I Don't Forgive You

by Aggie Blum Thompson

  Mark appears in the doorway, a mug of steaming liquid in hand. “Chamomile. Susan insisted.” He puts the mug on my bedside table. “She’s worried about you.”

  “Susan’s very sweet.”

  “So am I. Worried that is, not sweet.”

  I smile. “You’re sweet.”

  “What happened back there? You came rushing down the stairs…” His voice trails off.

  I shrug and avert my eyes from the intensity of his gaze. I know what he wants. Not just a recounting of what happened but to peer inside my psyche and listen in on my inner voice. In short, access to my soul. But my feelings are on lockdown. It’s a vestigial skill, one I honed growing up in a household where I never knew which mother I would encounter—the sarcastic drunk or the silly flirt. Learning to pack up my emotions in a box that I could access later, in safety and privacy, was a tool I learned quite early.

  Unlearning it is proving harder.

  “Can we talk about this tomorrow?” Dragging it all out in our bedroom would be letting that man’s ugliness into my safe and private space. I just want to put the whole thing behind me, pretend it didn’t happen.

  Mark sits down beside me.

  “Allie, I want to understand what happened tonight.” His tone is gentle, his face neutral. I have to tell him something. I believe this is what marriage is, taking the leap of faith into the void and having faith your partner will catch you. I take a deep breath.

  “I don’t want you to freak out or anything,” I say, my words directed at the curtainless window. “But that guy? At the party? He basically came into the bathroom when I was in it, and he, umm, I don’t know. Tried to kiss me?” My voice shakes as I speak, and I hate how tentative I sound, as if I am not exactly sure what happened, even though I am.

  “He did what?” A hoarseness has crept into his voice.

  “Please, please don’t overreact.” I place my hand atop Mark’s and squeeze. I don’t have the mental bandwidth for his feelings right now, only mine. “This guy was drunk and gross, and nothing happened—”

  Mark bristles. “I don’t call that nothing. He put his hands on you?”

  “You’re right. It’s not nothing.”

  “Did he hurt you?” His eyes bore into me, unnerving me.

  “No.” The word shoots out of my mouth before I realize that I am lying. I want to protect Mark from his own anger. It’s just a bruise, after all. It’ll heal in a week. “I’m fine,” I say. “It was just unsettling.”

  It’s a lie. But I feel myself shutting down. I won’t be forced into exploring all the awfulness of it right this second. Not even for Mark.

  “Unsettling? That’s illegal in the state of Maryland. Hell, it’s illegal in all fifty states. It’s called battery, and it’s against the law.” Mark stands up and runs his hands through his hair. “Do you know this guy’s name?”

  “Rob something. I don’t know his last name.”

  “Rob, huh? I’m going to go talk to him.”

  “No, that’s not a good idea.”

  He nods. “You’re right. We should just go straight to the police.”

  The word police seizes me in my chest, making it hard to breathe. “No, no, no, Mark. Please, sit down.”

  But he’s pacing back and forth, not listening to me. “Does Daisy know who this Rob guy is? Should I call her? No, it’s late.” He turns to me. “We can call Daisy in the morning. She’ll know his full name, and then we can go to the police.”

  “No police, Mark. Stop saying the word police.” My voice comes out thin and strained. He halts his pacing.

  “Why not?”

  “What do you think they are going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Investigate? Give this guy a warning?”

  “You mean start interviewing every one of the people at that party? Our neighbors? The other parents? Is that what you want? We just moved here; I don’t want to become the subject of neighborhood gossip.” I don’t tell him that I know what it’s like to carry around that hot stone of shame in your body, that I have lived through that and have no desire to ever experience it again.

  He stares up at the ceiling and then lets out a long, slow breath. “Fine. No police. But he shouldn’t get away with this.” Mark was an Eagle Scout when he was a teen. While other boys were binge-drinking and raising hell, he was building a handicapped ramp for the Chevy Chase library. In his world, there is right and wrong, black and white, truth and lies.

  I stand up, and he does, too. I am so ready for this to be over. At least for now. “This kind of stuff happens to women all the time.” I perch on my tiptoes and kiss him on his cheek. “All. The. Time. If women went to the cops every time some jerk came on to them at a party, the police wouldn’t have time to do anything else.”

  I wrap my arms around him and hold him tight. I know I’m not being brave. If I were a superhero in the Marvel Universe, I would spring into action with righteous anger. I would be the one calling the police. But I know how things work in the real world and that this is a bell that can’t be unrung. Slowly, he puts his arms around me, as well. I can feel the energy around him settle down. A few moments later, we disentangle, and it’s as if a storm has passed.

  “Let me lock up downstairs,” Mark says. “And then I’ll come to bed.”

  I head to the bathroom, where I dab cream made from Japanese mushrooms under my eyes and smooth a gelatinous firming serum that smells like bleach on my cheeks. These little potions cost more money than I used to spend on a week’s worth of groceries when I was single.

  I am lucky. I have a loving husband. A good job. A beautiful house and a healthy child. I don’t want trouble.

  Back in the bedroom, I wait for Mark under the duvet and watch the opening monologue of Saturday Night Live by myself. The host is a middle-aged actor promoting a new action movie. I remember when he almost killed his career about fifteen years ago after being found nude and stoned, wandering around someone’s backyard. But in the years since, he’s made a comeback. No one ever mentions his past.

  Lucky guy.

  Finally, Mark arrives, apologizing for taking so long. “I forgot to set my fantasy football lineup,” he says as he changes into his pajamas.

  I snuggle beside him. During a commercial, he mutes the TV and turns to me.

  “So what do you think that guy meant when he said stay off Tinder?” I look away from the television and directly at him. He looks like a huge version of Cole, right down to the shock of black hair falling across his forehead.

  I tense up. “I have no idea, Mark.”

  “I mean, you’re not on Tinder, are you?” I can tell he’s trying to sound lighthearted, as if the question is a joke. I think of my sister and the horror stories she’s told me about online dating sites—the married men looking for side action, the ubiquitous dick pics.

  “That guy was drunk, Mark. He wasn’t making any sense. Anyway, I don’t even have time to hang curtains, much less trawl Tinder.” I give his ribs a gentle nudge. “Now can we please watch SNL? You can tell me how much funnier it used to be in the old days.”

  “It was funnier,” he says, turning the volume back up.

  “I know. Everything was better in the eighties.”

  He settles back against the pillows, and I tuck myself up against his broad shoulder. He’s put on at least ten pounds since we moved to D.C. and he started working at the law firm. Long hours mean takeout for dinner at work many nights, and he has no time for the gym. I don’t mind the weight. I like him solid.

  And solid is what I need. Sometimes I think of Mark as my lighthouse in a raging sea, and I am a tiny boat keeping my eyes on him. It’s true that lighthouses aren’t warm and fuzzy, but I don’t need warm and fuzzy. I need strength, stability. I need to know he is always there, my light in the dark.

  Tension seeps from my body and sleep beckons, a delicious riptide dragging me under. The laughter from the TV ebbs and flows like the waves of the ocean. But then moments before I surrender to sleep
, I hear that voice again. I feel that finger pressing against my collarbone.

  Me Rob, the voice says. You Lexi.

  Then another memory, unbidden, drifts across my consciousness. One that’s been buried for years. A hand parting the curtain of hair that always hid my face. You don’t even know how sexy you are. Sexy Lexi, that’s what I’m going to call you.

  6

  I awake with a start at five fifteen, thoughts struggling to break the surface of my consciousness. My eyes are heavy in a familiar way. I am wide awake, yet still tired.

  Stay the fuck off Tinder, you cock tease.

  I roll over, and in the pale moonlight shining through our bare window, I make out the outline of the pile of books on my bedside table. I know the top one is a novel I am supposed to be reading for Leah’s book club, but it seems a Herculean task. Somewhere beneath that is The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, and Keeping Friends When You’re Not a Kid Anymore. Chapter 3 suggests that lonely grown-ups like me join a book club.

  Sauvignon blanc.

  John Wick.

  Cardi B.

  Lexi.

  My heart begins to gallop in my chest. I sit up. There’s no way I am falling back to sleep. I pull back the covers as quietly as I can, but nonetheless Mark stirs.

  “Huh?” he asks, jerking his head a few inches from the pillow. “What’s going on?”

  “Shhh,” I whisper. “Go back to sleep.” He lies back down, throwing his forearm over his eyes, his mouth open, and within seconds, he is snoring gently.

  After donning a robe and slippers, I pad downstairs and put the kettle on for a cup of tea. We keep the family computer in a little nook in the kitchen-slash-family-room, where the three of us spend about eighty percent of our waking hours. In fact, if a fire destroyed the rest of the house, we could happily live in this one room.

  Having the computer in a central place means we can pay bills, check email, or search for a recipe without having to leave Cole unattended. And we can monitor his online activity, which for now consists of watching YouTube videos of other children building complicated structures with LEGOs.

  I take my tea and settle in front of the computer, ready for it to give me answers to questions I’m not even sure I can articulate. I don’t even know this Rob’s last name.

  Above the computer hangs a poster I’ve owned for ages, a reproduction of a Mary Ellen Mark black-and-white photograph of a reed-thin girl in a black dress, arms crossed, a defiant expression on her face as she peers out from behind a black veil. Mark hates the photo, finds it depressing and spooky. But I hang it in a prominent place every time we move. It reminds me that photography isn’t only for the beautiful. Everyone deserves to be truly seen.

  Our home page is Google, and I type in Rob, then Eastbrook, and then Bethesda. What comes back are a jumble of meaningless results. It’s not a surprise that our D.C. suburb is filled with men named Robert. The sheer uselessness of this exercise leaves me defeated.

  My fingers hover over the keyboard, reluctant to type the word that has flashed neon in my brain. It’s as if doing so will conjure, voodoo-style, some spirit I won’t be able to rid myself of.

  I take a deep breath and type.

  Tinder.

  I click, but I can’t get far without joining. And it seems that to join Tinder, you have to link your Facebook account, which I am not willing to do, even for purely research purposes.

  Instead, I open Instagram and scroll mindlessly through the likes I’ve received recently. I click on a new follower, and it takes a moment for it to register: Rob, the guy from last night.

  I curse myself. Why did I tell him to follow me on Insta? He’s gone back through my posts and liked dozens of pictures from the last few months. Mostly cityscapes, but some studio shots that clients have allowed me to post, along with selfies of me in my new surroundings—the neighborhood pool, the Farm Women’s Market in downtown Bethesda. What he did takes time, and it creeps me out.

  But it is his comments that make my skin crawl.

  Under one selfie I took in front of a fiery red maple on our block, he wrote: Not just beautiful, but talented, too.

  And on a shot I took of Leah and me before we headed out for a girls’ night of drinks, he wrote: Sexy Lexi.

  I freeze.

  There it is again.

  That nickname. It can’t be a coincidence, but what connection could this Rob guy possibly have to Overton Academy?

  I’ve been careful since I left Connecticut more than sixteen years ago. There’s a demarcation in my life between then and now, and I am meticulous about not letting anything in from the past. I don’t subscribe to any of the Overton alumni stuff, I throw away anything that comes in the mail, and I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone from my two years at that school. If anyone from high school does manage to connect my past name, Alexis Healy, with my married name, Allie Ross, and asks to follow me on Instagram, or tries to friend me on Facebook, I offer the same response: radio silence.

  I’m super careful to keep everything under Allie Ross.

  Not Alexis, and certainly not Lexi.

  Lexi was an experiment my senior year at Overton—a brief and desperate attempt to transform from an awkward scholarship student into someone sophisticated and alluring.

  I can even recall the exact moment I decided to start calling myself Lexi. It was a chilly Friday night in late fall, the kind in New England where the wind is sharp and there’s no doubt that a long, cold winter is around the corner. Madeline, my only true friend at the school, convinced me to come with her to crash a house party.

  We’ll be sociologists, Madeline said in that way she had of hiding her teenage insecurities behind faux intellectualism. She was one of a handful of African American girls at Overton and the only one in our grade. She often came across as uptight and rigid, unfriendly even, the only child of two stiff academics. She had mastered the art of rejecting the world first, before it got a chance to reject her. But when it was just us two, she was different—wry and vulnerable. C’mon, she cajoled, we can stand off by ourselves and laugh at the sheeple in their J. Crew clothes getting drunk on Daddy’s liquor.

  I can see us now—me dressed incongruously in a miniskirt and a hand-me-down men’s parka, and Madeline, her shoulders stooped to minimize her height, dressed all in black—trudging up the steps to the grand Victorian a few blocks from the town square. I remember hoping that the party had reached that tipping point where everyone was too trashed to realize we had not been invited.

  It wasn’t long afterward that I was back on the street, pulling my parka tight against the wind, furious at Madeline for abandoning me for the attention of a wasted soccer player, the kind of vacuous bro we always mocked. Her transformation from cynical social observer to desperate groupie had been swift. All he did was offer her a red Solo cup full of beer and recite a few lines from a Dave Matthews song.

  Disgusted and betrayed, I headed to the bus stop and settled in for a long wait. I was no stranger to the public transportation system. Unlike most of my classmates at Overton, who lived in the wealthy town in which the school was located, I had a thirty-minute bus ride every day from Norwalk. I would press my forehead against the glass and watch as our neighborhood of low-rise condos and large homes chopped into apartments receded, to be replaced by the stately houses with pillars and porches that led up to the leafy campus of Overton. It took the entire ride to gird myself for the day and to put on my invisible armor. No one was overtly mean to me. No one mocked my off-brand sneakers, or sneered when I said I had never been to Martha’s Vineyard. It was all much subtler than that, and in a way that was worse. I didn’t even merit teasing. I was invisible.

  I sat at the bus stop with my camera on my lap. The public buses ran sporadically on weekend evenings, and that meant I might be sitting in the cold and dark for an hour or more. I was fiddling with the lens cap when a rusted BMW pulled up.

  The passenger-side window rolled down to reveal my photography teach
er sitting in the driver’s seat, a lopsided smile on his face. Paul Adamson was almost thirty, but he still dressed like a prep school kid—worn-out chinos and beat-up Stan Smiths held together by duct tape. His hair was dark auburn; thick, spirited waves fell this way and that. He had green eyes and long lashes, and when he got really worked up about some brilliant photographer in class, his whole face would turn red, right down to his neck, where it disappeared in the V of his button-down collared shirt. He never wore anything but—sometimes an Oxford-blue one, sometimes white, and on rare occasion, pink.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, smiling. “What have we here—my star pupil.”

  I approached the car, my face flushing under his gaze. Without the buffer that other students usually provided, there was nothing between us but the cold night air.

  “What in the world are you doing out here?” he asked. When he looked at me then, he ignited a small fire. No one had ever looked at me like that before, no high school boy, that was for sure. It was as if I had not existed until that moment. I burned red and hot then, even in the cold, and I was thankful for the cover of darkness.

  Before I could answer, he shoved open the passenger-side door. “Hop in, Alexis. I’ll drive you home.”

  I had always hated the name Alexis.

  It sounded like I was trying too hard, overcompensating for our cramped apartment and lack of family money. It reminded me of my mother smoking menthols while poring over gossip magazines, as if wearing the same shade of lipstick as some actress would magically imbue her with class. My Overton classmates possessed carefree, almost dowdy nicknames—Kristen V. in my English class was known as Cricket. My year also had two Mollys, an Emsy, short for Emily, and even a Cookie.

  As I climbed in the car, I improvised.

  “Call me Lexi,” I said.

  7

  “She’s trying to kill me!” I hold the phone a few inches from my ear, as the panic in my mother’s voice makes her sound more like a child than a fifty-seven-year-old woman.

  “No one’s trying to kill you, Sharon,” I say and roll my eyes at Mark. He pauses, mid-flip of a pancake, and gives me a sympathetic smile. We’ve both become accustomed to these dramatic phone calls at all hours.