I glanced out the window, remembering the day I came home to Dani filling the guest room closet with my clothes. That was three years ago.
“Yeah, it’ll be different though. It’s the next step. The pettiness is prolonging the inevitable. I’m signing the docs tomorrow. The paperwork is done. We’ll get the apartment and stick a fork in it, okay? It’s what she wants too.”
“I’m not trying to push you in that direction—”
“No, but you’re right. You can tell Alicia everything. I’m going to email Dani in a minute.”
Mark stood up and pushed a carton of food toward me. “You know this is gonna look like I prodded you.”
“No, it really won’t. It’s been a long time coming.”
“Okay, man.” Mark turned around in the doorway. “I’m here for you.”
“Thanks. Hey Mark, can we grab a drink this weekend?”
“Yeah. Don’t the boys have baseball?” he said. He knew wealways went to dinner with other baseball families on Saturday nights. I guess that was going to change too.
“I’ll be free after five.”
“Okay. Call me.”
As soon as I heard the door to the clinic close, I looked at the email to Dani and deleted what I had written earlier. I kept the new message short and to the point.
Dani,
All of that is fine and I agree. I’ll look for an apartment and send you the options so we can make a decision.
-Alex
I’m not a crier. I’m sure Dani could count on one hand the number of times I have almost cried, but never did. Of course, when her brother died, I didn’t even know him, but seeing her pain and her parents’ pain made me emotional. Still, I never shed an actual tear over it. There was the death of our beloved first dog, Sparty, who took his last breath in my arms as Dani wailed next to me in the vet’s office fifteen years ago. I felt sad but didn’t cry; he died of old age, and honestly it was a relief. There were Dani’s two miscarriages, when I almost cried, but not from the loss as much as from seeing Dani’s pain, physical and emotional. And then the birth of our two boys, where again, watching Dani labor, unmedicated, through excruciating pain, the relief and joy I could see on her face when they plopped our screaming babies on her chest—that’s what actually moved me the most, but not to tears. Never to tears.
Sometimes, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why I didn’t often get emotional. Dani sure as hell made a point of bringing to my attention that I was likely made of stone. I didn’t take it seriously, though, because it was coming from her, aperson who cried when someone sang the freakin’ “Star-Spangled Banner.” I always found that one particularly confounding because Dani wasn’t patriotic at all. She said she was moved by togetherness. A group of people sharing a moment. An evocative song. Someone or an animal in pain. A dog with a limp could literally make Dani spiral into a deep sorrow. To say I didn’t get it would be an understatement. I didn’t actually believe it was real. I thought she was an Academy Award–winning actress in life.
In the twenty-two years we had been together, I had never cried. Not in front of Dani and not alone. But that night, a minute after I sent Dani the email, and thirty seconds after I sent the lawyer an email to complete the divorce paperwork, I closed my computer down, looked out the window, across the freeway to where we lived for so many years, and the tears finally came. I sobbed. And I understood it…finally. It was the finality of it. The death in it. The mourning of somethingIactually loved.
8
i was screaming for help
Danielle
We no longer have to pretend in front of friends and family that we’re trying to stay together. I can stop feeling like I’m victimizing myself, and I can put an end to the internal dialogue about a possible divorce. It’s the reality now.
Today is moving day and I’m the first to go, take my things, spend the night in the nesting apartment…alone. Secretly, I made a deal with myself to avoid calling it the “nesting apartment” out loud, it gives the implication that we are expecting a baby, and boy if that’s not off the mark. I don’t completely understand why sharing an apartment and going to and from the family home during the divorce process is called “bird nesting,” but I bet there’s some anthropological reason for the name, one I don’t even care to look up.
The idea was the first suggestion our therapist had proposed that actually made sense to me. Up until that point, she was always pushing us more toward staying together than divorcing. She had gotten irritated with me at our last counseling sessionfour months ago, telling me, “Dani, I’m a marriage counselor, not a divorce counselor. You guys need to get a mediator. Try separating physically—get an apartment and go from there.”
It was the moment when both Alex and I finally showed some sign of surrender. We looked at each other, he blinked, and I said, “I guess that’s what we’ll do.” Of course we found ways to prolong that process as well, but here we are now, finally.
As I get dressed to head downstairs, I can hear the boys chatting with their dad in the kitchen. I’m dreading walking into the scene and interrupting their conversation, but I’m also anxious to get this whole process over with.
We had sat down with Noah and Ethan numerous times over the last two weeks to explain the looming divorce, to discuss their feelings, and to reassure them that it was not their fault, that we would always be a team for them. Throughout those conversations, I had done most of the talking, of course, while Alex sat back and nodded in agreement.
Noah’s reaction was expected. “Does this mean I get my own room now? I mean, you and Dad will share the master bedroom again, right? Just at different times? So the guest room or Nana’s old room…”
“No one is moving into Nana’s room,” I had said.
It was barricaded with boxes anyway. I normally didn’t have hoarder tendencies but when you watch a parent die in front of your eyes, it’s not an image easily erased from your psyche. You don’t want to continually have to revisit the room where it happened, so I made it off-limits. I intentionally filled it with junk to stuff the void of grief I felt, which was just another thing that irritated Alex.
