Bad Mommy

  He pattered in after me, and I immediately regretted walking into the closet. I was cornered.

  “You have nothing to say? I just told you I’ve seen everything you’ve said to him.”

  “I stick with my initial statement of—that’s creepy.”

  His mouth gaped. “That’s all?”

  “You knew I texted him. I wasn’t texting him in secret. My god, half the time I blow the guy off. What exactly are you saying?”

  “You shouldn’t be texting him, you’re married.”

  “I don’t text him,” I said. “I answer him when he texts me. And let’s talk about who texts you, Darius. I saw an awful lot of names on your phone the other day in your office.”

  “I think you’re a sociopath,” he said.

  “Yeah? You’re probably right.” I pushed past him out of the closet and back into the bedroom. I wished he’d leave. I had nothing to say to him anymore.

  “Why when I bring something up you deflect to me?” he said.

  I didn’t know how to hide my shock anymore. I was losing my cool, and fast.

  “You are saying that I shouldn’t be texting men while married, yet you text women, and clearly quite a lot of them. So, are you admitting to being a hypocrite, or a complete sociopath?”

  “I’m going to call Ryan,” he said. “Tell him all the shitty things you say about him being shallow.”

  “Ryan is a good person. I don’t know if he’s in love with me. I’ve not cared to ask, because I’m in love with you. So, call him if you fucking like, but don’t be an asshole.”

  Darius’s face softened. He set his phone down on the dresser in front of me, and as he did, his thumb brushed the upload button on Instagram. Just a little mistake, a nick of the thumb. I thought he was setting it down to make nice with me, when all of a sudden, his photo album popped up and I saw it all. Tits, tits, and more tits. There was also pussy, but mostly tits.

  For a frozen minute we stared at each other. Four pairs of shell-shocked eyes, two hearts beating so fast you could almost hear them in the silence. Betrayed. It goes something like this:

  Fuck

  Fuck

  Fuck

  Fuck

  Fuck

  Fuck

  Fuck

  I knew in that moment that all of my suspicions were true and real. The tits weren’t mine. The pussy wasn’t mine. He’d been outsourcing. As he scrambled for words, his hands out like he was trying to ward me off, I punched him in the face. He fell backwards in surprise, hit the dresser. My bottles of perfume scattered, rolled off, and crashed to the floor. I could smell the fug of flowers and musk as a bottle cracked and the liquid seeped into the wood. A photo of Mercy was knocked over too, the glass cracked. He held the spot on his face I’d hit, looking at me with something like fear. It was Mercy who sent me over the edge. Because when you fucked over your wife, you also fucked over your children.

  “Who are they?” I asked. And then I screamed it, “Who the fuck are they?”

  “No one,” he said. “They’re no ones!”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  I attacked him, fists flailing, words flying.

  Don’t wake up, Mercy, don’t wake up. I need to do this.

  And then I just stopped. I was tired, not physically. I could have beat on him all night. I was tired of life. This was the sort of thing that happened to other people, not me. My husband didn’t have dozens of naked women saved in an album on his phone, next to pictures of my daughter. My husband wanted only me. He loved me enough to deny the fractured parts of himself that could destroy our love. Didn’t he? No. The coward. I looked at him in disgust.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You did it,” he said. “With Ryan. I saw the picture you sent him last year. You’ve been emotionally cheating on me with him, don’t deny it!”

  “Oh,” I said. “You cheated on me because of a picture I sent Ryan. In my bikini. That makes sense. I mean, why would you talk to me about what I did? That would be stupid. Instead you start fucking other women?”

  He stared at me, that’s all. He just stared at me.

  “You and I are really good when we’re good. But we’re awful just the same,” he said.

  “What the ever living fuck are you talking about, you psycho? You cheated on me!”

  “You say terrible things about my family. You are as much to blame for this as I am!”

  The coffee mug was right there. I just launched it at his head. Goddamn my terrible aim. It smashed into pieces next to his head.

  “You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re a sociopath.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Get out of my house. You have ten minutes.”

  I walked out, back straight, eyes running, heart aching.

  I was good at grieving. Some people hid their pain, pretended they were fine. Those people deserved a medal. That ol’ brave face thing. Nah, not me. I didn’t have a brave face, but by God did I know how to sob. It came right from my belly and shook me down until I couldn’t breathe. I’d cry in the shower, or late at night so Mercy couldn’t hear me. When it became too much I called my mother to take Mercy. Cue the next stage: wall staring. How many days did I stare at a wall? Two? Three? I didn’t eat or drink anything, and I didn’t move. I watched the last three years of my life play out on that wall; the days of courtship, the text messages that said things like, I want to give you things you’ve never had. To experience things with you that you’ve never experienced. I want to make you feel what you make me feel. The hesitant first kiss, and the delicate vulnerability of the days after. The zeal of hope and future. I remembered the early days of diapers, and bottles—two very tired new parents having so much fun amidst the chaos. I remembered the tenderness, the way he’d look at me when I came home from a book signing, or trip—how his eyes lit up at baggage claim, and he’d hold me for long minutes. I remembered feeling safe and settled. Marveling at the good man I’d found. The wall played a reel of Thanksgivings, and Christmases, birthdays and vacations. Cooking—he loved my cooking, eating, drunken kisses by the fire pit, and the tender, reverent way he made love to me. One, two, three years a lie. How could I be so stupid? Was I that broken that I put on blinders to preserve something that wasn’t real?

  That’s what happened when your heart broke. You remembered the good things first. The thing you’d miss. Then when the anger set in, a new reel started to play. Your thoughts turned from a romantic comedy to a psychological suspense. A genre switch. What a joke. Wedged in-between all of the good memories were dark slivers: fights, text messages, dissonance. You remembered how lonely you’d been feeling, and the dark slivers became more pronounced. They pushed apart the good memories until they stood on their own. All of a sudden, you were thinking, ohhh, that’s why he pulled away. There’s the day he couldn’t get it up, there’s the Thanksgiving when he was distracted. It all made sense in a roundabout way. It was a rough realization that the life you were living was not beautiful, but underhanded and secretive. And the person you loved the most was striking you with blows you couldn’t feel yet.

  He called me in those days. Wrote long text messages begging me to take him back. I didn’t understand. Why would you beg to be with someone who you treated with such indifference? Then his begging turned to something else. He didn’t comfort me. He tried to make my sin louder than his. He wouldn’t tell the truth even when I held it in front of him. I found out about the lawsuit, a client he’d slept with, and that made him angry. He’d been fucking those girls since the moment he moved into my house, since before Mercy was born. Their stories all confirmed it. When I approached him with it he lashed out, called me names, told me I was a worse person than he could ever be.

  “You’re trying to find things to balance the scales of what you did with Ryan!” he yelled on the phone.

  “What did I do with Ryan, Darius? I’ve never touched the man! You started this long before Ryan showed up on the scene!”
r />   “You don’t have to touch him to be having an affair with him,” he said.

  He used Ryan—told me he’d done what he did because of my relationship with Ryan. He sent me the bikini picture I texted to Ryan last year and reminded me of how unfaithful I was. When I brought up the slideshow of pussy and tits I’d seen on his phone, he’d say I wouldn’t admit to my own issues. And then we’d argue about Ryan for the next fifteen minutes, me defending myself, him accusing. Until I realized it was a ploy. He was deflecting and I was falling right into it.

  I stopped answering the calls, stopped calling. I stopped eating too. Ten pounds in ten days. Wow, miracle diet. When my mom brought Mercy home, her faced paled at the sight of me.

  “I’ll just run to the store and get some things to make for dinner,” she said. I heard her calling my stepfather, telling him she’d be staying for a few days.

  Mercy asked for him in her raspy little voice. “Where’s Daddy? When’s Daddy coming home? Why didn’t Daddy say goodbye to me? Does Daddy love me?” And what could I tell her? How could I explain? I’d hold her little body as she cried against me, and I’d curse her father, curse Darius, curse all of the men who hurt her so succinctly. “It was a mistake.”

  I was so angry. He’d not just done this awful thing to me, he’d done it to my daughter. I failed to protect her. I’d let the monster in her house and given him free rein. Why? Why would he break something so beautiful? He hurt our family.

  What happened when anger was over? I waited for acceptance—that would be the good part. The moving on-and-I-hurt-less part … I’m still waiting.

  I hadn’t spoke to Fig in months. How many? Two? Three? And why had we stopped talking? Oh yes, because I thought she was in love with Darius. It all seemed so insignificant now. I’d known that something was up with Darius—I’d felt it. I’d just been looking at the wrong person. And in any case, I’d needed to take a step back, even after I changed my mind about Fig being in love with him.

  She was as strange as she was overbearing. There was once a point when she was over at the house five days a week, just showing up whenever she wanted, bringing Mercy crazy presents, and sneaking her candy. Things had just fallen off the way they do when people are busy. Fig had taken on a lot of freelance work from my author friends, building their websites. And then a while back she began pulling her white SUV into the garage instead of parking it out front like the rest of the block did. Nowadays, I could never tell whether she was home or not.

  I put on makeup for the first time in a month. My clothes were hanging loosely on my frame. I’d lost twelve pounds since my marriage ended. I didn’t even have tits anymore. It was a lovely evening, warm and still light. I pulled my boots on and went through the garden gate being careful not to let it slam closed. I don’t know why I was creeping around except that I didn’t want her to see me coming and pretend not to be home. I had the impression that she was hiding, and maybe it’s because I did it so well. When you worked from home, you parked in the garage, drew the drapes, and never made eye contact with the neighbors. I rapped on the back door, my knuckles stinging from the force. I lifted them to my lips while I waited. It was warmer out than it had been yesterday, I could see the buds growing on the tree branches. I must have caught her off guard because a second later her face appeared in the window, her mouth formed into a visible O. I heard the clicking of the lock as she turned the deadbolt, and then the door swung open. A familiar smell came from inside, it was the smell of my house. No surprise there.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?” She was in workout clothes and her face looked dewy like she’d been on the treadmill. My god, she was thin. Thinner than me, thinner than a real life human was supposed to be.

  “Did you know he was cheating on me?” I blurted, keeping my eyes steadily on her face. “Did he tell you?”

  Her pallor changed. All of a sudden her skin was the color of milk, sticky and white.

  “Darius … what…?”

  I started crying. I thought I was over the tears, that I had things under control, and here I was dripping tears on her back steps. Fig moved quickly, stepping aside to let me in. She pulled out a chair at the island. I slid into it, burying my face in my hands, trying to pull myself together.

  “What the hell happened?” Her eyes were held open wide, not believing.

  “He met her at a conference,” I said. “She’s a journalist.”

  “What?” Her voice cracked. She sat suddenly in the chair next to me causing our knees to bump.

  “Who? When?”

  “Her name is Nicole Martin,” I said, taking the tissue she offered me. Fig’s eyes darted around the room and I wondered if she was trying to place the name. She was like that about names, always asking you to repeat them, then saying them herself. Darius always joked about her immediately going home and searching Facebook for them. “She’s freelance.”

  “How did you find all of this out?”

  “Which part?” I asked.

  “The cheating…”

  “His phone,” I said, covering my mouth. The images still popped into my head every time I closed my eyes. It was like a tit and pussy parade.

  “He was showing me something on his phone and he hit the wrong button and his album popped up instead. I saw … pictures of women.”

  “More than one? More than this … Nicole?”

  “Yes, more than her,” I said.

  For a second she didn’t say anything, she just stared at her hands, which were gripping the edges of the counter. “Oh my god.”

  I had the feeling that if she weren’t already sitting she would have needed to.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I made him leave. A few weeks ago. I didn’t know what to do.” I wondered if she already knew. His car had been gone from its usual spot. She was such a watcher.

  “How’s Mercy?” she asked.

  “Not good.” That was an understatement. Mercy was withdrawn, sad, picking fights with the kids in her classroom. She asked for him every night, wanting him to read her story.

  I reached up and touched my temple where a headache was starting to root.

  “Do you have a headache?” she asked. “Hold on…” She went off to the bathroom and brought back some aspirin in the palm of her hand.

  “How long has it been going on?” she asked, pouring me a glass of water.

  “Over a year,” I said, swallowing the pills. “She didn’t even know he was married. He just kept everything separate … compartmentalized.”

  “How do you know that?” Fig said. “She’s lying.”

  I could see how anyone would think that. The other woman was often villainized more than the cheating man.

  These women owed me nothing; they were strangers. Perhaps they owed themselves something better than their actions, but Darius was the one who owed me his loyalty and life.

  “I called her,” I said. “She was crying. She told me everything.” I’d messaged her on Facebook after searching her name (which Darius had reluctantly told me). She’d sent me her number right away. When she answered the phone, her voice had cracked and we both just cried together for the first few minutes. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said. “Maybe I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that there was something shady about his story, but I didn’t want to see it. I should have known.” He’d told her that he was divorced, and with the lack of social media sites to follow him on, how was she to know the difference?

  “You’re way too trusting, Jolene,” Fig said, softly.

  “She wasn’t the one who made a commitment to me, Fig,” I said. “He was. It wouldn’t matter to me if she’d known he was married and thrown herself at him. It was his job to tell her NO, to protect our relationship and keep his dick in his pants.”

  Fig nodded noncommittally.

  “God, how could I be so stupid? All those late nights in the office … he’d been so distracted. I thought it was because I was on a deadline and I wasn’t as present wi
th him.”

  “You weren’t good for each other,” she said, firmly. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s disgusting what he did. How he could deceive someone for such a long time. I don’t understand why.” And then she added, “He has one hell of a good poker face.”

  I had whiplash. Did she just defend him, and what was that in her voice … joy? I felt sick. I was wrong to come here. It always happened like this, I’d tell myself that I was imagining the weird feelings about Fig, but then as soon as I was near her I’d want to leave.

  “I can’t believe he just drove away and he’s never coming back,” she said.

  Yeah, shit. That had been my thought too. But, then he was my husband. I thought only death would us part.

  I looked around the kitchen, searching for some clue, some confirmation of what I was feeling. “Is George here?” I asked. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even consider that you guys would be busy…”

  She waved off my comment. “He moved out. Two weeks ago.”

  Now it was my turn to be shocked.

  “Why?” I asked. “Oh god. I’m sorry. Forget it, it’s none of my business.”

  She shook her head. “Nah. We just aren’t working. We aren’t in love.”

  George was in love with Fig. It was all over him, the way he looked at her, what he was willing to put up with. He bent to everything she wanted. I’d often felt sorry for him. She just dismissed everything he did, pretended he wasn’t there.