THE AFFAIR

by Davis, Dyanne

  Larry stared straight into his eyes, refusing to let him off that easily. He should have known it would be a doctor Mick was involved with. Her work involved so many of them. This was Chance.

  And now it made sense, more than that cock and bull story she gave him about meeting a man in a parking lot. He’d always known that had to be a lie.

  “The C. on you lab coat, what does it stand for Dr. Morgan?”

  “Mr. Powers, if you like, you can just call me C. Morgan. I won’t be the one permanently on your case. In a few hours another doctor will take over. Your wife told me you had questions for me. Would you like for me to answer them?”

  Larry eyed the man, trying to decide what he wanted to do. One thing was for sure. He had no intention of allowing the good doctor to know how much pain he’d caused him. He’d focus instead on what had happened to him.

  “Did I have a heart attack?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

  “Well…”

  Larry watched as once again the doctor visibly restrained himself from looking in Mick’s direction.

  “Your arteries are clean, there is no blockage, none, and there is no damage to the heart.” Chance brought his eyes up finally to meet Larry’s. “The scenario is highly unlikely. I have no medical explanation for it.”

  “So what happened to me? I had this tremendous pain in my chest. I’ve been getting it now for a couple of months.” He looked toward Mick, who refused to meet his gaze or even to look up.

  The rest of what the doctor had to say went by in a blur. Larry could barely keep from closing his eyes against the pain of seeing the apparent love for his wife in another man’s eyes.

  He knew for sure if he went home with his wife it would be by default. He didn’t want that. He decided to stop asking questions of the doctor. He didn’t want the man in his room any longer. He couldn’t keep up the pretense.

  For several seconds after the doctor had exited the room Mick and Larry remained silent. Larry turned toward his wife. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

  She looked at him, her eyes large and watery. That did it. Larry closed his eyes and waited.

  “Yes, it’s him.”

  “Do you trust him, about what he said about what happened to me, I mean?” He wanted to say so much more, but this was safer. He couldn’t hid behind his closed lids so he opened his eye and met his wife’s gaze.

  “He knows how worried I am about you. Believe me, he did everything possible to find out what happened.” She looked into his eyes. “He thinks it might be a miracle.”

  “Yeah, right, I can imagine he’d be a big believer in that. I guess he’s gotten you convinced of that theory already, hasn’t he?”

  He watched her squirm, wishing she wouldn’t, wishing she would look him in the eye and tell him that the tall handsome doctor meant nothing to her.

  “Larry, Chance is not going to do anything to harm his patients, even for me.”

  “I saw the way he looked at you, Mick. I’m not so sure of that.” He took a deep breath. “I also saw the way you looked at him.”

  “Larry, it’s over between us.”

  “Is it because of me, because of what happened or didn’t happen?”

  “No, Larry, we’d ended it already. I was trying to tell you that at the hotel, but you never gave me a chance.”

  Larry studied his wife for a moment, his Mick. “Tell me you don’t love him.”

  He held his breath waiting for her to deny what he felt in the very marrow of his being, what registered in her eyes.

  “That has nothing to do with us. I love you, Larry. I think if we talk, and if we both listen, we can work this out.

  “Do you think it’s going to be that easy?”

  “I know it’s not going to be easy, but I want us to give it another try. Larry, we’ve got a lifetime of loving each other on the line.”

  Larry thought about what she’d said; her words echoed those of his therapist. She wanted to live up to her commitment, and yes, he knew she felt some guilt for his heart attack, or whatever the hell he’d had.

  He felt the pain starting again in his heart. He looked to the side of the bed and watched the spikes on the monitor go up.

  Maybe the good doctor was right. Maybe loving his wife was killing him.

  “Mick, I don’t think we should be talking about that right now. I’m tired, I just want to rest.” He closed his eyes and turned on his side.

  “I’ll stay until you wake up,” Mick offered.

  “Why don’t you just go home?” Larry realized what he’d said. “I mean, why don’t you just go back to your hotel? I’m in a hospital, I have everything I need.”

  Like hell, he thought. The one thing he needed was Mick, but he was through begging her to love him. It would have been so much easier if he’d never seen the man, but he had. What had happened was real.

  “I want to stay, Larry.”

  “Suit yourself, Mick, but I really don’t need you here.”

  He sensed the moment she left his side. He pretended to start snoring, anything to get her to leave. He was surprised that it worked. Then he felt the pain begin again. He had to think of something else.

  I walked out of Larry’s room feeling dejected. What had I expected, that he would instantly welcome me back with open arms? Then I remembered he had done just that in the first seconds he opened his eyes. He’d held me to him.

  I walked up to Blaine and Chance who were talking together, obviously waiting for me.

  I glanced at Blaine, before looking directly at Chance. “He knows.”

  “Yeah, I could tell,” Chance answered. “From the moment I entered the room, there was a certain look in his eyes. His voice held such hostility that I knew he knew.”

  “What did you expect? I’m sure he thinks you’re trying to help me kill him.”

  I started laughing hysterically, unable to control myself. “Just think about it, Chance,” I said between laughs. “He has this terrible pain, falls to the floor, he’s brought to a hospital where his wife’s lover just happens to be the cardiologist on duty. Where anyone else would have been diagnosed with a heart attack, what does he hear? No such thing, no heart attack, it didn’t happen. He has to think we’re all in this together. He already believes we’re crazy.”

  Chance was looking at me as if at any moment he would be the one to call up to the psychiatric unit for me.

  Blaine was glancing at me, at first worried. A moment passed and a smile touched his lips and he too began to laugh. “You’re right. You throw in a husband from the past, a son, and now you tell him he’s received a miracle.”

  I looked at Blaine because Chance was not appreciating the humor in this. “Try having the husband from the past for your surgeon. Poor Larry.”

  I felt the tears of laughter running down my face. “He has to think he’s gone to sleep and landed in a different universe.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Chance admonished us both. “I don’t know about the two of you, but I personally don’t want my patients thinking I’m in a scheme to do them in.”

  I sobered instantly as did Blaine. “Chance, I have to laugh at the absurdity of the situation or I would be bawling on the floor, kicking my legs like a child. I know it isn’t funny.”

  I sat down. Gazing up at Chance, I whispered, “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what’s going on. I was there with Larry. All of this is so unbelievable, from my meeting you, then Blaine, now this. I think I’ve reached my limit for the unexplained. I’m ready for this to end. I want my sane life back.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” Blaine inquired, no longer laughing, no longer seeing the humor in the situation.

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” I watched him trying to read my emotions, hiding his eyes when he realized I’d caught him.

  “Blaine, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I can manage now. You should go home and get some rest. I’m going to be he
re for a very long time.”

  “I thought you said Larry was sleeping.” Chance glanced once at Blaine, spotting the same hurt that I did. “You may as well get some rest yourself.” He looked at me, the grief in his eyes, touching my soul.

  I fingered the locket around my neck Blaine had given me. “It’s time I return to my life. I’ll wait until Larry wakes.” My response was to them both.

  I went to Blaine and kissed him on each cheek. “I’ll call you later. To Chance I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  Larry kept his eyes closed. He’d completely shoved Mick away, given her every reason to run back into Chance’s arms. He refused to look out the window in his door. He didn’t want to see Mick talking to Chance, didn’t want to see the way they looked at each other longingly.

  He heard the click of her shoes as she came back into the room, smelled her scent. Still he kept his eyes closed. Maybe she’d forgotten her purse. When he heard the soft whoosh as she sat, he held his breath. She lifted his hand and squeezed it in her palms.

  With his head turned from her he felt his own tears slide beneath his closed lids. He gave her fingers a gentle squeeze in return, without speaking.

  Larry had no way of knowing how much time had passed. He knew he had fallen asleep holding Mick’s hand. When he woke she was sleeping, still holding tightly to his palm.

  He brought his other hand over and ran his fingers through her cinnamon curls sprinkled with a little bit of gray. Maybe what had happened to him wasn’t so strange after all. He remembered the night Mick left; all he’d wanted to do since that moment was die. He’d almost gotten his wish.

  Mick started to stir. Her eyes opened, sleepy and sad. She looked at Larry. “How are you feeling?” she asked. He noticed the guilt was still there, hiding in the depths of her eyes.

  “What happened, Mick?”

  “Chance isn’t sure.”

  “No, I mean what happened with us?”

  He sighed, closing his hand over hers, and shut his eyes for an instant. “I swear, I thought you were happy. I never knew. Why didn’t you ever say anything to me?”

  “I did.”

  “When? I don’t remember.”

  Larry watched his wife’s face for signs that he must have missed before. “Was it because I didn’t satisfy you? Is that why you had an affair?”

  Michelle pulled her hands from Larry. “Larry, none of this has anything to do with Chance. You need to really hear me. Even if we’re never together again, I want you to listen to me for once.”

  “But I…” he started to protest before Mick stopped him.

  “No, Larry, you don’t listen, you assume. And it’s my fault for not demanding to be heard.”

  He watched her lips moving. He decided to be quiet; maybe he didn’t listen. Now he wanted, no, he needed to hear her.

  “Honey, it was not all your fault. I brought a lot of baggage into our marriage, baggage that I was unaware of. I was trying so hard to live the perfect life that we both wanted that I didn’t know what to do when I found myself unhappy.

  She laughed then, and he watched in silence until she began to speak again. “I thought I was so different from my mother,” Mick continued.

  “She never said anything to Dad about how she felt. She only told us kids. She told us repeatedly that she stayed there and took dad’s cheating and his abuse because of us.

  He watched as the tears rolled down her face. “She told us that so often that I began to believe her.” Michelle looked away. Her pain was breaking his heart.

  “Larry,” she began again, “I really wanted you to have the life you didn’t have, the life you thought I had. I really thought that in some way, it was my fault that my mother stayed, that life was so miserable, that my father cheated, and that he hit my mother. Larry, my dreams of having lived another life started when I was a kid. My mother took me to a psychiatrist. They all thought I was crazy. They didn’t know what to do so they blamed each other for what they believed was wrong with me.

  “I always thought that maybe, just maybe, if I was a good girl, pretend I wasn’t having the dreams, it would be fine, that we’d have the happy home my mother said she was trying to give us.”

  She was crying fully now. “God, how I tried, Larry.”

  “I always thought you had such a good life.” Larry’s hand went out to rub his wife’s cheeks.”

  “I know you did,” Mick answered him. “I kept telling you how it was, but you never heard me.”

  Larry pulled his wife to him. “It was just that…,” He bit his lips. He hated talking about his mother, hated admitting that even now the image of her leaving him bothered the hell out of him. It hurt like the blazes.

  All at once he realized that the pain of his mother’s abandonment didn’t hurt with a billionth of the force that Mick’s leaving him had. Maybe he could get over it.

  “Mick,” he said, holding her, “I couldn’t listen to you. Your parents didn’t divorce until you were out of high school.

  To me you were the luckiest girl on the planet. I was so awed by the fact that you were raised by your mother and natural father.” He smiled.

  “Baby, I thought you had it so good, that you just were unaware of how lucky you were. You were raised in a home with two parents, and neither of them was a stepparent. You know how rare that is nowadays. There’s always a stepparent around. Your life was magical to me. I would have given anything to have had even a foster parent that kept me for more than a month or two.”

  Larry looked at Mick and felt her sadness. “I wanted to recreate your life for you. I wanted to give you the happiness that I thought you’d grown up with.”

  “That’s the problem, ” she all but whispered. “I didn’t want to relive my childhood. I told myself I had so much to be thankful for. You didn’t cheat and we didn’t argue, and you…you were so very happy.”

  “But you weren’t?” He asked, saddened, hearing her for the first time in twenty-six years.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Mick, you should have said something, anything. You should have hit me over the head with a lamp to get me to listen.”

  “That’s just it,” she answered him. “I was too afraid of fighting, afraid that we’d be just like my parents, that you’d take lover after lover, that you’d come in one night and not like something I’d done, that I’d purposefully do something to anger you and that you would hit me.”

  “I would have never hit you, Mick.”

  “I know but that was my secret fear, so I pretended to be happy, pretended that yes, we were the perfect couple. Larry, it wasn’t the sex. That wasn’t the reason I was unhappy.”

  His gut knotted. He noticed she’d not said that he satisfied her. He pulled his errant thought back, determined to listen to every word she had to say.

  “Larry, I was so afraid of having children, of putting them through the same things, of blaming them for my own unhappiness, and here I did the same thing anyway.

  “I got angry at you for being so happy. I couldn’t understand it. The kids never got on your nerves, you never got upset with them, you kept wanting more and more and I felt with each pregnancy that I was being bound by a life I didn’t want.”

  Larry cringed. Here it comes, he thought.

  “Only that wasn’t the case.” Michelle paused. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but the issue with me and the kids, I don’t think it was what I always thought it was. I think now it was something entirely different.”

  He was staring at her, the words on the tip of his tongue. He was about to tell her that if she was going to tell him any more psycho babble to can it. He didn’t want to hear it.

  He realized that’s exactly what he’d done to her in the past year. He’d told her that he knew what was best for them. He felt the pain in his chest again, only much milder. God, she was right. He hadn’t listened.

  “What is it, Mick? What changed your mind?” he asked at last.

  “Are you
sure you want to hear?” she asked, a little uncertain. “I don’t have a scientific explanation for it.”

  “Yeah, I want to hear it.” He gave her fingers another encouraging squeeze. “Tell me.”

  “It was because of Blaine.”

  He watched her eyes. When she looked downward, almost embarrassed, he lifted her chin. He saw the smile that appeared on her lips and was happy that he was finally listening. Was this what it took to make him hear her, an almost heart attack?

  “This other life,” she began. “It was real, Larry. I lived it. I saw it and I do remember it. I remember the anguish I felt when I knew I was going to die leaving an infant son whose father might not love him because he blamed him for my passing.

  “I took that sense of loss into my spirit and I became afraid to love my children, afraid that if I did they would be taken away.”

  Larry felt his wife’s shiver, heard her voice breaking. She couldn’t have told him any of that before; surely he would have recalled.

  “Mick, I don’t remember your ever saying anything about this. You never told me you didn’t think you loved the kids.”

  “How could I? We were the perfect couple leading the perfect life. How could I tell you I didn’t want what you thought made us perfect? I didn’t want you to think I was like your mother.”

  For a long time they stared at each other, trying hard to read the other’s expression. Larry didn’t want to ask but there might never be another time.

  “Is that why you wanted to abort Shannon? You didn’t love her?”

  “I thought I didn’t. I was afraid to love her or any of them except maybe Derrick. Somehow I couldn’t stop myself from loving him.”