by Jenni Moen
“Everything okay?”
I turned to find Paul, leaning against the doorframe. His arms were crossed over his chest. A faint smile on his lips. He was so handsome, but that wasn’t even what drew to me him. He was a force, a living breathing force. I couldn’t resist him. I didn’t want to any more.
As soon as those thoughts danced through my head, I felt guilty for them. Arden knew. Tomorrow she would confront me with her suspicions, and I would either have to admit everything or lie. It went against how I felt. It went against how I lived my life. But, for Paul, I would lie.
I knew I should tell him. After all, it was his reputation – and life – on the line, but I couldn’t bear to do it yet. If there was a chance – however slim – that I was blowing things out of proportion, if it was possible that Arden knew nothing concrete, I didn’t want to worry him.
I made a promise to myself. If Arden confronted me tomorrow night, I would go immediately to Paul and tell him. Then we would figure out some way to do damage control.
However, I’d come to find him tonight because I’d wanted to see him. And now, I wanted one more night with him. One more night before everything possibly blew up in our faces.
“Everything’s fine. I was just thinking about my mom.”
“She was a wonderful lady.” He moved across the room until he was standing in front of me. He placed his hand under my chin and tipped it up so that I had no choice but to look into his eyes. “But you are, too. Come back. You’ll find yourself again.”
His head tipped to the side, and his gaze traveled to my lips. He was thinking about kissing me, and I wanted him, too. “Not here,” I said in spite of myself. The chance that one of the ladies might make a reappearance was too great.
“Then where?” His voice was low and thick and different than I’d ever heard it. We were wandering into new territory now. The desire between us was becoming more intense every time I saw him. I knew I should go home and send him home too, but that wasn’t what I’d come here to do. If we only had one night left, I wasn’t going to waste it.
“Nobody’s at my house. I was thinking you could sneak over, and we could watch a movie.”
“A movie?” There was a wicked gleam in his eye that I wasn’t used to seeing there.
“Yes, a movie. I have the perfect one in mind.”
“Sounds like you have it all figured out.”
If only.
_________________________
At my insistence, Paul parked around the corner. He hadn’t shared my concerns and had wanted simply pull to into the driveway. However, when I insisted he not call any more attention to us, he hadn’t put up a fight. Keeping him further in the dark, I didn’t tell him what the movie was, wanting to surprise him instead.
We began the movie with a big bowl of popcorn on the coffee table and the great expanse of the couch between us.
Other than the night before, I’d been the one to make every move. I’d perpetrated the attack in the vet’s office. I’d fallen into his arms in the cemetery. I’d been the one to kiss him after discovering the water truck. The only time that Paul had been the one to initiate anything between us had been when we were safely – or so we thought – miles away from Merriville.
I wanted to curl up next to him on the couch. I wanted to nestle under his arm and feel the heat of his body next to me. But, with Arden’s words still ringing in my ear, I wanted Paul to be the one to bridge the gap between us.
I wanted him to want me, too – not just when we were far away from the prying eyes of our small town – but here in the thick of it.
As the movie began, Paul chuckled at the selection. “Did you do this for me?” I nodded. “That’s amazing, Grace,” he said, scooting down beside me.
I wrung my hands in my lap, suddenly feeling foolish for hunting down and purchasing a movie that he’d mentioned during casual conversation. However, when he slid his arm around me and pulled me against him just like I’d wanted him to, I pushed my insecurities aside and melted into him.
“That’s you,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “My Amazing Grace.”
During the movie, I was acutely aware of his presence next to me. His thumb brushed a rhythm on my shoulder matching the staccato of my heart. When his knee bumped mine, my breathing hitched – two layers of jeans not enough to dilute the power of his touch. Every contact caused the spark of electricity between us to grow.
“Well, that didn’t end the way I hoped it would,” he said as the credits began to roll.
“I know - ” I pulled away from him and turned on the couch to face him. I blinked at him with wide, surprised eyes. “Wait - the way you hoped? You’ve never seen the ending?”
He chuckled. “Nope. I’d never seen the beginning either.”
“But you said it was one of your favorite movies.”
I must have looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Grace,” he said sincerely. He wrapped both arms around me and pulled me close to him again. “I thought you knew I was joking. I was trying to be funny. I guess I need to work on my funny factor.”
I shook my head. “I should’ve known. It really wasn’t very good.”
“Oh, it was okay. It was funny. I probably have an appreciation for it that most men wouldn’t, but it’s definitely not going to make it onto my favorites list.” He pulled back a little and rested his hands on my shoulders. His green eyes sparkled mischievously. “I mean, how could it? The priest didn’t get the girl. He lost her to the unappreciative rabbi.”
“I took issue with that as well,” I said, watching his mouth. Wanting it on mine.
“I’m probably biased, but I wanted the priest to get the girl,” he said, equally mesmerized with mine.
“I don’t think that’s how it works in real life.” Not wanting either one of us to think about real life at the moment, my voice was muted.
“Hmmmm,” he said, not giving me any insight at all into what was going on in that brain of his. He looked at me for a few long seconds, his eyes searching mine. “Come here, Amazing Grace.”
He tipped up my chin until his lips hovered just over mine. When they finally came together, squelching the ache that had been growing inside of me, there was no question as to what I was thinking.
I wanted the priest to get the girl.
I didn’t see how it could possibly work out, but I wanted this priest to get this girl.
TRUTH
GRACE
“Don’t forget that we have dinner with Arden tonight,” I said, busting unannounced into Kate’s room. I was anxious. Arden was all I could think about.
Kate was sitting on her bed, leafing through a familiar stack of papers. The mere sight of them caused even my toes to seize up. I began backing my way out of the room, not wanting to get sucked back into the dismal abyss of Jonathan’s affair. Not today. I had enough on my mind.
Why Kate was reading over it again was a mystery to me. I had to give it to her though. She was relentless. She was determined to figure out who Hope was, hunt her down and, I feared, put an end to her. I, on the other hand, had spent the past few days with my head stuck safely back in the sand, wanting just to enjoy my time with Paul.
She pushed her glasses up on her nose and glanced up at me. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“I’m kind of surprised that she picked tonight. It was her choice, wasn’t it?” I asked from the doorway.
“Yeah, it was her suggestion. Why?”
“Today’s her birthday. I’m surprised that she’d rather spend it with us than her kids.” I didn’t mention that it was possible that Arden had a hidden agenda.
“Maybe she wanted a girl’s night out for her birthday,” Kate said without looking up. “We can give her a couple of bottles of that terrible wine I bought.”
She returned to her reading, and I reached for the doorknob to pull it shut behind me. “Sure. And I’ll go get her a bunch of yellow tulips. Those are her favorites.” Maybe I could ply her with wine and flowers and
buy her silence.
As I pulled the door closed behind me, there was a shuffling of papers and then muttering. “Sweet baby Jesus,” Kate said, louder now. “No, no, no.”
I threw the door wide open again to find a wide-eyed and panic-stricken Kate frantically skimming the page in her hand. With an index finger, she traced a line midway down the page and then began pounding on the sheet so hard I thought her finger might poke clean through it. “Holy fucking shit, Grace. I can’t believe we missed this. What a fucking bitch.”
“Hope? Well, yeah.” Of course, she was a bitch. What kind of woman knowingly wrecks a marriage?
“No, not Hope … well, yes, Hope … she was right here. Right under our noses the whole time, and we missed it,” Kate stammered. She was so excited that she could barely speak, her level of anxiety unmistakable. It was infectious, and I could feel my blood pressure rising. An audible whoosh filled my head.
“You figured out who Hope is.” My voice was a hoarse whisper. I’d thought I wanted to know, but now that I was sure that I was about to find out, it didn’t seem like such a good idea. What was I going to do with the knowledge? Jonathan was gone. What would be the point in confronting the woman?
Kate was still staring at the paper in front of her. She shook her head in disbelief. “Did you read all of this, Grace? Every page?”
“No. I could only take so much.”
“Yeah? Well, guess who else has a birthday today.”
“Who?”
“Guess who else has a weak spot for yellow tulips?” She leveled her eyes on me. When I didn’t immediately answer, she went on, her words wild and unhinged. “What did you do with Arden last year for her birthday?”
“I don’t think we did anything,” I answered cautiously. “I think she was out of town or something. I think her sister had just had a baby or something.” I shook my head trying to remember.
“Did she take the kids?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“And where was Jonathan?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Because according to this, he was with her.”
My stubborn resolve not to refuse to face the facts that had been right in front of my face dissolved. “Hope is Arden.” The words hung in my throat, choking me. All this time, I’d thought that Hope was a nickname that he’d given his lover because that was what she represented to him. But, Hope was his lover’s middle name. “Arden Hope Fitzgerald.”
Kate looked like she’d just sucked on a lemon, as if the horrible taste in her mouth was more than she could bear. I knew the feeling. I could taste it, too. “Exactly,” she said.
She sprung off the bed and blew past me, leaving me standing in the hall. When I realized where she was going, I followed, tripping over my feet and the dog who’d again been shadowing me around the house all morning. She yanked the drawer of the table beside my bed with such force that the entire thing came free and clattered to the floor. I glared at the phone that had tormented me for so many months, now resting among the bodice ripper novels spread at our feet.
Kate lacked my hesitation and slid to the floor. With the phone in her hand, she pounded on the screen. The keyboard popped up on the display, and she entered a-r-d-e-n. I held my breath while I waited for the screen to change, fully expecting the jackass to have made his girlfriend and my whore of a best friend’s name his security code.
I was almost relieved when the phone denied us entry. Almost.
I expected her to try something different but she paused. “Are you sure that you even want in this thing now? No telling what you’ll find.”
“Yes,” I practically screamed at her. “My kids’ voices are in there. I don’t even care about Jonathan and his shit any more. I just want to hear Trey and Isabelle again.”
It wasn’t entirely true. I did care. Now that I knew who Hope was and how fiercely I’d been betrayed by both my husband and my best friend, I had a perverse desire to know every sordid detail. There’d be no more of this head in the sand bullshit. I was done being a doormat.
But first, I wanted to hear my kids’ voices.
She tried it again.
Nothing again.
Letting out a huff of air, she shook the phone in frustration, and then she tried it again, using a capital letters for the first letter. When that didn’t work, she tried Arden’s name in all caps.
Again, we were refused. “I think you only have one more chance before it locks up.”
“Gah! I know.”
“Try today’s date,” I said, resisting the urge to rip it from her hands. I’d tried every other date I could think of. Why not try this one? His girlfriend’s birthday was as good of a guess as any.
She punched in the four numbers for the month and day, and the phone came to life. “What a douche.” Anger emanated off her. “Even after everything, I can’t even believe that that man made his passcode the birthday of the woman he was having an affair with. Who does that?” She was preaching to the choir. I could hardly believe it myself.
She handed me the phone. Her shoulders slumped. All her previous energy drained. “Do you want to be alone?”
I nodded. “Maybe for a little bit.”
She unfolded her legs and stood to leave. “I’ll be in my room if you need me.” She pulled the door shut behind her, and I collapsed on the bed.
First things first. I ignored the screen full of notifications indicating all the things he’d missed during the last few months and opened up his voicemail. I skimmed past the three most recent messages, ignoring the dates and names, until I found what I was looking for. Home.
A small voice began to speak, and I closed my eyes. Instantly, I was sitting at our kitchen table, having an afternoon snack with my two favorite beings.
“Hi, Daddy. It’s Isabelle. Mommy says you have to work late tonight so Trey and I wanted to call and sing you a song.” A series of clatters and thumps indicated that the phone had been dropped and then swooped up again. “Okay. Got it.”
“One, two, three, go,” Trey said.
“No. I get to say when.”
“Why you?” he whined.
“Because I’m the oldest, and being the oldest is best.”
Trey grumbled in the background, bringing a smile to my face. “One day, I’m going to be the biggest, and I’ll be best.”
“Okay, one, two, three, go,” she said, ignoring his threat.
It had been an ordinary day. A day that had seemed no different or more important than any other. Yet now it seemed spectacular. One of the hundreds of days that would be remembered as the most important day of my life.
I’d cried a lot during the past two weeks. But each time, Jonathan had been the reason. I hadn’t cried for him. I’d cried because of him. Lonely tears had turned into bitter tears. I’d felt wounded and cheated, and the tears that fell were no longer because I missed him but because he’d tainted every memory I had.
Not all tears are alike. Not all despair is equal. The bitter tears that stripped me to nothing more than skin and bone were strangely easier to bear than these. I’d eventually numbed to them. However, the tears I cried now stemmed from love rather than anger and were even harder to swallow. I would never become numb to them. Even if I moved forward – or sideways as Paul had suggested – I would never stop feeling the loss of Isabelle and Trey.
So rather than thumb my way through Jonathan’s phone, which surely hid many more secrets, I allowed myself to wallow in the loss of my two little angels. And I cried.
I cried because a thirty-three second recording of my two favorite voices would have to be enough to last me the rest of my life. I cried until I was too exhausted to cry any more. I cried until my head and heart couldn’t take any more.
When I woke up several hours later, I wasn’t alone. Kate was curled up next to me with her arm thrown over the top of me as if she’d been trying to hug me in my sleep. Dark hair partially covered her face and fanned across the pillow. Lips ful
ler than mine twitched as if she giving someone an earful. I didn’t have to imagine who.
I carefully slid her arm off me and slowly rolled to the edge of the bed so as not to wake her. Jonathan’s phone was now resting on the bedside table. The screen was dark, but that would no longer a source of frustration for me. It was time for me to face the music.
I tiptoed across the room and opened the door. I continued creeping down the hall until I was in Kate’s room. Papers were still strewn all over her bed, but I could see that while I’d been sleeping, she’d been hard at work. She gone through the chat string yet again, highlighting anything that she had found interesting. At some point she must have snuck into my room for the box of bank statements because those had also been thrown about on the bed.
I nestled myself into the middle of it all and started with the phone. I typed in today’s date again. This time, when it opened up, I looked at each icon on the screen, noting all of the missed notifications. In addition to the three voicemails that I’d skimmed past earlier, Jonathan had missed 28 text messages, 144 Facebook messages, and 1256 emails.
I was well aware of what each of the Facebook messages would say. After his death, I’d watched his wall, taking consolation in each message. Every single one of the 144 messages were from people expressing their disbelief that he was gone, their horror at the tragedy to which he’d succumbed, their praise for the hero he’d attempted to be, and their assurance that he would never be forgotten.
I wondered now how many of those 144 people had even known who Jonathan really was. I suspected the answer was one. That one person, who’d possibly known him better than anyone else, had also left a message though I couldn’t remember now what it had said. I was sure that Arden’s message had been as generic and flavorless as the rest, with no hint as to the true depth of her grief.