I make my way around the block before going home.
Moments later, I stand alone in the kitchen, peeking beneath the lid of a skillet to see what Will’s cooking tonight. Pork chops. It smells divine.
I stand, with my shoes still on my feet, a bag slung across me. The bag is heavy. The strap burrows deeply into my skin, though I hardly feel the weight of it because it’s my stomach that hurts the most. I’m hungry, completely famished, my day getting away from me so that I never had time for lunch.
Without a word, Will slips silently into the kitchen and curls up behind me. He nestles his chin onto my shoulder. He slips his warm hands beneath the waistline of my shirt, wrapping them around me. A single thumb sweeps up and down my navel, strumming me like a guitar. I feel myself tense up at Will’s touch. “How was your day?” he asks.
I think back to the days when Will’s arms around me made me feel safe, invulnerable and loved. For a moment, I want nothing more than to turn and face him, to unload about the dreary workday; the run-in with Officer Berg. I know just exactly what would happen if I did. Will would stroke my hair before lifting the heavy workbag from my shoulder and setting it to the ground. He’d say something empathetic, likeThat sounds rough, as he poured me a glass of wine. He wouldn’t attempt to fix things for me as other men might do. Instead, he’d lead me to the single spindle-back chair pressed against a kitchen wall and hand me the wine. He’d drop to the kitchen floor before me and remove my shoes, massage my feet. And he’d listen.
But I don’t tell Will about my day because I can’t. Because there on the countertop sits his true crime novel, and in an instant, last night comes tumbling back to me all over again. From where I stand, I see the edge of Erin’s photograph jutting out from the pages of the book, just a couple of millimeters of blue trim, and even though I can’t see it, I still imagine the blue eyes, blond hair, rounded shoulders. The willowy woman who stands with her hands on her hips, pouting at the camera, baiting whoever’s on the other side of it.
“What’s wrong?” Will asks, and though I hesitate—thinking I might just saynothingand leave the room, too exhausted for this conversation right now, I say, “I started reading your book last night. When I couldn’t sleep,” motioning to it there on the countertop.
Will doesn’t pick up the innuendo. He draws away from me and begins tending to dinner while asking, “Oh yeah? What do you think of it so far?” with his side now turned toward me.
“Well,” I say, hesitating. “I didn’t actually have a chance to read it. I opened it up and Erin’s picture fell out,” feeling shamefaced for admitting this, as if I’ve done something wrong.
Only then does he put the tongs down and turn to me.
“Sadie,” he says, reaching for me, and I say, “It’s fine, really it is,” trying my hardest to be diplomatic because, for heaven’s sake, Erin isdead. I can’t be outwardly angry or jealous that Will’s been carrying her photograph around after all this time. That just wouldn’t feel right. Besides, there’s no reason for me to be concerned. I, too, had a high school sweetheart once. We broke up when he went off to college. He didn’t die, but we severed ties just the same. I never think of him. If I were to pass him on the street, I wouldn’t know.
Will marriedme, I remind myself. He has childrenwith me.
I look down at my hand. It doesn’t matter that the ring I wear once belonged to her. As a family heirloom, Will’s mother refused to let Erin be buried with it. He was honest when he gave it to me. He came clean, told me what the ring had been through and where it had been. I promised, at the time, to wear the ring in both his grandmother’s and in Erin’s honor.
“It’s just,” I say, staring at the book as if I can see straight through the cover to what’s inside, “I never knew you carried her picture around with you. That you still thought about her.”
“I don’t. I didn’t. Listen,” he says, reaching for my hands. I don’t pull back, though that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to be hurt. Iamhurt. But I try to be compassionate. “Yes, I have a photograph of her still. I came across it in some of my stuff when I was unpacking. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I stuck it in the book. But it’s not what you think. It’s just that, I realized recently that it will be twenty years next month. Twenty years since Erin died. That’s all. I don’t think about her, hardly ever, Sadie. But it got me thinking, and not in a mournful way. More in aholy shit, twenty yearssort of way.” He pauses, runs his hands through his hair, thinks his next words through before he speaks.
“Twenty years ago, I was a different man. I wasn’t even a man,” he says. “I was a boy. The odds that Erin and I would have actually gone through with it and gotten married aren’t great. Sooner or later we would have realized how dumb we were. How naive. What we had was just young love between two stupid kids. What you and I have,” he says, tapping my chest and then his in turn, and I have to look away because his stare is so intense it gets inside of me. “This, Sadie. This is marriage.”
And then he draws me in and wraps his arms around me and, for just this once, I let him.
He presses his lips to my ear and whispers, “Whether you believe me or not, there are times I thank God it happened this way because if it didn’t, I might have never met you.”
There’s nothing to say to that. It’s not as if I, too, can say that I’m glad she’s dead. What kind of person would that make me?
After a minute, I pull back. Will goes back to the stove. He reaches for the tongs, flips over the pork chops in the frying pan. I tell him that I’m running upstairs to change.
In the living room, Tate sits playing with Legos on the nicked-up coffee table. I say hello and he rises from the floor and squeezes me tight, calling out, “Mommy’s home!” He asks me to play with him, and I promise, “After dinner. Mommy’s going to go change.”
But before I can go, he pulls on my hand, calling out, “Statue game, statue game.”
I don’t know what he means by this,statue game. But I’m too tired for him to be pulling on me. He doesn’t mean for it to be, but his tugging is rough. It hurts my hand.
“Tate,” I say, “be gentle,” as I withdraw my hand from his and see him pout.
“I want to play the statue game,” he whines, but instead I say, “We’ll do Legos. After dinner. I promise,” seeing the castle he’s already begun to create, complete with a tower and gatehouse. It’s impressive. A mini figure sits at the top of the tower, keeping watch over the land, while three more figures stand on the coffee table, ready to attack.
“You did that all by yourself?” I ask, and Tate tells me he did, beaming proudly as I disappear up the stairs to change.
It’s dim in the house. Aside from the shortage of windows and, therefore, a scarcity of natural lighting, the house is coated with a dated wooden paneling, which makes everything dark. Gloomy. It does nothing to bolster our moods, especially on days like this, which are depressing enough as is.
Upstairs, I find Otto’s bedroom door pulled to. He’s there, inside, as he always is, listening to music and doing homework. I rap on the door and call out a quick hello. He says back, “Hi.” I wonder how Otto’s commute was to school, if he wore wet clothes all day from the rain-drenched ferry ride to the school bus waiting on the other side, if he sat with anyone at lunch. I could ask him, but the truth is I’d rather not know the answer. As they say, ignorance is bliss.
Imogen’s door is open a smidge. I peek in, but she’s not there.
I head to Will’s and my bedroom. There I stare at my tired reflection in the floor-length mirror, the weary eyes, the poplin shirt, the skirt. My makeup has nearly worn away. My skin is washed out, more gray than anything else, or maybe it’s just the lighting. Crow’s-feet sneak from the edges of my eyes. My laugh lines become more prominent each day. The joys of aging.
