by Nina Laurin
I never liked cats. My sister did but I always thought they were dirty, nasty creatures. They bury their shit in the litter box and then go on the kitchen table with those same paws. Byron suggested we get one once because he thought I was getting depressed, sitting at home alone all day. He thought it would do me good to care for something.
But I don’t want a cat. It’s a baby I want.
As I walk past the cat into the main (and only) room, the mess only becomes worse. There’s dirty underwear on the floor, and I kick it squeamishly out of the way. Clothes are piled on every piece of furniture, stacks of books sitting here and there on the floor among the chaos. Empty cans of Diet Coke with cigarette butts crushed on top of them. The bed is unmade and half-buried in more clothes. And amid all this, the desk is curiously clear, only a neat stack of books and notebooks and a pen. I don’t see a laptop or tablet anywhere. When I open the lone drawer, it’s overflowing with stuff she had probably swept off the desktop: bits of paper, hair clips, miscellaneous junk.
One of the spines of the books jumps out at me. It’s wrapped in brown paper, old-school. I remember seeing this book. She was reading it the day I came by Byron’s office. A massive, heavy, old-looking hardcover.
I pry it out of the stack and open it.
The title page stares back at me.
THE MAGUS BY JOHN FOWLES, it reads in a small, retro font on yellowish paper.
This is Byron’s favorite book, I think dully to myself. No, not just his favorite book. This is his book. The physical copy that used to sit on the bookshelves back at Colleen’s house before migrating inexplicably to the office. Original first edition. Don’t know how much it’s actually worth but it’s damn near priceless to him.
I slam the cover shut like something might leap out of the pages and bite me. My ears are ringing.
Mia Mia Mia.
I sweep everything off the desk onto the floor in one movement. I yank out the drawer and upend it onto the desktop and onto the floor; little papers scatter all over like scared butterflies.
I tear through the apartment like a tropical storm, an unconscious, unstoppable force. I shred clothes that get in my way. I smash dishes, tear pages out of books. A black veil of pure rage falls over my vision. It’s only happened once or twice before. I don’t think about what I’m doing anymore—I just coast along on the powerful pull of my id.
When the veil drops, I find myself standing in the middle of the destroyed room, panting. My hair has escaped from the hair tie and falls into my eyes, sticking to my sweaty forehead.
And someone is knocking on the door.
“Hey!” A muffled voice comes through the thin panel. “Keep it down in there. People are studying, you know!”
The understanding of what I’ve done crashes over my head. Oh shit. What was I thinking? How could I?
Panicked, I spin and spin around, as if I’ve forgotten which way is the exit. I stumble to the kitchen, tripping over the things I threw on the floor. The cat considers me with round-eyed indifference. God, I want to wring its stupid, skinny neck.
“Mia?” The pounding on the door resumes. “Is everything okay? Mia?”
I flee through the kitchen door, out onto the balcony, down into the alley, then to my car. When I turn the key in the ignition, I feel another stab of that disorienting, panicked feeling. It’s past five in the afternoon. Where did four hours go? Oh God, Byron must already be on his way home. I hit the gas pedal and pull out of the parking spot. I do everything on autopilot, on the setting of Good Wifey Claire: drive back, stop at the grocery store, buy things for dinner—random things that don’t go together that I just throw into the cart without thinking too much. Pay, load up the car. Drive back home. Pull into the driveway.
Except I realize at the last second that I can’t—another car is blocking the way, parked illegally at the curb in front of our garage. I stop the engine and storm out, ready to smash the windows and key the paint and kick the doors until the damn thing is totaled, but I stumble and come to a halt.
There’s a figure standing on the porch. A woman, in too-tight black leggings tucked into those awful cheap boots. I can only see her back—boxy denim jacket, brittle hair pulled back in a ponytail—but then she turns around, and I stop cold. My mouth forms her name before my mind fully connects the face to it. “Chrissy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Hi,” she says. Her smile is shaky and supplicating. She clasps her hands in front of her chest, and I can’t stop staring at her nails: a tour de force of hideousness, acrylic pointy ends with some kind of plastic design glued to them. She always was the tacky one. “I couldn’t get hold of you so here I am. You look nice.”
“You ambushed me?” I ask in a low hiss. “How dare you.”
“I didn’t ambush you. We need to talk…”
“My husband is coming home soon. And when he gets here, you’ll be gone.”
“I’m afraid not. We’re talking about this. You owe me, remember? Mom’s life insurance? The money from the house?”
I spent the money a long time ago, and she knows it. On college tuition, on books, on piano lessons that never came in handy, on the cooking and wine-tasting classes—all the things she never would have considered in her wildest dreams. Ways of self-improvement, something my trailer-trash sister wasn’t keen on.
“If that’s what it’s about, why did you show up here? In front of my husband’s house? When he’s coming back any minute? Cut the bullshit, Chrissy.”
She gives a single hoarse laugh. “Oh, there she is. My little sister. This life suits you.”
I scoff.
“I have my own nail salon now,” she says, her hooded eyes boring into my face. “In Cincinnati. I put aside enough money, finally, and I’m buying a condo. Not that you care.”
She’s right. I don’t care in the slightest.
“I have a boyfriend, too, you know.”
I can’t help but chuckle, imagining.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh. He may not be a literature professor or anything but at least I didn’t have to scrap who I was to get him, am I right?”
And what you are isn’t much, I think. My mouth twists.
Chrissy sees it and shakes her head. “Don’t put on airs. Claire.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “Jesus. I never thought you could pull it off—”
“Then maybe you underestimated me.”
“Oh, I don’t think I have. I think you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, little sis. I think it’s all closing in on you now.”
I draw a breath through flared nostrils. “Leave.”
“Or what, you’ll call the police? That won’t happen.”
“What do you want, Chrissy? You didn’t drive up from Cincinnati to insult me. What, you didn’t scrape together quite enough money for that one-bedroom with a garden view? You want cash?”
“For fuck’s sake!” She takes a menacing step toward me, and I back away instinctively. “I wish I could shake some fucking sense into you. I don’t even care about the money, you hear me? I don’t care. I mean, you’re a little shit for pocketing Mom’s life insurance, selling the house—sole inheritor, my ass. No one ever notified me that Mom died. That’s what it’s all about. She died, and I learned it six months after the fact! I didn’t even go to the funeral because I didn’t know there was a funeral. How can you think you can possibly make it up to me?”
“If you’d ever called or visited, you would have known,” I say dryly. I’m not going to put up with her shit, not going to let her stand there and spew venom. She’s the traitor. She took off and never looked back and left me with that fucking alcoholic monster.
“How could I possibly have come back?” she shrieks. “With Mom in that state, out of her mind all day long, and you too, completely going off the rails? I was lucky to get away. Or I would have ended up like her.” She glowers at me, her eyes shiny with tears. “Or you.”
“Yeah, sure, it’s better to glue rhinestones to strippers�
�� acrylic talons all day long.”
“Maybe,” she says, sucking in a breath. “Maybe. Maybe you think it’s a shitty life but at least it isn’t all a lie.”
She storms to her car. She’s crying now, her tears tinged with cheap mascara.
“I’ll come back,” she says as she climbs into the driver’s seat. “And we’ll talk. We’re not finished here.”
“Yes we are.”
But she’s already slamming the door. The engine starts with a cough that grows to a hoarse roar, and for a moment, I’m dead certain she’s about to slam her foot onto the gas and try to run me down. The hairs on my arms stand on end, and instinctively, I get out of the car’s way, ducking behind my own. But she just screeches away from the curb and careens down the street.
Crash, I catch myself praying silently. But she doesn’t crash, of course. She takes the turn at the last second and vanishes from sight.
Numb, I go into the house. It greets me with cool semidarkness. I plunk my keys onto the counter and collapse onto one of the chairs, remembering that I forgot the groceries in my car.
I stare at my hands with a sense of loss, like they’re not my own. I notice that two of my fingernails are broken, their edges ragged and crooked. On one, the cuticle is bleeding. Must have happened while I was trashing Mia’s place. I think of the little bits of fingernail lost among the chaos. Loose hairs, bits of dead skin I left in my wake. How careless. How stupid. She’ll know it was me, she’ll call the cops, and then…
And then nothing. She doesn’t know that I know about the affair. Neither does Byron. No one has any reason to be looking in my direction.
God, I have a headache. On heavy legs, I plod upstairs to the bathroom and dig out the plastic bottle of Advil. I twist the cap off and dump two pills into my palm. Yet moments before I toss them into the back of my throat, something makes me pause. Pause and look at them. Really look at them. They grow blurry as I bring them close to my eyes. Then focused again. They’re oblong, they’re reddish brown, but that’s all they have in common with Advil. Something about them is wrong. The surface is rough. They look like little alien eggs.
I put the pills back into the Advil bottle and hide it in the back of the medicine cabinet. Next, I head back downstairs but remember there’s no wine—everything ended up down the drain. The realization sends me scurrying to the recycling bin, digging for the empty bottles. I sniff the gullets with suspicion but they only reek of vinegary old wine.
I really must be going crazy. It can’t be, right?
It can’t be.
The sound of the key in the lock takes me by surprise, and I get to my feet so fast my head spins.
“Claire?” Byron’s voice.
“Here.”
“What are you doing?” He appears in the kitchen doorway, still in his light jacket with his bag over his shoulder. He looks genuinely puzzled and a little annoyed.
“Just…I don’t know.”
“Is there anything to eat?”
I shake my head.
“What did you do here all day?”
I open my mouth but don’t answer.
“Don’t tell me you wrote. You haven’t written in months.” The offhanded way he makes the remark hurts the most. I clutch my hands to my belly, like I’ve been physically wounded. So you knew, then. Yet he never let on, allowing me to continue the whole charade. I don’t know what I think about that.
I make a split-second decision and go on the offensive. “At least I’m not screwing an undergrad behind your back.”
Color drains from his face, and I realize how I screwed up. I showed my hand. This is bad. I must backpedal. He doesn’t yet know how much I know—
“Oh God. You think I’m having an affair?”
“Aren’t you?”
“No.” A small chuckle escapes from him, as if the very notion was ludicrous.
“What about Mia?”
“Who— Oh.” His shoulders droop. He looks relieved, I realize with dismay. A terrible suspicion creeps into my mind. What if I have it wrong? If it’s not Mia, it’s got to be someone else. And now I’ll never figure it out because he’s on his guard.
“Mia? Are you nuts? She’s nineteen. And I’m pretty sure, from that haircut of hers, that she’s a lesbian.”
I saw her kissing a guy but I don’t tell him that.
“Claire,” he says, and takes a tentative step forward, “I’m not having an affair. You can’t seriously think that.” He makes a motion to take my arm but I move out of the way.
“Claire.” A note of tension in his voice, not yet a threat. “I’m not a cheater by nature, Claire. I’ve told you this a million times. I’m a one-woman person.”
He has. And I realize now that, sure, it could very well be true but I have always assumed that the one woman was me. But now it occurs to me that I might not be.
“I’m not having an affair,” he repeats. He reaches out, and I let him brush the side of my face. The gesture, a reminder of how much he once loved me—how much I still love him, even right this minute, in spite of everything between us—almost hurts.
I step toward him and grab him, pull him close, and cradle his face in my hands.
“Claire—” he starts to say. Then, “Stop,” but I don’t want to be stopped. I kiss him hard on the mouth and start to unbutton his shirt. He shivers but he doesn’t pull away. Once upon a time, I could make him rock hard in seconds with just the lightest touch of my fingertips, and I still can, and I’ll show him; I’ll show him no matter what it takes.
“I love you,” I exhale in his ear. “I love you more than anything, and more than anyone else ever has or will love you. Do you understand that?”
His gaze meets mine. I look up close into those pale blue-gray eyes I once admired so much it hurt, and I don’t see the man I love. I only see a glassy surface.
“Yes,” he says, never blinking, and for a moment, I think I glimpse something beneath the glass, something mysterious and primal. It’s there and gone again, like the splash of a fish on the surface of a still lake. “I understand.”
He leads me over to the couch, untucking my shirt from my jeans as he does. He pulls it over my head, violently. My hair tumbles out of my loose ponytail and falls around my face, crackling with static.
“Byron,” I murmur, but he’s already moved on to my jeans. He yanks the button, then grabs the waistband and pulls it apart until the zipper pops. “Byron!” I say louder, my voice hoarse. “What are you—”
He pushes me—shoves me in the chest so I lose my balance and fall on my back on the couch. He pulls the jeans down my legs, rough, careless, leaving burning skin in his wake.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
He stops, panting, glowering at me as he straddles me, and I realize he’s expecting an answer. I give a tiny, terse nod.
“The love. The marriage. Sex. A baby. Is that what you want, Claire? A baby? Then will you be satisfied?”
A smile spreads over my lips. “Yes.”
“Will you do anything you have to do to make it happen?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
He lowers on top of me, unbuttoning his pants with one hand. His weight pins me to the couch, and I put my arms around him and then my legs as he finds the right spot and begins to thrust, his muscles rippling in my embrace.
My husband. My Byron. My love.
I’m not letting go of what we have so easily.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I screwed up. I screwed up so bad.
If you knew, you’d never want to even look at me. I’m so ashamed. I feel like I failed us both, failed our future—failed fate itself. I only needed to do what had to be done, and I screwed up. Now the plan is all messed up, and I don’t know how it’s going to play out.
She saw me. I made a mistake, I was sloppy, and she saw me. Now she knows my face, what my car looks like. She must have followed me, somehow, without me noticing. I got overconfident, sensing the end was close
. I forgot to pay attention, and now I’m going to pay the price.
She knows I exist, when she never should have known. No one else does. Not even you, my love. That’s disastrous enough on its own. But she also knows my license plate number; she knows where I live.
She knows about me; she followed me. And now she’s coming to my home.
I don’t know what to do.
I have to think fast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I wake up the next morning with renewed hope. I swear to God, for the first time in months I feel hopeful, happy, and full of energy.
Byron wakes me up with a kiss. Just like old times. While he’s splashing in the shower, I get out of bed and put on the pink satin robe he gave me for Christmas last year. In front of the mirror, I quickly fix my bed hair and pinch my cheeks so there’s color in my face. I’m still a little gaunt, worn-out-looking from all these months of unhappiness, but I’ll recover. I just need to take care of myself. To start paying attention to the little things again. And everything will be back under my control in no time.
While I’m making breakfast, I hear the shower stop and then his footsteps upstairs as he gets dressed. Coffee is already hissing out of the spout of the coffee machine. Eggs sizzle on the stove. I make three for him, two for myself. And I’ll eat every bite, and the toast. I set the plates and cups on the table so that everything is ready and served when he comes down.
I greet him with another kiss. I catch him watching me with astonishment as I shovel scrambled eggs into my mouth.
“Storing up for winter?”
I give a laugh and try not to choke on my mouthful. Then I notice that his plate is barely touched. He follows my gaze. He must notice how my smile fades because he hurriedly picks up his fork.
“I want us to do something special this evening,” he says.