“There were a lot of things I didn’t know about your father,” she said then. “Someday when you’re older, you’ll better understand.”
“What things?” I said, finding my voice. The words sounded surprisingly sharp, loud and startling, like a hard and sudden rap on the door. How did I know I wasn’t supposed to talk, to ask ugly questions? No one had ever said as much to me. But my question was an uninvited guest in the room, greeted with stiff politeness, clearly unwelcome.
My mother closed her lavender-shadowed lids, then opened them slowly. It was something she did to show us she was summoning her patience. She gave me the lids, our father would say.
“It’s not important now, Isabel.”
“I want to know what you’re talking about,” I said firmly. “What didn’t you know?”
She shook her head, released a long breath, as if she regretted starting the conversation and now lacked the will to go on. Looking back, I realize she was very young to be a widow with two daughters, just two years older than I was the day Marcus disappeared. She’d married at nineteen, been pregnant by twenty. She was thirty-five when my father killed himself.
“I’m sorry, girls. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, sounding weak and tired. “Really, the only thing you need to know is that he loved you both. Very, very much. You were everything to him.”
She reached for our hands. I let her take mine. Linda snatched her hand away.
“Did you even love him?” my sister asked. All the color had drained from her face. My mother looked down at the table, tapped her outstretched hand on the wood, seemed to consider her answer.
“Marriage is not just about love. Only little girls believe that.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Her voice was thick, unlike her.
“He killed himself because he knew you didn’t love him anymore,” my sister said simply with a prim shake of her head. There was a frayed edge to her voice; her hands quavered. I felt anxiety building in my chest; it was expanding, threatening to bust me open wide.
“That’s not true, Linda,” my mother whispered, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s just not true.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, strangely bright, her eyes wide. “And everybody knows it.”
My mother dropped her head to her arm and started to sob right there in front of us. My mother, who was a study in self-control-never speaking too loudly, never laughing too hard. Her makeup was always done; her clothes were always perfect. To see her sink like a rag doll and weep was shocking. I put my hand on her back and felt her heaving, touched the silk of her hair. I remember how golden it looked against the green cotton of her shirt. She was so real in that moment, so soft and full of life, so overcome by grief. It was terrifying and at the same time exhilarating. She was solid, was tied to the world by her pain. She couldn’t just drift away and be gone like him.
“You silly, selfish bitch,” Linda said. Rising from the table, she looked down at our mother, who released a deep sob at her words. Linda’s features glowed with a dark victory, a grimace of disgust and condescension pulled at her mouth. She was a sliver of a girl, thin and narrow as a pencil, but that night she was a titan in her rage and her sadness. Just months before, she’d loved Duran Duran and set the VCR to tape episodes of The Young and the Restless while we were at school. She’d slept with the same blanket she’d had since she was a baby. She’d giggled at all my stupid jokes and stories. That girl was gone, just her brittle shell remained. Then she left us there. I listened to her walk up the stairs, her pace measured and unhurried, and slam the door to our bedroom hard.
I sat rubbing my mother’s back. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry.” It was all I could think to say.
“I did love him, Isabel,” my mother whispered. “I truly did. It just wasn’t enough for him.”
And, even at ten, when I didn’t understand the power of things like love and money and secrets between husbands and wives, I knew it was true. My father was a ghost who walked among us. He was a sweet, kind man, who always had a smile, who always said the right thing, who always gave the most extravagant gifts, who never failed to hug or stroke. But even as a child I sensed that he held the largest part of himself inside, that he was too far away to ever touch. He was like a bright-red helium balloon always just about to loft away-until he did.
BUT I WASN’T like my mother, turning away from signs, closing shadowed eyes against the things I didn’t want to see or know. I couldn’t be that. I’m the seer. The observer. Life is a liquid that sinks into my skin; I metabolize all the ingredients. I ask the questions, hear the answers, extrapolate meaning from the rhythm and nuance of language and tone. In our arguments, it used to come down to words. Marcus, not a native speaker, would throw up his hands, walk away, so angry that I could get hung up on the semantics, the connotations of the words he used, ignoring, he claimed, his true meaning, the argument itself. But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel
“You use language like a weapon, like a sword, Isabel,” he said one time. “Am I your opponent? Will you cut me because I can’t wield it as well as you?”
“And you use it like a blunt-force instrument-imprecise, clumsy, banging, banging, banging to get your point across. You’d use a jack-hammer for needlework.”
“WHAT ABOUT THE affair you mentioned?” Detective Crowe charging into my reverie, bringing me back to present tense. I don’t know how much time had passed since he last spoke.
“What about it?”
I heard him sigh, as though I was being obtuse in order to exasperate him. “How did you find out about it? Did you know her name, where she lived?”
“I just knew,” I told him. “I felt it. Then there was a text message. I asked him to end it; he said he would. I never knew anything about her.”
He tugged at the cuff of his shirt, straightening the line that was exposed beyond his jacket, frowning.
“You don’t seem like the type not to ask questions.”
Maybe I was more like my mother than I wanted to admit, about some things, anyway. But it was different. I didn’t want to know anything about Marc’s lover at the time, didn’t want any fodder for my imagination to spin. Without it, I could just cast her as a bit player, someone who glided across the stage barely noticed. Any detail might have started me weaving her into something bigger, more important than I wanted her to be.
“He met her in Philadelphia. That’s all I know.”
“And even that might have been a lie.”
I shrugged, gave an assenting nod.
“That’s what really got me, you know? About my wife? I think I could have gotten over the cheating part. It was all the lying, all the sneaking around that really irked me. You can almost understand infidelity, right? The whole lust thing-it’s there. But it’s the logistics that make it really ugly, unforgivable. You thought she was spending time with her mother, but she was with her boyfriend. It turns your stomach.”
I didn’t answer because I knew what he was doing. He was trying to make me angry, relate to me and get me talking, commiserating. I’d watched enough television to know this. I’d start talking and some “clue” would pop out of my mouth, or I’d say something I hadn’t intended to, give away something that I knew. Maybe even admit that I’d killed my husband, dumped his body in the East River, killed his colleagues and trashed his business and the home we shared.