Once More With Feeling (19 page)

I wanted our time to be about us
, she wrote,
and maybe that was selfish. And maybe you don’t want this information anyway. I honestly don’t know. But …

It took so long for the second text to come in that I considered calling her and demanding she stop the torture – but then my phone buzzed in my hand again, and there it was.

A certain doctor emails me every once in a while, just to say hello
, the second text read.
So I happen to know that Alec is home for the holidays, up in Vermont. Just in case you find that relevant to anything you might be doing. Love you, B
.

I read the text once. Twice. Then I shoved my phone in my pocket and looked back out of the window at the
painfully bright morning rushing alongside the train. The sun bounced off of the snow, so brilliant it hurt. It made my eyes water and made me glad I had a pair of sunglasses in my purse that I could shove on my face. It was entirely too bright, I told myself. Today was the third day of actual winter, after all, and it showed. It glittered hard all around.

I’d left the city under cover of darkness, the better to force myself to really, truly do it. I knew that I would take any excuse to stay, because what was there to go home to but more uncertainty? I knew a leisurely morning wallowing further in Brooke’s life with all of its echoes of our old one would lead to another whole day spent there, and while that wasn’t the end of the world, I knew it was time to move on. I tilted my head back against my seat, and told myself that this was the right thing to do.
It was
. I didn’t move again until the train pulled into Rivermark’s pretty little train station, and I was forced to disembark and face my life. Or what was left of it that early in a brand-new, post-Manhattan morning.

I didn’t have time to think about Brooke’s text. I didn’t have time to think through the possible implications. I had too many other things to do. I’d just spent a week excavating the past and that was enough, wasn’t it? Even Goldilocks’s attempts to find the right fit had been finite. How many more possible, discarded lives did I think I had to try on before I grew the hell up and lived the one I had?

I took a taxi back up to the house, and felt like a ghost
the moment I walked inside. It moved over me like a shiver, like ice down my back. I’d just had a whole week in New York slowly coming to terms with the fact it wasn’t home to me any longer. I recognized the sensation when I felt it again, and I felt it now.

This was nothing more than a house. It wasn’t my dream any longer. Had it ever been
mine
or had it only ever been
ours
? Today, it didn’t feel like my home at all. I made my way through the chilly, empty rooms, then up the stairs to the master bedroom to change my clothes. None of it felt like mine, I realized, as I walked along the hall and into the bedroom. None of it felt the way I thought it should, if it was something worth fighting so hard to keep.

I tried to shake the feeling off – maybe it was some kind of intimacy hangover from all those days with Brooke, I thought, which was only to be expected, really – and stripped out of my travel clothes. I did this in the bathroom, not the bedroom, as I still couldn’t shake the creepy feeling I got showing any kind of skin near that poor, abused bed. I ignored the unpleasant sensation this morning, and turned on the heated tiles in the bathroom floor to combat the chill as I pulled off my clothes. I wanted to wear something else, something new. Something that wasn’t that blue hoodie that I’d been forced to don again for the trip back to Rivermark and which, after a week of wearing Brooke’s lovely and stylish clothes instead, made me feel disgusting. I threw it in the corner of the bathroom, watching it land between the hamper and the
wastebasket, as if it were an emblem of my indecision. As if it were taunting me. Toss it or clean it? I told myself I would decide its fate later.

And, of course, mine.

Then I walked into the closet, and scowled at my clothes. Nothing appealed to me. It all seemed like so many
costumes
, suddenly. Brooke’s clothes had felt that way too, but the difference was, there was a large part of me that
wanted
to play the role of fabulous New York editor, complete with family money and an addiction to truly delectable boots. There was a whole lot less of me that was interested in reprising the role of Rivermark DWI lawyer and oblivious wife to a cheating husband. I flicked through the racks of my workday suits and the shelves of upscale yoga wear I usually wore for Saturday errands and the occasional class. It was all fine. It was all nice enough. But it didn’t feel like
me
, suddenly, and I thought I should pay attention to that feeling. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world to start a voyage of discovery with the knowledge only of who I
wasn’t
. It was a start.

I ended up making do with a pair of jeans I’d bought a very long time ago because I’d seen them in a store window and had then never felt they were entirely
appropriate
, because they were more rocker than respectable, and then I dug out a very old pair of Frye motorcycle boots that I’d bought in a vintage store in Brooklyn back in college. After that, the long-sleeved T-shirt and sleek v-neck sweater I pulled on seemed that much more cool.
Or maybe not cool at all, but a lot less
that person who hijacked my life
and a little more
the person I was supposed to be
. It was the little things, I told myself with more pride than the situation warranted, and then I marched back downstairs and drove to the hospital. It might be barely nine in the morning, but I felt more in control than I had since I’d walked in on the two of them months before.

Because I was still Tim’s wife. And so these were still my responsibilities. I figured that should matter to someone.

And that someone might as well be me.

No one I recognized was in the waiting room, and the nurses were all distracted when I walked toward the ICU desk, so I kept right on walking toward Tim’s little cubicle. I tiptoed in and peeked around the curtain, and then froze in my tracks right there.

Carolyn was slumped in the visitor’s chair next to Tim’s bed, her head tipped back to rest against the back of it. Her eyes were closed, as if she might have slept like that. She looked drawn and exhausted even so, her dyed ink-black hair making her seem washed out without the makeup she usually wore to go with it. She’d pulled Tim’s hand over from his bed and had rested it against her belly, palm down, and then covered it with both of her hands.

It was a striking family tableau. It was incredibly intimate. Unsettling. It was the sort of moment that should have been private. That should have been something only they knew had ever happened. A secret smile that was
only theirs. It was that poignant. And Tim’s machines sang a little song all around them, as if in accompaniment.

I had never felt more discarded. More alone.

I backed out of the room and then made my way out into the main corridor. I didn’t know why my head was spinning. Why I felt charred through, down to bone and ash. Why it
hurt
—

But of course I did. I knew exactly why.

It was one thing to think of them having sex – to have seen them having sex – all passion and physicality and that animalistic
grunting
. A quiet moment was much worse. A soft sort of moment that said all kinds of things I didn’t care to know about them. About their feelings for each other. Or about Carolyn’s feelings for Tim, anyway. And her feelings about her baby.

For a terrifying moment, I thought I might be sick, right there on the squeaky hospital floor. But I breathed through it. Again and again, until the spinning faded and I could start walking.

Right
, I thought, trying to sound brisk even inside my own head.
Perhaps you can check in on your responsibilities later, when there’s less chance of heaving all over the floor
.

If I could, I would have reached in and scrubbed that image out of my head. With my very own hands. I noted the
swish
of the ICU doors behind me, but I didn’t stop walking until I heard my name.

She said it again and I turned, determined to smile as if I hadn’t seen anything and if I had, that it hadn’t shaken
me so profoundly. It occurred to me that I had had entirely too many conversations with Carolyn in this same goddam hallway. I would be thrilled when this strange interlude in all of our lives was over. When we could have whatever interactions were left us once the dust of all this settled somewhere – anywhere – but here.

‘What are you doing here?’ Carolyn asked. If I’d been asked, I would have described her tone and expression as suspicious. Unduly suspicious, in fact. I blinked.

‘What do you think I’m doing here?’ I asked. More curiously than aggressively. Because surely there could only be one reason for my presence. The same old reason there’d always been.

‘I can’t imagine.’ She sniffed. ‘You told me to text you if he woke up, and he hasn’t, so …?’

I fought to keep myself from rolling my eyes, from playing further into this, from contributing to this mess in all the ways I could see, now, that I’d been doing from the start. The facts were very clear here. There was no getting around what Carolyn had done. If she felt guilty about it, well, she would have indicated that in some way by now. She hadn’t. Ergo, my attempts to play the martyr so that
she
would be forced to feel bad were, at best, a whole lot of misplaced energy on my part.

‘Mom said you were in New York with that Brooke person,’ Carolyn continued, apparently totally unaware that I was having a breakthrough adult moment mere feet from her. ‘No one expected you back for months. I
thought the two of you would disappear into that little fantasy world of yours and stay there.’

I blinked again. ‘There’s a whole lot to unpack there,’ I said slowly. ‘And I’m not really up to the challenge. I think I’ll just point out that you don’t really know Brooke—’

‘Are you checking up on me?’ Carolyn demanded, cutting me off and taking a step closer. I saw that her hands were clenched into fists at her sides. ‘Are you here to confirm all your worst impressions about me? Or is it that you honestly can’t believe that I could ever do something that you did? That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘I just got back into town, Carolyn.’ I kept my voice low. I felt as if I’d accidentally ripped the lid off of some intense internal battle of hers, and the last thing I wanted was for it to bubble over and drown us both where we stood. ‘I have no particular agenda here.’

‘Bullshit.’ If anything, her fists seemed to clench harder. Tighter. ‘You wouldn’t know how to take your next breath without an agenda!’

I raised my hands in the air. I also might have smirked, which definitely didn’t help the situation. But I stepped away from her, which I thought made up for it.

‘Okay,’ I said in a soothing tone – a smirky soothing tone, I could admit. ‘I think maybe you’re having a blood sugar moment. You need to consider the possibility that I don’t care about you or what you’re doing at all. And that I came here purely to see how Tim is doing. That’s my entire agenda, if I have one at all.’

‘What the hell do you care?’ she threw at me, her voice shaking, making me wonder how many imaginary fights she’d been having with me in my absence. ‘You’re the one who stormed out of here over a week ago. What? Did all that time in Manhattan reliving your glory days remind you that you had some unfinished business to take care of?’

I rocked back on my heels. I felt like her anger was some kind of hot wind, swirling over me and around me, but I didn’t have to stand there and take it. I really didn’t. I could … step away from the weather. I didn’t have to be the sort of person who scrapped with her sister in a hallway over the same man. I didn’t have to live this trashy, skanky reality-show life, no matter if it happened to be mine. I could remove myself from this situation. Because who in their right mind would put up with this? I’d just seen what she was fighting for, very much against my will. But what was
I
doing here?

Besides, she had a point. If not the one she thought she had.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said then, ignoring the mounting colour on her face and the murderous way she was looking at me – not even really caring about either, if I were honest – ‘I do have some unfinished business. Thank you, Carolyn, for reminding me.’

And then I walked out of the hospital, climbed into the car, pointed it toward Vermont, and drove.

*

It was a remarkably easy, pretty drive.

After a quick stop at the house, I headed out of Rivermark, taking the back roads through old Dutch farmlands toward the famously tight curves of the Taconic Parkway. Eventually I headed east, leaving New York state behind and crossing over into Massachusetts. Once I hit Route 91 a little bit north of Springfield, I started the drive toward the great frozen north that was Vermont.

Goldilocks was going to check out one other life before she made her final decision about what to do about the one she had. One other discarded possibility. I owed it to myself, didn’t I?

All around me stretched fields and farms, woods and hills, framed by pines and birches and open, empty branches on trees that looked cold and bare. The drive up was like a tour through my favourite Edith Wharton novel: stark farmhouses silhouetted against the winter, the frozen earth forbidding yet picturesque, and chimneys sketching faint hints of warmth and cheer against the sky. It was beautiful, of course, in that solitary way of winter, but it was also somehow exhilarating. As I raced along the ever lonelier stretch of highway, cutting through the heart of New England, I found myself singing along with the satellite radio. The day wore on and the light began to get thinner, colder even as it bounced back at me as bright as ever from the piles of snow at the sides of the road.

I knew the route by heart. I told myself that was because
it was simple, and because I’d always had a head for directions. Both of those things were true. Also true was the fact I hadn’t been up here in a long time, but there was no forgetting the way, for some reason, as if the map were burned into my brain. Once I crossed the state border into Vermont I was about halfway there. I couldn’t quite sit still.