Lovely Wild

  She shoved him with her elbow hard enough to push him back and sat up, her legs over the side of the bed. In the moonlight, her naked skin gleamed. The fall of her dark hair down her back made her look exotic, foreign. She sighed and rubbed her thighs.

  Ryan sat up, too. “What’s wrong?”

  Her shoulders shook, and he didn’t understand what was so damned funny. Annoyed, Ryan tugged her shoulder to pull her around. What he saw stunned him more than her refusal of his advances had.

  She was crying.

  “Babe, babe,” he said and pulled her close to him. This time, she let him. “Are you sick? Is it something with the kids? What?”

  She curled against him, her face hot. The sheet tangled between them. She gripped his shoulder hard, her fingers digging into him so hard he winced. Her tears slicked down his bare skin and the hard-on he’d been nursing wilted. Anxiety made him push her away so he could turn on the light. He needed to see her face.

  “Mari. What’s wrong?”

  “Why did you bring me back here?” she cried in a low, strangled voice that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “I thought...we needed... It was a place to go to get away,” he began, the words clumsy on his tongue. “Because of what happened at work, the book... I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t think it would bother you so much.”

  But that was lie, wasn’t it? He’d known she would be affected. How could she be anything else? He hadn’t imagined the extent of how she might react, that part was true, but that had been his own stupidity, his blind spot. His greed.

  And now she was crying. Something she never did. All because of him.

  Mari sat up and swiped at her face. Her uncommon tears had left tracks on her face. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, fingers curling into the hair at her temples. She shook her head, then pulled her hands away to look at him.

  “What happened at work? Really, Ryan.”

  His gut clenched. He reached to the side of the bed for his boxer shorts and pulled them on. “It was a mistake. That’s all. My patient killed herself and her husband’s trying to blame me.”

  “Was it your fault?”

  That she would even ask the question stunned him into a sputtering reply. “No! Of course not!”

  “Why does her husband feel like it’s your fault?”

  Ryan’s shoulders sagged. He said nothing, but she read it on him. She must’ve known, he thought, then felt an instant pettiness that she was forcing him to say it aloud. That she was making him admit what they both could’ve continued to ignore.

  “How many times did you fuck her, Ryan?” Mari asked. Tears gone, voice sober. This was the woman he knew. Solid.

  “It was a mistake. An accident.”

  Her low, strained laugh made her unfamiliar again. “Ah. I see. She slipped on a banana peel and landed on your dick?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “What,” Mari asked, “is fair?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, babe. I fucked up. I know it. But it’s not my fault she killed herself.” Ryan spoke faster when it looked like Mari was going to interrupt. “She had a history of transference, which is when a patient believes herself in love—”

  “I was raised by your father, Ryan. I know what it means.”

  He went silent at that, mind abuzz and throat dry. Suddenly, everything Ryan had ever known was crumbling beneath him.

  “She had a history of attempting to seduce her therapists,” he said finally, when it became clear his wife wasn’t going to speak. “She’d had four before me. I believe she slept with at least two of them, if not all.”

  “And you wanted to compete? You wanted to be the best, her favorite? What?” Mari’s mouth twisted, but her solid and unyielding gaze pinned him.

  Ryan made a miserable noise from someplace in his throat. “She just kept coming at me. And finally, I gave in.”

  Mari was silent again for the span of several breaths. Then her laughter growled up from her belly once more. The sound chilled him. When she got off the bed to pace the narrow strip of floor between him and the dresser, Ryan wanted to reach out and snag her wrist. Get her to stop, look at him. He didn’t.

  “You gave in,” she said finally with her back to him. Her shoulders shook again.

  He couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying, but Ryan got out of bed and touched her shoulder tentatively. “Mari. Babe. I am so fucking sorry, you don’t even know.”

  “No,” she said. “I guess I don’t.”

  He didn’t know what to say after that, but he took his hand away. They’d never fought, not really. She’d annoyed him and he’d irritated her, but their entire marriage had sailed along on smooth waters he’d come to take for granted. Now she had every right to be furious with him and to feel betrayed.

  “Today,” she continued before he could speak, “I went into town and a woman told me she knew my...my...”

  She struggled against sobs. The tears were bad enough, but this ratcheting sound of grief throbbing out of her mouth was enough to make him want to weep himself. It was worse that she was doing that thing with her hands again. He recognized the patterns, the shift of her fingers, the tap of a palm against her heart. He thought he’d mastered the lexicon that his dad and the rest of the team studying her had made so they could understand her. She’d so quickly taken up spoken language, regaining what had been lost in such great leaps that it had become unnecessary for them to use hers to communicate. What Ryan understood from what he’d read and watched so far, once Mari had started to talk with her voice, she’d given up using her hands. Now he didn’t know what she was saying.

  She obviously hadn’t forgotten, though. Just refused to go back. And that was how he knew his wife. As a woman who looked forward, not back. If he’d ever heard her say she regretted anything, Ryan couldn’t remember it.

  He was counting on that now.

  “Babe...Mari. Honey...I’m so sorry.” He reached for her again, and this time she didn’t shrink from his touch. She didn’t lean into it, either. “I screwed up. I know it. And it was over almost as soon as it started. I promise you.”

  He thought of Annette, breasts heavy in his hands as she rode him, her mouth slick with her favorite red lipstick. Such a cliché, that lipstick, but then everything about her had been from her bleached and overprocessed hair, her thong peeking from the back of her too-tight jeans, her tiny baby voice. Annette Somers had made a doll of herself. A man’s plaything, because that was the only way she’d known how to be. It had been Ryan’s job to help her overcome the insecurities and the mess she repeatedly made of her life. He’d failed in that.

  “I never loved her,” Ryan said. “And it was never because I didn’t love you.”

  Mari let out another rasping, agonized sob and turned to cling to him. Ryan buried his face in her hair. She shook against him, and her tears were scalding.

  “Then why?”

  “Because she kept at me and I was stupid. Because I was so damned stupid.” Ryan shuddered with his own tears. “I ended our professional relationship. But when I broke off the other, she...killed herself. She’d threatened to commit suicide many times before. She’d been hospitalized four times previously with attempted suicide. She had a long history of mental problems and depression. I was stupid and wrong, but I’m not the reason she died.”

  He believed that, no matter what guilt he felt about any of it.

  “But it’s going to be okay, babe. I promise you that. The case will be settled. I’ll get another job. And there’s the book.”

  She drew in a low, shivering breath. “The woman in the restaurant today knew my mother. She said she knew her. She recognized Kendra, then said she recognized me. She knew who I was, Ryan. And she said...she said my mother had me in the bathroom at the Red Rabbit! How, how... What should I think about that?”

  He looked at her, startled. “What?”

  “She said she knew my mother because she’d worked there. In that
restaurant. She said my mother had a baby in the bathroom, said she didn’t know she was pregnant. That nobody knew until she had the baby.” Mari drew in another breath, slower this time. Her eyes were bright, and she’d chewed on her lower lip, bringing blood.

  Ryan, relieved she wasn’t harping on the fact he was an unfaithful prick, wiped the crimson with his thumb. There’d been a file on Mari’s mother in the boxes, one of the slimmest. There hadn’t been much information on her, and nobody seemed to know how to find out more. Or to care. Mari had been the prize for men and women like his father. Linguistics experts, therapists, graduate students writing their theses. The fact that there was no parent to step forward and claim the “Pine Grove Pixie” had been a good thing, at least until funding ran out and there was nobody to take her. Nobody but his father, anyway. But there had been information in the file, and he had read it.

  “Your mother, by all accounts, did have a baby in the bathroom of the Red Rabbit. She was not quite twenty-one at the time, said she hadn’t known she was pregnant. Refused to name a father—”

  Mari shook her head. “No. She was nineteen.”

  Ryan held her by the upper arms and gently pushed her inches away so he could look down into her face. “No. She was older than that. She never told anyone she was pregnant. She went into the bathroom and gave birth. No charges were filed against her since she wasn’t a minor and didn’t try to hurt the baby or anything like that. But it’s all documented.”

  She shook her head until stray dark hairs fell forward over her forehead. “Them. Those Them, those Them with the writing sticks. The writing...” She broke off with a gulping noise, almost a gag. She shook her head furiously. Drew in a longer, deeper breath. She looked up at him with clear eyes shimmering with tears. “I heard the doctors talking. I remember them saying how old she was when she had me.”

  He shook his head and pulled her closer to stroke her hair from her face. “Your mother did have you when she was nineteen. You’re right. But there’s no record of your birth. It’s believed she had you at home without ever telling anyone she was pregnant. It’s why you were able to be...hidden...for so long, honey. Nobody knew about you.”

  Her tears stopped. Her expression shifted into steadiness. “I don’t understand.”

  He kissed her, tasting salt. “The baby your mom had in the Red Rabbit bathroom wasn’t you.”

  FORTY

  MARI STARES AT the file boxes. The piles of folders. This is the work her husband has been doing. The book he’s writing.

  About her.

  “How long?” She sounds calm, but her fingernails are once more cutting into her flesh. She keeps her voice low because she doesn’t want to wake her kids. She doesn’t look at Ryan. She can’t stand to see his face.

  “I’ve always known parts of it. I mean...you’re a textbook case study, Mari.” He sounds miserable.

  “So you knew. All of this. For how long?”

  “Not all of it for that long. When the stuff at work happened, I thought I could take my dad’s research and turn it into something. He always talked about it, you know. Writing your story.”

  “Not to me,” Mari says, lip curling but fists unclenching. She turns to him then. “He never asked me! And neither did you!”

  Ryan looks contrite, but she knows that look. It’s the face of a man sorry he’s been caught at what he was doing wrong, not sorry for doing it. And in that moment, she remembers that she loves him but can no longer feel that love.

  This is betrayal worse than his infidelity—the truth is, Mari always expected Ryan to cheat on her. There were so many other more beautiful women, smarter women. Women who didn’t catalog everything in the cupboards or wander the house naked at night. Who’d been raised by families, not by a pack of dogs and a silent, senile and demented grandmother.

  No matter what Ryan did with another woman, or women, he came home to Mari and their children, and that is what matters to her. There is a disconnect here, and she knows it. She should rail and scream, slap his face, sob into her hands at her broken heart, but the fact is she only wishes she could unknow about it so they could move on with their lives.

  But this other business of him knowing her whole life, planning to use it for his advantage and worst of all not telling her—as though it wouldn’t matter! That gouges her so deeply she isn’t even sure what she feels could be called pain.

  “It was never a secret,” Ryan says hesitantly. “I knew who you were, Mari. It never mattered to me.”

  “It matters to me.” The words come out on a hiss she keeps from becoming a growl. She chews her lower lip and tastes blood, slicks it away with her tongue and rubs the sore spot with one fingertip. “You brought me back here, to this place!”

  “I didn’t know, I swear to you, how bad it was. Until we got here and I really started looking at all the notes. Until you—” Ryan breaks off.

  They stand and stare. Mari wonders if this is how she should’ve felt about learning he’d been cheating. This feeling of trying to breathe and not finding the air. The feeling that everything in her life was going to slip through her fingers like water through a broken vase.

  She taps a pile of the papers. “If I’m not the baby she had in the bathroom, who was it?”

  “She gave it up for adoption. It was a girl.”

  “I have a sister.”

  Ryan shrugs and scratches his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. The rumpled look usually suits him. Now it makes him look tired. “Yes. But it was a closed adoption.”

  “So I can’t find her?”

  “If she comes looking for your mother, she could find you. But other than that, I don’t know where to begin. Do you want to find her?”

  Mari isn’t sure. That baby would be a woman now. She might have a family. She might not want to discover a sister, and Mari might not want to see what her own life might have been like if their mother hadn’t pretended she didn’t exist. Still...a sister. Mari has never imagined having a sister. The thought of it is overwhelming. Frightening.

  “And my mother? You really have no idea where she is?”

  “After she gave up the baby, she was diagnosed and hospitalized for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. You’d’ve been about two years old. She was admitted to Harrisburg State Hospital and was there until at least 1989, when she was released.”

  Mari swallows hard. “What happened to her?”

  “No records. Either she was never hospitalized or arrested again, or she changed her name. Or couldn’t give anyone her name.”

  “She could be alive.”

  “She could, yes.” Ryan pauses. “But it’s really unlikely. Babe, I am so sorry about all of this. I hope you believe me.”

  “I believe you. I’m not sure it matters, but I believe you.”

  She’s pleased to see the way that sets his mouth, like he sucked a lemon. She sees so much of his father in him now, with his rumpled hair and the lines around his eyes. Ryan had always been her prince but it seemed she’d been his fool.

  He hangs his head but gives her a sideways look. “Your story is inspirational. Really. You’re a success story.”

  “For who? Your father? You?” She manages a bitter laugh. “What do you think that book would do to us, Ryan? Our family? The kids? Did you think of anything beyond yourself?”

  “Of course I did! Everything I’ve done is for this family!” Ryan shouts so suddenly it sends her back a step. “If I could sell that book, if it was as popular as I think it could be, it would be entirely for this family! We’re drowning in debt, Mari, but you wouldn’t know a goddamn thing about that, would you? No! Because you don’t pay the bills, I do. Because you have no idea of anything beyond your tiny little world. You’ve spent your whole life being taken care of!”

  “Not,” Mari says, “my whole life.”

  “Your whole life with me.”

  “Why did you marry me, Ryan? Was it because you loved me? Or because I just kept going after you until
you couldn’t say no?” Mari pauses, the words bitter. “Or was it because I was some sort of prize you could take from your father, get what he didn’t.”

  “I loved you. I still love you. Christ,” Ryan says with a swipe of his hand over his face. “What do you want me to do? What can I do but say I’m sorry?”

  She thinks on this for only a second or two. “Leave.”

  Clearly, he’s not expecting this. “The hell I will!”

  She gives him a steady, solid stare until it’s his turn to step back. “I want you to leave, Ryan.”

  “In case you don’t remember, sweetheart—” the pet name does not sound kind “—someone’s renting our house until September. That’s four weeks away. And frankly, we can’t afford a hotel bill.”

  “Go stay with your mother.” She spits this suggestion. She needs time to herself, to think. “Take the children,” she adds. “She’ll be thrilled to have you all.”

  “For how long?” Ryan asks again.

  She wants to tell him forever, but knows that’s not a practical answer. Because what will she do without Ryan? Does she really want to find out? “The weekend, at least. Maybe a week.”

  “What will I tell the kids?”

  “Tell them you’re taking them to see Grandma, Ryan. It’s not like you’ve never gone to visit her without me before.” In fact, most of the time they visit her without Mari, who has no issue with her mother-in-law but is all too aware of the former Mrs. Doctor Calder’s issues with her.

  “Fine.” He’s angry.

  She doesn’t care. Ryan turns to fuss with a pile of papers on the desk. She stops him when he goes to shove them in his briefcase. “No.”

  He looks up, still clutching the papers.

  “Leave that. I want to look at all of this. I want to see it.”

  He shakes his head. “I really don’t think you do.”

  “Oh, Ryan, you’re so wrong.”