The Arrangement

by Sarah Dunn

  Kelly settled down into her chair and looked across the table at Gordon.

  “I want Gordon to get Mrs. Lowell her job back.”

  “And who is that?” asked Hugh Willix.

  “The kindergarten teacher that Gordon got fired,” said Kelly. “The one who turned into a woman.”

  “Mr. Allen can’t do that. It falls under the jurisdiction of the local school-board officials. It’s entirely beyond his control.”

  “I think Gordon can control anything he wants. And I’m not going to sign anything until it’s done.”

  And with that, Kelly pushed her chair away from the conference table, hooked her elbow through her Dior bag, and made what she thought of as her Hollywood exit.

  Twenty-Three

  We all have a strong preference that life should be easy, comfortable, and pain-free, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with life when it isn’t those things. It’s just life. It’s just life and it’s not how you would prefer it to be, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it.

  —Constance Waverly

  WaverlyRadio podcast #132

  No,” said Owen.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean no, I don’t want you to go to the city tomorrow. I don’t want you to see whoever you see when you go there.”

  Lucy and Owen were in the living room, both on their laptops. Wyatt was asleep, early for once, and the house was quiet except for bursts of typing and clicking.

  “The six months aren’t up yet, Owen,” said Lucy.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I’m going to the city.”

  “No.”

  Lucy closed her laptop and looked at her husband. “Honestly, I don’t know what you mean by no.”

  “I mean, I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go into the city to see the person you’ve been seeing there. We had an agreement. If things got too crazy and out of control, we would call it off.”

  “Is that on the paper, Owen? Because I don’t remember that part.”

  “I’m going to go get the legal pad,” he said.

  “You’re going to go get the legal pad?” Lucy started to laugh. It was a forced, angry laugh. “I love it!”

  “What?”

  “We are so far beyond any stupid list of rules. I love that you still think those are relevant.”

  “Why aren’t they relevant?”

  “The people who wrote those rules don’t even exist anymore, Owen.”

  “That’s not true. I’m still the person I was.”

  “Well, I’m not,” she said. “The person I was when I wrote down those rules—that person doesn’t exist anymore. That Lucy has left the building!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do we really want to have this conversation?” Lucy asked. “Because I don’t think we do.”

  Lucy went into the kitchen to get some wine. She poured herself a glass of sauvignon blanc and drank it quickly, and then instead of heading back into the living room, instead of talking to Owen, she put on her running shoes and a heavy jacket and an old scarf.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” she told Owen.

  “It’s pitch-dark outside.”

  “I’ll bring a flashlight,” she said. “I just need some air.”

  “Don’t forget your phone,” Owen called after her as she walked out the door. “You wouldn’t want to forget your phone.”

  Lucy headed down the driveway and toward the dirt road. When she got out of sight of the house, she called Ben, but he didn’t answer. She thought of calling her sister, but she didn’t know what she would say. Mostly she hoped Owen would be asleep by the time she got home. And even though it was cold and dark, it felt good to be outside. She walked for a long time, and she didn’t think to turn around until she was quite far from the house.

  When she got back, all the lights in the house were out. She let herself in quietly and locked the door behind her. She was setting the alarm when she heard Owen’s voice.

  “I want you to stop, Lucy.”

  Owen was sitting at the kitchen table, in the dark. He was staring down at a glass of bourbon in his hand. “Whatever is going on, I want it to stop. We can talk about it or we can not talk about it.”

  Lucy walked over to the table and sat across from him.

  “It was after you started, just so you know,” she said. “I know how fast you found someone. And it wasn’t because I was snooping.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because you were so happy all of a sudden. Slinking around, smiling all the time, showing up with cat hair all over you. I felt like I was living with a sixteen-year-old boy who’d just convinced his prom date to go all the way. And that was not fun for me, just so you know. That did not exactly renew my faith in our marriage.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Owen.

  “You know, it was one thing to be invisible to the world. To be yet another invisible mommy. I’d gotten used to that, actually. I’d gotten used to slipping on my Merrells and heading off into the world like a phantom of a person, being yes-ma’am’d if I wasn’t ignored completely. But apparently I’ve been involved in a marriage where my husband doesn’t even see me. What did you think? You thought I wouldn’t do anything?”

  “No! I tried to—I tried not to think about it. It’s not the most pleasant thing to think about. I tried to put it out of my mind.”

  “You thought I just really, really needed French lessons,” Lucy said. She put on a weird voice, like a dopey guy in a 1950s TV commercial. “‘Those French lessons sure put a spring in my wife’s step!’”

  “Did you meet him in your class?”

  “I didn’t take French, Owen,” said Lucy. “I never took a single class.”

  “So that was all just so you could—”

  “Go see someone. Yes. Go see my person in the city. That’s what French was for.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Wow.”

  “We did this together, Owen. We did this to each other.”

  “Yes, we did a stupid thing, and we both did it. I should not have agreed to it, I should have shut it down the minute it came up, and obviously I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t shut it down,” said Lucy. “Quite the opposite.”

  “Yes, right, I had fun. I enjoyed it. Guilty. Guilty as charged.”

  Lucy reached for Owen’s glass and took a big sip of bourbon. And then another one. And another.

  “Just tell your somebody that we decided to stop early,” Owen finally said. “Say we agreed we made a mistake, and we decided to cut things short. We’ll go to therapy and work on our marriage. Obviously all of this is a symptom of something bigger. Let’s work on that.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why not?”

  For a moment, things could go one way or they could go the other.

  “Because I’m in love with my somebody.”

  And then Lucy started to cry.

  Lucy started to cry.

  * * *

  Lucy crawled into bed and got under the covers. After a bit, Owen climbed in next to her. They both stared up at the ceiling. Neither of them said anything. Owen finally reached over and took Lucy’s hand, and held it in his. His hand was warm and big and soft and forgiving. Tears rolled down Lucy’s face, slowly but continuously, but she did not sob.

  “Do you still love me?” Owen eventually asked.

  “Yes,” Lucy said.

  And it was true, she thought. She did love Owen.

  “But I love him too.”

  “Okay,” Owen said. He did not let go of her hand. “That’s okay.”

  “You don’t know him. He lives in Brooklyn.”

  “What? How did you—you think you’re in love with him?”

  “I didn’t think it would happen. I wasn’t looking for it to happen. But it did and it has and now this is what we’ve got.”

  It was late, three o’clock in the morning. Owen got
up to go to the bathroom. When he got back into bed, Lucy sat up and turned on the light.

  “I was thinking, no matter what happens, between you and me, I mean, the family part of us doesn’t have to break up,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, we’ll always be a family. We’ll always be his parents.”

  “Are my brother Greg and his ex-wife, Alexa, still a family? No. And do you know why? Because they got divorced and they’re both married to other people. That’s what happens when you get divorced. You stop being a family.”

  “I’m talking about something different than what your brother did.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, different. Amicable. Friendly.”

  “I honestly have no idea what sort of relationship you’re talking about.”

  “I mean, we’ll always be his parents. We can make it amicable. We can be those amazing divorced parents who are best friends and do holidays together and go to soccer games together and take, maybe, vacations together at some point.”

  “Okay, that thing you’re talking about doesn’t exist. And if it does, somewhere, it’s because the parents are too selfish to go ahead and admit that they’re ruining their kids’ lives.”

  “It does exist, Owen. People do it. They stay friends.”

  Owen rolled over and stared at the wall, his back to his wife.

  “I won’t be your friend,” he finally said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to be your friend if you do this to us. If you do this, I’ll never say two words to you again.”

  “You’ll have to, Owen. We’ll still be raising a child together.”

  “Correction,” he said, “I’ll never say two friendly words to you again.”

  “I feel sick,” Lucy said. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Lucy ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  The next several days were among the strangest of Lucy’s life. It was a long weekend, thanks to teachers’ conferences, and the dailiness of her world took hold again, almost imperceptibly. She shopped for groceries, she took Wyatt to Blake’s Ninja Turtles birthday party, she dropped off the dry cleaning and then picked it up again. She texted Ben, and she called him every chance she got, but she didn’t go into the city to see him, and things between her and Owen seemed to settle down. It almost felt like nothing was going to happen.

  But then, late on an otherwise ordinary night, Lucy was straightening up the kitchen when Owen walked down the stairs and asked her, “What’s his name?”

  “What’s whose name?”

  “The guy,” said Owen. “Your guy.”

  Lucy ran water over a sponge and squeezed it.

  “Ben.”

  “Ben? What kind of a name is that?”

  “It’s a name, Owen. Ben is a name.”

  “Is he a Benjamin? A Bennet? What?”

  “I don’t know what it’s short for.”

  “You don’t know what it’s short for? This man you’re in love with? You don’t even know his name?”

  “I guess we haven’t spent a ton of time talking.”

  “Nice,” said Owen. “Thank you for that.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.”

  “You don’t think it’s weird that you don’t know this man’s actual name?” asked Owen. “Has it occurred to you that you might be just a little less important to him than you think?”

  Lucy reached for her phone, which was charging next to the coffeemaker. She was angry. She fired off a text.

  “His first name is Benjamin,” she said, reading her phone. “His middle name is Walter.”

  “Good to know,” said Owen.

  Lucy put the phone down. She started to wipe down the kitchen counters.

  “So what is this, exactly?” Owen asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What is the scope of your relationship with this Benjamin Walter Somebody person as it pertains to our family? Why don’t you ask him that? Send him a text and ask him that.”

  “He already told me.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Owen. “What did he say?”

  “He said he wants to marry me.”

  Owen was motionless except for the fact that he was breathing fast and hard. Lucy could see his every breath.

  “Get out,” he finally said. “Get out of this house. I want you out now, Lucy.”

  * * *

  Owen went upstairs and climbed into bed with Wyatt, who had woken up and was jabbering away to himself, softly, rerunning things through his head, repeating sentences that had imprinted themselves on his brain. (“During a lockout we hide in the library behind a bookshelf, and if we can’t get to the library we hide behind the yellow line, so the bad guy can’t see us. We hide behind the yellow line, very, very quietly, so he’ll move on to the next classroom.” My God, Owen thought, what the hell are they telling these kids in school?)

  Wyatt was talking in loops and fluttering his fingers in the air like butterflies. It was one of his ways of soothing himself, of making sense of his world, and the fact was, it worked pretty well.

  Owen did not know how to soothe himself and could not make sense of his world, and so he’d crawled into bed with his son. His warm little body never failed to comfort. Someday, he would be too old for this. Someday, Wyatt would lose interest in snuggling his dad, he would balk, straight-arm him, or just say, “Dad.” It was one of those truths about raising a child that was almost impossible to imagine. The fact that these things would disappear, the body-to-body connection that began that first day in the hospital would one day come to an end.

  Wyatt’s comforter felt like a lead blanket, probably because that’s what it was. It was weighted—not with lead, presumably—designed to calm kids with sensory issues, with spectrum-y problems of every sort. It was a variation on Temple Grandin’s squeeze machine.

  It felt good, being under the blanket, like a full-body hug. Maybe I should get one of these for the master bedroom, Owen thought. He wondered if they made them in a California king, without the superhero design. Probably not.

  “Dada, can I have your phone?”

  Owen handed over his phone without resistance.

  “Siri, show me videos of the Hindenburg,” said Wyatt.

  “Okay, Owen, here are directions to Linden Road.”

  “Siri, you’re stupid.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way about me, Owen.”

  “Siri, show me videos. Of. The. Hindenburg.”

  “Here are some videos of the Hindenburg I found for you online.”

  How did we end up at the Hindenburg? Owen wondered.

  Well, you watch enough YouTube videos about the Titanic, pretty soon an algorithm kicked in and started suggesting Hindenburg videos. It’s one of those natural progressions. What came after the Hindenburg? The Challenger explosion? The Twin Towers falling? Those South American soccer players who ate each other after their plane crashed in the Andes?

  His wife was in love with somebody else. No, not “his wife”—Lucy. Lucy was in love with somebody else. Somehow that made it even worse. She loved him still, but she was “in love” with this other guy, this Ben character.

  Falling in love was against the rules! He kept coming back to that. He felt as powerless as a kid on a school playground. No falling in love! No leaving! No falling in love and then leaving!

  The Hindenburg was finally exploding. It had traveled from Frankfurt all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and exploded in New Jersey. How come I never knew any of this? Owen wondered. Like everyone, he’d heard about the Hindenburg, and as a kid he’d seen that black-and-white video with the news guy crying, “Oh, the humanity,” but he never knew the whole story.

  People were fleeing, jumping, screaming, dying. Owen felt the weight of Wyatt’s special blanket, which failed to squeeze the terror from his chest, and tried to close his eyes. His last thought before sleep took him wa
s that he was surprised only thirty-six people had died. It had felt like so many more, in that old video, as the flames engulfed the screen and the newsman cried.

  Fifteen Months Later

  Owen and Wyatt were heading up from the mailbox, sharing a big black umbrella. They were making plans to build a fire, and Wyatt was jumping in every puddle he could find. Owen flipped through the mail and saw an interesting envelope with unfamiliar handwriting. He read it while they walked.

  Saturday was going to be the official opening ceremony for the Gordon and Simka Allen Center for Children with Special Needs. Wyatt was going to cut the ribbon, and he was very excited. He’d been practicing all week with a very big pair of scissors.

  The center had a sensory gym, multiple therapy rooms, and a state-of-the-art PT gym, as well as an innovative program that would bring in graduate students from nearby universities to perform the kind of research that was difficult to do in a clinical setting. It wasn’t a clinical setting, it was a school setting—it was connected to the Beekman public school by a winding, glass-enclosed walkway that took advantage of the view.

  They’d even gotten a small school farm as part of the deal, the old Jenkins place, just out past the soccer field. The farm had been in the Jenkins family for over a hundred and fifty years, but it turned out the current generation was happy to sell it to the school, at a fair price, for the good of the community. The school farm would offer therapeutic horseback riding, as well as after-school programs in animal husbandry and organic gardening, permaculture and wilderness-survival skills, as a way for the neurotypical kids to interact meaningfully with the special-needs children in a structured yet nonacademic environment.