Two months.
Sometimes it felt like two weeks.
Sometimes it felt like two decades. How else could I know so much about Erik if we’d been dating only two months, two pages on a calendar? How could all I’d learned about him fit into that impossibly minuscule time frame?
Sixty-one days.
All the little things I discovered by watching him: Whenever he drank more than two beers, his language became oddly formal. Did I not tell you, he’d say, or Shall we think about…“Oh no, you’re getting British,” I’d tease. He sat at tables or bars sideways because of his too-long legs. People often asked if he’d played basketball. “When you’re this tall you don’t have much choice,” he’d say.
He’d been close with his dad, who died of bladder cancer two days after Spencer was born. Erik brought Spencer to his dad’s hospital room, and though his dad was barely conscious, he reached for Spencer. “When I took Spencer back, my dad had tears rolling down his cheeks. Spence was the last person he held.” Erik paused. “I feel like Spencer has my dad’s soul.”
We emailed constantly, spoke on the phone nights we weren’t together, went running and to the Y after work, brought the kids to his house on Saturdays, had dinner with them at Annabelle’s. He gave me a tour of Ten Chimneys, and we visited the gallery that sold my collages. I introduced him to Margaret one night, and we had Gabe and Eva to dinner at his place. In the kitchen, as I was making coffee, Eva told me, “I’ve never seen Erik this relaxed.”
I nodded, picturing that photo of Erik and Annabelle, their happiness so real it felt like you could cup it in your hands. Eva regarded me, then said, “I’m not saying he wasn’t happy before, but there’s an ease in him now.” Before I could answer, she said, “Wait. Don’t move,” and reached to fix my earring. “There. You were about to lose it.” I must have looked stricken—it’s how I felt—because she asked, “What? What did I do?” but I could only shake my head.
How could I explain? That casual gesture. That intimacy between women. Fixing an earring, adjusting a collar. Kelly licking her index finger and smoothing my eyebrow into place. I could have that again, I thought: friends and laughter, drinks at Hattie Magee’s; my footsteps in sync with Erik’s as we ran, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the smell of woodsmoke in the air. All his nicknames for me—“Sunbeam” and “Pea,” and “Carl Lewis,” after the Olympic runner—as if I were multiple people instead of the single thing that had defined me for so long.
And there was Annabelle, giving me grief whenever I gave her wardrobe advice, because if the choice was between something black and something with a color, I always chose black. The way she’d cock an eyebrow and nod to her back deck, which meant “I need a cigarette.” We’d sit outside, teeth chattering as the nights grew colder, and she’d talk about Scott, her face animated and happy. When I stopped by, mostly with Erik but a few times by myself when Erik worked late, the girls would race to the door, fighting over whose turn it was to open it. Their solid weight as I carried them on my hip, their sticky hands on my neck and face. Wanting me to tuck them in, wanting me to read them a story. And Spencer shyly launching into a recitation of weather facts.
How could I have guessed all the ways I would learn to love Erik and Annabelle’s children? All the ways loving them—and being loved by them—would begin to heal me? I think of the night I’d been coloring with the twins while Annabelle was doing something with Spencer, and Hazel reached over and set her warm hand atop mine.
“What’s up, bunny?” I asked. “You getting tired?”
“I just want to hold your hand,” she said.
I’m not sure why it was that moment of all the dozens just like it when I realized: I would have been a good mom. If I’d only had more time.
It happened again the night we were all at Annabelle’s watching The Wizard of Oz and Spencer wedged himself between me and Erik on the couch, then leaned his head on my shoulder. The thought was there then too—I would have been a good mom, the realization moving through me like an electrical current.
I could have this life, I would think as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror after Erik left for work some mornings. My makeup worn off, skin flushed, eyes tired because we never got enough sleep. I’d stare at that woman and realize how much I wanted to be her, wanted to hold a child’s hand or sit at a picnic table eating frozen custard with a man who, after kissing me, would grin and say, “Oh, your mouth is so cold, I better warm it up.” Then kiss me again.
And I was her, wasn’t I?
That was the part I wasn’t sure of: Could I be her and me all at once?
Our favorite place was Kopp’s. On Friday nights, packs of teenagers arrived after football games, shouting to each other across the parking lot, but during the week, now that night fell earlier, it was sometimes just us and an older couple who always sat in their pickup with the windows down. “Good evening!” the guy would call, his wife waving through the windshield.
“That’ll be us in twenty years,” Erik whispered.
Something in me soared: us in twenty years.
We called them “the farmers” because of the truck and the John Deere cap the guy wore, and then it became “our farmers.”
“You realize he’s probably an executive,” I said.
Kopp’s was closing on November first, and as the days ticked down, I felt almost sad. It had become our place. We talked differently there, ended up in conversations we didn’t have on the phone or in his kitchen or even in bed.
It was there that Erik told me he was estranged from his mother, who had remarried and moved to Arizona only five months after his dad died. I told him about my parents having to sell their house, though I didn’t say why. It was the house my dad grew up in, I told Erik, and losing it broke something in him. He used to come home from the restaurant at night and sit on our back deck with a scotch and a cigar, but in the condo, the small balcony overlooked a parking lot, and the neighbors complained about the smoke, so he quit. It was the only time I heard my mother cry about the loss of the house. It broke something in me, I told Erik.
It was also at Kopp’s that I told him about Kelly. She’d landed the role of Belle in the Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. My mom had sent the article from the Cape Gazette: “Local Star Shines on Broadway.” A grainy photo of seventeen-year-old Kelly in our high school production of The Scarlet Letter. I stared at that photo for a long time, feeling unmoored.
“This is your Kelly?” Erik said when I showed him the clipping.
“She probably told me about Alfred and Lynn years ago,” I said. “I know Shakespeare because of her.”
“Your face lights up when you mention her,” he said. “Do you ever think about getting in touch? Mending whatever happened?”
“I can’t.” A chalky taste in my mouth. I had tried. Only once, but it was enough. I’d been out of the hospital for just a few weeks, but already too much had happened that I’d been shielded from. My mom told me that, at first, Kelly made the hour-long drive every week to visit me, but I’d been too drugged, too numb, too afraid, too everything, to respond. Eventually she stopped coming.
I came home after eight months, though it wasn’t really home, wasn’t the bungalow on Fourth Street I’d shared with Nick, but my parents’ house, the house I’d grown up in and the one they would lose paying for the private hospital I’d end up returning to. The day I saw Kelly again, I was in Browseabout Books with my mom. I was like a child in those first weeks, terrified of being alone, shadowing my mom everywhere. She was looking at books and I wandered over to the cards, and there was Kelly. “Kel?” I said quietly. And then, “Oh my God! I can’t believe it’s you!” I blurted it without thinking, without considering how stupidly cheerful I sounded—as if the last eight months had never happened.
The look on her face when she turned to me: confusion, hurt, anger. “I can’t believe it’s you?” she said incredulously. “Are you kidding?” Tears filled her eyes. “You don’t call me Kel; you don’t call me anything.” And then she left. I wouldn’t see her for over a year. And that time would be even worse.
I stirred my plastic spoon through the melted custard, grateful for the darkness, grateful Erik couldn’t see my face. My heart felt huge inside my chest. Kelly was Lucy’s godmother. She’d been in the delivery room. She used to hold Lucy for hours, marveling at her tiny fingernails, her spiky eyelashes.
I glanced at Erik. There was so much I needed to tell him, but Kelly was a start, wasn’t she? The Christmas lights swayed, colors washing across his face. He knew Kelly had been my best friend since preschool, knew we’d had a terrible falling-out connected to the end of my marriage. But I hadn’t told him Kelly was my sister-in-law, afraid to get too close to the black ice of talking about Nick. As a result of the omission, though, I’m pretty sure Erik jumped to the conclusion that Nick had cheated on me with Kelly, that this was why I’d left Rehoboth. He never said this, but I saw the scenario flit across his face, and I thought of how we often create the stories we need out of the fragmented information we have.
“What I didn’t tell you about Kelly,” I said hesitantly, “is that she was also my sister-in-law.”
“What?” Erik set down his custard. “Kelly was…Nick’s her brother?”
I nodded.
He exhaled slowly. “Okay.” He glanced sharply at me and then away, across the narrow road toward the empty cornfields. “That kind of changes everything, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? You knew this fucker your whole life, Claire. You were kids together.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I assumed he was some jerk and you made a mistake, but that’s not the case, is it?”
I was shivering, and it wasn’t from the cold. I hadn’t expected Erik to feel so deceived. I pushed my hands between my legs, trying to keep from trembling. “I never said he was a jerk.” I forced myself not to look away.
“It’s what you don’t say, Claire.” His voice was hard. “I thought he and your friend…” He sighed heavily. “I’m glad it’s not that. It’s just…Did you cheat on him? Is that what you’re so afraid to tell me?”
“No.” The question stung, not because he’d asked but because it was the worst thing he could imagine. Before Lucy, I might have thought this too.
In the lighted window of the custard shack, a ponytailed girl was wiping down counters, getting ready to close. “I know I’ve asked before,” Erik said, “but you are divorced, right?”
“We’re very divorced. Nick’s remarried. He has a child.” Another child, I almost said. I forget how I knew this. Nick didn’t live in Rehoboth anymore. He’d moved, maybe for the same reasons I had—to try to start over.
A breeze swayed the lights overhead, and a wash of green spilled across Erik’s features. “Does your mom send you articles about him?” His question like a sharpened point.
“No,” I said quietly, my mouth dry, my heart hammering a mile a minute. Tell him, I thought. Tell him about Lucy. I had to. I wanted to. And there would never be a good time, a right time. I could feel him waiting, willing me with his eyes to speak, and…
“I can’t,” I said helplessly. Disappointment swept over me.
He held my gaze for a moment, then reached for my hand.
Our last night before Kopp’s closed for the season, Erik told me his own secret, about what had happened in his marriage. We’d been talking about Spencer, and he said quietly, “I was the one who blamed Annabelle for Spencer’s problems.”
I remembered he’d said she blamed herself, and I thought again of how complex every story is, a prism reflecting different things depending on how you turn it. “You actually said that?”
“Oh, I said it, all right. It was unforgivable. I was just so pissed off about—” He stopped, raked a hand through his thick hair. Our farmers were the only other customers, sitting in their idling truck, a plume of smoke trailing from the exhaust.
“She was taking all these vitamins when she was pregnant,” Erik continued, “not because her doctor suggested it, mind you, but because she’d done the research. But whatever, I didn’t think it was a big deal, until after Spencer got diagnosis number three or four or whatever it was and we learned folic acid had been linked to some of the disorders we kept hearing about.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, but I did.” They’d been arguing, he said, not about Spencer, but about Annabelle being reckless. “Although it doesn’t really matter what we were fighting about. The truth is I wanted to hurt her, and the bottle of vitamins was there. I was so angry. I told her that her carelessness with our son was unconscionable.” He let out a long breath. “The second the words left my mouth, I wanted to take them back, but…you can’t. I’ve told her a hundred times I didn’t mean it, and I didn’t….” His voice trailed off.
It explained a lot, I thought. His guilt, his capitulation to Annabelle. But it scared me too. This? I thought. This is your biggest sin? Who hasn’t said the awful thing? “Why did you want to hurt her so badly?”
“Why did I know you would ask?” He glanced past me, beyond the cornfield to the line of lights in the distance that was the interstate. After a minute, he said, “I’ve debated telling you. I want to because…well, because I want to tell you everything. But I don’t want it to change how you feel.”
“I promise I will still like Annabelle.” I held up my hand as if swearing an oath. I honestly couldn’t imagine anything she’d done that would make me not like her. She was fun and zany and kind, and mostly, she was so honest about being a mom that it made me wonder how my life would have been different if she’d been my friend ten years ago. She had no qualms talking about how lonely motherhood often was and how, some days, when she was at her PR job, dressed in a suit and heels with people paying her ridiculous amounts of money to help them strategize about problems, it was all she could do to get in the car and come home to toddler tantrums and macaroni and cheese and Spencer repeating the same phrase three hundred times.
“It’s also Gabe I’m worried you’ll change your mind about,” Erik said.
“Oh.” I dropped my hand. “Okay.”
“He and Annabelle had an affair.”
“What? Does Eva know?”
He shook his head.
I had so many competing thoughts. That he could forgive this mistake, because clearly he had; that was the first thing. If he could forgive something this damaging…I felt as if a bell were ringing in the center of my chest. He got it, I thought. He understood. What you did is not who you are. But right on the heels of this was the realization that they were all keeping this secret from Eva. It seemed a horrible betrayal, as horrible as the affair itself, maybe worse. And I would now be part of it. I wondered if it meant I could never truly be Eva’s friend. “Don’t you worry she’ll find out?”
“I used to.”
“But that you all know—”
“It’s fucked up. Believe me, I am well aware.”
“And you’re really okay with Gabe?”
“What’s the choice? He and Annabelle both swore it was a huge mistake and if they could do it over…and they never meant…” He shrugged.
“You don’t believe them?”
“No, I do. Which is why it’s complicated. Because how do I let one mistake—and granted, it’s a big one—but am I really going to let it destroy two decades of friendship? Gabe’s been there for me. Big-time. When my dad died, when we were going through all this hell trying to figure out what was going on with Spence. The day of my interview with Ten Chimneys he came over to make sure my tie looked good.” He laughed, but it was serrated and sharp. “And then there’s Eva. I’m going to let a stupid regrettable mistake destroy what she has with Gabe? Gabe’s her world. She’s his.”
How was that possible? I wondered. But wasn’t this the same logic people had used with me? How could I have loved Lucy? Even though loving her was the only thing I knew for sure.
Scratchy music—Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream—came through the speakers mounted to poles. Our farmers were leaving and we waved, watching the red taillights of their truck until it disappeared.
“Should I not have told you?” Erik asked.
“Of course you should have.”
“I’ve made you complicit, though.” His voice was quiet. “I hate lying, I especially hate it with Eva, because like I said, she’s one of the best people I know. But I just can’t see how telling her the truth helps in this situation.”
Of course I would think of this later that week when I finally told Erik my own truth.