She Wouldn't Change a Thing

by Sarah Adlakha

  She swallowed down the tears that were threatening to surface, not sure if they were stemming from anger or guilt or frustration, too full of pride to let them flow. She could tell from the clenching of her husband’s jaw that he had more to say, that he would have been content to go on all night about the meanings of dreams and the people who visit us while we sleep. Maria was overdue for her own sleep, and she didn’t have the energy to indulge him. Once upon a time, she’d enjoyed those all-night discussions, during their courtship and the early years of their marriage, when she’d wanted him to think she was deep and philosophical. But a couple of kids later, when she didn’t have the energy to fake it anymore, the discussions came to a screeching halt.

  “I’m sorry, Maria.” He scooted his stool closer to her and ran his hand across her back. “I know as well as anyone how hard it is to not second-guess yourself when you lose a patient, but you know I’m not blaming you, right?” When she didn’t respond, he turned his attention back to the spaghetti. “Let’s just forget about it. Tell me more about your meeting with the detective. You said you had to sign something so he could search our storage unit?”

  “I don’t know if I should have signed it or not,” she said, relieved at how willingly her husband had dropped the conversation, knowing what it meant to him. “I haven’t given him the key yet, in case you think I shouldn’t.”

  “No, give it to him.” He twirled the last heap of spaghetti around his fork, shoved it into his mouth, and then froze with half a noodle still dangling from his lips. “We have nothing to hide in there. Right?”

  “Of course not. But doesn’t it make you a little nervous that he wants to search our unit?”

  “It’s obviously about Rachel.” He pushed the empty plate away and paused before going down a road they were both hesitant to traverse. “Do you think it has something to do with Jonathan’s death?”

  Maria shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “The detective asked me if Rachel and Nick were ever questioned about Jonathan’s death, but I told him I didn’t think so.”

  “That’s weird,” Will replied. “I guess we’ll find out what it’s all about when they give you the letter.”

  “Aren’t you curious, though?” Maria gulped down a swallow of her watered-down drink and turned to face her husband. “What if there’s something important in there that we need to know about?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, wishing she had the courage to ask her husband to walk her through her anxieties:

  I’m worried that something bad is going to happen to our son.

  I’m certain my patient broke into our house before she killed herself.

  I’m convinced there’s something I need to see on Rachel’s laptop in our storage unit.

  The words never left her mouth. In the end, she couldn’t force herself to confess, because even to herself she sounded neurotic, and if Will was ever looking for proof that she needed a break from her job, here was the evidence.

  “Maybe we should go see for ourselves,” she said.

  “No, Maria.” His finger shot up between them like a scolding parent. “Do not go snooping through that unit.”

  “Of course not,” she mumbled, swirling the half-melted ice and the remnants of her Coke in small circles and wondering how she was going to get herself to the storage unit before the end of the weekend.

  “I mean it, Maria. For once in your life, just listen to me. It could be a crime scene, for all we know.”

  “I’m pretty sure if it was a crime scene, they wouldn’t need a search warrant.”

  “Please don’t do this, Maria.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get one of those crazy ideas in your head that you try to drag me into.”

  “Okay,” she said, unable to meet his gaze. “I won’t go there.”

  “I want to hear you say ‘I promise.’”

  “I promise,” she laughed. “Now settle down.”

  “You’re a mess.” Despite his best efforts, the corner of Will’s mouth curved up, and the crooked smile that had first endeared him to her all those years ago drew her in again. The wooden stool creaked as she heaved herself from it before draping her arms over the furrows of her husband’s shoulders and pressing her lips into the curve of his neck. His body was lean and muscular, like a distance runner’s, and she was suddenly conscious of all the ways her own body had changed over the years.

  “You’re so cute when you’re serious,” she said.

  “I’m not cute.” He slid his hands over her belly before wrapping them around her back, and Maria could feel his breath brush across her cheek before he pressed his lips into hers. “But I am serious,” he said. “Go upstairs and get ready for bed and I’ll be up in a minute.”

  As the dishes clanged in the kitchen, Maria heaved herself up the stairs, pausing for a contraction on the landing between floors, breathless and sweating. By the time she made it to the top and into her bathroom, a vortex of images was churning through her thoughts and spiraling into a knot that contained a dead patient, a cryptic suicide note, and now the lie that she’d lobbed to her husband not five minutes earlier.

  “Are you okay?” Will’s reflection in the mirror startled her as she watched him approach from the doorway.

  “I’m fine,” she whispered.

  “Why are you crying?” He stepped closer, his image watching hers as he closed the distance between them. She hadn’t realized the tears were flowing until he was standing beside her, his hands running down the sides of her arms as he watched her reflection in the mirror. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she replied, wiping the tears away, wondering if she would ever have a moment of privacy in her life again. “I’m just a little stressed right now. It’s nothing. I just need a minute.”

  He kissed the back of her head and watched her in silence as she tried to explain away the tears and the anxiety and the stress, wondering why she had to provide an excuse for a perfectly reasonable response to her situation. He was hesitant to leave her, but when he finally slipped out the door, her tears went with him. She was too tired to cry. It took too much energy, and she didn’t have any to spare.

  She pulled her maternity dress over her head and dropped it onto the floor at her feet, examining her belly from every angle in the mirror and cringing at the damage control looming on the horizon. It was just one more thing to deal with. What would she look like after three babies? At least her son would arrive before her fortieth birthday, though just by a few weeks. She pictured her fifty-year-old self at a book club with other women her age, commenting that all her children had been born while she was in her thirties; somehow, that seemed important to her.

  Will was already asleep by the time she climbed into bed. With her back turned toward him to shield the glow, she eased the laptop open and punched at the keyboard with the tip of her index finger. “John Ambers and Shelby Whitten” flashed back at her from the search box on the screen, the names of the lives that Sylvia was certain she had destroyed before her death. It was a mistake to search for them. It wouldn’t prove anything if they were real, just that Sylvia had somehow incorporated them into her delusion, but even before her finger came down on the button, Maria knew she couldn’t resist.

  FIANCÉE FOUND DEAD UNDER RUBBLE.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  jenny

  Calebasse, Louisiana

  HER HANDS TRACED THE CONTOURS OF her hips and slid over the taut muscles of her stomach. Nineteen years had passed since her last and only pregnancy. She stretched out on her son’s abandoned bed and took in the memories of his childhood. They hung on the walls in the form of posters and medals from his varsity baseball career and the dust-covered picture frames that captured the eternal smiles and laughter of high school friends who swore they would always return. Jenny remembered those same broken promises with her childhood friends.

  “Jenny?”

  Her husband’s voice bellowed from
the kitchen, but she didn’t respond. The door creaked when he pushed it open.

  “What are you doing?” He glanced at his watch. “One more cup of coffee before we head to New Orleans?”

  “Sure,” she mumbled, watching her husband from the bed and taking in his image as if it were the first time, amazed at all the ways he’d changed over the course of their marriage. His beard was more gray than brown, his skin was thick and tanned from countless hours in the sun, and his face was etched with the creases of time. Despite the years of abuse to his body, he was somehow more rugged and handsome in his forties than in his youth.

  “What’s up, Jen?”

  “Don’t you miss him?” She straightened the wrinkles from the covers as she slid to the edge of the bed.

  “Of course I miss him,” he replied, with a guarded step forward, stopping a few feet short of her. “But he’s just at college. He’ll be by in a couple weeks to visit.”

  She imagined her husband not stopping a few feet short but sliding onto the bed beside her and draping an arm around her shoulder. She couldn’t remember the last time he had done that, but he wasn’t the only one to blame.

  “I know you miss him,” Hank said, his tone softening. “It’s got to be pretty lonely around here with both of us gone now. Maybe I’ll look into that onshore welding job.”

  The conversation was as timeworn and weary as their marriage, but she nodded her approval, knowing it would never come to fruition. Their lives had been dictated by Hank’s work schedule, two weeks on the oil rig and two weeks off, and she had her suspicions that more than two weeks together would be the end of them.

  “Or maybe we could get a dog to keep you company,” he said, with another quick glance at his watch.

  “I don’t want a dog,” she said, following him down the hallway and into the kitchen. “I was actually thinking that maybe I’m ready to do something different with my life.”

  Hank sighed and sank into his chair, just like she knew he would. This was one of his least favorite conversations, and one that rarely got off the ground. He was, without fail, disinclined to engage in it. He didn’t want Jenny to work outside the house and would do anything to preserve the rhythm and flow of the two-week breaks he had between oil rig stretches. She’d given an honest effort a couple of times over the past six months to breathe life into it, to let him know how she felt she was destined for something greater than the trivial life she’d been living since Dean left for college, that maybe it was her turn to do something selfish for once, to find out what she might have been if motherhood hadn’t stolen her youth. But Hank had been unwilling to humor her in the slightest. He was scared he was going to lose her. On some level, she understood this about her husband, but it was never something they put into words.

  Hank swallowed a large gulp of coffee before he pulled the cup from his mouth, his expression lost in the steam billowing between them.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled with a shrug. “I guess I just feel like I’m in a little bit of a rut. I seem to have a lot of time on my hands lately.”

  “You should check out the high school,” he said. “Remember when Dean was a student there and they were always nagging parents to volunteer?”

  “I already do that on Monday and Wednesday afternoons.” She hadn’t considered a task so inconsequential, or that her husband’s expectations for her could be so trivial. Her ideas were on a much grander scale. “And I go to cooking classes on Tuesdays, yoga on Thursdays, and volunteer at the hospital two Fridays a month. I’m not talking about more volunteer work,” she said. “I think I might want to go back to college.”

  If she hadn’t heard her own words churning through the air, she wouldn’t have believed she’d voiced them. She’d been trying to get to this point for months, embarrassed by what she considered her overconfidence, as if she belonged in a class of people who graduated from college. She’d been a couple of years into an undergraduate program at the University of New Orleans when she ended up pregnant, but that had been a lifetime ago, and any thoughts of returning had been stashed away in the back of her mind, gathering dust and cobwebs, last item on a long to-do list. Hank didn’t nod or smile or even appear to be breathing, until Jenny repeated her words. “I want to go back to college.”

  “You mean like one of those online courses they offer now?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean I want to go back to college and finish my degree. I only have a couple of years left. And I can commute from here.”

  The chair creaked when Hank eased his back into the wooden slats with his arms crossed over his chest. His biceps bulged in Popeye fashion from beneath his cotton shirt, and Jenny admonished herself for allowing her eyes to wander. When she pulled them up, they landed on the smirk that was creeping onto his face.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?” he said, but the grin that had surfaced on his face was all she needed to see. She already knew his thoughts: that she was foolish and naive for believing she could dive back into that world and be a part of something significant and transformative, that she was not destined for greatness but for mediocrity.

  “Like I’m not good enough.”

  “I never said that. I never said anything.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. I can tell by the look on your face that you don’t think I can do it.”

  “Is that right?”

  He sighed as he pushed his chair back from the table, stepped over the linoleum tile floor they had talked about upgrading for over a decade, and dumped his half-full cup of coffee into the sink. As she listened to the water from the tap rain down and rinse away the remnants of his coffee, she wondered if her dreams were destined for the same fate.

  She’d once believed that she could have been successful in business, finance maybe. She’d been good with numbers and had even thought about working for a nonprofit organization, to give back to the community. Her dreams were old now, though, and faded. She couldn’t even remember what color suit she’d be wearing as she rushed to catch the train, or if her hair would be cropped short or pulled back in a power bun, or how late into the night she’d work while she helped Dean with his homework at the kitchen table. The little details, the things that once brought her dreams to life, were all gone now.

  “Do you have an opinion?” she said, following her words to her husband, who was still standing at the sink.

  “You don’t want my opinion, Jen. You just want me to agree with you and support your decision.”

  “You’re right. I’d like your opinion to be that you agree with me and support me, but I guess that’s not the truth.”

  “You want the truth?” Hank said, and when the water stopped running and there was nothing left to rinse away, he turned to face her, the weight of his question bearing down on her. “I think it’s a waste of time and money.”

  “How can you think doing something to better myself is a waste?”

  “Having a college degree doesn’t make you a better person. It’s just a piece of paper you put in a frame and hang on the wall. It’s not going to change who you are.”

  It could have been her mother standing there giving her the same lecture. The similarities of their words were striking, but the differences in their intentions were undeniable. Hank wasn’t trying to stop her because of jealousy and apathy; he was a candid, commonsense type of guy, frugal to the point of cheap. If the ends didn’t justify the means, then it was a waste of time and money.

  Her mother had been his polar opposite, oblivious and unpredictable, jealous to the point of vindictive. Even as a child, when Jenny’s actions took the attention off her mother, there was a price to pay, and it usually involved dropping everything to nurse her drug-addled mother back from an overdose. The only time Jenny had refused to play that game, the night before a big exam during her second year of college, her mother had upped the stakes and ended up in the morgue.

&
nbsp; The guilt she owned was more about her lack of guilt over the death of her mother than about the death itself, but at the funeral she’d played the part she was expected to play. She cried when cued, made up memories when prompted, and took on the role of the grieving daughter with such gusto she could have won an Oscar. The handful of mourners at the grave site scattered when the funeral was over, and Jenny had taken the opportunity to cut ties with the family that had fostered addiction and apathy and everything dirty that her mother had tried to pass on to her.

  She didn’t know it at the time, but she was four weeks pregnant when her mother passed away, and if she’d believed in hexes and curses, she would have sworn that her mother had planted that baby in her womb just to destroy her dreams.

  “This is important to me,” she mumbled. “I wish you could see that.”

  “I do see that,” Hank sighed. “And I’m not trying to stand in your way. If it’s really that important to you, I’ll do whatever I can to support you, but it seems like a whole lot of work just to get a piece of paper that says you did it.”

  “It’s not just a piece of paper,” Jenny said, but she stopped herself there. It was futile to argue. What a college degree meant to her, Hank could never understand. He came from a middle-class family that carried work ethic and principles in its genes. They took care of each other and provided food, shelter, and encouragement to their offspring. They took in other peoples’ children and raised them as their own. He could never understand her need to distance herself from the cesspool she had clawed her way out of, and how a college degree could permanently sever the chains that she could still feel wrapped around her ankles and dragging her back into it.

  “Can we talk about this some other time, Jen?”

  “Like when?”

  “Like maybe when I have more than an hour to get to the dock.”

  Jenny didn’t reply but yanked the screen door open and let it slam behind her on her way out. Hank was trailing close behind, somehow keeping pace as words poured from his mouth. “Give yourself a couple weeks to think it through,” he said, “and when I get back, maybe we can get a puppy.”