Faye's Story: Crave Series, #2

by Heidi Lowe

  I'm like a mad woman as I shove everything off the dressing table, wrench open the closet and proceed to tear every item of clothing that Nikki left.

  "I gave you my life," I scream, pulling at a cashmere sweater until it finally rips. "I've been nothing but loyal; I've done nothing but love you. And this is how you repay me."

  I spot a small box in the back of the closet, and reach for it. It's been almost a year since I last looked in there, since we sat together and perused through the contents. We do it every year, without fail. On our anniversary.

  A stack of folded papers lie inside, among them two ticket stubs for Desert Hearts. The local movie theater was doing a showing of some romance classics. That was our first date, and the first night we kissed.

  I slump down on the carpet, pick up the stubs and look at them.

  "You kept yours too?" Nikki had asked six months later, when we were in bed, and I'd casually brought up the fact that I still had my ticket stashed in the bottom of my underwear drawer.

  "Of course I did. I couldn't throw it away."

  She proposed to me shortly after that.

  "When you showed me the ticket stub, I knew right then that we were meant to be together," she'd said. "I just knew you were the one."

  Now her words echo in my head. Once they had meant everything to me, but now they mean nothing. As hollow as our vows; as empty as her promises to me. How callous it was to make them, to say those things, all the while knowing that her heart belonged to another.

  Just like the divorce papers, I rip the stubs up into little pieces. Then I move on to the letters. Love letters. I'm not strong enough emotionally to read them before I shred them. That would be too painful. To see more of her words, more of her lies, telling me how much she loves me, and how hopeless she would be without me. Telling me, sometimes in cheesy verse, that nothing in the world means more to her than I do. I don't need to read them – I remember almost every sentence, word for word.

  She would write them once or twice a month, at work, at home while I slept, it didn't matter where. Then I'd wake to find a new one on my nightstand. It went on like that for two years. Then Emily came along. But I never stopped feeling loved and cherished. She showed me, told me in so many ways.

  I'm rabid when I tear those worthless pieces of paper. I leave them in a strewn pile on the closet floor. They represent all that we are now: torn, broken beyond repair, filled with lies.

  I don't get up from the floor when I'm done. I lie down among the mess, cradling and crying myself to sleep.

  "Faye? Are you in?" The voice – her voice – wrenches me from my slumber. I wake, disoriented, to find myself on the floor in the closet. I can't get up fast enough, and she catches me. "What are you..."

  I pick myself up. She's looking at the mess I've caused, at the destruction of her things, of our memories, and there's a melancholy look in her eyes.

  "Were those our letters?" she says.

  I say nothing as I step out of the closet, stepping all over her things. I shoot her the most scathing look I have in me, and don't blink, making it all the more ominous.

  "Why–" She stops herself abruptly, as though realizing how stupid the question is.

  But I'm prepared to give her an answer. I square up to her, and for a moment she looks genuinely afraid, afraid of what she has led me to do. I'm not a violent person at all – at least, I didn't use to be; but she sees a woman on the edge, and it frightens her, I guess.

  I look into those leaf-green eyes, not into the eyes of my wife but a stranger who has caused me nothing but pain, and then I say, "I hate you."

  She flinches. She knows I mean it. I've never meant anything more in my life. Not even the I love yous. You can love someone deeply, but when they hurt you the way Nikki has hurt me, that hate cancels everything out. The hate is so immense, it consumes you.

  "Don't say that. Look, I saw the divorce papers on the floor in the hallway. She shouldn't have come here. I didn't want you to find out that way."

  She isn't telling me that Angel lied, that they're not getting married. She isn't telling me that it's too soon to even be thinking about a divorce let alone remarriage. Instead she's trying to apologize for breaking my heart.

  "I don't think we have anything left to say to each other."

  "Of course we do. We have a child together."

  "No! I have a child," I scream, the rage enveloping me all over again. I don't care how callous what I'm saying sounds. This is her own doing.

  "Emily is my daughter too, Faye. No matter what happens between us, that isn't going to change."

  "We'll see about that."

  She grips my wrist when I try to walk away. "I'm not just going to desert my daughter. You know that."

  "Do I? That's not what your whore says. In fact, she made it very clear you won't fight me for custody."

  She frowns, searches my face for signs that I'm lying.

  "She wouldn't say that. She knows how much Emily means to me."

  This comment makes me see red. I hate the fact that they've spoken about my daughter, about their future together with her. They were making plans while I was still moping around the house, bemoaning the breakdown of my marriage, and clinging onto false hope of a reconciliation.

  "If you think I'm going to let that evil bitch anywhere near my daughter, you're as crazy as she is. If you think you get to play happy families with my child–"

  "No one is trying to replace you."

  I let out a sardonic laugh. "No? Seems to me that that's exactly what's happening. You couldn't even wait two months before you file for a divorce. Well, guess what, I'm not signing those papers, no matter how many times you send them."

  She's trying to stay calm as she takes in a shaky breath.

  "I know that you're upset right now, so I won't push you."

  She's so cold, it's as if she's been replaced by a robot. How can she stand there so calmly and say these things to me? Even if she doesn't love me anymore, surely her humanity would act as a filter.

  "Get out of my house," I say, eyes burning into hers. "And leave your key. You're not welcome here anymore."

  "Okay, I'll go, but we're going to have to talk about this properly at some point."

  I've already turned my back to her. I don't want her to see my tears.

  "I really am sorry. I didn't want it to be like this," she says. Is it my imagination or did I hear her voice get choked up? No, because that would mean she actually has a soul, and everything she's done recently speaks to the contrary.

  I hear the plonk of the key on the dresser, then she leaves. I watch her from my bedroom window as she climbs into her new car. She doesn't drive off immediately, just sits there, hands on the wheel. I would give all I have to know what she's thinking. Perhaps she's already regretting her actions. Maybe a part of her is battling with the other part to knock on the door and plead for me to take her back.

  It wouldn't matter now, anyway. It's too late; the damage has been done. She can't come back. Not now, not ever.

  SEVEN

  Dr. Laurel Morehouse doesn't usually make house calls. In fact, what I mean to say is, she never makes them. Not to her usual patients. And she only sees people during normal office hours.

  One late afternoon when I call her and tell her I'm holding a bottle of pills in my hand, and I don't know how many I'll take before I decide to stop, she rushes over without a second thought. She should have let me finish. I know it's my fault for making it seem as though I'm about to kill myself. It's me playing on her emotions. Yes, I do feel like dying, but I'd never do this. I'd never do that to my daughter.

  Fifteen minutes after the call ends, she's hammering down my door.

  "Faye, open the door. Faye?" she shouts. When I do let her in, and she sees that I'm not drugged up, not about to keel over and die from an overdose of sleeping pills, she lays in to me. "What the hell is wrong with you? What sort of phone call is that?"

  She's like me, at least how I us
ed to be – it's rare to see her angry. I feel like a teenager again, hearing her explode like that. There's something comforting about it. And even though her face is cherry red with fury, and her graying black hair is a scruffy mess, like she just got out of bed, there's still a pleasantness to her that makes me glad she came.

  "If you had let me finish my sentence, you would have known I wasn't planning to harm myself."

  She rolls her eyes. "And how else am I supposed to take it when I hear someone say they're about to down a bottle of pills?"

  "I'm sorry to disappoint you," I say.

  "Jesus, Faye. I'm glad you're all right. But I must have jumped three red lights getting here." She calms down, let's out a long sigh, and regards me with concern. "I know you're having a hard time with everything that's happened. And I've seen this stuff play out before."

  "Relax, I have no intention of killing myself. I wouldn't give either of them the satisfaction."

  We go into the kitchen and I make coffee.

  It doesn't take long for her to slip into shrink mode, falling silent and letting me air my grievances, berate my cheating wife and the tramp she's shacking up with. I'm glad she isn't charging by the hour.

  "It's just easier to sleep it off, you know. It doesn't hurt when I'm asleep. And as soon as I wake up, I want to go right back. I know it's not a way to live."

  She sips her coffee, nods, but lets me continue:

  "I mean, what kind of mother am I? I don't have the energy to do all the things I used to do with Emily. But worse still, I don't feel like doing them. That scares me. Is that normal?"

  "Indeed. You've suffered a trauma. It's natural for you to feel detached from the world, from the people around you."

  Trauma? Could separation really be called that?

  I pace around the kitchen, coffee cup in hand. The sun streams in through the kitchen window, and birds chirp their melodies to one another. Life, as they say, goes on all around me, undeterred by my "trauma". It seems I'm the only one suffering.

  "The hatred is consuming me, Laurel. I don't like the person I'm becoming."

  "You're going to feel like that for awhile. And then, one day, it will get easier."

  I can't imagine a time when it will ever get easier. "Right now, it feels like the pain will never stop."

  "It's still early days. Give yourself time to grieve."

  Ten weeks, that's how long we've been separated. And just a month since the revelation that Nikki wants a divorce.

  "I suppose you're going to tell me to take one day at a time?" These were her words after my sister died. If I recall correctly, they were also the same words she used when my parents died.

  "You'll survive, Faye. You always do," she says, and sounds so sure about it, even if I'm not. "I'm not just saying this because we're friends, but you're one of the strongest people I know. There aren't many who lose as much as you have and can still get up every morning and do what needs to be done."

  Lately it's felt like I have no friends, so I'm glad for the reminder. When you're a couple, the friends you share have to choose sides; and seeing as most of our friends were Nikki's first, there's been a scarcity of phone calls and visits from concerned acquaintances coming to check up on me. Laurel and I knew each other long before Nikki showed up, because she was a friend of my mother's. I met her when I was still in middle school, and she had just finished her clinical psychiatry degree.

  "We proved you wrong, didn't we?" I say after a while.

  "I don't follow."

  "You were at the wedding. You said Nikki and I would stand the test of time, or something like that."

  She looks at me sadly. "I'm a psychiatrist, not a psychic. You both looked so happy, so real." She shrugs.

  "We were..." I sniff back the tears. This time, I restrain them. "Just three months ago we were. Tell me how something so perfect, so real, collapses so easily?"

  "I can't answer that. Maybe this was always how it was destined to end. The most important thing now is that you learn to cope, and learn to envision your future without Nikki. It's going to really test you, and you'll feel like reaching for the pill bottle again, but you'll get there. You'll move on."

  I plonk myself back on my seat, and deliberate. There's no quick fix, no shortcuts to take to get to indifference, to the point where I can sign those divorce papers and let Nikki go for good. Where I'll be able to look at her again, co-parent with her without wanting to claw her eyes out. There's only one remedy for what I'm feeling, and that's time.

  Sandra's house sits on a pretty little cul de sac, quite picturesque, especially when the sun's shining on it. Freshly trimmed lawns and hedges decorate the front of each house. Children pass me on bikes and scooters, chasing each other, or kicking soccer balls back and forth. It's the perfect neighborhood to raise a family, and the ideal spot for the child of divorce to spend her weekends while her mother recuperates.

  I've left the car at home and opted to walk there, Doctor Laurel's orders. "Go for a walk, or a run. Get out there again. It will do you some good."

  I've got to hand it to her, she knows what she's talking about. By the time I reach Sandra's road, I feel a lot better. My thoughts aren't laden with images of me growing old alone, or of my daughter calling another woman Mom. The talk and the walk have done me good. I know this feeling will be temporary, but I'm happy to revel in it, however fleeting it is.

  From the end of the street I see Sandra and Emily on the lawn. Emily is in an inflatable kiddie pool with another little girl, whom I recognize as Sandra's niece, Mya. She's a couple of years older than Emily, but not much bigger.

  Sandra has her back to me and a cell pressed to her ear while she lounges on a picnic blanket on the grass. Toys and various children's vehicles surround them all. No one spots me approaching.

  "I understand that, but what do you expect me to do, Nik?"

  I stop. Eavesdropping is such an immoral act, and I don't like doing it, but hearing Sandra call Nikki's name, I know instinctively that they're talking about me.

  "This isn't a competition. I don't like the position you've put me in."

  I hope none of the kids turn around and see me, bust me. I need to know where this conversation is going.

  "I told you I would be there for her, and you didn't have a problem with that. Now all of a sudden you do? All because she feels left out?" Sandra laughs without humor. "I don't care what she thinks. Just because you've lost your mind, doesn't mean I have, too."

  I smile to myself when I hear that. I could kiss Sandra. We've always gotten along well, but I never thought she would side with me over Nikki. She's had my back since the split. It almost makes me cry how vehemently she's going to bat for me.

  "Oh, come on. This isn't about me trying to sabotage your union. You're my best friend – of course I want you to be happy. Just don't try and drag me into your drama. And don't expect me to give my blessing either. 'Cause you'll be waiting a long time."

  A neighbor across the street, a man with a baby strapped to his chest in a carrier, eyes me suspiciously as he leaves his house. Maybe now's the time to announce my arrival.

  I'm about to approach Sandra when I hear her say, "For God's sake, Nik, give her time. It's been a couple of weeks since you sent her a new copy. Why are you in such a hurry?"

  She must be referring to the fresh set of divorce papers that arrived in the mail a fortnight ago, before promptly going straight into the shredder.

  I've no doubt that more will turn up, once they learn what happened to the last set. I've no doubt I'll conjure up more ways of destroying the new ones.

  "I can't believe you've already set a date when you're still married," Sandra says, sounding utterly disgusted.

  My stomach feels like it's in free-fall. Just like that, the effects of Laurel's visit and the nice walk vanish, and the haze of misery returns.

  They've set a date. She's still my wife, I haven't signed the divorce papers, yet she's made her plans to remarry. She won't allow
me time to grieve the loss of our family. I feel like throwing up.

  It's as if Sandra can read my thoughts, because she says, "She's barely had time to get over you leaving her. You're damn right she's bitter about it. I don't blame her for not signing them."

  Emily looks like she's about to turn around and spot me, but she and Mya are too busy splashing water at each other. The two giggle as though they haven't a care in the world, Emily ignorant of her reality. Clueless to the hell that her mama is putting us through. By the time she's old enough to understand, so much time will have passed that the new will have become the norm.

  "You want me to what?" Sandra says incredulously. "Hey, I'm not the one who wants it. You talk to her." She goes silent for a while, sighs, rubs a hand down her face, then adds, "Fine, I'll talk to her. But don't you dare take this to mean I support this farce of a marriage. I know it's not what you really want, even if you're too stubborn to admit it."

  "I'm not giving her a divorce, so she might as well stop asking." The words burst forth before I can contain them, prompting Sandra to spin around and stare at me in horror.

  "I have to go...Yes, she is." She rings off without saying bye, and looks at me guiltily. "How long have you been standing there?"

  "Long enough," I say coldly. Emily waves at me but continues playing.

  "I, I–"

  I put up a hand to silence her. "Forget it. I just want to collect my daughter and be on my way."

  "You're mad at me, aren't you?"

  "No, you're her friend, of course you'll take her side. So naturally when she asks you to convince her pathetic wife to sign the papers, you'll do it. At least, you'll try," I say, an acerbic tone to my voice. I lied, too; I am mad at her. Mad at her for claiming to be so against their union, yet happy to talk me around. Maybe I should have known she would eventually side with Nikki. That best friend bond is hard to break.

  "You think this is about her? It's not. I hate that this is happening, and honestly, I approve of anything that will stop that wedding from taking place. But...honey, you need to let go, for your own sanity."