I can’t really fault my husband, though. Our love is dead and buried. We are together only for the sake of our boy, and we did agree to live separate lives. And I think I wouldn’t mind the affair so much except that recently the tenor of the correspondence has changed.
I know he’s been to see a lawyer. He is careless with his computer, doesn’t realize that I know his password. He wanted to know how much I would get in a divorce. Here’s the worst-case scenario: half of everything (including his family money and inheritance because we were too in love to get a prenup-ha ha), child support (for our special-needs boy), and alimony until I married again (which, trust me, I never will). Marriage sucks, by the way, diary. It’s like a mirage in a desert. Tired, travel-worn, and dying of thirst, we all stagger toward it looking for water and shelter. But when the shimmering image fades, we find only what we brought with us. Which in my and my husband’s case was simply selfishness and vanity.
Suddenly their e-mails are short and cryptic. He’s been away every third weekend, meeting with his agent, he claims, visiting with publishers. But I know they’re together. She sends pictures. And there he is, holding hands with his other son in Central Park, pushing him on the swings. He looks happy, free from the grim frown he always wears at home. I hate him for it. The last time we fought, he called me a succubus. All you do, both of you, is drain and drain and drain. You give nothing.
I wonder if that’s true. Maybe it is. I haven’t been the wife I wanted to be. Motherhood has dominated me for the last sixteen years. But it’s too late to look back in regret. At least that’s what my therapist says. There is only moving forward.
I’m weak. I’d let the whole thing slide. But the violence has escalated. And I can feel his frustration mounting. We have constructed a trap for ourselves. Yesterday, I stumbled upon (while I was snooping in his office, which I clearly do a lot of ) a term life-insurance policy that he has taken out on me. I know, another cliché. But there you have it; I’ve built a life out of them, as most of us do.
When I think of uprooting our son, ending my marriage, and opening whatever Pandora’s box of neurosis and breakdowns such acts would inspire, I can’t. I just can’t. I have no real proof that he’s actually planning to kill me. He hasn’t threatened me. It’s possible that I’m being paranoid.
If I’m right, I wonder how he’d do it. Would he hire someone to break in? Would he find an evidence-free way to poison me? The stairs would be a good plan-most accidents happen in the home. There might be an investigation. He’d be expecting that, I’m sure. He’s a man who knows how things work; he’s canny and wise. He’d have a plan, a good one. He is charming and semi-well-known, a B-list celebrity journalist-or he was once upon a time. He’d walk away from my demise richer than ever and free to be with his new family. And what would happen to our son? How would he fit into my husband’s new life?
He’s so fragile, our boy. Even in his newfound happiness, what passes for us as wonderfully normal. He has friends, a group of funny, funky, artsy, alternative kids. I think he’s been smoking. He’s adopted a kind of Gothic androgynous look, with spiky, wild black hair. And I think I saw just the hint of black eyeliner under his eye the other night when I picked him up from the movies. Like he’d had it on and washed it off. He’s had both his ears pierced, which is apparently the style among a certain set. I didn’t say anything. I honestly don’t care. It’s only recently that I’ve seen him smile, and heard him really laugh. Whoever he has to be to make himself happy? It’s okay with me.
Am I making a mistake? Staying here in this dead and loveless marriage? Am I being paranoid, thinking my husband might kill me? Maybe I’m just creating drama, as he has so often accused me of doing. Should I ask him to leave, tell him that he can keep his money, that we’ll be fine? Maybe that’s all it would take.
Even so, I worry about my son all the time. The other night, when I picked him up from the movies and his friends were calling after him, waving, I think I heard one of them call him by a name that wasn’t his. I can’t be sure, and I certainly didn’t ask about it. But I have been turning it over in my mind. How the name sounded on the air, and how he smiled a little at the sound of it. Then, again, maybe I misheard. But I could have sworn that one of the girls (who I thought might be his little girlfriend) waved her arm wide and yelled, “Good night, Lana.”
PART TWO: lane
27
Why is God so unfair in His distribution of gifts? Why does He give so much beauty and love and wealth and ease to some? Why does He ask others of us to toil, to struggle, to grieve? This is something that has always bothered me. How could He create the monarch butterfly, and the pit viper? Why is the world so twisted, so dark and complicated, so impossible to understand? I was thinking all of this as I trekked, wretched and exhausted, through the woods. I expected helicopters to come swooping in overhead. But, no, there was nothing.
They’ll think I killed her, my father said to me. I’ll go to prison. And you’ll go to a group home. You have to help me.
There was so much blood. When I had knelt down to her, I got it on my palm and I thought about preschool and how they used to brush our hands with finger paint and press our palms into paper, write our name and the year. Mom? Mom? What’s wrong? She was so still and white. Her head was misshapen, flattened on one side. Her arm was twisted so horribly, it looked as if it were rubber tubing. I stood staring, the world around me reeling, and me falling through space and time.
You have to help me, he said again. He stood in the kitchen weeping.
I ran, keening, up the stairs to my room. There had been so many day-mares, so many ugly visions and imaginings, surely this was just another of them. My mom, my mom, mom, mom. I dove under my bed and stayed there. I listened to all the strange noises downstairs, the afternoon light fading, the room growing dark.
Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve.
Later, after her body was discovered, after he finally admitted to burying her, he said she fell from the landing, down to the marble floor below. She must have-or someone else pushed her. But not him.
He hid her body because he’d been having an affair, he said. She’d discovered it, and knew he wanted to leave her. He knew how it would look. He was a journalist, had reported the story a million times. It’s always the husband. He panicked, he claimed. He hid her body and made me help, but he didn’t kill her. Of course, no one believed him.
I helped him carry her body, wrapped in the Oriental carpet she had so loved, out to the car, heft it into the trunk. And we drove and drove, endless miles into endless night. Why? That’s what the police would want to know when I finally, with the help of my aunt and grandmother, screwed up the courage to tell the truth. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this. Why would I help the man I believed had killed my mother? And the truth is as simple as the fact that I loved my father, too. It was my mother who put the stars in the sky, but I loved him, too. Absent, short-tempered, sometimes distant-he was still my father. I couldn’t lose them both. I knew neither my aunt nor my grandmother would want me. I didn’t think they’d take me in after all the things I’d done. I didn’t want to go back to crazy school or a group home like the place where my mother worked. I would rather have slept in my own bed down the hall from my mother’s killer. But of course, I was in shock, too. And I wasn’t the most stable kid on the block to begin with.