I sit up and my vision goes black. The voices around me come in and out like I’m opening and closing a door between us. I blink my eyes and my head spins.
“Did I pass out again?” I ask.
“This time there was no airbag,” Adam says, helping me sit up.
“You hit your head on the wet grass. Farah went to get some of her doctor stuff to check you out,” Aimee adds.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Ted?”
He doesn’t hear me. I push myself up to stand and fight the wave of nausea creeping up my throat. Adam helps me balance myself.
“Ted, I need to talk to you,” I say.
“Now? You want to talk now?”
“Yes, now.”
I move past Rini and her sister, ignoring them, and reach the dock, away from the group. The wind picks up as Ted and I walk over the water, but we forge our way to the floating dock, as far away from the others as possible. I lose my footing but Ted grabs me before I fall. I consider that this isn’t the safest place in a storm, but it will give us the best chance of privacy.
“Margot, you’re not listening to any of this, right?”
“Ted” is the only word I can eke out before my throat closes up. He wraps his arms around me and presses me into his body. I smell his sour alcohol breath and remember how much drunker he is than I am. I don’t know what to think, what to believe. If Andi is telling the truth, that Ted did those horrendous things, it would make him a monster.
That couldn’t be the man I know, the man I married. The man I love. Could it?
I think of the tarot cards, the ones left in the dumbwaiter only for me. The ones Rini knew nothing about.
The Empress, upright: pregnancy; reversed: domestic problems.
The Fool, upright: new beginnings; reversed: poor judgment, naivety.
If they were left by Andi, who said she was trying to warn me, then their intended meaning was clear. And yet I saw what I wanted to see, a promise for the future rather than a glimpse of clarity into the past. I’ve always willfully ignored the signs that disturbed me. I did it with my parents’ marriage. With their tragic death. With Adam. With Ted too?
I remember back to that time before Ted and I got engaged. Our two-year dating anniversary was coming up, and I had a feeling Ted was going to propose. We’d been talking about the future and engagement rings and our favorite time of the year for weddings. Despite my firmly held career ambitions, I suddenly became more desperate for him to propose than a woman approaching her thirties in the 1950s. Aimee and Adam were already married and I knew they’d start having kids. I wanted the same. Adam and I would morph from orphans into a superfamily.
It was easy to ignore the nights Ted stayed out until the morning. Or the unexpected business trips. I was so close to getting what I wanted that I glossed right over those incidents. And in hindsight his odd behavior felt like a blip. Last-minute jitters before a well-planned-out, highly orchestrated proposal. There was nothing to ask about. Nothing to dig up. Until Andi appeared from the hands of fate with a horror story to ruin my life.