Lies of the Heart (50 page)

It’s April, and she’s in Jerry’s bedroom, cleaning up the mess from last weekend and getting it ready, expecting Nick to walk in the door with Jerry any minute now. The window above the bed is open halfway, and the fresh spring air ruffles the curtains—there’s still a bite to it, but this is New England after all. By tomorrow it could rise into the seventies, and maybe the three of them would go down to the dock to get the boat ready for the season. Katie and Jerry waxing the fiberglass while Nick tooled around with the engine, and then putting on thick sweatshirts and motoring around the inlets . . .

. . .
Is this really what I was telling myself while I waited for them? she thinks now, lying on Jerry’s bed in the dark. Trying to convince myself that all Nick and I needed was the summer to make things better? But no, Katie remembers what came after—the creeping embarrassment at herself, the sensation of standing at a great height and looking down. The weight on her shoulders, the threat of falling, plummeting . . .

She fluffs the pillows, waiting for the sound of Nick’s tires crunching over the rocky driveway. For the past two months, Katie has sent Nick to pick up Jerry alone like this, and she tells herself that her motives haven’t been completely selfish. Jerry has needed this time alone with Nick, and lately it seems to be working. Nick has been more at ease with Jerry around the house, and last weekend they went fishing together at Conimicut Point, alone the entire day for the first time in months. Katie wasn’t asked to go along, but she didn’t begrudge their time together. It was good for Jerry to rekindle his relationship with Nick, and he had come home smiling, relaxed, ready to draw pictures of his day at the beach. Besides, it gave Katie more time to search Nick’s office upstairs, to look for clues . . .

So far her efforts in the preceding weeks have produced very little—a note found in Nick’s suit jacket from that college girl, Alicia, thanking him for all his support, signed with a childish heart over one
i;
a Post-it note on his home computer, reminding him to “talk to Stephen ASAP”; a phone message in his desk at the Warwick Center to call Robin; and, last week, Nick’s prolonged visit at a Cumberland Farms, though Katie couldn’t see who he was talking to from where she was parked, lights off, at Brooks Drugs across the street. She still has hopes that the Cumberland Farms incident will pan out (who talked to a convenience-store clerk for over twenty minutes anyway?), and after a little prying she found out from Veronica that Robin is Joey’s mother . . .

. . .
She cringes now at the image of Veronica standing at the entrance of Nick’s office, catching Katie in the act of sifting through his desk drawer. Was that really her? Snooping through his desk while he was out to lunch? Hunting the hallways even after Nick had packed up and left? Donna’s words again: “In fact, you spent an inordinate amount of time there, didn’t you? Sometimes three or four times a week?”. . .

The sound of Nick’s car pulling in to the driveway. The front door opening. Maybe, if Jerry and Nick watch a movie together tonight, Katie can sneak out to his car, rummage through the glove compartment and between the seats . . .

Nick stands in the doorway, alone.

“Where’s Jerry?” Katie asks.

“At the group home,” he says, staring. “I saw you tonight.”

“Where?”

“You were following me. Again.”

She turns to Jerry’s bed, places his Bugs Bunny pillow in the very center of the pillows. There’s a smudge on the top, something Jerry has carelessly spilled, and she’ll have to ask him to be more careful if he brings drinks up to his room.

“I’m just finishing in here. If you want me to go for the ride to get him—”

“Jerry’s not coming this weekend.”

“Why not? He won’t understand—”

“Why the hell were you following me?”

She tries to close the distance between them, hand outstretched, and Nick takes a step back into the hallway. Katie stops midstride, wonders when it came to this—her husband recoiling from her touch.

“You never say where you’re going. I needed to know.”

“There’s nothing to know. I just wanted some time for myself.”

“You have
all
your time to yourself lately—”

“I can’t work through any of it here,” he says. His eyes moving around Jerry’s bedroom, then down the hallway.

“I know you’re frustrated with Joey, and you’re disappointed that I’m still not pregnant—”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

“Then tell me. I’m so tired of watching you and trying to figure it out.”

“I’m tired of it, too. Sick of it, actually.”

“So you’ll try with someone else, is that it? Find a woman who—”

“You aren’t listening!” he suddenly shouts.

She’s too afraid to speak, because she knows it’s one of those moments in life, the kind that determines everything else that will follow. All she can do is stare.

“Right there,” Nick says, pointing at her. His lip curling up. “Right there, Katie.”

“I’ve tried, I don’t know what else to do,” she says. Hating the whining need in her voice.

“It’s not about
you.
”

“If it isn’t about me, about us, then what is it?”

“All of it,” he says. And when she waits for more, for him to finally reveal something she can hold on to, her eyes searching his face, his voice comes out in a growl. “Stop, okay? Just fucking
stop.
”

. . .
She wasn’t sure what he meant then—stop what? Waiting for him to talk to her, to open up to her? But no, after all this time something simple, almost absurd really. Stop looking.

“We have to get Jerry, he needs his family.”

“Are you that blind, Katie? We are
not
a big happy family.”

“How can you say that? Things aren’t perfect right now, but—”

“Jerry isn’t my son, and he isn’t
your
son.”

“Is that it? I know you want your own child, and we’ll keep trying, we’ll have a baby eventually.”

“It isn’t that. It’s you—it’s both of you, staring at me all the time. It’s suffocating.”

“We’re worried about you. We love you, Nick. I love you more than anything else in this entire world.”

His shoulders slump, and he shakes his head; his face, so angry and resolute seconds earlier, softens a little. “You don’t get it.”

“I want to—I want to understand. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

His head dips down, and he stares at the floor, a muscle in his jaw pulsing. When he looks back up at her, his face is pinched with fear.

“Everything,” he says. “Right now everything is off kilter.”

She watches this raw, helpless look on his face, realizes that she’s holding her breath. “Tell me. Please.”

He looks down the hallway, looks back at her. “At least Jerry knows, Katie,” he says in a whisper. “At least he knows. Did you ever think of it like that?”

“What? What does he know?”

“About his father,” Nick says, his voice trembling. “That it was his fault. He left because of Jerry. Don’t you think . . . can’t you see that there’s comfort in that? Knowing?”

“Maybe, I don’t know, but not the way his mother told him, how she accused him.”

“My mother,” Nick says, shaking his head as if he didn’t hear her. “She always said—she always told me my father didn’t leave because of me.”

Katie tries to move to him, to soothe the tortured look off his face, but he does it again: takes a step away until his back is pressed up against the wall in the hallway.

“If she lied, Katie. If she was lying about that . . . then what else?” This in a strangled voice.

“She didn’t lie. You were only a kid, it wasn’t your fault.”

“She used to do that all the time, too, while I was growing up. Stare at me. And I never knew. I didn’t know what she saw, what she was really thinking. If she believed what she said. Not just about my father, but about
me
. Brilliant from birth, right?” His face contorts with the effort to smile.

“She didn’t lie about that, Nick. I know—I
know.
”

“Sometimes I believed her. She said it all the time, Katie. My earliest memory, telling me I was destined for greatness. She made me feel like a fucking giant, like I could do
anything.
But then I’d see her, her eyes were always on me, and I knew. I felt like—I always thought, She’s lying, she’s just waiting.”

“For what?”

He turns away, looks back. “For me to disappoint her, to fall short. It was stupid little things, a C on a math test, or . . . or coming in in second place in an essay contest. Nothing big, but I’d know—bullshit, everything she said was
bullshit.
”

“Nick, look, I won’t pretend that I like your mother, but it wasn’t—”

“And then something would work out, something good—I’d ace a test, get into the right college—and I’d think, Okay, maybe she’s right. Maybe I deserve this, maybe I am just fucking
brilliant.
”

He crosses his arms, his face slowly closing up.

“Nick, don’t stop. Please. All these years—all this time.”

His voice changing now, too. Becoming harsh, accusatory. “Always, always at the back of my mind, right until I moved out. I knew. It was just talk, she was just afraid that she would lose
me,
too.”

“Nick, I know your mother isn’t perfect, but I don’t think—”

“You weren’t there! You weren’t in that house, with her eyes hunting me down. Years! Like you, that’s all you do. But you, Katie, I
believed
you. From that first night, I thought you saw someone else, someone better. My biggest fan, right?”

“I am, of course I am.”

“Really?” Suddenly sneering now. “Still?”

“Yes. Always.”

He shakes his head again. “Right.”

“It’s true, Nick. I swear it,” she says. “What can I do? I’ll do anything.”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Do you think you just need a little time?”

He stares for a few seconds. Lowers his head. “I found an apartment. I can rent it month to month.”

She turns back to Jerry’s bed, sits down on it. Tries to draw air into her lungs. “You’re leaving?”

“I can’t breathe here,” he says, looking around the room.

“But—but what will we tell Jerry?” she says.

“You’ll figure something out.”

“Me?”

But he only glares at her, waiting for her understanding.

“He’ll have to spend weekends with you,” Katie says. “You’ll have to tell him.”

Using Jerry as a punishment, the child in the middle of the divorce.

“Fine.”

Her fingers dig into Jerry’s blanket. She watches Nick turn now, walk away from her. Listens to the sound of his footsteps as he walks to their bedroom.

She listens to their bedroom closet open, the plunk of the suitcase hitting their bed. “I want you to leave,” Katie calls out to him. “Just go.”

And then, when he doesn’t answer, in a hopeful voice: “Just for a little while.”

. . .
Pretending it was her choice, her decision . . .

The dry squeak of drawers opening. Katie still on Jerry’s bed, cement in her limbs.

She curls up on Jerry’s bed now, her body like lead
.
All this time she blamed Jerry for taking Nick away from her. For losing Nick.

J
ill and Sandy are in the courtroom now, waiting for her, and her entire family is there, too, filling the benches, standing at the back of the room. Dana must have called their parents early this morning, replayed the long conversation she had with Katie on the couch and then later, in the middle of the night—working through that last fight with Nick again. Her mother probably took over from there, burning the phone lines, making demands that no one dared refuse. Katie can hear her now, as she bends over the bathroom sink to wash her hands for the third time.
What do you mean you have to work? For God’s sake, Katie needs you there today!

The rows behind the prosecution table are filled with uncles, aunts, cousins she sees only twice a year and barely knows. Even her parents’ neighbors are there, along with Mr. and Mrs. Potter, the couple they go to Gregg’s restaurant with every Saturday night.

Her mother didn’t say a word when Richard walked into the courtroom earlier—she just touched Katie’s arm, gave her a look of teary pride. But Katie could see the fear there, too, and in her father’s eyes as well. There would be consequences for what she said today, and Richard would be unforgiving.

It was as if Richard were reading her mind at that very moment; he swiveled around in his chair to check on Katie, his speculative gaze urging her to her feet. “Bathroom,” she muttered to her mother, and raced out of the front row.