Acts of Contrition (20 page)

“How
are
we going to handle this?”

I took a deep breath and released it, looked at Landon with pleading eyes, and kissed the top of Sally’s head. “I want you to stay out of her life.”

He stood and walked to the window, placed his forehead against the cool glass, and breathed little clouds of fog onto the pane.

“I want to raise her with Tom,” I went on. “With the other children we’re going to have. I’m asking you to give up any right to her, Landon. I mean, my God, you’re running for attorney general again. You have your law firm. The last thing you need is an ‘illegitimate’ baby, right?” As the word
illegitimate
floated from my mouth, I felt guilty instantly for my little innocent baby, who was anything but illegitimate.

Landon exhaled noisily, furrowed his brow. “Goddamn, MM, why’d you tell me, then? What kind of man would give up his right to his own child?”

“She doesn’t fit into your life, Landon. And she fits perfectly into mine. I’m asking you to let me have her. You owe me, Landon. For a decade of my life when you promised to love me and you didn’t. You owe me. Let me get on with my life.”

Landon covered his face with his hands, and when he removed them his eyes were red and puffy. “I know I owe you,” he said. “But still, what you’re asking…”

“I know, Landon,” I said. “It’s a lot. But it’s not like you want a baby in your life right now, is it?”

“No, God no,” Landon said. “It’s the last thing I want. It’s just the point of it: giving up any claim to a child I fathered. It makes me feel like my good-for-nothing old man, that’s all. A de facto lowlife.”

“You’re nothing like him.”

Landon stared into space, as though trying to will that to be true. Then he turned to me. “You didn’t have to tell me,” he said. “Why did you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “For some reason, I just had to.”

Landon walked briskly toward me, and my first thought was that he was storming out of the room, but instead he lifted Sally from my arms. He held her awkwardly in front of himself, and then he sat in the chair and draped her across his legs. She didn’t seem to mind. Tears welled in his eyes, then he shook his head, wiping them away. “Goddamn, MM. She’s…she’s really
my daughter
.”

“No, Landon, she’s not,” I said. “A daughter belongs to the father who raises her. Biology doesn’t matter. You, of all people, know that. I want Tom to raise her.”

“What if I say no?” he asked. “What if I want to be her father?”

“Do you?” I asked, because I knew from experience that Landon James didn’t want to be a husband, much less a father.

He didn’t. Landon agreed to my terms, and then a few months later he was elected as attorney general. That was when I learned that Landon’s success was my ticket to freedom. The more successful, the more public his career became, the less likely the chance that he’d want anything to do with Sally and me.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Loss of Heaven

THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW ROLL
through like a heavy fog. I’m a stranger in my own home. My children think I’m acting weird. I’m despised by my husband. I can see in his eyes the raw disgust he feels for me, and I don’t know how to act. I’m torn. On the one hand, I still need to be Mom to my kids. They need me to be up and happy and cheerful and here. They need me to be present in every minute of their days. Running away, crawling into a hole, seeking shelter under a pile of thick blankets isn’t an option.

But on the other hand, Tom needs me to be sorry. He wants to see me suffer. He wants me to hurt as badly as he does. And then there’s Sally, my intuitive lawyer-to-be daughter, who is scrutinizing me and analyzing my every move as though she’s a forensics expert, ready to testify as to the competency—or lack thereof—of our family.

The needs of my children are at odds with the needs of my husband. The two are incompatible, and every move I make feels wrong. If I laugh at something the boys say, I feel as if I’m betraying Tom’s pain. If I’m gloomy and quiet for Tom, I feel
guilty that I’m not the mom my kids need. I’m being pulled, and my heart—the anchor that once rooted me against the tugs—has given up, separated from the rope.

Each day Mom and Dad call. “It’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine,” I whimper over the phone. I don’t have the vocabulary to put this crisis into words, can’t craft a sentence around this catastrophe, can’t even begin to explain
what I have done.
On the third day, they show up at my door. I collapse into my mother’s arms and fight for breath, because at the sight of her I lose it and cannot breathe. I want to breathe in, but the cries are forcing their way out. There’s a traffic jam in my throat and just as Dad’s going to get a paper bag for me to breathe into, I fall to my knees and catch some breath. “I’m okay,” I say, and then start to cry again.

For the next hour I cry and my parents hold me without saying a word. I lie across them like I did when I was a kid. Dad strokes my hair and Mom draws shapes on my back. I soak Dad’s pant leg with tears and snot, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe I can go home with them, move back into the room I shared with Angie, organize my shelves of stuffed animals, write in my key-lock diary, and pretend I never grew up and built a life on a lie.

Mom’s loving and caring, but she’s also efficient. “Okay, then,” she says. “Let’s sit up, get a cup of coffee, and talk this through.”

Once Mom has started the coffee and we’re back on the sofa, I say, “I saw Landon.”

“Saw him?”

“I was
with
him.”

“With him…in the biblical sense?” Mom asks.

“In the I-was-a-giant-idiot sense,” I say.

“Recently?”

“God no!” I say, shocked, forgetting that this is their first time hearing a story I’ve known for a decade. “A long time ago. Before Tom and I got married.” I swallow. “Right before we got married.”

“Oh, honey,” Mom says in a sad voice, like she pities her stupid daughter who couldn’t say no to Landon James.

“Did it happen again?” Dad asks.

“Of course not,” I say, offended, but Dad’s question is valid; if I did it once, why not twice?

“And Tom knows,” Mom says.

I nod. “But there’s more. It wasn’t just that I slept with him.”

Mom and Dad look at each other. My poor parents, who raised me with perfect morals, who took me to church every Sunday, who said the Rosary with their girls every night, who focused on family and gratitude and making smart choices.

“He’s Sally’s biological father.” I say the words, and though I said them to Tom the other night, today—in the light of day, not fueled with adrenaline—they seem dirtier, more tawdry, like seeing a seedy nightclub in the daytime. A creepy feeling fills me, like watching the sex scene of an R-rated movie with Mom and Dad in the room.

Mom and Dad nod, rock backward and forward, fiddle with their hands, and pull their mouths into tight lines. “Well,” Mom says. “Saints preserve us. That’s big.”

“I know,” I cry.

She puts her arm around me and I bury my nose into her neck. Dad reaches over, too, and rubs my back. After a while Mom goes to the kitchen to pour us coffee. When she returns, she says, “Her hair. Tom’s hair. You’d never guess that he wasn’t her father.”

“The hair,” I repeat. “Same color as Tom’s.”

“But also the same color as my mother’s.”

“It had to come from somewhere,” I say, because the jig is up and there’s no point saying that it came from Tom anymore.

“My mother, your grandmother, was widowed early with two small children—my older brothers. When she remarried, to my father, he was a widower, too, with a daughter. When they got married, they went on to have three more children—my brother, Mike, my sister, and me. So they had yours, mine, and ours, if you will. But they never once treated any of us different and we never talked in those terms. We were all siblings. We never said ‘your dad’ or ‘my mom,’ and it wasn’t until we were older that we used to sit around and sort it through. We were just a family.”

“I know, Ma,” I say. “I can never remember who belonged to whom in your family.”

“That’s the point,” Ma says. “We all belonged to each other. So much so that we couldn’t remember either. We were just a family, brothers and sisters all the same.”

“I love that story. I wish Tom had known the truth from the beginning. Maybe we still would have gone on with our lives, had our children. But I didn’t play it that way. I was too scared he’d leave.”

Day four of our new coexistence, and nothing much has changed. Tom wakes up, heads to work early, is home in time for dinner. He spends more time than usual outside with Daisy, our golden retriever, throwing her a tennis ball. We barely speak to each other, yet we still sleep in the same bed and all sit down as a family for dinner every night. Pretending.

“Blessing,” I say, snapping my fingers at the boys. Instinctively my four children make the sign of the cross while Tom says grace. Then the craziness begins, and the kids start barking out what they need, what they’re missing. Tom cuts a piece of pork chop into bite-sized pieces for the boys. I pick at the salad bowl with tongs, like playing Operation with the kids: cherry tomatoes for Sally, red peppers for Emily and Danny, just “leafs” for Dom.

Sally pops out of her chair looking for pepper, then Danny pops out of his booster seat.

“Gosh darn, Sally!” I say. “He watches you get up and thinks it’s okay.”

“I needed pepper,” she says.

“Missing the point,” I snap.

Out of the corner of my eye I see the side of Tom’s lip turn up, and I’m not sure what it means: that he’s happy to see the children disobeying me? That he no longer finds Sally’s brand of wit funny, now that he knows of her biology?

Once meat has been cut and doled out, bread buttered, milk poured, dressing passed, I take a bite. A minute later the twins proclaim that they’re finished, even though Danny’s only picked at his food.

“Dom, go play. Danny, sit down,” I say. “You need to eat five more pieces of meat.”

“I don’t like it,” he whines.

“Eat it or no dessert.”

“I don’t want dessert anyway,” he says, blowing my negotiation. He runs off to play.

“That’s so funny,” Sally says. “Danny, who
need
s to eat, is punished for not eating by not getting dessert, and Dom, who eats a ton, eats his meal and, as a reward, gets dessert. So the one who
eats gets
twice
as much food, and the one who doesn’t, loses an opportunity to eat.” Sally’s sitting up proud, like she’s just won a case.

“Yes, Sal,” I say. “I get the irony.”

“So, you should think about it,” she says in her know-it-all voice.

“I swear to God, Sally,” I seethe at her.

“You shouldn’t swear to God.”

“Go to your room!” I holler, pointing upstairs.

“Why?”

“Because I’m sick and tired of your snotty comments. Enough!”

Sally harrumphs and doesn’t budge, and before I know what’s happening, I’ve taken a step in her direction and slapped her across the face.

“Mom!” Sally cries, reaching for her cheek.

“Mary!” Tom says, rising from the table.

“I’m done,” Danny says, dropping from his seat.

“Sit down!” I scream, lifting the little guy and planting him firmly in his booster seat.

“You
hit
me!” Sally yells.

“Mary,” Tom says again.

“He needs to eat his five bites,” I hiss in Tom’s direction.

“He’ll eat if he’s hungry,” Tom says. “Stop badgering him. You need to take—”

“Sally, room! Danny, eat! Dom, go play!” I look at Emily, and she’s staring at her plate. “Finish up, Emily!” I holler.

The room is spinning and my cheeks are hot and I can’t breathe. I open the door to the deck and walk into the yard, looking for Daisy. Rarely have I had the instinct to strike the kids and I ponder why tonight Sally looked like such an easy target
—and I wonder if on a subconscious level I saw her as Landon’s proxy, and smacking her in front of Tom was the same as smacking him.
For you, Tom
. I pray that that wasn’t my motivation; I pray that I wouldn’t do such a thing. But the days have begun to blur and I no longer know who I am, so why not, what would stop me from being
that
person?

“Good God,” I mutter, at last finding Daisy’s ball. I lift it and aim it at the tree but miss by a mile, stupid me with my stupid girl throw.