Love and Other Natural Disasters (9 page)

Jacob had a snore like his daddy's.
I was glad he was young enough to just accept that Jon was living in a hotel,
and to sleep so undisturbed. It made me realize that Jon and I had done a good
job of making Jacob secure in the world. He didn't know to fear change.

I caught sight of the calendar on
the wall, and was reminded of all the times I'd seen Jon hunkered down with
Jacob as they did an art project together. And for the moment, I didn't care
what Lil had said; I didn't care what Jon had done. He was, simply, the man I
loved. He was Jacob's father—an amazing father, at that—and for all I'd known
for so long, he was a wonderful husband, and who was to say that there was more
truth in those e-mails than in all the years of looking into his eyes? Maybe
his dealings with Laney really didn't mean anything, just like he said.

He was probably fifteen minutes
away, at most, since his hotel was near the airport. If I called him, he would
come, no questions asked. Didn't that mean something? Before I could stop
myself, I dialed his cell.

"Hello," he said,
sounding groggy.

"It's me," I said. I
tried to ignore the voice inside my head asking, How
can he sleep at a time
like this?

"I'm so glad," he said.

I started crying. "I want you
to come over. Can you come over?"

"Of course. I'll leave right
now."

"Okay. See you soon."

"Thank you. God, Eve,
just—thank you."

After I hung up, I fought my second
thoughts. I didn't want to think how just days before, Jon had been the one
calling late at night, and how the things he'd said had been contradicted by
the e-mails. I didn't want to think about Laney. I wanted to just think about
Jon and me, and the lives we'd created together.

The shower seemed the perfect place
to block everything out, and afterward, I was in a robe, drying my hair, when
Jon came up behind me. I jumped as he touched my shoulder.

"Sorry," he said. "I
guess you didn't hear me at the door."

I'd imagined opening the door and
throwing myself into his arms. That would have circumvented the awkwardness.
But now, I had to turn off the dryer, and the bathroom light was way too
bright.

"It's okay," I said.

He backed out of the bathroom into
our adjoining bedroom, and stood waiting for my cue. I went and sat on the bed.
The only light came from the lamp on the nightstand.

"I want to be able to get past
this." I looked up at him. "Do you think we can?"

In a few quick steps, he was on the
bed beside me. "Yes. Of course we can." As soon as I felt his arms
around me, I was racked by sobs.

"It's going to be okay,"
he whispered, kissing the top of my head. "I'm so sorry, Eve. I am so, so
sorry. I love you. I love you, Eve."

I believed him, and now I was
crying with relief. We could do this. We could make it through anything.

"It's going to be okay.
Shhh
."

That was when my blood ran cold, so
cold that the crying stopped. Everything stopped.

I pulled away. "I don't think
it is."

"What just happened
here?" He looked at me steadily.

"I thought I could just
overlook everything, like we were bigger than this thing with Laney. We're
not."

"Yes, we are. I love you, and
I love this family. What could be bigger than that?"

"You jeopardized all that for
Laney."

"I didn't see it that way at
the time."

"No, you thought you could
have it all." I stood up so suddenly that my robe threatened to fall open.
I retied the belt securely around me. "I shouldn't have let you come over.
This was a mistake."

"It's not a mistake." He
moved toward me and cradled my face in his hands. "Let me stay. Or let me
leave and come back tomorrow. But don't do this indefinite thing. Don't just
send me out there with nothing."

I shook my head and his hands fell
away. "I'm sorry, but you need to go."

"Can I come back tomorrow? Or
the day after that?"

"I don't know. I can't tell
you that right now."

"If I call you tomorrow, will
you answer?"

"I don't know."

"I'm going to call. Every
night, just like I said."

"I might screen you every
night. I'm not saying that to be mean, I just want you to be prepared. I don't
know how to do this, Jon."

"Let's do it together,"
he said, his eyes an appeal.

"I don't know if we can."
I didn't know if I'd ever said "I don't know" so many times in one
conversation. I did know I'd never been so lost.

CHAPTER NINE

I he next day, somehow, we resumed
our lives: I dropped Jacob off at school and headed to work. When I was about
two blocks away, I found myself driving in the outer lane, easing my foot from
the gas pedal. I had little desire to arrive. I worked with nice people,
concerned people, intuitive people. They'd take one look at me and want to
help, but the exposure would only make it worse. I didn't want the world
knowing my life was in shambles. The more people who knew, the realer this
would get. I was already up to my neck in reality. I was drowning in it.

I worked as an academic counselor
at a community college with kids primarily from lower and working-class
backgrounds. I liked the kids well enough, and there was often a certain
comfort in the easy administrative tasks, as if my mind were just idling for a
few hours. Hired with no qualifications two years ago, I'd been idling ever
since.

Mindlessness was the only appeal of
the job that day. What I wanted was to get to the cell that passed for my
office and focus on everything that wasn't Jon and me.

But given the layout of the Student
Services office, I figured I'd at least have to interact with Chad—the
department's admin, barely twenty-one and a free spirit who claimed he lived in
the Bay Area only because his car had broken down and he couldn't be bothered
to get it fixed—and Dyan and Melinda wouldn't be far behind. I most wanted to
avoid Dyan. She was the mental-health counselor, and nothing got by her.

When students first came to the
department office, they encountered a perpetually sticky mauve front counter,
with Chad seated at a desk beyond, surrounded by various office machines and
filing cabinets. Branching off from the main area was the break room and the
four individual offices, one being unoccupied and the others belonging,
respectively, to Dyan, Melinda (the department supervisor), and me. I knew Chad
sometimes used the vacant one for a lunchtime catnap; he'd emerge with renewed
energy and his normally buoyant curly hair matted on one side. Melinda knew
about the naps, too, and the fact that she didn't mind was one of the selling
points of the job, as far as I was concerned. In terms of workplaces to have a
public breakdown, I could do worse than this one.

I pushed open the door.

"Hey, Big Momma!" Chad
called out immediately. He'd recently taken to calling me that, and it was
proof that you really can get used to anything. He was sitting at his desk,
wearing a short-sleeved polyester shirt whose placket revealed part of a rather
concave chest. Neither Melinda nor Dyan was in sight.

"Hi, Chad," I said. I was
trying not to talk too loudly, lest the others materialize. Dyan, in
particular, liked to pet me as if I were a cat. Women tend to get tactile with
pregnant women, I'd noticed—men, not so much. There's information in that, I'm
sure.

"How was your turkey
day?" he asked cheerfully. He was vegan (a step beyond vegetarian, he
wouldn't eat dairy or wear leather shoes) and liked to underscore the
animal-murdering aspect of the holiday. At other times, he liked to highlight
the Indian murdering. Needless to say, he didn't celebrate.

To my pleased surprise, I felt
perfectly steady and technically honest as I answered, "The turkey part
was good."

He put a hand to his chest,
mock-wounded. "Have I taught you nothing?"

"Yes."

He laughed. "I bet it'll be
slow today."

"Next week it'll be crazy,
with everyone gearing up to register for spring semester."

"We should enjoy it now."

Somehow, inexplicably, that did it.
I found myself getting teary. "I'd better get to my office," I said,
moving quickly past him. Just get
inside and close the door,
I thought.
That's
all you have to do.

"Okay," I could hear Chad
saying slowly, obviously confused. I figured he was more likely to assume
pregnancy hormones than my husband was having an emotional affair.

Once seated in my windowless
office, through concentrated breathing techniques and sheer force of will, I
managed to pull myself together. I consulted my schedule, and saw that I didn't
have any appointments or meetings until the afternoon. Fortunately, there was
busywork. The job had a surfeit of busywork.

Two hours later, submerged in
minutia, I was jarred by the ringing phone. I'd been doing my damnedest to
become one with the transcripts.

"This is Eve," I said.

"Hey, Eve. Just checking
in," Tamara said.

"Are you at school? It sounds
so quiet."

"I'm in my car. It's my free
period."

"Oh. Thanks for calling."

"Nothing to it. Tell me how
you are."

"I'm unpredictable." I
sat back in my
pleather
office chair, wincing
slightly as I recognized the consequence of my unfortunate ergonomic choices.
"Chad just made the most benign remark and I had to run in my office so I
wouldn't cry in front of him."

"Well, sure," she said,
as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I loved her for that.

"Jon made this great big
calendar for Jacob's wall with all the days they're going to see each other and
what they'll do. He decorated the last square with balloons for the baby's
birthday."

"That's sweet. I guess,"
she added, trying to straddle the fence.

"And then I let him come over
last night." I didn't want to admit that I'd invited him over.

"Really? How'd that go?"

"At first, I thought I could
get over it; then I remembered everything and I asked him to leave. I just
can't wrap my head around Laney. The Jon I know wouldn't do that. Not if we
were having the relationship I thought we were having."

"Did I ever tell you my
stuffer theory?" she asked.

"I don't think so."

"You know how I had that
string of nice guys who seemed really into me, sometimes even in love with me,
and then they weren't anymore?"

"Yeah. There was Chris and
Jeff and—"

"Hey now. We're talking about
you."

I laughed. "Sorry."

"I decided, based on my
ex-boyfriends and the evidence from the exes of friends, that there's this
class of guy called a stuffer. Stuffers are these seemingly great, nice guys
who stuff their anger down rather than expressing it, which is why they seem so
sweet all the time. They don't even know they have all these negative feelings
because they're out of touch with themselves, and then, because they don't
know, they never release the feelings. They just keep stuffing them, so it's
layer upon layer of old anger, which turns to resentment, and eventually it
gets so they can't feel love like they used to. It's like getting a blockage in
their arteries.