I knew Sullivan Crisp didn’t want me to do it. And the startling thing was, I cared that he didn’t want me to do it.
But not as much as I cared about getting Rich back. Which was why the day after our session, I let myself into the house with a letter in my pocket, made as much noise as possible clamoring up the stairs, and pushed open our bedroom door.
The room was a cave until I yanked the blinds up and let the light of a rare sunny day stream in. The sight it revealed was dismal, the odor worse. I’d smelled subways in New York that were sweeter than this.
I was working the window open when Rich stirred, his breathing still carrying the faint echo of a snore. The Rich I knew could come out of REM already shouting coherent orders to twenty firefighters and pulling on fifty pounds of equipment without missing a Velcro strip.
This Rich was red-eyed and disoriented, as if he’d been roused from the dead. I glanced at the bedside table and spotted a half-empty prescription bottle. Not that I hadn’t thought of sleeping pills myself, but it jarred me. Rich wouldn’t take so much as a Tylenol for a bruising headache.
I decided not to let his obvious stupor stop me. I sat on the edge of the bed—blocking his way out.
“What are you doing, Demitria?” he said. The words were fuzz.
“Saving our marriage.”
He looked at me through swollen slits. “I told you I can’t talk about this yet.”
“You don’t have to talk,” I said. “I’m going to talk.”
He half growled.
“I have something I want to say to you.” I pulled the letter out of my pocket and unfolded it. “I want you to listen all the way through. You can say whatever you want to me when I’m done, but please hear me out.”
He opened his mouth, but I plunged forward, reading as fast as I could.
“Dear Rich, I know it’s hard for you to believe that I truly am sorry for what I’ve done to you and to the kids. If I were that sorry, why did I do it in the first place, right?”
He grunted.
“I think I can answer that question now—the why—but I’m not sure you’ll believe that either. I know what the pain is like, Rich, and I know how hard it is to keep your perspective in the face of it. So maybe it would help to look back—to before this happened—before 9/11— before there even was a ‘why.’”
Rich ripped the covers off and dumped his feet to the floor.
“Don’t go—please,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.” His voice thickened, but the sleep had disappeared from it. He went to the window, his back to me.
I read on.
“What I’m remembering is the first months of us. When you told me even my toes were beautiful. When you were so proud that I was in college, even though you teased me about not having any mechanical sense. When you made me physically go through what I would do if my building caught on fire—the most endearing thing I could think of.”
I glanced up at him. His head hung between his shoulders, and he rubbed the windowsill with his thumbs.
“I took cooking lessons from your mama, and I pumped your papa for your kid stories so I didn’t have to feel left out of everything that had happened to you pre-me. I knew I wanted to be part of your family, part of you. That, and the fact that you were a gifted kisser.”
“Demitria,” Rich said.
I couldn’t stop.
“You proposed to me two months after we met. It was so right, Rich. And it still is.”
I grasped at the silence.
“It was a huge risk—as all the important things in life are, I’m learning. No, we didn’t know each other well when we got married. I learned only after the ceremony that you snored. That you burped. That you wouldn’t wear a tie ever again once that tuxedo came off and fell onto our hotel room floor. But none of that could overshadow your tenderness. Your appreciation of my jokes. Your calling out “Hey, Hon!” whenever you walked in the door at the end of your shift.”
I paused, not for an answer, but for the courage to move into the next paragraph—the one that might bring him off the windowsill he leaned on.
“The only dark discovery I made was that when you were upset about something, you brooded. Whether it was work issues, a worry over Eddie, something I said to hurt your feelings, you closed yourself off and stewed, often for an entire day. Drove me crazy. I got the same feeling of dread that came over me in my childhood when my mother meted out the silent treatment. I took it from her because I had no choice, but I couldn’t take it from you.”
I drew in a rough breath.
“I cried. I pleaded. I slammed cabinet doors. All the things I never dared do with my mother. I don’t think anyone had ever challenged your cavelike way of dealing with things, and over time, you began to at least tell me that you weren’t upset with me and you just needed to think things through on your own. It wasn’t my favorite compromise, but I learned to live with it. Until 9/11.”
“Stop,” Rich said.
“I’m almost through. Rich—please.”
“I can’t—”
“I didn’t know how to help you. You wouldn’t let me find a way, and that cut into the core of who I think I’m supposed to be.”
I let the letter fall to the floor and took a step forward.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Just hear me then. I have this—this premise, they call it—that I live by. It tells me I’m supposed to be everything to everyone, and if I’m not, I’m a failure. Only you know me, Rich. You know I can’t do failure—I have to find a way to make it right. And here’s the screwy part.” I was close to tears. “When someone told me I was right, I believed him—and that started my downfall.”
Rich didn’t move.
“I know I can’t erase the past,” I said. “But I’m learning from it, Rich. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”
He sank to the edge of the windowsill and parked his wrists on his knees as he stared down at his feet.
Did that sound too desperate? Dear Father in Heaven, I was desperate. This was my life—
“You think we could make it work?”
Rich’s voice was small. So small I wasn’t sure I’d heard it at all.
“What?” I said.
“You think we could make it work?”
Oh, dear God.
“Because, Demitria, I can never go through this again.”
He looked up at me, eyes mapped with the pain I’d put there.
“You won’t have to. It was the most horrible thing I have ever done in my life, and it will never, ever happen again.” My voice begged, and I didn’t care. He was saying yes.
“It can’t be like before,” he said.
“No—absolutely not.”
“I don’t know what we’ll do about the house and the bills—but you can’t go back to work—not if we’re going to make it.”
I blinked, hard and fast.
He fisted his hands, stretched his arms, gathered up control before my eyes. “I gotta believe that’s what did it,” he said. “You working all the time—you said it yourself—you wanted to feel needed, and that’s where you did.”
I studied his face. Tears had formed at the corners of his eyes, and the jaw muscles worked against them. I thought my chest would rip in half. He was asking me to give up a piece of my being. But I had said I’d do anything.
“If you stay home, we can do this. Maybe.” His voice caught on a lurking sob. “I don’t know, Demitria. This scares me to death.”
I pressed both hands against my mouth as I sank gingerly to the sill, not touching him. “Me too, Rich,” I said. “But we can do it. I know we can.” And then I heard myself add, “If you want me to stay home, I’ll stay home. We’ll figure out the money.”
Rich didn’t take his gaze from me. “I want to believe you. Honest to God, I do.”
We hunted for each other, eyes everywhere, my hands risking a reach for him. We almost found it—when I felt a presence in the doorway.
“There is no way,” a voice said.
With my fingers still straining toward Rich, I whirled around. Christopher stood there, face white and angular, like a jagged piece that didn’t fit what we were putting together. He inserted himself into the room, his eyes on Rich.
“You’re not actually considering letting her come back,” he said. “I thought you decided—”
Rich looked at me, face splotched, and said, “Your mother and I have been talking.”
“So I see.” Christopher lowered his eyes to me. “What lies did she tell you this time?”
Rich said nothing. Did nothing.
“Please send him away,” I said between my teeth.
“Christopher, you’re over the line, son,” Rich said. “Go on—we’ll talk later.”
Christopher gave one long, disdainful hiss and left. I counted the steps until his bedroom door slammed.
Rich stood up and disappeared into the bathroom.
I sat, frozen.
He came back into the doorway in a T-shirt that smelled like exhaust.
“My career is not the only thing that’s going to have to change if I come back,” I said.
He stayed in the bathroom doorway, put his hand up on the frame.
I jutted my head forward. “Were you just going to sit there and let him talk to me like that?”
“I sent him away.”
“After I asked you to. Rich, he doesn’t run our lives. I don’t know what we did with him that made him think he could take over, but that has to change.”
Rich shook out the bedspread, smoothed it out, and sat on it. “I’ll handle it my own way.”
My face burned. “I need you to stand up for me with him, Rich,” I said. “We both have to look at the way we handle him.”
He snapped his head toward me. “I don’t need you telling me how to deal with my son. It’s been the two of us through this thing—”
“By your choice!”
“He’s been a godsend,” he said. “I couldn’t do it without him.”
“And now it’s time you did it with me. And he can’t be part of it— this is between us.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Rich put his hand up. “Let me get this straight, all right? You were the one who went out and slept with somebody else—now you’re begging me to take you back, only you want to make the rules about how it’s going to be.”
I stared at him, hard.
“Christopher is not what’s wrong with us. You—what you did— is what’s wrong with us.”
“Then when do I get to be right again? When are you going to forgive me, Rich—so we can be equals again?” My voice was shrill and shaken. “I want to come home more than anything in this world— but only if you forgive me, because you know what? I am not going to live in shame for the rest of my life. If you—and our son—are going to hold this over my head forever, then you can forget it.”
I watched Rich recoil into himself, watched him plant his hands on his hips, heard him say, “Then I guess you can forget it.”
I got hold of Mickey and asked her to check on Jayne, who was home alone. Then I got there too and made it to the window seat before I collapsed into myself.
But there were no tears. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t claw at the cushions and call myself an idiot. I couldn’t even wish I could take it all back.
Because I’d done the only thing there was to do. And now it was over.
I laid my cheek on my knees, head to the side so I could watch the last of the houses perched on the hill across the street blend in blackness into the sound. I’d expected to be devastated should this ever happen, but it didn’t feel real. That “if ” still lurked. I could go back—if I did it on Rich’s terms. I’d thought I would do that no matter what they were. Sullivan Crisp had said I couldn’t.
A curse on him and his game shows. He was right.
I looked at my reflection, now clear in the window. I looked like a woman who’d just had a bout with destiny and barely come out with her life. But she’d come out—hair in hunks, eyes sagging into carry-on luggage, lips chewed to a feathery red—but she’d come out, and here she was. With nothing left to do but figure herself out, or she was lost for sure.
I dug my face into my knees. I had to find my way—for Jayne— for what was left of my Christopher—for myself.
For God. Because if I let go of where I was going before—my direction, my call—where did that leave me with God? I grabbed my knees and held on and groped for my breath.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
I snapped my head up. Jayne stood halfway between me and the kitchen. She clicked on the lamp and flooded herself in strawberry blonde light.
“No,” I said. “But I will be.”
“Okay.”
She padded toward me. She nestled onto the window seat facing me with something in her hands.
“Whatcha got?” I said.
“I made this for you.”
She held it out to me, requiring two hands. It was the Sullivan Crisp rock—now shiny with a coat of pink paint and bright yellow stripes with blue dots.
“It was an ugly rock,” she said. “So I turned it into an Easter egg.”
I put my hand sideways over my mouth, and for the first time in days—weeks—maybe months—I laughed. It bubbled up from a spring I’d forgotten I even had, and it didn’t stop.
She wrinkled her fragile brow. “Is it funny looking?”
“No—it’s absolutely delightful.”
“It’s funny looking,” she said. “But that’s okay. You like it, right?”
“I love it. It is the most precious thing I have ever seen.”
She set it down between us and surveyed it—dispassionately, I thought. Which made me giggle even harder.
“I might have an idea, actually,” she said.
“Yes?”
“It’s like transformation.”
My laughter faded. “What do you mean, honey?”
“You said you were supposed to make it into something besides a weapon to use on yourself. Easter eggs are like new birth and all that. So it’s transformed—and maybe we are too.”
I looked at the girl who for an instant gave me a glimmer of a woman. Perhaps a woman wiser than I. And then she tilted her head at me.
“Do you think I could have an Easter outfit?” she said.
“Well—yeah—when’s Easter?”
“Okay—you’ve been holed up in here too long, Mom. It’s this Sunday. Hello!”
I laughed again.
“We’ll go shopping,” I said. “Only—I mean, you’ll want to go to church.”
“Not our church.” She rolled her eyes. “Christopher’s been making me go, and I feel like a beta fish.”
“Excuse me?”
“In a bowl. All these people are looking at us like, What’s wrong with your family? It feels weird because if somebody asks, I’m not allowed to tell them. So—no—can we find someplace else to go on Easter?”
“We will do whatever you want,” I said.
She got up and put the Easter egg on our coffee table. “There,” she said.
Now in full display, the rock showed itself lopsided and garish, with paint hardened into a drip on one side. If that symbolized my transformation, I had a long way to go.
But now I had a reason to go there.