I shuffled the pages until I found what Wyatt wanted me to see. A full-page spread. A series of photos. An accompanying article. John Dale and I were caught mid-embrace. You can see my open car door in the background, the fuzz of my steering wheel cover, a curved blur of white. In the photo, John Dale’s mouth is to my ear, and my eyes are looking up, not at John Dale but toward the sky. It looks like I’m laughing, but I’m not. I wasn’t.
Beneath that photo were others, the quick shutter clicking of the photographer: me, walking into his house last night. John Dale, carrying my bag. Me, looking back over my shoulder before I step inside. The article called it an affair. Not a tryst or a one-night stand or a movement of bodies in space and time, or a kind of revenge against my own life, the anguish of it, which is exactly what it was. I’m not excusing it. Beneath the article was a still from the set of the Christmas in July Fund Drive. There I was as that elf, holding the screaming baby. How unnaturally I was holding that child. Her neck bent back, unsupported. No wonder she was crying.
“Wyatt—”
“Stop.”
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
Wyatt turned to go inside the house, and I followed him.
“You didn’t sleep with him?”
A pause.
“You don’t understand.” I covered my face. I tried to think of what to say. I closed my eyes and opened them again. “I tried to call you. You didn’t answer. You never answer. You never talk to me. I went there to—”
“Oh, I know why you went there.”
“Halley left me something. It’s about Earthshine. It’s connected to the Jane Does, to the lawsuit. This is bigger than us.” I used John Dale’s words.
Wyatt walked to the refrigerator and looked inside, then slammed it closed.
“There was a woman named Opal Doucet. She was medicating these women with Comet Pills, but they had these terrible effects, and she was pregnant, and she was trying to get to France. I read all these letters from her friend or—or I don’t know what they were to each other. But Opal didn’t die in the Earthshine fire—it’s not at all like Bertie said.”
“John Dale Fox.” He was still on that. He still felt rage, which, looking back, was a good sign. Rage contains love, I think, the pain of something you want being taken from you. I felt rage, too. “I mean, look at him. He looks like Wham! in a suit. And you look…”
“Like what?” I said.
Let me dispense this advice: Never ask a question you do not want the answer to.
“Desperate. Really fucking desperate. Clinging to your last shred of fame. Riding the wave of a third-rate soap character. Pretending like those stupid commercials were the best thing that ever happened to you, like you’re something to the Tuttles other than marketing material. They have to be nice to you, Nona. Your face is on the fucking package. Stella is dead, and now you’re nothing. You’ve aged out. Middle-aged. You’re done. Next.”
In fifteen seconds, all my fears articulated. Maybe that’s the difficulty with marriage in the first place. You must hand yourself over,armorless, knowing your vulnerabilities might be weaponized against you at any point. It’s a long-term struggle not to say the meanest things we could possibly say in order to protect ourselves and our pain. I could have said plenty to Wyatt in this moment. About him. About how this wasn’t the life I wanted, about how I was desperate, but not in the ways he imagined.
I dug into my handbag for that gray notebook Halley had left me. It was a formulary—a list of drugs and their ingredients—I know that now.
“They call them ‘showmances,’ right? So you don’t come out looking slutty?” He opened and closed the cabinets, looking for something, though I didn’t know what.
Wyatt’s neck beat with his pulse. His nostrils flared, and it occurred to me how rarely I’d ever seen him angry, how rarely I’d ever seen him yell or cry or react with anything other than perfectly measured breathing. I tried to imagine how I looked to him, standing there with that old formulary, holding it out like it was the answer to all our problems.
“Get out,” he said. “I pay the mortgage. This is my house.” He was pointing toward the door as if I didn’t know where it was. “I don’t even know you anymore. Look at you. That hair. A walking midlife crisis. You look ridiculous.”
“Maybe you just don’t like me.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
We locked eyes and stood there in the living room until Wyatt kicked the coffee table and it landed on its side. I could see the ring mark from where he’d once set a glass down without a coaster.Who cares?he’d said at the time. I did, that’s who. I cared, and didn’t it matter what I cared about?
“I want a divorce,” he said.
The worddivorcecomes from a Latin root that means “to divert, to change direction.” But I had already changed direction. I was moving toward the door.
1910
Opal could hear the chanting from Liberty Street.Our bodies, our soap.
She’d overslept, and now she walked as quickly as her legs would take her. She wore her cloak with the hood drawn over her head, despite the warm temperatures. One day, Jagr would appear, like a monument in front of her. Stone. Solid. The kind in a children’s book that came to life. Her eyes were steadied upon the sidewalk, cragged with cracks the shape of lightning bolts. When she heard a rumbling, she suspected thunder, but instead, it was a group of boys who pulled each other on a wooden go-cart. She followed them all the way to the factory.
