Tim has dragged me to this appointment. It isn’t his, but he insisted on coming with me, and now he sits stiffly at my side, uncomfortable. He’s never visited a therapist before, either.
The office is done up in Easter pastels. Light yellow walls, lavender curtains, a rose and baby blue plaid sofa. I am sitting next to a stuffed bear. Tim rests his arm on the head of a duck. A bowl of potpourri sits on the low table before us, a blend of cedar and cinnamon and sage, too strong. I feel a headache starting at the back of my skull.
The therapist stares at us. I can’t remember if she’s asked something. I don’t know whose turn it is to talk, or if anyone has spoken at all.
Her name is Helen, and her eyes are enormous, amber-brown, the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, overshadowing the brightest blue or green, and I find myself envying them, though the rest of her is bland and thick. She is tall and wide-shouldered, and she towers over me when we shake hands.
“I’m sorry to hear about Edmund,” she says, and I try to remember if it’s the first thing she’s said. “We worked together a few times throughout the years. He was a great asset to the state.”
“He still is.” My voice is too defensive. I hear it.
Tim takes my hand, and I have to make myself not draw away. He feels less of a husband now that Ed is less of a man.
A week ago, Bonnie and Pete and Tim cornered me in the kitchen of our house. They’d occupied the children with a movie downstairs. Pete poured us each a whiskey, and Bonnie said, “You need to let Ed go.” Pete was nodding at her side, Tim, too. They were staging an intervention. I thought again about that last day with Ed in his kitchen, all that broiling anger. I thought I’d let him go. I thought I was done.
But he is sick now, and everything is different.
Tim said, “Baby, this is too much right now. It’s hard on all of us, but you’re taking the brunt of it. I’ve made us an appointment with a therapist.”
“She’s wonderful,” Pete added. “Bonnie and I have seen her, and she really helped us work through some of our shit. She’ll be able to help you sort this out. There’s no guidebook here, Laura. You’ve got to talk to someone.”
I took my whiskey to my room and stayed there through dinner. But they were persistent, and here we are.
Helen says, “Tell me what’s going on.”
Tim speaks first. “Laura is driving to Great Falls twice a week to visit Ed. His parents were here for a while, but they had to get back to Michigan, and Laura has taken on the bulk of Ed’s care. He still thinks they’re married, and I think—Pete and Bonnie and our other friends, too—that it isn’t good for either of them. Ed needs to understand what his life really looks like, and Laura needs to focus on her own.”
“You mean I need to focus on you.”
“That’s not what Tim said, Laura.” Helen’s voice is calm and even. She has a notepad on her lap, a pen in her hand. She blinks at me.
“It’s what he meant, and of course he deserves my attention. But I’d appreciate a little understanding while I help Ed get back on his feet.”
“Why is it your responsibility to help Ed get back on his feet?”
Her voice is like a metronome, a steady unbroken rhythm. I don’t want it to soothe me as much as it does.
I say, “He’s my son’s father.”
Tim says, “I’m your other son’s father, and I’m your husband.”
Helen says, “Can you understand how this might be hard for Tim, Laura?”
I look away from her, my gaze catching on the prints and posters she’s chosen to display on her walls—waterfalls and meadows and mountains, their natural colors at odds with the room’s muted tones. Near the window, she’s hung a framed copy of the Serenity Prayer, the words in swooped calligraphy, vines and flowers decorating the border. How can anyone have the wisdom to know what they can and can’t change? We learn only after trying.
I remember Ed telling me the Catholic Church doesn’t recognize divorce. Ed and I are still married in its eyes, and I am committing adultery with Tim. I am a polygamist, a whore, and I fight the urge to tell Helen that sometimes I feel the same way. I am still married to Ed, I want to tell her. Make my new husband understand.
Tim isn’t even new anymore.
“Laura?” the woman asks. “What are you gaining through this time with Ed?” Her pen is poised over the notepad, ready to scribble down my response, because this answer feels like the answer if I can find it. What are you gaining? But I can’t see it in terms of gain. I am focused only on not losing anything else. I have lost Ed over and over—to the institution, to Penelope, to policy, to the state, to his friends. I had so little of him left that I had to finally let go of the last bits, which is maybe a new version of the story I’ve told myself of our divorce, but one that feels true right now. It was Ed who slipped away from me, and I couldn’t hold him, couldn’t bring him back. He was a bachelor and I was a wife, but we would raise our son together, and I would live just a little through the power of him, the great force that was Ed out in the world.
I have lost him as husband and lover, but it’s the idea of him I risk losing now. We build our lives on ideas.
I still have not answered her question.
“Do you feel responsible for Edmund’s accident, Laura?”
“Yes,” I say. Do I? The doctors have given us no cause, no preexisting condition that led to Ed’s aneurysm. It could’ve been due to his smoking and drinking, which were always heavy but grew heavier after the divorce. Still, plenty of nondrinking, nonsmoking people develop aneurysms. Likely, it was some faulty piece of genetic code, passed along from his parents or grandparents, a dormant weapon crouching in the shadows of his brain, grating away at that one vulnerable spot, thinning and weakening it until it burst.
Starburst. Sunburst. Outburst.
“Laura, no one could’ve stopped this thing that happened to Edmund, not even Edmund himself. You are feeling guilty that Edmund is having to go through this without a spouse, and you are transferring that guilt onto something you have no control over. Tell me, why did you and Edmund divorce?”
“He didn’t see me anymore.”
“Ed was never home,” Tim tries to clarify, and I hate him for speaking now, the word hate sharp and defined in my mind. “He was completely devoted to his work and had an inappropriate relationship with—”
“Ed’s and my marriage is not yours to discuss,” I say.
Tim’s voice grows tight. “When it’s affecting our marriage, then I’d say I can talk about it all I want.” He turns his attention to Helen. “I’m going to wait outside.”
“Are you sure, Tim? It’s good to work through these things together.”
“I think Laura has some work of her own to do.”
I watch him walk to the door, stiff and indignant. He wears short sleeves and shorts even though it’s October, and I watch the muscles of his calves, the thickness of his forearms. He is still tan from summer, long days outside building. He built the boys a multistory playhouse in the backyard, nicer than a lot of real homes. It has a balcony.
“How would you describe your relationship with Tim?” Helen asks once he’s gone.
“Good, like it’s always been.”
“You sound disappointed by that.” She is a professional, versed in diplomacy.
“It’s boring,” I say. “Boring and monotonous and safe. There’s nothing to complain about. Tim is everything I said I wanted Ed to be—attentive, available, open. He’s home for dinner every night. Half the time, he’s the one cooking. He takes our boys for walks and bike rides and trips to the library so I can have time alone to paint. He supports my artwork, asks about it every day.”
“How’s the sex?”
Bonnie is the only one who’s ever asked me this question—abrasive, bold Bonnie who asks anything, no subject off limits—and I’ve never answered fully. “Fine,” I’ve said. “It’s great.”
“It’s all right,” I tell Helen. “Rare, I guess, but good when it happens.”
She is staring at me, pen poised. Her face says, Why don’t you tell me the whole story.
“It’s good and boring, like the rest of our lives. We have sex in one position in our bed on Friday nights unless something interferes.”
She’s writing in her notebook, and I worry that I’ve said too much, that I’ve betrayed Tim, that I’m being too fussy.
“Do you think it’s boring for Tim, too?”
I have never considered what Tim thinks of our sex life, and it makes me feel even worse about my indictment.
“I don’t know,” I admit to Helen.
“How was sex with Edmund?”
I am in the bathroom at Dorothy’s. I am in the bathroom at the hospital. I am in my classroom in Boulder.
“Sex with Ed was exciting, but he used it to take the place of real connection.”
Helen nods and writes. “Do you feel like you have a real connection with Tim?”
“Yes.”
Helen puts her pen down as though she’s just penciled out an answer to the troublesome equation we’ve been working for days. Sex times x equals intimacy plus y, in which x is of greater or equal value to real connection; y is less than excitement but greater than boredom. Solve for x and y.
“It’s human nature to second-guess our decisions, Laura, especially decisions of this magnitude. There’s no way to completely eradicate that way of thinking. However, you can behave in ways that lessen it. It sounds like you and Tim have some things to work on between the two of you. By focusing your attention on Edmund, you avoid the issues with Tim. Does that make sense?”
I nod.
“If you want to save your current marriage, you must invest in it, and to truly invest in it, you have to let Edmund go.”
I stare at her, those giant amber eyes, rich as honey.
“Can you do that, Laura? Can you let Edmund go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say Edmund is not my husband.”
“Edmund is not my husband.” Have I ever said this before? Edmund is not my husband.
“I divorced him four years ago.”
“I divorced him four years ago.”
“I am divorcing him again right now.”
“I am divorcing him again right now.”
I don’t know that I want to.
“I’m just supposed to abandon him?” I ask.
Helen’s voice is patient and gentle. “You can’t abandon something that isn’t yours.”