Before He Finds Her (28 page)

Meg herself had turned it into a game. One morning at breakfast, she smiled at Allie, who said, “Are you happy?” And Meg said, “Little happy.” Then she widened the grin and said, “Big happy!”

They’d practiced that morning over their frozen waffles, mother and father and daughter: They made sad faces—“little sad”—and really, really sad faces—“big sad.” Ramsey asked Meg what “little mad” looked like, and Meg scrunched her face into a scowl. Then, unprompted, she whacked the tabletop with her open palm and shouted, delighted, “Big mad!”

They played this game at random times in the day. And sure enough, before long Meg’s tantrums started becoming less frequent and less violent. When she’d start to show signs of a meltdown, Allie or Ramsey would ask, “Are you mad right now?” and even if Meg admitted to being “big mad,” the naming itself, the awareness, nearly always had the effect of letting some steam out of the pressure cooker.

Ramsey seemed to take special pride in this particular act of parenting. But as with everything else, the solution was only temporary, and Meg’s temper these days was as unpredictable as ever. Thankfully, though, after several high fives with strangers, a trip to the stage between songs, where she insisted on precisely three hugs with Daddy, and a fruitless search for the moon, Meg finally looked up at her mother and asked the magic question—“Where are the stories?”—which required the proper answer—“On your bookshelf”—which meant that Meg would now deign to be led up the porch steps toward the back door and into the house.

Allie welcomed the routine activities of Meg’s approaching bedtime. It was already past 7:30, so she skipped the bath, but she gave her daughter’s face a good scrubbing with a washcloth, helped her brush her teeth, and changed her diaper. A flash of guilt jabbed Allie. She should have started the toilet training by now. There was a girl Meg’s age down the street who... But this was a project that Allie needed to gear up for, and... Okay, she promised herself. Next week.

Pajamas on, stuffed animals properly arranged in the crib (Shouldn’t Meg be sleeping in a real bed by now?
Another guilt- jab), stand-up fan turned on for white noise. The fan somewhat drowned out the music in the backyard. With any luck, all the excitement would tire Meg out. A last sip of water (from an actual cup—at least Meg no longer relied on sippy cups), and then mother and daughter sat side by side on the wide rocker and read two books. Then one more.

Sure enough, with the last book, Meg was leaning her head against Allie, her eyes heavy. When the book was done, Allie stood up with Meg in her arms and, as always, quietly narrated the day.
We played with puzzles, we watched the beginning of
The Little Mermaid
, we ate special cheese with apples for lunch, we played at the park, we rode around the block in our stroller, we played in the yard, we had a picnic and listened to Daddy’s band play music. We had a good day, my beautiful girl. And now it’s time for bed.

Allie shut off the bedroom light. Then one last kiss, and—
sweet dreams, baby
—she gently lowered Meg into the crib. Meg immediately rolled onto her side, a good sign, and didn’t make a peep as Allie eased the door shut, keeping the knob turned so that when it latched, there would be no click.

Most nights, Allison would sit in the hallway outside Meg’s door and listen to her daughter talk to herself for five or ten minutes before dropping off to sleep. It was one of Allie’s favorite times of the day, listening to her daughter’s intricate monologue of stories real and imagined, sometimes with bits of songs mixed in.

Tonight, the only sound was the fan’s gentle hush, so she walked down the hallway to her own bedroom and lay down fully clothed on the bedspread. Her body instantly relaxed, and she felt her eyelids getting heavy. Then she noticed that everything had become quiet. For a moment she thought that she’d been asleep for hours and that the party had ended. She looked over at the clock—8:20 p.m. She’d slept for only a few minutes. The band must have gone on its set break.

She lay there for another minute, then rose, used the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and went back downstairs and outside to the yard. Fewer than twenty people remained. A few of them were sitting with their cups of beer on the grass around the fire pit, which now blazed, sending smoke across the yard. The smell sent her back to being a young girl, camping with her parents and members of the church. She’d loved the woods, loved cooking hot dogs and s’mores over the fire, but she knew that sooner or later the marshmallows and chocolate would be put away and her parents and their friends would begin their stern talk of Satan’s treachery. There would be hours of prayer and public repentance. Yet even that she found herself missing, at this moment.

She collected a few abandoned cups from the grass, a few plates and napkins, and put them into the trash bag by the grill. No one seemed to notice her. Ramsey stood with Eric near the stage, talking and periodically glancing upward. Now that the sun had set, the sky was quickly darkening to purple.

She had to leave him. The hows and whens could be sorted out later, but theirs was not a marriage with a future. When she awoke from her brief sleep, she did so with a clear picture of how this would all play out. Ramsey would wake up tomorrow, shocked that his superconjunction was all a bunch of nonsense. He’d find some excuse to get back on the road sooner rather than later. While he was gone, Allie would get down to logistics: hire a lawyer, find a place where she and Meg could stay if Ramsey refused to move out of the house... whatever the details were, she’d tend to them. It would be hard, but her life with Ramsey on the road all the time had only been half a marriage anyway. How could they not grow apart when their home was merely Ramsey’s mailing address? When he didn’t know the names of any of Allie’s coworkers or what Meg had tried eating for the first time or some new thing that she’d said? When he had no clue what it meant to work a full day and then be on all night with a baby, a toddler, day after day after day? When he didn’t understand what her promotion to Assistant Director of Sales, Mid-Atlantic Region meant to her because he hadn’t bothered to ask? Or that maybe she didn’t necessarily want to have sex with him the minute he came home from a week on the road, because she was exhausted from having been a single parent all week and needed some time to reconnect with Ramsey, to remind herself that this was her husband and not just some acquaintance with a key to the front door.

Not that
that
had been an issue lately. Since June, in a relationship in which any emotional or intellectual connection had long since dissolved, the last vestige of their nominal marriage—the occasional late-night screw—had vanished as well. But that wasn’t a reason to stay. It was a reason to go.

Superconjunction
. Give me a break.

Yes—when he was off on his next cross-country haul, she’d end the sham.

And while she was at it, she’d end a second sham, too.

19

If Allie needed confirmation that her decision was the right one, she didn’t have to wait long. Just a few minutes later, the band returned to the stage, and Ramsey walked up to the microphone.

“I want to thank you all again for taking the time to be here on this beautiful and important evening.” Another glance up at the sky. “The beautiful part I think is clear enough. But why ‘important,’ you ask?”

Good lord, she thought. She knew what was coming, because she’d heard the same lecture back in June.

“No, Ramsey.” She came forward, right up to the front of the stage, cutting him off. He looked down at her, and she lowered her voice so that only he could hear. “Nobody wants to hear that. They came for a party. For good music. That’s what they’re here for.”

Chastising while also placating—something she did with Meg. But Ramsey wasn’t a toddler, and come tomorrow he would have to carry on with his life. Even if Allie were to leave him, he’d still have a daughter and a job. So it was important that he keep it together, or at least keep up the appearance of keeping it together—for his own sake, and also for hers. She could do without the Miller house being a topic of juicy neighborhood gossip.

Ramsey seemed to weigh her words. “Allie, these people have a right—”

“No, they don’t.” Because he was standing a few feet above her, the closest approximation to an intimate gesture she could manage was to lay a hand on his shoe. “And what does it matter, really? You wanted to throw a party to make everyone happy, right? Then do that.” She kept her voice barely above a whisper. “Play your music. Make them happy—don’t freak them out.”

He looked up at the sky for longer this time, but not for dramatic effect, Allie could tell. Out of concern. She couldn’t tell, however, if the concern was because of what he believed was going to happen or because it wasn’t happening yet.

He stepped back to the microphone.

“In simple terms,” he said, glancing again at the sky, “the real show tonight won’t be coming from the stage.”

She rushed across the yard, headed for the side gate and the freedom beyond, her eyes blurry with tears.

“Now, we can’t do a thing to prevent it,” she heard as the gate clanked shut behind her. “But that’s okay.”

She stood on David Magruder’s front stoop, wishing she had a mirror to see how awful she looked. Maybe better not to know. Her eyes burned from crying and from the fire pit smoke.

The music in her backyard had started up again on her walk over, so Ramsey couldn’t have spoken for long. Long enough, though. Jesus. She rang the doorbell and waited. An outdoor light came on, and then the door opened, and seeing David in his T-shirt and those starched jeans, an expression of immediate concern on his face, made her well up all over again. She stepped into his house and embraced him, fighting the urge to full-out bawl. She clung to him tightly, breathing in his scent, feeling grateful to him for simply letting this moment linger while mosquitos and moths and humid air rushed into the house. When she released her grip, he took a half step back, looked her over, and said, “Tough day?”

Her response was a half laugh, half sob, and a split-second decision to end the second sham first. She moved forward again, into him, and kissed David on the mouth. Unlike their kiss of twelve weeks earlier, this one was for real, close and lingering, and when they separated again, the look of surprise in David’s eyes was comical and lovely.

“I think you’d better come in,” he said, looking somewhat dazed.

He shut the front door and turned on a hallway light. Despite how close they’d become, she’d never set foot inside David’s house before. His wife wouldn’t be home tonight. Allie knew that. She was counting on it. When David and Jessica married, she maintained her Greenwich Village apartment, where she stayed when she worked late at the network. Every Sunday night she slept there to get an early jump on the week.

Allie knew this and many other things about David’s life because they were close. They were confidantes. Everything, really, but lovers. She knew, for instance, that he’d been second-guessing his marriage almost since the wedding.
She isn’t a warm person
, he once told Allie.
Not like you are
.

He’d been a little drunk the morning he said it, but being drunk didn’t make you lie—if anything, it encouraged truth-telling.

They met for breakfast sometimes, when Allie had a gap between dropping Meg at day care and her first appointment with a physician’s office. Jessica was usually out of the house at dawn to get to Manhattan, and Allie was pretty sure that David’s wife knew as little about these breakfasts as Ramsey did. But that was David’s concern, not hers. And anyway, there was nothing to hide.

On that morning, Allie had argued with Ramsey over which level of day care to put Meg into. He wanted her to stay in the younger group, the Ladybugs, but for no good reason, and this tiff—it was hardly more than that—made her seethe. He wasn’t home enough to have the right to weigh in. He was dealing in abstractions about
what’s best
, while she was dealing with their daughter. Anyway, at one point she said,
Fuck you, Ramsey
—-something she’d never said to him before. There were worse offenses between husbands and wives, she knew, but they had both grown up in hostile households, and civility was something they had long ago promised each other. She was immediately sorry, but Ramsey’s response—to get up from the table and leave for a week without so much as a good-bye—refueled her fury, which battled her guilt to the point where no way could she meet with that dermatology group in Wall Township at 9 a.m. No way could she put on a tight business suit and act bubbly and informative while overstating benefit A and downplaying side-effect B. Their new, hot product was an “exciting new treatment” for psoriasis called D-Derma. In the trunk of Allie’s car were D-Derma mugs, pens, and mouse pads. On none of this swag did it mention that the cream could, in some instances, cause liver damage.

No, the dermatologists could wait. She canceled her appointment, phoned David, and made breakfast plans.

Something in her voice (even she could hear it) made him add, “I’ll pick you up.” In the past, they always drove separately, despite living in the same neighborhood.

On the ride to the diner, she told him about her argument with Ramsey. The moment they were seated at the diner, David ordered two Bloody Marys. When their food arrived, Allie backed off ordering a second drink—the first was potent enough, and there were afternoon appointments to be awake for. But David ordered another.

“This breakfast is actually a celebration,” he said.

“It is?”

“Indeed.” Then he told her his good news: He’d been promoted at the station. Now, in addition to weather, he’d be reporting select news stories on air.

“David!” She smiled. One of his hands was resting on the table. Instinctively, she reached across and took it in hers. “That’s amazing.”

Though trained as a meteorologist, he’d always wanted to do more than report the weather. He saw himself, someday, somehow, anchoring or producing one of the New York network newscasts.