Summer Secrets (19 page)

That night set me off. Yet again. The vicious cycle of weeks of not drinking, then falling off the wagon with a terrible bump.

I wanted to get sober more than anything in the world. I knew my marriage depended on it, but the pull was too strong. I just couldn’t do it.

And Annie. My poor, darling Annie. When I was drinking, I was raging. There were times when I would scream at her, berate her for doing nothing other than what a young child should do. I would scream at her for not closing the fridge door properly, or her bedroom being a mess, and I would watch her little face fall, see how she tiptoed on eggshells around me, in exactly the way I would tiptoe on eggshells in the house I grew up in, terrified of my raging father, and I would be so disgusted with myself, I would shout more, drink more.

In between, when I was sober, I showered her with love, with gifts, with attention, trying to make up for my bad behavior, my guilt. The poor child never knew which mother she was going to get, never knew where she stood. It was as unsafe a childhood as I had had myself, more so, and there wasn’t a minute that went by when I didn’t hate myself for it.

The night Jason finally said he couldn’t do it anymore, he was leaving, I wasn’t yet drunk. I was kidding myself that I was just having a glass of wine at the end of the day, and that I would stop after that glass, and that tomorrow morning would, yet again, be my first day of not drinking, because I knew I had to get serious.

“I love you,” he said, and he wasn’t angry as he so often was, but weary, and my heart started knocking in my chest. “And I love Annie, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch you destroy your life, and ours. I’m leaving and I’m taking Annie with me.”

And he did.

*   *   *

I didn’t actually believe he would. I sat in the chair in the living room, dizzy with despair and vodka, a terrible combination, and saw him get the big suitcase down from the cupboard in the hall and fill it with his and Annie’s clothes.

I lost it then. Burst into tears and staggered down the hallway—how ashamed I am to admit I was too drunk to even walk—and sank to my knees, begging him not to leave, crying that I couldn’t live without him, but he wouldn’t look at me, said nothing, just quietly moved through the rooms, as if I wasn’t there.

He packed their things and left me in a sobbing heap on the hallway floor where even in my drunken stupor, I honestly thought my heart was going to break. I stayed there all night, and in the morning, when my pounding head and dry mouth woke me up, I wished my heart had broken. I wanted to die.

Instead, I stopped drinking. That was my bottom. Abandoned by my husband and daughter. There was no place left to go; the switch was flicked, and while Jason and Annie moved in with his parents, I got sober. And this time it was for real.

I had been a terrible mother; I deserved everything I now had. Something in me woke up, and instead of dwelling on all that had been, all the horror and shame of the past, I knew I had to change, and this time it was serious.

I went to America. To the relapse treatment program at Caron Pennsylvania. I had tried the UK rehabs too many times; it was all a well-worn and familiar road that hadn’t worked. Getting serious about getting better meant coming to America, and from the first day I walked into Caron, I knew things had changed.

Jason knew things had changed when I finally got back home. He saw me going to meetings, and working the steps, and more than that, saw how different my behavior was.

I was allowed to pick Annie up from school and take her out for tea, returning her to Jason for the night.

And I was there at the school gates, on time, every single day. That alone was enough to tell him I had changed.

“You look different,” he said to me one day, when I was dropping Annie off and he had invited me in. We were in the kitchen of the flat he had rented in Belsize Park, with me thinking how weird it was to see our furniture in new surroundings, for he had moved a number of things in—the sofa, an armchair, paintings—and how awful it was that I no longer had a claim to these things, to Jason’s life, to Jason.

“Different bad?” I said, for I was taking great pains in my looks every afternoon before hitting the school gates. Not so much to compete with the other Yummy Mummies, although that was definitely part of it, but to show Jason what he had left, to try to tempt him into coming home.

“Different good,” he said with a smile. “Your eyes are clear and your skin. You look…”

“… Sober?” I asked, thinking he’d smile, but he just looked sad.

“Yes. Sober.”

“I am,” I said. “For today.” I didn’t give him a day count. There had been far too many times in the past when I had used my fifteen days, or eighteen days, or twenty-four days to throw in his face, right before diving into drink again.

Jason nodded, and in his sadness I saw everything he was thinking:
Why couldn’t you have done this years ago? Why did you have to wait until our family had been torn apart? Why did you leave it until it is too late?

I know what he was thinking because I was thinking the same thing myself. I left then, tears leaking down my cheeks all the way home. I got my daughter back, under court supervision, for half the time. But I didn’t get Jason back. I had changed, but he hadn’t. The damage I had wrought had altered his feelings. He would always love me, he said, but he just didn’t have the wherewithal to do it anymore. He was so scared of it happening again, and he didn’t trust me, my new sobriety.

So here I am, eighteen months after our divorce, rebuilding my life, interviewing women like the one I interviewed earlier today, about how she threw her life away for an affair, and I have long known that the greatest affair of my life was with alcohol. I love Jason, but I loved drinking more; in my heart I chose Jason, but everything overruled that, and drinking won, every time.

I did what I had to do, all the work successful recovering alcoholics do to stay successful recovering alcoholics, moving through the steps, speaking to my sponsor every day, filling my free time with meetings.

Finally, I reached the one step I was dreading, the step I had been dreading since the moment I first heard of this program. Step 9:
Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

I had a very long list, and the big ones, the ones I left to the end, the ones that had haunted me for years, were my family. The other family. The ones I had let down so badly it is still sometimes unbearable for me to think about.

Three years ago, before I got sober, my father died. Brooks. I wrote to Ellie and Julia then, not to make amends, but to let them know how sorry I was, how sad. I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear from them. Just sad. And sadder still that I will never have a chance to make my amends to him.

I have worked my way through the rest of the list. The easy ones, most of whom had no idea what I was talking about. I phoned Jackie and met her for coffee, and I told her I had to make amends for all the late mornings and lying, and late copy, and she just cracked up laughing and told me I was being ridiculous.

I haven’t worked my way through the entire list yet. No one explained quite how long it would take. But I have made amends to Jason, and it did make a difference. Not quite the difference I would have liked—he has made it clear that he has moved on, that he and I as a couple are never going to work, but my acknowledgment of the hell I had put him through seemed to ease things between us, pave the way for, if not a friendship, then at least a convivial coparenting relationship.

Although all that may have changed now that Cara has come on the scene.

Eighteen

I buzz the door open and check my hair in the mirror. I may not stand a chance with Jason, our marriage may be well and truly dead in the water, our divorce a fact of life I have to live with every day, but I still want him to feel some regret, want him to look at me wistfully, see me at my best.

While Annie gathered her things, I surreptitiously ran to the bathroom and tidied myself up. Not too much, not enough for Annie to notice, although she’s thirteen: She notices everything. Primer to remove the shine and turn my skin into silk, a touch of bronzing powder that glimmers seductively on my cheekbones, a slick of gloss, my hair quickly brushed, then gathered up in a loose bun, tendrils hanging around my face, in just the way he always used to love. I pick up my reading glasses and put them on. I don’t really need them—in fact, they make everything slightly fuzzy—but Sam says I look like the sexiest librarian he’s ever seen in the glasses, so what the hell. Jason can see me looking like a sexy librarian, even if to me he’s just a blurry fuzz.

“Hey, Jason,” I say casually, picking up a stack of books, walking through the hallway and waving, as if he had just caught me unawares, as if I had no idea he was coming, as if I weren’t nervous at all, and yes, ashamed as I am to admit it, I am nervous. Always. Still.

He is still exactly, but exactly, my type. And his smile still has the ability to completely undo me. And I look at his hands and remember exactly what his hands used to do, how they used to make me feel, and I could cry with my own remorse and pain.

Jason is such a good guy. He has always been such a good guy. I sit around, frequently, with other forty-something women, and they talk of their husbands, or ex-husbands, with disdain, with derisive laughter; they talk of the excuses they come up with to avoid having sex, the holidays they would much rather take with their girlfriends, and I always find myself looking at them as if they are speaking another language, for it was never like this with Jason.

Even when I was drunk, it was never like this with Jason.

When I was drunk, I loved him more. The fact that his eyes registered his disappointment only made me want to comfort him, reassure him in my slurry way that it wasn’t his fault, that I was fine, that I still loved him, no matter what.

“Hi, Cat,” he says, awkward. Always awkward. It was fine between us for a while, after I made the amends. We had a few weeks where I actually started to think that maybe we weren’t dead in the water, maybe we had a chance. On Annie’s birthday the only thing she said she wanted was the two of us to take her to see
Matilda
and then dinner at Wagamama—finally a place she loved unreservedly.

We did, and it felt like a proper family, like we were all supposed to be together, in the way we were together when Annie was very small.

Annie spent the entire evening beaming, and even though she had turned thirteen, she walked along between us, holding our hands, constantly looking from one to the other as if she couldn’t believe that not only were we together, we were having fun.

And we were having fun. We loved the play, then slurped noodles and drank green tea and delighted Annie by telling funny stories about when she was a little girl, which she has heard a million times before but never gets tired of hearing, and it was actually a shock, at the end of the night, when Jason said good night and went home.

There was a moment, at the end of the night, when he had gone in to kiss Annie good night, as she had asked him to do, and I had offered Jason a coffee, and he hesitated, and our eyes held for just a few seconds longer than was probably necessary, and my heart jolted, and I thought he was going to kiss me. He didn’t. He left, but I was certain that look meant he still loved me, still felt something, and surely it was only going to be a matter of time.

It was only a matter of time before he announced he had met someone. Cara. I didn’t hear it from Jason but from Annie, who bounced home after a weekend with her father filled with excitement about this amazing woman who had spent most of the weekend with them.

When I say woman, that isn’t quite correct. Girl. Or girl-like. I learned, that Monday afternoon when Annie came home from school, that Cara is, oh lucky Cara, only twenty-nine! Twenty-nine! Practically a child! So much younger than Jason. She is blond! said Annie. And beautiful! Well, of course. And so much fun!

I knew it was serious from the outset because even though I’m quite sure she wasn’t the first girl Jason had gone out with, she was the first girl he had ever introduced to Annie, and not just introduced, spent the weekend with. Although she didn’t spend the night.

I asked.

But she met them at the Wolseley early Sunday morning for breakfast. And went boating on the Serpentine with them. And made them dinner on Sunday night, lasagna, which I never make because pasta, as far as I’m concerned, is nutritionally empty. Even if it is delicious.

It was clearly serious, and yes, I will admit to being sad. And disappointed. But I was also grateful that if Jason was going to have a girlfriend, at least it’s a girlfriend who’s nice to my daughter; at least she doesn’t have a potential evil stepmother to contend with. It was small consolation, but consolation nevertheless.

How wrong I was. What I didn’t see coming was Cara’s raging jealousy. It didn’t emerge for a while. The first time I met her I was going out and Jason had come to pick Annie up, so we all walked out together, and there she was, this very short blond woman in the front seat of Jason’s car.

Sober, I am always gracious, or at least I try to be, so I walked over with a big smile to introduce myself. She could barely look me in the eye. It was quite clear, in fact, that she wanted nothing to do with me, and as the relationship has progressed it is clear to me that she is the one who wears the trousers, and oh what demanding trousers they are.

Before Cara, Jason and I were becoming friends. We had had that lovely night at the theater, and then a few other nights, always with Annie as the excuse, but it was starting to feel hopeful.

Suddenly he stopped wanting to spend time with me, started making excuses. I would suggest something, but he was busy. After a little while I stopped suggesting we do things together, but then, if I asked him to take Annie on a night that wasn’t his, or babysit her, or show up to something at school, which had never, ever been a problem for him, suddenly he was unavailable. All the time.