The Private Serials Box Set (3 page)

   I hated complaining to her about him or our relationship, because it did nothing but further tarnish him in her eyes, but I had no one else to turn to. In my family, we didn’t talk about problems. It was understood that you were to always keep up appearances. If you had an issue, you resolved it quietly. You didn’t bring attention to it. You swept it under the rug.  I had been trained my whole life to stay silent, until Sam.

   It was comforting to walk in to our usual coffee shop and see her sitting at a table waiting for me. I went straight for her. She stood when she saw me and opened her arms for me without question, knowing I’d be here with bad news instead of good.

   “What happened, Lena?”

   I let myself take the comfort from her, allowed her arms to pull out some of my anxiety. I sighed into her shoulder, trying to keep the tears at bay. I didn’t want to cry anymore.

   “I don’t know, Sam.” I pulled away and sat in the chair opposite her, giving a sad smile to the cup waiting for me. If Sam made it to the coffee shop first, she always bought my drink, and vice versa. “Thank you for the coffee.” She smiled at me, but said nothing. “I made the dinner, put on the dress, and was all ready for him when he came home from work.” I dove right into the story.  I knew Sam wasn’t going to stand for pleasantries and chit chat.

   “Did he appreciate it?” she asked, not even blinking.

   “No. Actually, he seemed put out by it. Like having dinner with me was an inconvenience to his evening schedule.”

   “That bastard.”

   “It gets worse.”

   “I’m not surprised.” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to continue.

   “When I mentioned I wanted to work on our marriage, that I wanted to get back to the happy couple we had been when we got married, he basically told me our marriage was over and that I should get used to the status quo. He said that our marriage fell apart a long time ago and that it was too late to fix it.” Samantha said nothing, but I could tell she was holding her rage inside for my benefit. She knew what I had been hoping for, knew I wanted my husband back. So, out of love for me, she was reining in all the expletives I knew she wanted to unleash, because she knew it wouldn’t help me, wouldn’t make me feel any better. I loved her even more for it.

   I looked down at my coffee cup, slowly twisting it around and around, watching it circle in my fingers, while I continued.

   “He wants to hold up the façade of our marriage, you know, still make appearances together in public, but pretty much indicated he was done with me in private.” My voice faltered on the last few words, my throat constricting with that painful pinch that was always followed by tears, aching. But I pushed it back.  I wouldn’t cry any more. “He only wants to be my husband when other people can see us.”

   Sam was quiet for a few moments more, and then she adjusted in her seat and tilted her head to the side. “Why would any man want to continue a marriage without the
benefits
of marriage? I mean, let’s be real. He’s a man. I can understand him wanting to stay in the marriage if you were going to try and fix it and work on the intimacy, or I can understand him cutting his losses and wanting out in order to find that intimacy in other places. But what hot-blooded man chooses to stay in a sexless marriage and wants it to remain that way?”

   I didn’t look up at her and I didn’t say anything, afraid to tell her what I’d seen under his shirt collar. Being a terrible husband, being absent and emotionally unavailable, was bad enough. If I told her what I saw, she’d likely be unstoppable in her rage and find him to take her anger out on him. She would also try to pressure me into leaving him, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I also knew she’d never be able to understand why. The mistake I’d made before our marriage had even begun would keep me tethered to him.

   I sighed loudly and shook my head. “I couldn’t fathom the thoughts running through his mind. Perhaps in a few days I can try to talk to him again. Maybe I just caught him at a bad time.”

   “Your wedding anniversary was a bad time for him to talk to you?” she asked snidely. I didn’t take offense. I knew she wasn’t angry with me.

   “He’s stressed at work,” I mumbled.

   “Don’t make excuses for him, Lena.”

   “Sorry.”

   “Don’t apologize either!”

   “What do you want from me?”

   “I want you to take a stand! Don’t let him walk all over you and don’t let him make all the decisions! It’s your marriage, too, Lena. It’s your life just as much as it is his.”

   I heard her words, felt them sink into me, and then I felt them fall away. I was conflicted. Before I could stop them, the words were falling out of my mouth.  “I think he’s cheating on me,” I whispered.

   Sam didn’t blink, didn’t breathe.  She just looked at me as she formulated her thoughts.  “Why do you think that?”

   “Last night, when he came home, I saw something inside his shirt near his collar. At first, stupidly, I thought it was a bruise. But I eventually realized it was
not
a bruise. It was a hickey.”

   “Did you ask him about it?”

   “I tried, but he changed the subject and left.”

   “Hmm. Suspicious,” she said, warily. I nodded. We were both quiet for a few minutes. I replayed the whole evening in my mind, running through each and every thing I could have done differently. But no decisions I’d made or words I could have said differently changed the fact that he’d come home with that mark on him. A mark another woman had put on him.

   “Why don’t you leave him, honey?” Sam’s words were a quiet whisper, as if her voice could have scared me away. She was treading lightly, not wanting me to turn away from the direction the conversation was heading.

   “I can’t,” I whispered, just as quietly.

   “Yes,” she said, placing her hand over mine. “You can.” I shook my head slightly, feeling my hair sway back and forth over my ears.

   “No,” I whispered again. I tipped my head up to look her in the eyes again. “I can’t, Sam. Really. It’s complicated.”

   “How can I help?”

   I shrugged. My next words were drowning in tears, choked out on sobs. “I don’t know.”
I don’t know.
Those three words were the answer to a lot of questions I had running through my mind. Was there any hope left for my marriage? Would I spend the rest of my life tied to a man who didn’t want to be with me? Would I feel this lonely forever? Would I go the rest of my life without feeling a man’s hands on me again? My head fell into my hands as I tried to cry discreetly in the coffee shop. I heard Sam move and then heard her next to me before I felt her arms come around me. I leaned into her and let the tears come, but stifled the sobs, tried to hold at least those in.

   “What are you going to do?” Sam finally asked after I’d calmed down a little.

   “Well,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I guess I’m going to find out if he’s really cheating on me.”

   “The hickey isn’t enough proof for you?”

   I shook my head again. “Listen,” I started, unsure of how I could explain something to her I’d never explained to anyone. Unsure of how to say the words I’d never uttered to a single soul. “I can’t just go on a hunch,” I said quietly. “I need actual proof.”

   “For peace of mind?” she asked.

   I nodded. “Sure.”

   She tilted her head to the side again, her eyebrows narrowing at me. “What’s going on, Lena?”

   “I’m sorry. I can’t go into any more detail than that. All I’m saying is, if anything is going to change, I need actual, physical proof he’s cheating. Me spying what I think is a hickey on the inside of his collar isn’t going to cut it.”

   “Well, then,” Sam said with resolution in her voice. “We’d better get a rental car, some black turtlenecks and ski masks, and brush up on our stakeout skills.”

   “What?” I said, half laughing.

   Sam had a sneaky smile on her face when she answered me, rubbing her hands together. “We’re going to stalk your husband.”

Chapter Four

   I sat in the passenger seat of a black Toyota Corolla, quietly crunching on Cheetos, my eyes glued to the front doors of my husband’s work. Cheetos, in hindsight, might have been a bad snack choice when wearing all black, and I struggled to keep the neon orange cheese powder from making its way into the fibers of my new turtleneck. I heard a giggle and looked over at Sam, sitting in the driver’s seat.

   “What’s so funny?”

   She took a bite of the licorice in her hand and waved the red rope between us. “We might be some of the worst stalkers ever.”

   She wasn’t wrong, although, we had gotten most of the basics down. Black car? Check. The cover of night? Check. Black clothes to blend into said cover of night? Check and check. But we also might have indulged and turned our rental car into a snack wagon, using our stakeout as an opportunity and excuse to eat gas station fare, which we never really had a valid reason to buy. But under the guise of our stalker outfits, it seemed fitting to break a few rules, even if they were self-imposed.

   It had taken two weeks from our original conversation about my husband’s possible affair for me to agree to Sam’s crazy idea. At first, although it was tempting to see if we could find out what was going on, I wasn’t really ready to know. I went home from our coffee shop date and pushed the idea of his affair out of my mind. I had gone back to plan A.  If I tried to be the perfect wife, perhaps he would come around and want to be my husband again.

   So I baked and cleaned and was waiting to be the doting wife when he came home from work. Only, sometimes he never came home from work, and most of the time, when he did come home, it was so late that I was either crashed on the couch in the living room, or had long given up and was asleep in our bed upstairs. On top of that, he often left for work before the sun came up and I would wake to a house just as empty as it had been when I’d fallen asleep.

   I counted eight days in a row in which I didn’t once lay eyes on my husband.

   I saw proof of him and his presence around the house: a coffee mug in the sink, wet towels in the laundry room, opened mail on the counter. But I never saw him and I hadn’t spoken to him since our anniversary. He wouldn’t answer when I called him at work, and I was sent directly to voicemail if I called his cell. After about the first five days of silence from him, I stopped trying to reach him at all.

   Finally, I decided to take some sort of action, so I called Sam and told her to greenlight her plan. Three nights later we were sitting in a black rental car, watching the doors to my husband’s building, waiting for him to exit so we could follow him. It shouldn’t have been fun and it shouldn’t have felt like an adventure, but it sort of did. It was impossible not to laugh when trapped in a car with my best friend, especially when she was trying her hardest to keep the mood light, trying to entertain me. I knew what she was doing – trying to keep my mind off the idea that we were, in fact, trying to catch my husband in the act of cheating – and I let her do it. I let her make me laugh so hard I cried. I let her rap along to the radio even though she didn’t know all the words and made a horrible rapper. And I let her tell me the horror stories of her most recent travels into the world of dating at twenty-nine.

   Suddenly, everything lost its humor as I watched Derrek walk out of the building. Both Sam and I went quiet, watching and waiting. When his car pulled onto the road, Sam gave me a look, silently asking me if I still wanted to go through with our plan.  I nodded. She started the engine and pulled out, only a few cars behind his.

   I had never tailed a car before and found it was a delicate balance between staying close enough to follow, but far enough away so that you melted into the background. After a few minutes, it became clear he was not headed to our home. I wasn’t surprised at all by this fact, but I was, admittedly, a little saddened. I came out with Sam to find out if he was cheating, but now that we were actually in the midst of possibly finding proof, I realized I might not be ready to deal with the reality proof would bring with it.

   “You okay, Lena?”

   “Yeah,” I said. I took on the role of navigator, keeping my eyes on his car and telling Sam which way to turn or which lane to move into so she could focus on just driving. His car took us more than forty-five minutes away from his work. We were a good distance out of the city, far away from our home, and unfamiliar with the area.

   “Where in the world is he going?” I asked, knowing Sam didn’t have the answer. I hadn’t expected to leave the city. I imagined him pulling up to a corner and propositioning a prostitute, or pulling in to a seedy motel to meet up with some random woman. I had never imagined him leading us to suburbia. The further we got away from the city and closer we got to housing developments, the more nervous I became. My body was clued into what was happening and sending me all kinds of signals to run away. My fight or flight instincts were kicking in, and my body was telling me to fly.

   But his car kept driving so we kept following. An hour after he’d left his building we watched as he pulled into the driveway of a house. We stopped down the block and turned off the headlights, watching with suicidal fascination. I wanted to look, but I knew on some unconscious level it was going to hurt.  Whatever we saw was going to open me up and rip me to shreds, but I couldn’t look away.

   He opened his car door and climbed out, stretching up toward the sky, obviously tight from the long drive. He grabbed his briefcase from the backseat and walked toward the two-story, cookie-cutter house. When he was halfway up the path to the house, the door opened and my mouth gaped as a small child ran toward him. Derrek dropped his briefcase and crouched down, opening his arms. When the child, a girl if her long hair was any indication, made it to him, he picked her up, hugging her tightly. Then, as if my world couldn’t fall apart any more, a woman came out of the house, a smaller child held to her hip. She stood on the front porch, watching Derrek and the little girl, a warm smile on her face.