‘I’m also your daughter,’ I pointed out, as if it didn’t hurt. As if I wasn’t fairly certain I’d broken into ugly little pieces because I had to be the one to point that out.
‘This can’t go on forever,’ Mom said after a moment. ‘Tim will wake up, and when he does, I have to say, he’s unlikely to be thrilled with how Carolyn’s been treated. The angry looks, the threats, the silent treatment …’ She let her words trail away and then shook her head. Sadly, of course. Always sadly.
‘So, wait.’ I sat back in my chair, ignoring the burning feeling behind my eyes that I would die before I’d let tip over into tears. Not here. Not now. ‘You’re telling me that my cheating husband might get mad at me for not being overly nice to his girlfriend? Do you think he’ll do something really bad, Mom? Like maybe divorce me?’
‘You already know how this is going to go,’ my mother continued, her expression pinched. Mutinous. ‘He and Carolyn will get married, and they’ll have that baby. Are you planning to just avoid them for the rest of your life? What about family events? You already missed out on Thanksgiving, are you going to stay away for Christmas, too? What about next year? How long do you plan to make this stand of yours?’
Her words fell between us and sat there, nestled in with the salt and pepper and olive oil and vinegar in the centre of the table top. I stared at them as if they made sense. As if it were really time, now, with Tim still in his coma and all of this so fresh and awful, to be debating family visitation rights.
‘Please explain to me why I should be forced to spend Christmas or any other holiday with the two of them,’ I said, fighting once again to stay calm. ‘Really. Explain it to me. They get to act horribly, and do whatever terrible thing they like, but I’m the one who keeps being punished for it? Why is that okay?’
‘No one is punishing you,’ Dad said, his brow knitting in concern. ‘Of course not. There’s no debate here. What Carolyn and Tim did was inexcusable.’
‘But life goes on,’ Mom added. It was as if she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t let a single statement roll by without slapping a qualifier on top of it. Not one.
‘None of this is fair,’ Dad said, as if he were supporting me, but he wasn’t. I got that all too well, finally. He could talk a good game, but at the end of the day? He went for the path of least resistance every time. I knew that better than anyone – this was the first time I’d ever gone the other way myself, and look how everyone was reacting to it. ‘We missed you at Thanksgiving,’ he said, in that voice of his that I no longer found at all soothing. ‘What do we have to do to make you comfortable about being here as we go forward?’
‘You could not invite Carolyn,’ I said bluntly. ‘Problem solved.’
‘We’re not going to do that, sweetheart,’ my father said gently, even kindly, as if I was being wildly unreasonable and he hoped to tame me with his gentle voice. ‘You can’t ask us to choose between our daughters.’
‘I’m not the one asking you to do that,’ I pointed out, my jaw aching from the way I kept clenching it, keeping back all the things I’d really like to say. ‘She is, since she’s the one who did this.’
‘You’re welcome here anytime you like,’ Mom said, stubbornly, clearly drawing her line in the sand. With both hands. ‘As is Carolyn, of course.’
I pushed back my chair and got to my feet, only then realizing that I was shaking. I didn’t bother to say anything else, I just grabbed my jacket and bag and headed for the door, praying that I would make it outside and into my car before I dissolved.
‘This is a family,’ Dad said from behind me. Piously. ‘You don’t just discard family members when they do things you don’t like.’
I stopped in the doorway, and had a brief, vicious battle with myself. But I turned around anyway, and looked back at them. Hadn’t I promised myself I wouldn’t fight with them? Look how well that had worked out. And still there was that part of me that thought I could keep talking, keep explaining, and they would have to see the light. They’d smack themselves on the forehead in some cartoonish way, and wonder how they’d ever been so terribly wrong about things. About Carolyn. About me. But that was my biggest delusion yet.
At least the difference was that I knew it now. Hooray.
‘Unless it’s me, you mean,’ I said softly. ‘Then it’s a whole lot easier, isn’t it?’
If they called out after me as I left, then I didn’t hear them.
Outside, the December night was darker and colder than it had been before; thicker around me, as if it might swallow me in one gulp. I wished for a moment it would. I let my parents’ heavy front door slam shut behind me and discovered that I was panting. Clouds of breath hung there in front of me, sketched against the night for a moment. The cold wind rushed at me, claiming me, as I struggled to find the damned zipper on my jacket. As I tried to catch my breath.
What the hell was I doing here?
It seemed like a bigger question than one about my specific geographic location. I looked wildly around for a moment as if I were even more lost than I felt, then trudged over the frozen front garden toward the car I’d parked at the kerb. And when I got in, I cranked up the heat and sat there.
I wanted to go home. I wanted that more than anything, with a yearning that seemed to sear right through me. But I didn’t want to maroon myself in that empty house of mine that sat up there on the top of the hill – that monument to my completely fake life. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t that.
Your parents have always been about the status quo, Lianne texted me from the middle of her late-night shift at the office, in reply to a few choice quotes from dinner I sent along to her. None of this is surprising. It just sucks.
That it does, I replied, feeling like a teenager again, adrift and angry, unmoored in my own home town and abandoned in every way that mattered by the people who should have been protecting me. I didn’t know why I let them get to me like this. I didn’t know why, if I knew they would make me feel like this, I’d set myself up for it by allowing the conversation in the first place.
This was exactly why I’d made rules before I’d gone over there. Why I’d been determined not to fight with them.
Come over later, Lianne texted back, just as she might have had there been text messaging when we were sixteen. We’ll watch something cute and eat something bad. And we’ll psychoanalyse every terrible thing your parents have ever done. I remember them all.
Thank God, I replied. I think I blocked them out.
But I couldn’t bring myself to go home and sit in that house and wait for Lianne to get off work. I found myself driving in wide circles around Rivermark instead, hardly recognizing all the old, familiar landmarks through the tumult and chaos inside me. They all looked fake to me now. Like free-standing lies.
The old train station that had stood as an icon of the town, in brick and iron, since the late 1800s. The stately old library that commanded the whole north side of the manicured town green, buried though that picturesque lawn was now beneath the cover of snow. The village’s self-consciously quaint main street preened against the night, all lit up with holiday lights that twinkled happily in the cold December dark. Even the bed and breakfast that I knew Tim and Carolyn had shacked up in was lovely tonight, with its white picket fence covered in evergreen garlands and wreaths in all the windows. I should have found it all pretty. I should have stopped to take it in, like all the tourists did. Hadn’t I moved back here because I wanted to live like this? In a fucking postcard? But my head was pounding, my ears were alive with white noise, and I was breathing in loud little gulps that wouldn’t take too much prodding before they tumbled into sobs.
I was completely alone.
I knew that wasn’t true the moment I thought it. Not entirely, anyway. I had Lianne and her family, of course I did, but I didn’t want to take advantage of them – any more than I already had. They couldn’t be expected to make up for the various betrayals of my own family. I had a whole spread-out network
of friends from college and life in New York with whom I kept in touch, some more closely than others, and I knew, intellectually, that there were any number of people I could call on if I needed them, in some capacity or another. But first I’d have to explain what had happened. And there was not a single part of me that felt as if that were something I was capable of doing. Not one single part.
And not one of the people who might be there for me was ever going to be my parents. That was a stark, simple fact. The little girl who still lived inside of me couldn’t seem to get a handle on the harsh truth of that, but that didn’t make it any less true, did it?
It felt as if there were a gaping hole punched right through my chest, and worse, like everything else this long, terrible fall, that it had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed it until now. I clenched my hands hard against the steering wheel and felt the air blow hot at my face from the car’s heater, much too hot, and knew that I had no idea how I was going to go about fixing this. Fixing myself. How could I, when I hadn’t known everything was so wrong to begin with? When I’d actually been happy with what I’d imagined my life was?
Maybe my mother was right. Maybe the right thing to do was to rise above all this, to be the bigger person, to take the high ground – and whatever else people called it when you stopped fighting. When you surrendered. Turn the other cheek, and so on. Maybe I should give in and let Tim go without a fight, without even the passive, mostly well-behaved one I’d been waging since before the accident. Because what was the point of fighting to keep somebody if they wanted to leave? If they’d already left? How could that possibly end well?
There was probably something in that I should examine, but I felt too beat up tonight to do it. Too outside myself. There had been too much revelation and not enough dinner, and I wasn’t sure I’d survive a close and unflinching look into my own part in any of this tonight.
Tomorrow, I promised myself fiercely, as my phone vibrated in my pocket and I pointed the car toward Lianne’s house, because I knew there would be no one else texting me. And I wanted to sit on her couch, eat something bad for me, and forget. I just wanted to forget. I’ll deal with that fresh hell tomorrow.
6
But it was hard to get that dinner with my parents out of my head. It seemed to linger; to expand inside me until it took up far more space than it should. Even a night spent on Lianne’s living-room sofa, acting as if we were sixteen again, failed to dispel the remnants of it.
‘You can’t let them get to you,’ Lianne had said, passing me the giant family-sized bag of Cheetos while a classic John Cusack movie played on the impressive TV on the wall. ‘They want you to give in and get over it because that would make things easier for them. Everything could just go back to normal.’
‘They can’t really believe that things will ever be normal again,’ I’d argued, baffled and uneasy at the very suggestion, and what the possibility that my parents actually believed that might mean. ‘Can they?’
‘Here’s what I know about parents,’ Lianne had said with a long sigh, tacitly inviting us both to think about her own father, who had dealt with her mother’s death by throwing himself into the dating world with unsavoury and unfortunate gusto – each new girlfriend shockingly and almost creepily younger than the last. The current one was barely of legal drinking age, we estimated. And we couldn’t discuss the way he dressed young for these increasingly more vapid girlfriends – Lianne found it entirely too painful. ‘There is no level of denial they won’t cling to, as long as that means they don’t have to face the truth about something they don’t want to deal with. Believe me.’
I knew she was right. Of course she was. I just didn’t want to believe it.
A few days later, exhausted from another long day in the hospital fending off well-meaning yet tiresome visitors like the difficult Annette, as well as an extensive and annoying conversation with the two local lawyers I’d handed off all the active Lowery & Lowery cases to while Tim’s coma dragged on, I found myself on my hands and knees at the back of the huge walk-in closet off our master bedroom. I was digging through piles of Tim’s and my detritus in search of those ratty shoeboxes filled with old photographs that I distinctly recalled stowing away in there years ago. The whim to do such a thing had overtaken me as I’d been haunting the upstairs hallway like something out of a Brontë novel, brooding over all the carefully displayed photographs laid out before me on the walls, which some part of me had wanted to take outside and set on fire in the frozen back garden.
A large part of me, actually, but I’d refrained. There was a far more insistent part of me that didn’t want to do anything I couldn’t take back, and yes, I was aware of the irony of that. My entire life was the irony of that.
I’d been staring at all the pictures I’d chosen to display along that hall, glaring balefully at the representations of a life that not only no longer existed but, I was forced to contemplate, had perhaps never existed at all, or not the way I’d imagined it had. I’d thought about how I’d always been the one to insist not just on taking all the photographs to document our life but to figure out how to display those pictures wherever we were.
Do you need proof? Tim had asked, his voice sleepy and indulgent, as I’d photographed him lying stretched out across the bed in our honeymoon suite in Nevis, so blonde and blue-eyed, staring out at the beautiful blue Caribbean sea.
Always, I’d replied, laughing. Just in case you’re tempted to forget – I’ll have all these pictures to remind you!
But this particular late afternoon, staring at the pictures, I’d wondered at my own compulsion to document my relationship with Tim so thoroughly – and at the selection process I’d used to decide which ones went on display.
What had made me choose these particular photos? What had made me put together this specific narrative in all these distressed frames? Because that was exactly what this was – what I’d done. This was a story. Looking at it from the critical distance these last few months had forced upon me, I hardly saw the pictures as just pictures any more – they seemed like some kind of pictorial fairy tale, with Tim and me no more than two-dimensional characters I’d slotted into predetermined roles. Look at the happy girlfriend, the delighted fiancée, the emotional bride! Look at the caring boyfriend, the charming engaged man, the loving husband!
Who were these people?
And that was when I remembered that when I’d moved in with Tim, I’d moved into his already-furnished apartment. It had been a gorgeous one bedroom on the Upper West Side, huge steps up from where I’d been living at the time. I’d been too much in awe to really put my stamp on the place. Instead, I’d fitted myself in around what was already there. His furniture. His art. His possessions. It wasn’t until we’d moved out to Rivermark and into this house that I’d really been able to put my mark on things. I’d spent the most time on the pictures, as I recalled. And tonight, I found myself wondering about all the pictures I hadn’t chosen three years ago. What story did they tell? Were they hiding all the things I’d managed to forget – like my own dreams? Had I banished them from view for precisely that reason?
What did that say about me?
That was how I found myself in the most crowded of the house’s closets. That it was so spacious, with so many built-in shelves, had dazzled us when we’d moved here from the city. But we had soon packed it full to bursting. I’d had to psych myself up considerably to dig around in there. Who knew what might be tucked away inside?
Not to mention, I hadn’t been in the master bedroom much since That Day. I’d found myself unable to sleep in the bed they’d so defiled, even with a brand-spanking-new mattress, and so spent most of my nights pretending to sleep on the deep-cushioned sofa in the den – something I had started lying about to Lianne. She thought I needed to reclaim the king-sized platform bed in the master bedroom as my own. She insisted there should be a ritual to let me do so. Or a cleansing of some kind. I thought there was a long list of things I should proba
bly try to reclaim from this situation, a much longer list than I really wanted to think about if I were honest, and the couch in the den was remarkably comfortable, really.
And anyway, it’s not like I was sleeping very much these days. So who cared where all that insomnia happened?
I shoved aside some old golf clubs now, muttering to myself. This closet was like a temple to Tim, and it was giving me a headache. Here, surrounded by his clothes and accessories, it was as if everything that happened on the other side of the closet’s pocket doors was a dream. In the cocoon of the closet, I could smell him, that mix of soap and the aftershave he only wore on important occasions, and that particular scent that was only his. It clung to his clothes, to the sweaters and shirts stacked so neatly on his side of the closet, like some kind of unwanted embrace. His dry-cleaned suits hung in neat rows in their plastic covers, and his dress shoes gleamed, reminding me that Tim hated it whenever any scuff marks appeared to mar those glossy surfaces and had spent many hours industriously polishing them away himself. I ran my fingers over a gleaming dark chocolate loafer near me and had to swallow hard on a sudden lump in my throat.
Annoyed at myself, I pushed into the deepest recesses of the closet with far too much force, upending the contents of the furthest shelf all over me. It was the damned shoeboxes, of course, and as they fell they spewed their contents everywhere, old photographs raining down on my head and shoulders, not gently, and one box actually glancing off my forehead.
Great, I thought. Head injuries all around!
But it was the piece of fabric that fluttered down after the avalanche of shoeboxes that caught my attention. I ignored the sting in my forehead and grabbed it, rolling it open in front of me like some kind of Dead Sea scroll, and laughed out loud, surprising myself with the sound.
I hadn’t seen this in years. I’d forgotten it existed. I traced the nearest clump of words that had been painstakingly painted onto the large, once-white sheet in scarlet nail polish with my finger – I’d done it myself when I’d been all of eighteen years old, newly arrived at NYU and bursting with the sense of my own poetic melodrama. To say nothing of the illicit bottle of wine we’d smuggled into our dorm room. It was a few key lines from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem I’d discovered that very same week, if I remembered it right.