“What did you say?” It can’t be. It’s as if my life is being lived in a strange parallel to the past. The past resurfacing, resurrecting, filling its lungs with a sharp breath of my present, encroaching in on me in every direction.
Ree shakes her head, refusing to reiterate any part of it, her feet stumbling backwards as if she were trying to get away from me.
“It’s your mother, isn’t it?” A mild sense of relief sweeps through me. “Of course. She’s gotten into your head. Filling you with all this bullshit.”
“It’s not my mother. You cheated on Simone and you lied to her. You went to New York for a dental conference and you slept with somewoman.”
The world goes black. That numb feeling intensifies. Nothing feels real. Not me, not Ree, not those happy screeching children running wild outside.
A small chortling laugh escapes her, the cackle of a madwoman. “You’re not denying it because you can’t. My God, you did that to her. If you did it to her, what makes me think you won’t do it to me?” Her eyes ride up and down my body as if the scales have fallen off and she’s seeing me for the very first time. “You’re a cheater?” Her body bucks with emotion. The devastation written on her face is palpable, and my heart breaks to witness it.
“I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s happening here.” I take a step backwards myself. I’d like nothing more than to reverse this day, this lifetime, and do everything right the first time. “My God, I love you, Ree. You are everything Simone wasn’t. You are my true wife, the one I would choose over and over, and I would never even think to betray you that way.”
“Like you betrayed her.” She nods as we both come to terms with this horrible, horrible truth circling the room like a serpent. “I think maybe you should go. You should pack your bags, and you should leave tonight. Go right now, Peter, and get out.”
My body resonates as if I were struck on the head with a tuning fork when she said it. It felt like a gunshot to the heart when she invoked my true name.
“Go!” she thunders so loud her voice echoes in my skull long after she says it, and without protest my feet carry me upstairs.
“Shit.” I rake my fingers through my hair before knocking a row of books off the dresser. “Fuck.” The door to the closet sits open, and I stagger over. Here it is, my undoing part two. How in the hell did we ever get here? I flick on the lights and kick the shit out of a pile of clothes to my left, but my foot slams into something hard and the sweaters fall to the sides, revealing a box concealed underneath. I peel it open, and a small notebook catches my eye. Without thinking, I pick it up, fully expecting to find it filled with the children’s scribbles, stick pictures of our nuclear family, which has indeed gone nuclear. But I’m greeted with the neat handwriting of a woman and my heart stops cold. Dated entries, familiar penmanship. Ree keeps a journal? I look to the dates one more time and freeze.
“What the hell?”
This isn’t Ree’s journal.
It’s Simone’s.
