twenty-three

Cooper’s scar is flaming red and I can’t stop looking at it as I avoid his eyes. He’s crying, and I know it’s real; he’s scared and hurt and wants to mend it all.

“I want to take it all back. I’m sorry. I should never have lied about that night. I did it to protect you. To protect us. I didn’t want you to know my business was failing. I didn’t want my parents to know.”

God, how I loved this man once.

“So you wanted me to think that my sister was drunk. That you were having an affair, that you would lie about meetings and places, that you would shift money around—all these things were better for me to believe than that the company was failing?”

“I didn’t think about it that way. I just wanted to protect you and Gwen from something that would make you worry, when I knew I could fix it.”

“Can you tell the truth about anything at all?”

He reaches behind his chair and pulls out the Savannah News, slamming it onto the coffee table. “Did you read this?” He points to the article “Finding Home.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t kill anyone, Eve. I didn’t hit anyone or lie about it.”

“I know that now.”

“Did you really believe I’d hit a man and leave him?”

“I didn’t know where your truth ended and the lies started. I didn’t.” I look up to Cooper and see a slight smile.

“See? What I did wasn’t that bad.”

“But … you threw my sister under the bus. You were willing to blame her, to lie about her to save face? My sister: For God’s sake.”

He touches his bandage and attempts humor. “I didn’t really get to save face, did I?”

There he is, the charming, smart man I fell in love with—my husband. But I feel nothing. The anxiety is gone and a windless empty space remains.

He pushes on. “All the stuff you were worried about had nothing to do with me. I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t sleep with anyone. You are making this so much bigger than it is.”

“All those lies—all of them about money and who you were with and why—are no different from cheating. How can you separate them?”

“I’m sorry. It was wrong. But I don’t have a mistress. I didn’t hit a man and walk away. I just.… It was for us. For our family.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was for you.” I can see by the look on Cooper’s face that he doesn’t get it. “It was for you, Cooper. Your image. Your gratification. Your ridiculous pride.”

The air shifts and Cooper leans back in his seat to cross one leg over the other. His face is altered, and not just by the scar and the pulled skin but also by the wave of anger that comes, immediate and flaming. “And you want to talk about image? It’s what you do for a living. It’s all you’ve ever been about.”

“Maybe. But if that’s true, I’m lying to myself, not to you. I’m not dragging your family into chaos, or hiding where I am, or shuffling money, or moving people around to make it seem better. You’re right: I’ve been trying to save an image of a family. But now I’m going to save my family.” My voice isn’t my own; it belongs to someone stronger, braver than I am. I stand to look down at his anger, at his impotent rage to fix what is now shattered.

“Really? Saving your family?” he shouts, and I stumble backward with the force. “Because Mary Jo told me that you and Max seemed a little too cozy at work. You want to tell me about that?”

“About that?”

“Yes. I’ve always wondered about you two.” He’s gaining momentum now. “About your friendship.” He spits out the word.

I can’t believe how calm I am. “Friendship—yes. Love, kindness, all the good things.”

The curse words that come out of his mouth are in a string so long and so jumbled, I am impressed by the creativity. I’m in the room and completely disconnected from it; staring out onto the porch as I can do in dreams when I see myself as another, as someone doing and saying what I only imagine. It’s only now that I can walk away, and I do.

*   *   *

It’s Cooper who files the divorce papers, a preemptive strike. I stay at Willa’s cottage, going home for clothes and mail and necessities when I know he isn’t home. It’s a floating feeling, an untethered peace, like bopping around in space, knowing that soon I’ll run out of oxygen in my tank, but don’t. There are lawyer visits and Cooper’s texts reminding me that I will lose everything if I continued to “blaspheme” him with my random accusations. It is true: His lawyers, his family lawyers, all of them are better and stronger than anyone I could find.

But who is to blame? This is what my lawyer, Betsy Rusk, wants to know, and I can’t answer. Slowly, I tell her, the unseen was seen; the invisible became visible. Nothing was as it appeared. Cooper had become his own fictional version of himself: the stage our house, the players being Gwen and me, the backdrop his job. Meanwhile, the real Cooper was another man entirely, and the double sidedness of the man and family life were both familiar and disturbing.

And I had done the same, I admit, I’d pretended. I needed to believe in the facade, in the Family with a capital F. I desired the family and the man and the love. I desperately needed it all and refused to see I didn’t have it. I’d been holding on to something that wasn’t even there, like an old photograph that fades because it wasn’t living at all, just a captured shadow.

Cooper created the man he wanted to be and acted it out, and I’d cheered him on, colored inside the lines of his drawn character. In a way, he was telling the truth: The accident wasn’t his fault; the dead man’s life wasn’t relevant. In the end, it was the fictional version that had become true.

You really think I’m that guy? You really believe I could do that?

Yes, I do.

Yes.

*   *   *

I told Gwen, in the presence of her therapist, about the divorce. We’d have to move and close the studio, I said. She cried but looked straight at me, tears running down her cheeks like silver scars, and said, “I know, Mom. It sucks, but still … I know.”

Late one night, a week later, all the Ten Good Ideas cards are complete, lined up in their beauty as stones on an artful walkway. Francie, Max, Gwen, Willa, and I stand over them like a parent at the nursery window, admiring in bleary-eyed exhaustion the red-faced newborns. We know what this finishing means. It is not only a new card line but also an ending.

We are silent for a long while, no one knowing what to say. Some endings are wordless. Then together, we walk outside into the dark night. It’s Gwen who looks up and says, “Full moon.”

As everyone wanders away, Max and I are left standing side by side, and I try to speak first, but it’s his proclamation that overrides mine. “I took a full-time job at SCAD.”

“What? I thought we were going to try to teach classes at the studio. Expand things.”

He turns and faces the studio, the barn that has become home. “I know you’ll have to give this up and find a new place. It’s the right time for me to move on, too.”

“No.” I take one step toward him and place my hand on his chest. “Please don’t.”

“I took the job.” He waves toward the barn doors. “I’ll never forget any of this. And I know it won’t be here anymore, which maybe makes it easier to leave.”

“‘Easier to leave’?”

He touches my cheek. “No, not easier to leave. Just thought it sounded better.”

“I’ll find a new place for the studio and—”

He places his finger over my lips. “Stop.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small box.

“What is this?”

His answer is a smile.

I unwrap the tight knot of paper and find a vintage Paragon letter T—the one we’ve been searching for all these years. “Oh, wow.” I look at Max. “How did you find this?”

“I was looking for something else in Cameron’s store, and there it was.”

“All those years when I looked on purpose, and you find it without trying.”

He wraps his arms around me and pulls me to him. With my head on his shoulder and his hands on the back of my neck, he says, “Please be well. You have so much ahead of you.”

“I want you ahead of me,” I say before I know the words have formed in my mind at all.

He pulls back and looks at me. “It’s too late for all that. It is. We had all those other chances and we didn’t take them. We were either too early or too late. I know this is a terrible time for you, with Cooper leaving, but I’m not your plan B. You can’t, after all this time, say ‘I want you now that everything else has fallen apart.’”

“You are not a plan B. That’s not it at all.”

“You’re in the middle of a firestorm that will demand all of you. I can’t make it better, and we’ll both end up hurting if I’m in the middle of it all.”

I take a step back and then another.

“Us.” He waves his hand in the space between. “We’ve never had our timing right.”

He is right. I have—again—been trying to save my family, but this time in a different way, in a parting way. I’ve let go of everything in order to know the truth, and I won’t grab hold of Max, pull him back from the life he wants and needs to make.

“I know you’ve always wanted to teach. I was hoping it would be … with us.”

He hugs me one more time, then leaves. Truck tires crunch across the gravel and taillights fade as he makes the sharp right onto the paved driveway.

A swirl of static electricity wraps around my stomach. The free fall of losing him; the painful shock of loss again and again in the middle of my body, and I see that, yes, there’s more to lose than a house and a studio and the image of a family.

Minutes pass as I stare at the empty driveway. It isn’t fair to grab hold of Max him as my life comes undone, as the waters rise and the storm thunders again. I am still staring down the driveway when I hear the growl of a grunting truck. Headlights appear where taillights have just receded. I grip the fence, my smile rising as hope takes flight.

The full moon spreads its reflected light onto the drive, and with a sinking, a dropping of the heaviest stone, I see the truck. It is dark green and larger, not Max’s at all. The vehicle pulls into the parking lot and a tall man with a handlebar mustache, dressed in a black suit, gets out. He holds a large manila envelope in his hand as he steps onto the gravel. “Are you Eve Morrison?”

I nod.

Without another word, he hands me the envelope. Of course I don’t need to open it to know what’s inside. Another ending.

Francie walks outside then and glances at the envelope with the lawyer’s logo stamped in dark black ink. “Divorce papers?” she asks in a whisper.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Eve. So sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m the one who’s sorry,” I wave toward the studio. “We’re going to lose all of this.” They come now—the tears hidden somewhere beneath the frenzy of finishing our card line, below the bobbing-in-space peace and denial.

“This is not ending,” she counters quickly. “I know a warehouse we can rent. I’ve been looking. We can do this. I know we can.”

I try to smile. “A warehouse.”

“It’s the best I can do so far. But I’ll keep looking.”

“No, it sounds great. I’ll go look with you. But I’ll understand if you want to move … on.”

“Move on? You’re not getting rid of me. This is what I do.”

“The cards,” I say. “They’re good.”

“No,” she says. “They’re great.”

From inside the barn, a watery light spills out the window and onto the ground, the washed-up remains of all we’ve been and done here. The last two Ten Good Ideas sit ready to enter the world. Once again, the false commandments are breaking apart what has been: a beginning built into an ending.