Heart of the Matter (36 page)

***

Every hour over the next few days, and virtually every
minute
of every hour, is torture, marked by a range of emotions too varied to chart but all shades of bleak and bleaker. I am ashamed for what has happened to me,
humiliated
by Nick’s infidelity even as I look in the mirror, alone. I am furious when he calls (six times), e-mails (three), and drops off letters in the mailbox (twice). But I am frantic and filled with deep despair when a stretch of time goes by that he doesn’t. I scrutinize his silence, imagining them together, jealousy and insecurity pulsing inside me. I scrutinize his words even more, his apologies, his proclamations of love for me and our family, his pleas for a second chance.

But with Cate’s help, I remain vigilant and strong and do not contact him—not once. Not even in my weakest late-night moments when his messages are soft and sad, and my heart aches with loneliness. I am punishing him, of course—twisting the knife with every unreturned message. But I am also doing my best to prove to myself that I can survive without him. I am gearing up to tell him that I meant what I said. That we are done, and that he no longer has a place in my home or heart. Moving forward, he will be the father of my children, nothing more.

To this point, my first communication with him is two days before Christmas, an e-mail of precise instructions regarding the children and the visit I am granting him on Christmas Eve. I hate that I have to give him that much, that I have to contact him at
all,
for any reason, but I know he has a right to see the kids—and more important, they have a right to see him. I tell him that he may come to the house at three o’clock, that Carolyn will be here to let him in. I am paying her for four hours, but he is free to let her go, so long as she is back by seven when I return. I do not want to see him. I tell him to have the

kids fed, bathed, and dressed in their Christmas pajamas, and that I will put them to bed. He should retrieve any belongings he needs for the next few weeks, and that we will schedule a weekend in January for him to get the rest. I am all business. Ice-cold. I reread, fix a typo, hit send. Within seconds, his response appears:

Thank you, Tessa. Would you please tell me what you’ve told the kids, as I want to be consistent?

The e-mail stabs at my heart, not for what is there, but for what
isn’t.
He didn’t ask to see me. He didn’t ask for the four of us to be together. He didn’t ask to come over on Christmas morning and watch the kids open their presents. I am enraged that he seems to be throwing in the towel, but then tell myself that I would have refused him anyway, and that I didn’t leave him even a slight opening to ask for more. And that is because there
is
no opening. There is nothing he can say or do to change my mind. My hands shaking, I type:

I told them that you’ve been working very hard at the hospital because a little boy was badly hurt and that he needs you to make him better. They seem satisfied with this explanation for now. We will have to handle after the holidays, but I do not want their Christmas ruined by this.

There is no mistaking the little boy I am referring to, no mistaking the subtext:
You put another child above your own. And because of that choice, our family is broken forever.

***

Later that afternoon, the doorbell rings. Expecting it to be the UPS man with a final delivery of catalogue-purchased Christmas gifts for the kids, I answer the door. But instead, I find April with a bag of presents and a tentative smile.

“Merry Christmas,” she says, her smile growing broader but no less uneasy.

“Merry Christmas,” I say, feeling conflicted as I force a smile of my own. On the one hand, I am still angry at her for handling things the way she did, and have the irrational feeling that she and Romy somehow
made
this happen to me. On the other hand, she has arrived at a very lonely moment, and I can’t help feeling relieved and a little bit happy to see my friend.

“Would you like to come in?” I ask, somewhere between formal and friendly.

She hesitates, as drop-in visits, even among close friends, are firmly on her list of faux pas, but then says, “I’d love to.”

I step aside and lead her through the foyer into my very messy kitchen, where she hands me a bag of beautifully wrapped presents.

“Thank you . . . You shouldn’t have,” I say, thinking that I
didn’t
this year, for the very first time deciding that gifts to friends and neighbors simply weren’t going to happen. And for once, I let it go, let myself off the hook with no feelings of guilt.

“It’s just my usual pound cake. Nothing fancy,” she says—although her pound cakes are a thing of beauty. “And a little something for the kids.” She glances around and asks where they are.

“Watching television,” I say, pointing toward the stairs. “In my room.

“Ah,” she says.

“There’s been a lot of television watching these days,” I admit.

“Television is crucial this time of year,” she agrees, a rare admission. “My kids are bouncing off the walls. And the threat of Santa Claus not showing up has really lost its teeth.”

I laugh and say, “Yeah. That one doesn’t work so well with Ruby, either.
Nothing
works with Ruby.”

Then, after one awkward beat, I ask if she’d like a cup of coffee.

“I’d
love
a cup,” she says. “Thank you.”

She takes a seat at the kitchen island as I turn and flip on the coffeemaker and reach into the cabinet for two matching mugs. Upon realizing that most are still dirty in the dishwasher, others piled in the sink, I mentally shrug, grab two random cups, and forgo saucers and place mats altogether.

The next few minutes are awkward, and I am grateful for the task of brewing coffee, while fielding questions from April about holiday shopping and where I am on my various lists. But by the time I hand her a cup of black coffee, I have worked up the nerve to address the real reason I know she stopped by.

“Well. You were right about Nick,” I say, catching her off guard. “And you were right about that woman . . . I kicked him out last week.”

She lowers her mug, her face crumbling with genuine sympathy. “Oh, God,” she says. “I don’t know what to say ... I’m
really
sorry.”

I nod and numbly thank her as her expression becomes anguished. “I promise I won’t tell anyone. Not a soul. Ever.”

I give her an incredulous stare and say, “April. We’re separated. He’s not living here. People are going to find out sooner or later. And anyway . . . what people are saying about me is really the least of my concerns right now . . .”

April nods, gazing into her still untouched coffee. Then she takes a deep breath and says, “Tessa. I have something to tell you . . . Something I want to tell you . . .”

“April,” I say drolly. “No more bad news, please.”

She shakes her head and says, “This isn’t about you and Nick . . . It’s about. . . me. And Rob.” We make fleeting eye contact as she blurts the rest out. “Tessa, I just want you to know . . . that I’ve been where you are right now. I know what you’re going through.”

I stare at her, processing her words, the very last thing I expected to hear from her. “Rob cheated on you?” I ask, shocked. She nods the smallest of nods, looking the way I feel—ashamed. As if Rob’s actions are her failure, her humiliation.

“When?” I say, recalling our recent doubles match and her bold insistence that she would leave if it ever happened to her. She had been so convincing.

“Last year,” she says.

“With who?” I ask, then quickly add, “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. And it doesn’t matter.”

She bites her lips and says, “It’s okay... It was with his ex-girlfriend.”

“Mandy?” I ask, recalling April’s Facebook obsession with Rob’s high school girlfriend and how ridiculous I thought she was being at the time.

“Yes. Mandy,” she says, her voice dropping an octave.

“But. . . doesn’t she live in one of the Dakotas?” I say.

She nods. “They reconnected at their twenty-year reunion,” she says, making quotes around
reconnected.
“The Fargo-sounding whorebag.”

“How do you know? Are you sure?” I ask, envisioning a scene like the one following Nick’s walk in the Common.

“I read about fifty back-and-forth e-mails. And let’s just say ... they left very little to the imagination. He might as well have taken pictures . . .”

“Oh, April,” I say, letting go of any residual resentment toward her—for her call, for her condescending tone when she told me about Nick being spotted by Romy (a tone that was likely in my head), and most of all, for what I believed to be her perfect life. My mind races as I try to remember any time last year when April was less than her cool, collected self—but come up empty-handed. “I had no idea,” I say.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” she says.

“No one?” I ask. “Not even your sister? Or mother?”

She shakes her head again. “Not even my therapist,” she says, releasing a nervous laugh. “I just stopped going to her . . . I was too embarrassed to tell her.”

“Shit,”I
say, exhaling hard. “Do they
all
cheat?”

April looks out the window into the backyard and shrugs despondently.

“How did you get through it?” I ask, hoping to at least glean an alternative route to the one my mother took.

“We haven’t,” she says.

“But you’re together.”

“Cheaply,” she says. “We haven’t had sex in nearly a year . . . We sleep in separate beds . . . We haven’t even been out to dinner alone . . . And I . . . basically despise him.”

“April,” I say, reaching out for her hand. “That’s no way to live . . . Did you . . . Is he sorry? Do you ever consider forgiving him?” I ask, as if it’s a simple matter of choice.

She shakes her head. “He’s sorry. Yes. But I can’t forgive him. I just
. . . can’t.”

“Well, then,” I say, hesitating, thinking of my father, then Rob, then Nick. “Do you ever consider leaving him? Ending things?”

She bites her lip and says, “No. I’m not going to do that. My marriage is a joke, but I don’t want to lose my whole
life
because of what he did. And I don’t want to do that to my children, either.”

“You could start over,” I say, knowing that it’s not nearly as easy as I’m making it sound. That dissolving a marriage is one of the hardest things a person can go through. I know this because I saw it firsthand with my parents—and because I’ve been imagining it every day, nearly every
hour,
since Nick dropped his little bomb on me.

“Is that what
you’re
going to do?” she asks.

I shrug, feeling as forlorn and bitter as she looks, “I don’t know,” I say. “I honestly don’t know
what
I’m going to do.”

“Well, I can’t start over,” she says, shaking her head sadly. “I just can’t... I guess I’m not that strong.”

I look at my friend, overwhelmed with confusion. Unsure of what April should do. What
I
should do. What a strong woman would do. In fact, the only thing that I am certain of is that there are no easy answers, and that anyone who says there are has never been in our shoes.

***

And now it is Christmas Eve and I am driving through the dark, mostly empty streets, watching snow flurries dance in my headlights. I have another hour before I can go home and have already exhausted my errands: buying a few final stocking stuffers for the kids, returning the sweaters I bought for Nick, stopping by the bakery to pick up the pies I ordered only minutes before Nick returned from his walk in the Common—including the coconut cream he dared to request the day before, knowing what he knew.

I try not to think about this, try not to think about anything as I weave my way through the public gardens, turning onto Beacon, then over the Mass Avenue Bridge. As I reach Memorial, my phone rings in the passenger seat. I jump, wondering whether or maybe even
hoping
that it’s Nick—if only so that I can ignore him once again. But it is not Nick; it is my brother, who does not yet know what has happened. I tell myself not to answer because I don’t have it in me to lie, and I don’t want to burden him on Christmas. But I can’t resist the thought of his voice—the thought of
anyone’s
voice. So I slip on my headset and say hello.

“Merry Christmas!” he booms into the phone over his Usual background din.

I glance at the Hancock Tower, its spire aglow with red and green lights and wish him a Merry Christmas back. “Got your card today,” I say. “What a gorgeous photo of the girls.”

“Thanks,” he says. “Rachel gets the credit on that one.”

“Obviously,” I say, smiling.

“So what are you guys up to?” he says, sounding the way you’re supposed to sound on Christmas Eve—buoyant, blithe, blessed. I can hear Julia singing the kitschy version of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” her voice high and off-key, and my mother’s bell-like laughter, as I envision the sort of scene I used to take for granted.

“Um . . . not too much,” I say as I drive across the Salt-and-Pepper Bridge, back into Beacon Hill. “Just. . . you know . . . Christmas Eve.” My voice trails off as I realize I’m making no sense at all, not even putting a proper sentence together.

“You okay?” Dex asks.

“I’ll be fine,” I say, knowing how revealing this statement is, and that there is no turning back now. But as guilty as I feel for tainting his night, I feel a sense of relief, too. I want my brother to know.

“What happened?” he says, as if he already knows the answer. His voice is more angry than worried, the one thing absent from Cate’s reaction.

“Nick had an affair,” I say, the first I’ve used the word, having decided only a few hours ago, in the bakery, that even “one time” constitutes an affair, at least when there is emotional involvement leading up to it.

Dex does not ask for details, but I give a few anyway, covering Nick’s confession, that I kicked him out, that I have not seen him since, and that, although he has a few hours with the kids now, he will be spending Christmas alone.