Chapter 60

60

It had been a stupid place for me to leave it. Under the bed. I’d tossed it there when I heard you come home midafternoon. You never took notice of the books I had lying around anyway. And I hadn’t thought of her, if I’m being honest; I barely existed in her world, and she barely existed in mine beyond the logistics of the routine we kept.

I don’t know why I bought it. I knew it wouldn’t help, but it felt like something I could do to try to make it real. To make me feel something other than desperately curious. Two months had passed since I confronted you about the affair. And all I could think about was: Who is this woman? What’s she like? You refused to say a word about her—all I knew was that she’d been your assistant. The woman you’d taken our daughter out to lunch with.

Every time I asked you to tell me more, you shook your head and said only, quietly, “Don’t.”

I found the book in her backpack. Surviving an Affair: How to Overcome Betrayal in Your Marriage. Violet was eating yogurt at the kitchen counter, her after-school snack, and looked up as I stared at it in my hands. I didn’t know what to say to her—she was ten. Could she have known what an affair was? I thought of the older kids at school whom she wouldn’t have hesitated to ask.

“Why did you have this?” I asked nervously. She raised her eyebrows knowingly and went back to stirring her bowl.

“Answer me.”

“Why did you have it?”

I walked away.

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•   •   •An hour later, I knocked on Violet’s door and asked if we could talk. She spun her desk chair around slowly and looked at me blankly. I held the book out and said that I wanted to clear something up—that this book was research for something new I was writing. That we should talk about what this grown-up word “affair” meant—what she thought it meant. That I didn’t have this book because there was something wrong between her mom and dad. That we loved each other very much.

“Okay,” she said. And then she put her head back down to her workbook.

I knew she knew who the woman was. Maybe that day you took Violet to your office wasn’t the only time they’d met—I didn’t know what secrets you two kept. It was so strange to me that she’d never used the unicorn pencil or eraser the woman had given her. She’d kept them on her bedroom shelf, on display like trophies, prized possessions that must have meant more to her than I had realized.

I threw the book in the trash can outside, and I wondered about other lies I could tell her that would corroborate the one I’d just told. I wanted to walk back in there and convince her, with the authority that a mother should have, that she was wrong. I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of woman a husband cheated on. And despite my ten years of resentment for the relationship you and Violet shared, I didn’t want her to believe you were the kind of man who would do that.

I was hanging on to my family by a thread, I knew. But I had to. I had nothing else left.

When you came home that night, I touched you with affection when I thought she might be looking, and I called you “honey” instead of your name. I slipped in beside you on the couch while you watched the hockey game. I put my hand on your lap and my chin on your shoulder, and I called her into the room to ask if she had handed in the money for the school pizza lunch. She glared at me and looked down at my hand on her father’s thigh and shook her head just slightly, just one sharp back-and-forth, just enough to tell me she knew what I was trying to do. She had a remarkable ability to make me hate myself.

One month later—three months after I discovered the affair—I woke up on a Sunday and I knew. We were over. We needed to stop pretending we would simply float past this, like it was something unpleasant on a riverbank. The sitter took Violet out for the afternoon and we went to the bar down the street.

“You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?”

You looked out the window and then impatiently waved for the server. I asked you again if you could just, please, tell me about the woman. Tell me why you loved her. You didn’t avoid my eyes. You looked like you were talking yourself through the decision of how much to tell me, what secrets you were willing to part with. An urgency welled inside me and I could no longer be there across from you—we needed to get this done. I wanted you gone.

I walked home briskly, with my coat clutched at my chest. I brought up the suitcases from the basement. I packed all of your clothes neatly inside and zipped them shut. I called a moving company and booked four large packing bins and a small moving van to arrive the next day. I found a pad of sticky notes in your desk drawer and I walked through the house and stuck one on each item we shared that I wanted you to take: the small rolling island in the kitchen, the record player, the set of dishes from your parents, the runner in the front hallway that had marks from the shoes you never took off when I asked you to, the sofa in the living room that had been imprinted with the shape of your ass for years, the green glass vase, the chopping board stained with the blood of red meat, the chairs you commissioned for the dining-room table that hurt everyone’s backs, all the furniture in your den, and most of the art in the house. And then I went to the closet in your den and found the tin of blades. I took the longest one and wrapped it in a silk scarf, and I put it in my bottom drawer.

“I don’t care where you stay tonight. Just come back tomorrow to pack everything else.” I even kissed you good-bye, a habit, a reflex of a married woman. As I walked up the stairs I thought of Sam’s things. Everything we kept that had belonged to him was in boxes in the basement. Maybe you would want something—a blanket, a toy. Maybe I should ask you. Maybe you were owed the faint smell of him still lingering in the fabric after nearly three years. I turned on the tap of the bath and took my clothes off. The sound of the water had muffled your footsteps and so the sight of you in the doorway startled me. I clutched my breasts and turned away. You felt like an intrusion now. All those years, and now you felt like a stranger.

“What about Violet?” You didn’t take your eyes off me as I stepped into the tub. The water was too hot, but I forced myself lower.

“What about her? This is your doing. You can figure out what to tell her.”

You looked up and away, as you did whenever I said something that made you wish I wasn’t so stubborn or vague or difficult or indecisive. Or flippant. Or sarcastic. Those were some of the things you didn’t like me to be. You rubbed your forehead. I seemed to make you tired. I seemed to make you wish I hadn’t ever existed at all.

“I’ve tried my best to keep this from her because I don’t want her to think badly of you. I don’t want things between you two to change,” I said. “But I think she knows.”

I waited for your reaction. I wanted you to be grateful to me, to concede that you were the one doing this to us. But all you said was:

“I want to share custody. And split the time evenly.”

“Fine.”

You watched me slip into the tub until my whole body was magnified under the water. You stared at me, the woman you’d been inside for twenty years. I wondered if you might try to come in with me. If despite all my faults, all the ways I disappointed you, you still wanted to feel my skin one last time. I looked up and felt nothing for you—not love, not hate, not anything in between. Is this what the end was supposed to feel like? There are people who work through it, who fight for one another, who do it for the children. The life they thought they needed. But I had nothing to fuel the fire. Nothing to give.

And then what you said hit me—shared custody. I’d be alone with her. That’s what you had meant when you’d asked, “What about Violet?” You’d meant, “What about you and Violet, what about the life you’ll have to endure together without me? What about the days you don’t speak to each other, what about the nights she needs someone, and you just won’t do? What about the times she knows you’re pretending to care as much as you should? Who will believe her? Who will defend her? Who will comfort her? Who will light her up in the morning when she wakes? Who will love her on those days when she’s alone with you and needs to know everything will be okay? Who will believe her?”

You stood in your jeans and your gray sweater with your hands in your pockets and you watched me. Bare. Inadequate. I met your puncturing eyes.

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m her mother.”