Reason To Believe (38 page)

"Well, I... This drinking problem isn't all there is to Ben Pipestone. I mean—"

"I don't want to lose you," he ground out desperately. The tortured look in his eyes was beginning to scare her. "I've done some stuff... and I've been lyin' about it because I don't want to lose you."

"You won't. I'm your wife. Do you think I'm going to abandon you when you're in trouble?" She slid to the edge of her chair, reached out and touched the hard knobs of his knuckles, fingertips grazing his wedding ring. "We can beat this thing together."

"I need you. But I can't ask you to stick by me without tellin' you about something first." Like a man who feared drowning, he released the armrest and grabbed her hand before it got away. "Something you have a right to know."

An insidious chill slid over her body, and a voice in her head whispered,
You don't want to know. Tell him you don't want to know.

But instead, she asked tonelessly, "What is it, Ben?"

"I've cheated on you, Clara."

"Cheated?" Her brain refused to process the word.
Cheated?
Cheated, how? Was this a game? Had he been burying aces somewhere?

"I had—" his low voice dropped further, approaching soundlessness "—an affair."

"You mean—" her voice weakened and fluttered ceilingward "—with another woman?"

"Yeah." He nodded once, cleared his throat, avoided her eyes. "With another woman. It's been over a year now since the last time I saw her. A year and a half at least. It didn't last long, and it wasn't anything..." He gave a quick shake of his head, his eyes approaching a connection with hers as he spoke, but taking the long way around her chair, her knees, her shoulders. "It was stupid, and I don't know why I did it. I knew it was wrong. I just wasn't—"

Numb everywhere, no feeling, no sense to the words. "You... had sex with this woman?"

"Yeah." He stared at the button in the middle of her chest. "Yeah, I did."

Eighteen months ago. When was that? Where was I?

"Who was she?"

"You don't wanna know that, Clara. And it doesn't matter. I mean, it was just—"

"Do you—"
No. Not possible.
"Did you love her?"

"No. God, no, it was just—" He dismissed it with a gesture. "It was just sex. That's all it—"

"Just
sex?" Images formed. Awful, ugly images. Her pulse hammered in her ears.
"Just sex?
What does that mean? You're married to
me!
That means you
just
have sex with
me.
No one else! How could you..." She had her voice back now, full-strength and mortified. "How could you?"

"I don't know. All I know is, it's over. It was over a long time ago, and it'll never happen again." Their eyes met, his gaze latching firmly on to hers. "And I'm sorry."

"Who was she?" she demanded.

He shook his head dumbly.

"You're protecting her, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not. You're the only person I want to protect. You and Annie."

"Don't even
mention
Anna's name. You...you..." She felt as though she had run a long way, was still running, couldn't stop, couldn't catch her breath.

Don't run anymore. Don't
ask.

"Who was she, Ben?"

Don't answer. Don't tell any more.

He glanced away. "Marian Anders."

"Marian Anders!" Clara stiffened. An acquaintance. Someone so different from Clara that she would never be more than an acquaintance.

But she needed someone to hate, someone besides the man she could no longer allow herself to love. She shook her head tightly. "You're right. It doesn't matter who the little slut was, but... but..." Her whole body steamed and melted, all happening at once, all turning to water. She swallowed furiously against the threat of a deluge. "She's not even... very pretty or anything. Did you..." His face blurred.
Deep breath. Steady.
"Did you meet her somewhere? Did you... Where did you do this... this
stuff
you did?"

"Why do you wanna know all this?" He loomed closer, a shape becoming less distinct, but his voice sounded tightly controlled. His eyes had always been the place to look for signs of his emotions, but they were smeared, like watercolors running together. "I wanna be honest with you, Clara. I don't wanna hide anything from you anymore, but I don't think it's good to—"

"What do you know about
good?"
She closed her eyes and gripped the front of the chair seat. "Ben, I don't understand this."

"I don't expect you to."

"I had no idea." Dashing the tears away with her knuckles, she turned, suddenly remembering the counselor's presence. Someone with some sense, maybe. She obviously had none. "Why didn't I know?"

"Because you trusted him, would be my guess. Ben is an alcoholic, Mrs. Pipestone. He's—"

"I don't care. That's not an excuse." She pounded her fists on the armrests and shouted at her husband. "That is no excuse for betraying your wife, your family, your marriage."

"I know."

"I wasn't offering it as an excuse." Tinker plucked a box of tissues off his desk and scooted across the floor on his wheeled chair. "But you asked me why you didn't know, and I'm offering a possible answer. Alcoholics are very good at covering up, and their spouses usually deny the disease in their own minds and very often enable the behavior by—"

"I didn't enable anything. I'm not the jealous type, not even suspicious. Ben's the one who gets jealous any time a man so much as talks to me. And I've always been—" she snatched a tissue from the box with a shaky hand "—absolutely faithful to him. Do you hear me, Ben? Completely and totally faithful.
How could you do this?"

"It was a mistake. I knew it then, and I sure as hell know it now. I feel like shit."

"Good." Clutching the tissue, she drew a quavering breath. "Because that's exactly what you are."

Tinker touched her arm. "We'd like to have you join in our group sessions with—"

"Group sessions?" She drew away from the warm hand intruding on the cold storage locker she was frantically fashioning for her own refuge. "You don't actually think I'm going to discuss this with other people?"

"We can help you get through this," the counselor said gently, "but only if you want our help."

"I don't need help. I'm fine. I'll be fine." On that determined note she ejected herself from her chair and looked down her nose at her husband. "We're not going to tell Anna about this, of course. She's much too young. We'll just have to tell her... that we can't..."

He pushed himself up slowly, like an old man. "I'll tell her the truth if you want me to."

"No. That wouldn't be good." There was no goodness left except Anna. None. "I don't know where you're going to go when you leave here, Ben. I guess I really don't care, or at least I won't, by the time all this really sinks in." She drew a deep breath and faced him stalwartly. "You have no home with us anymore."

He swallowed audibly. "Clara, please..."

"If I have to get a court order, I will."

"You don't have to do that," he said quietly.

"Of course, anything that belongs to you..."

"Just throw my shit out in the garage if it's in your way."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd send someone else to pick it up." She turned to leave, then paused, thoughts and images swirling, swelling her brain, making her taste sourness, smell foulness. She felt a little dizzy. She didn't know if she could make it to the door. She closed her eyes briefly, trying to steady herself.

Say something. Somebody say something.

"I really don't know what to say to Anna," Clara heard her own voice say. "She... l-loves you s-so m-m..."

His hands were on her shoulders, his strong support so close, so close.

"Jesus, Clara, can't we talk—"

"I could have forgiven almost anything else, Ben, but not..." She looked up, her eyes pleading for an excuse to grant him a reprieve. "You gave your love to another—"

"There was no love," he said wretchedly. "It had nothing to do with love, Clara."

"You didn't like her?"

"Jesus Christ." He tipped his head back, searching for an answer from somewhere on high. "I liked her, yeah. I mean, I didn't
dis
like
her. It had nothing to do with love. It's hard to explain."

She'd been pleased with her exit. Much more so than, she had been with her subsequent behavior. Not that she'd done anything untoward in front of any more witnesses. She declined the invitation to the treatment program's "family week." She wasn't interested in Al-Anon. She had no use for counselors or therapists. She'd told a few close friends that she and Ben were no longer living together, but she'd invited no questions and offered few details.

Privately, though, she had suffered in a way that she had never suffered before. The secure facade might well have been held together on the inside with staples and masking tape. She lay awake nights imagining Ben having sex with Marian Anders. She imagined the two of them in her own bed, in the back of Ben's pickup, in dark places and sunny places and all kinds of places that she had shared with him. She imagined him undressing himself, letting someone else undress him, undressing someone else, touching someone else, kissing someone else, and on and on and on until in the dark she had to cover her mouth with both hands so that no one would hear her terrible, throat-tearing scream.

She hated Marian Anders. The bitch. The home-wrecking whore. She hated Ben. The bastard. The lying, cheating, drunken... She couldn't come up with the right epithet. Cursing had never been her forte, but she was getting better at it. Mentally. She'd punished them mentally.

But she had punished herself more. The worst of it was that in all her imaginings and all her condemnations, she couldn't expunge Ben's face from her thoughts. And it wasn't monstrous. It wasn't ugly. Tearing his picture to shreds only filled her with regret. Remembrances of him—his scent, his touch, the sound of his voice—lingered in every corner of her life, still, in some foolish fragile female sense, cherished.

The worst of it was that she missed him.

The worst of it was that she still loved him.

The worst of it was that they had shared,
still
shared, big, beautiful chunks of their lives, and there was so much about him that she would always love.

Clara clamped her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering as she dressed in the dark. Remembering was hard, would probably always be hard, but the pain was not as acute as it had once been. It was late, but it was still Christmas, and she hadn't given Ben his gift. She hadn't given him one last year, either, but this Christmas was certainly different. The little joke he'd made about giving her a Christmas gift had thrown her off, but she'd been "off" for some time. Off balance, off schedule, off her usual track. She was going with the flow this Christmas. Against her own grain. Funny how the cliches came in battalions, even though this Christmas was anything but cliche.

Funny how eager she was to see him this time of night, and unlike a time not so long past, it wasn't because she had worked up the urge to scratch his eyes out. Figuratively, of course.

"Mom?"

"I'll be back in a few minutes, Anna. I just remembered that I have a gift for your father."

"You do?" The voice rose, gaining enthusiasm. "What'd you get him?"

"Long silk underwear, like ours, only men's."

Anna's giggle woke Billie, who groaned, then mumbled thickly, "Whas goin' on?"

"Guess what my mom got my dad for Christmas.
Silk long johns."

"Shhh," Clara warned. "He won't wear them if everybody knows. But they'll keep him warm, and they're—"

"They're great." Anna's bedding rustled as she settled back down, snuggling in newborn contentment. "Tell him they're from me, too. I was gonna give him a bottle of Obsession, but I decided not to."

"Why not?"

"Because I didn't pay for it."

"Oh."

"It was from before I got caught. I talked to Lala about it."

"What did he say?"

"He said that there were some customs we had to do away with a long time ago if we didn't wanna end up in jail or on the hangin' tree, and stealing horses was one of them. He figured it was probably the same with umbrellas and men's cologne." Anna sighed heavily. "So I've decided when I get home, I'm gonna give it back, along with some other stuff. That'll be my gift to you, Mom."

"Well... thank you."

After a pause, Anna came back in a smaller voice with, "Will you go with me?"

Clara tried to imagine trooping from store to store, introducing herself and her daughter to the managers and throwing themselves on their mercy. "Maybe we could just mail it back anonymously."

"Don't you want 'em to see our faces?"