in the old home. I remember how
hot I was in my dream. I must have whipped off the nightgown
unconsciously.
I find clothes in the dresser drawer, running tights and a long-
sleeved shirt that I slip on. As I do, another thought comes to me, about Imogen. What if like me, Will only assumed she’d gone
to school, because of her tendency to slip in and out unnoticed?
My fear of Imogen colors my judgment and I find myself won-
dering: Is she still home? Are Imogen and I the only ones here?
I cautiously leave the bedroom. Imogen’s door is closed, the
padlock on the new locking mechanism securely fastened, which
tells me she’s not there in her room. Because she couldn’t lock
it if she was inside.
The purpose of the lock: to keep me out. It seems like an
innocuous enough thing, but at second glance, I wonder if it
would as easily lock someone in as lock someone out?
I call out to Imogen as I make my way down the steps, just
to be sure. Downstairs, her shoes and her backpack are gone,
as is her jacket.
Will has left breakfast for me on the counter and an empty
mug for coffee. I fill the coffee mug and take it and my crepes
to the table to eat. Only there do I see that Will has left his
book behind, the true crime novel. He’s finished it, I assume,
and left it for me to read.
I reach for the book and slide it towards myself. But it isn’t
the book that I’m thinking about. Not really. It’s the photograph
inside, that of his former fiancée. I take the book into my hands,
take a deep breath and leaf through the pages, expecting Erin’s
photo to fall out.
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When it doesn’t, I leaf through again, a second and a third
time.
I set the book down. I look up and sigh.
Will has taken the photograph. He’s taken the photograph
and left the book for me.
Where has Will put the photograph?
I can’t ask Will. To bring Erin up again would be in poor
taste. I can’t possibly nag him over and over again about his
dead fiancée. She was long gone before I arrived. But the fact
that he hangs on to her photograph after all these years is hard
to stomach.
Will grew up on the Atlantic coast, not far from where we
now live. He transferred colleges during his sophomore and ju-
nior years, leaving the East Coast for a school in Chicago. Be-
tween Erin’s death and his stepfather’s, Will told me, he couldn’t
stand to stay out east anymore. He had to leave. Shortly after he
did, his mother married for the third time (far too soon in Will’s
opinion; she’s the kind of woman who can’t ever be alone) and
moved south. His brother joined the Peace Corps and now lives
in Cameroon. Then Alice died. Will doesn’t have family on the
East Coast anymore.
Erin and Will were high school sweethearts. He never used
that term when he told me about her because it was too senti-
mental, too endearing. But they were. High school sweethearts.
Erin was nineteen when she died; he’d just turned twenty.
They’d been together since they were fifteen and sixteen. The
way Will tells it, Erin, home from college for Christmas break—
Will went to community college those first two years—had
been missing overnight by the time her body was found. She
was supposed to pick him up at six for dinner, but she never
showed. By six thirty Will was getting worried. Near seven,
he called her parents, her friends in quick succession. No one
knew where she was.
Around eight o’clock, Erin’s parents made a call to the po-
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lice. But Erin had only been gone two hours at that point and
the police weren’t quick to issue a search. It was winter. It had
snowed and the roads were slick. Accidents were plenty. The
police had their work cut out for them that night. In the mean-
time, the police suggested Will and her parents keep calling
around, checking out any place Erin was liable to be—which
was ridiculous since a winter weather warning had been issued,
urging drivers to stay off the roads that night.
The route Erin often took to Will’s was hilly and meandering,
covered in a thin layer of ice and snow that wrapped around a
large pond. It was off the beaten path, a scenic route best avoided when the weather took a turn for the worse as it had that night.
But Erin was always foolhardy, not the type, according to
Will, that you could tell what to do.
At just thirty-two degrees, the pond where they later found
her hadn’t had a chance to freeze through. It couldn’t bear the
weight of the car when Erin hit a patch of ice and went soar-
ing off the road.
That night, Will looked everywhere for Erin. The gym, the
library, the studio where she danced. He drove every route he
could possibl
y think of to get from Erin’s house to his. But it
was dark out, and the pond was only a black abyss.
It wasn’t until early morning that a jogger spied the car’s
fender sticking out of the ice and snow. Erin’s parents were no-
tified first. By the time Will heard the news, more than twelve
hours had passed since she hadn’t showed up for their date. Her
parents were devastated, as was a little sister, only nine years old when she died. As was Will.
I push the book away from me. I don’t have the stomach to
read it because I can’t see the book without thinking of the photo
that was once tucked inside.
Where is he keeping Erin’s photograph? I wonder, but at the same time comes another thought: Why do I care?
Will married me. We have children together.
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MARY KUBICA
He loves me.
I leave my breakfast dishes where they are. I step from the
kitchen, slip into a windproof jacket that hangs from a hallway
hook. I need to go for a run, to blow off steam.
I head out onto the street. The skies this morning are gray, the
ground moist from an early rainfall that’s drifted somewhere out
to sea. I see the rain in the distance. Streaks of it hover beneath the base of the clouds. The world looks hopeless and bleak. By
the end of the day, forecasters predict the rain will turn to snow.
I jog down the street. It’s a rare day off work. What I have
in mind for it is a jog followed by a quiet morning alone. Otto
and Tate have gone to school, Will to work. Will has no doubt
caught the ferry by now, getting shuttled to the mainland. There
he’ll catch a bus to campus, where he’ll rivet nineteen year olds
about alternative energy sources and bioremediation for half
the day, before gathering Tate from school and coming home.
I jog down the hill. I take the street that follows the perim-
eter of the island, moving past oceanfront properties. They’re
not lavish, not by any means. Rather, they’re well worn, lived
in for generations, easily a hundred years old. Breezy cottages,
rough around the edges, hidden amid the ample trees. It’s a five-
mile loop around the island. The landscape isn’t manicured. It’s
far more rural than that, with long stretches of backwoods and
public beaches that are not only rugged and seaweed-swept, but
eerily vacant this time of year.