13-APR
The night Ames died, Grace had sex with Liam for the first time since the baby. She wore a black lace slip to avoid any confusion about exactly what she had on the menu for the evening’s entertainment. No Lester Holt for you tonight, Liam-baby!
At no point did Liam think it odd that his wife felt frisky—finally!—on the day that her boss had died. On the contrary, he was happy to dive right in.
Under normal circumstances, Grace would have said that she and her husband had good sex. She’d never understood her girlfriends who, in their twenties, prattled on about how you could never-ever marry a man with whom you didn’t have great sex. Grace didn’t think she’d ever had great sex. She liked sex. Very much. But great? She figured that if you loved someone, then surely you could sort out the details of mutual satisfaction in the first couple of years. And it wasn’t as if she’d ever had bad sex, either. At least, that had been true. Until that very moment. That moment when she had listened to Liam’s ragged breaths, feeling as though someone were stuffing her insides like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Want to know what I did today, honey? she thought to ask him as she stared up at his bare chest.
The sex hurt. There was no way around that. She winced silently. But then again, that was the point. She deserved a bit of suffering. Craved holy penance.
Afterward, when the parts between her legs felt as if they’d been sandpapered, she slid from the bed and ran a damp towel over her body.
Liam lounged on the pillow. Tufts of hair stood up from underneath each arm. “Are you okay?” he asked, watching her wet her face in the sink. She pulled a pair of matching J.Crew pajamas from her drawer and tugged them on. “With … everything?”
Honestly, what was she supposed to think he meant by that?
“You seem a bit, I don’t know, off.” He tucked the wrinkled sheets around his waist. Really, Liam, do I seem a little off? My, my, aren’t you observant.
She was being mean. If only in her head.
“I’m fine,” she said. “You know me.”
He was a good husband. Dressed impeccably, bought jewelry, cooked dinners, called on his way home from the office each day, took shopping lists to Target. Here she was, defending her own husband to herself.
He retrieved his cell phone and rested it on his stomach. They both did this: checked their work email up until the moment they went to sleep. “You’re amazing, you know that?” he said.
She turned from the mirror. “I’m going to go get a glass of water. You want anything?” She sounded the same as always, so the fact that Liam—her dearly beloved—didn’t press her any further was almost entirely her fault. Just like everything else.
For a moment, before she left, she watched the groove of his shoulder muscle deepen as he stretched across to turn off the lamp on his nightstand. And then it was dark in their bedroom.
She padded out into the living room. The house at night was artificially cold—their electric bill another luxury in her life, proof that she had no right to complain—and her arms pricked with goose bumps. She found her purse slouched beside the front door. She reached into the middle compartment and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. Quietly, she opened the front door and sat down on the porch. The paper tube stuck to the moist insides of her lips. She lit the end and breathed.
As she puffed, she stared out into the night, out at her neighbors’ houses, with their attractive floodlights shining up the trunks of old trees. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t seen Ames’s message on her computer screen: I thought we were friends.
Anything? The same thing?
Friends.
There were no answers out here on her porch. She walked to the road and rubbed the butt of her cigarette into the brick mailbox and then flicked it sideways into the bushes. Back inside, she washed her face again and swished mouthwash over her tongue and her teeth. Liam’s breaths were slow and even beneath the covers. She shook him awake. “Liam. Liam,” she whispered. “Emma Kate’s crying.”
He turned over, his eyes adjusting in the dark. “Huh?”
She listened.
“Emma Kate’s crying.” Grace yawned. “Can you go give her a bottle?”
Liam rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye sockets and propped his torso up with his elbow. “Bottle? Yeah. I can do a bottle.”
“Thanks,” she whispered. “I stored a couple new bags of breast milk in the fridge.”
A lie. Grace had stopped breastfeeding three days ago and had hidden a box of premixed formula underneath a tarp in the garage. What other people don’t know can’t hurt them, she thought, almost as a reminder to herself. And then, she went to bed.
That was two days ago and, since then, she had hardly left.