Best Kept Secret (6 page)

“Good night,” I said, pushing back from the table. I strode down the hall and slammed our bedroom door behind me, making it clear I didn’t want him to follow. I lost sleep that night and several more after that, wondering if I had enough strength to pull my marriage out of the rut it was in without the help of my husband.

A month later, he volunteered to head up a project that would require twelve-hour days and working weekends, too.

“Weekends? Really?” I said, struggling to keep the petulance out of my voice. Martin typically took Charlie to the park for at least a few hours on both Saturday and Sunday so I could have uninterrupted time to work.

“Leading this project is huge, Cadee,” he said. “Opportunities like this don’t come along very often. It gives me a chance to move up.”

“How long will the project take?” I asked. I didn’t recognize this man standing before me. What had happened to the Martin I fell in love with? In his determination to provide for his family, he appeared to have lost track of something infinitely more important—spending time with us.

“Six, maybe eight months.”

I sighed. “God, Martin.”

His jaw tensed; the muscles worked like tiny gears beneath his skin. “It’s my job. I can’t help it.”

I nodded tightly, telling myself I’d find a way to make it work. I continued to write, though with days filled with carting Charlie to the park and the play area at the mall to help wear out his raging toddler energy, I rarely met my goal of completing five articles a month. I did some short online pieces, trying to build a more varied customer base with quicker turnover when it came to getting paid, but for the most part, writing evolved into more of a hobby than a career—something I slipped into the cracks around my real job of being Charlie’s mom.

That first project came and went, and Martin was promoted to a management position and was asked to start speaking at regional technical conferences. He’d let me know maybe a day or two before he had to travel, though there were a couple of times I had no clue he was leaving until he pulled out his suitcase from our closet.

“I’m sorry I forgot to tell you,” he said, blaming his busy schedule for this new habit of forgetfulness. I blamed his new obsession with making more and more money, which demanded he
have
such a busy schedule. He bought a custom golf club set and almost every week brought home a different useless gadget from the Sharper Image. He filled our garage with elaborate tools he rarely used and upgraded the stereo system in his new car. He brought home gifts for Charlie and me, too, like a set of high-end pots and pans I’d drooled over at Macy’s and a video gaming system Charlie was too young to use. But having these things didn’t make up for having a husband who was rarely home.

I tried to talk with him. I told him I was afraid our marriage was disintegrating. He told me I was imagining things. He said he was only doing what any good father should. He had it set in his mind that how we were living was fine. Nothing I said, no matter how I said it, seemed to get through.

The summer of Charlie’s third birthday, an important deadline
approached on a profile piece I was writing about a local Native American artist for
Sunset
magazine. It was a pretty huge deal for me to land a contract with
Sunset,
especially at the time, since I hadn’t sold anything for a couple of months. I was anxious to make a great impression and hopefully build a solid relationship with the publication’s managing editor.

I was able to do a lot of my background research online, but needed to visit the artist’s home to conduct the interview. When I called her, I quickly discovered she was a grandmother and she was nice enough to encourage me to bring Charlie along. Finding a time that worked for her was a challenge, and as it turned out, our meeting ended up being scheduled precariously close to the day the finished article was due. The day before I was supposed to make the trip to La Conner, a quaint town about an hour north of Seattle where the artist lived, Charlie spiked a temperature of one hundred and three. I took him to the doctor.

“Is he okay?” I asked. Heavy with worry, the muscles of my face pulled downward. I held Charlie in my lap as the doctor examined him.

“It looks viral,” his pediatrician said. She peeked in Charlie’s ears and up his nose. My son was too exhausted to protest.

“Are you sure? His fever is so high.”

She gave my forearm a reassuring squeeze. “As long as he’s fussing and giving you a hard time, I wouldn’t worry. If his fever hits one-oh-four or he gets too listless and unresponsive, I want you to take him to the ER.”

Panic swelled in my chest. “What’s ‘too listless’?”

“Not eating, not drinking, not crying, not responding when you say his name.” She squeezed my arm again. “It’s only a cold, Cadence. We’ll keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t turn into an ear or sinus infection, but it’s nothing serious. Just keep him hydrated and as cool and comfortable as possible over the next few days.”

As usual, Martin was late that night getting home from the office,
and even after I’d called his cell phone twice and left messages asking him to pick up Charlie’s cough medicine at the pharmacy, he’d forgotten.

“I have to go do my interview tomorrow,” I told him. I stood in the living room, holding my son, swaying back and forth. If I set him down, he cried. If I put him in a lukewarm bath, he screamed. My arms were the only place he was calm. “Can you stay home with Charlie?”

“I can’t,” Martin said. “I have a huge presentation in front of the executive team. I can’t miss it.”

“And I can’t miss this interview,” I said. “I’m on deadline. I haven’t asked you to skip one day of work since Charlie was born, Martin. Have I?”

“If it were any other day, I’d say yes,” he said, avoiding eye contact and my question. He fiddled with the remote control, trying to figure out how to get the screen off the
Rolie Polie Olie
DVD I’d put in to entertain Charlie.

“So your job is more important than mine?” Charlie’s skin was sweltering, his breath hot and slow against my neck. I was fairly certain he’d fallen asleep again.

He set the remote down hard on the coffee table and finally looked at me. “My job pays the bills.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said, seething. “Because I make less money, my work isn’t as significant as yours?”

He didn’t blink. “You can’t live off what you earn. So yes, in the grand scheme of things, I’d say it’s less significant.”

It was everything I could do not to tell him to fuck off, but I didn’t want to swear in Charlie’s ear and wake him up.

Martin saw the look on my face and held his hands up in front of his chest, palms toward me, in a gesture of mock surrender. “You’re the one who wanted to do the freelance thing, Cadee. You know you don’t have to work.”

“I know I don’t have to. I
want
to. Is that so hard to understand?”

“It is, actually,” he said. His blue eyes flashed. “From the minute you had Charlie you were adamant about not letting other people raise him. You swore you wouldn’t be like your mom.”

“I’m
not
like her,” I said, incensed that he would hit so far below the belt.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. At least she had a good reason to be away from you so much. She had bills to pay. You need someone to take care of Charlie tomorrow just so you can go find
fulfillment.
”

I glared at him, fury rising like a wave inside me. “What I
need
is for his father to help take care of him when he’s sick.” I adjusted Charlie in my arms and he whined, rubbing his snotty nose against my bare shoulder.

He gave me a glowering look. “I do take care of him. I bust my ass to make enough money so my wife can stay home with him. Like we agreed she would.”

“Don’t talk about me in the third person,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m not just your wife.”

“No, you’re a mother, too,” he shot back. “Shouldn’t your child be more important than some stupid interview?”

“Shouldn’t your child be more important than some stupid presentation?”

He fell silent after this, visibly fuming to the point that his body shook. I didn’t know how he could discount my work like this. I felt torn enough already, needing to leave Charlie when he was ill. His father was the logical choice to take care of him. I didn’t think it was too much to ask.

After a few minutes of silence, Martin spoke with an exasperated sigh. “Can’t you reschedule your interview?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Can’t
you
reschedule your presentation?”

Round and round we went. In the end, I gave in and asked Alice to watch Charlie for me, enduring her reproachful stare while I explained why it was so important I make it to the interview. Charlie and
I both sobbed when I left him, and while I managed to finish the article, I had a hard time forgiving my husband for the things he’d said.

Still, I told myself, this was a normal way to live—that every family was busy, that most couples struggled with spending enough time together and finding balance between work and family life. All mothers had to make sacrifices. When Jess or my mother asked how we were doing, I smiled brightly and said, “We’re great. Busy, but really great.” I repeated this line enough times in my own mind to believe it was true. But my husband seemed to drift further and further away.
Only a temporary side effect of young parenthood,
I reasoned. He’d come back around and everything would be fine.

Of course, it wasn’t fine. We fought frequently over his long hours at the office and how much he was missing out on at home. “Charlie doesn’t care about how much money you make,” I told him as gently as I could. “He cares about how often you’re there to tuck him in at night.” Martin loved his son, I knew, but he simply brushed off any input I gave him about how his behavior was affecting us. He, however, felt free to dish out criticism about me. As the months passed, his belittling of my career grew worse.

“It’s not like you’re a hard-hitting journalist,” he said one night after Charlie had gone to bed. We were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, once again discussing my need for more time to work. “You spit out cute little essays about what it’s like being a mother or how to get a job. The world’s not going to end if you don’t write anymore.”

Tears filled my eyes and the air stopped short in my lungs at his words. I had to remind myself to breathe before responding. “I can’t believe you would say something like that to me,” I whispered, my chin trembling.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Do you have to take everything so personally? I’m only making an observation.”

It struck me in that moment just how much like his mother he’d become. “Martin, if you think that wasn’t personal, then you’ve
got bigger issues than we can deal with on our own.” I swiped my eyes with the bend of my wrist. “I think we need to see a marriage counselor. We need someone to help us learn how to work through this stuff. We keep going round and round on the same issues.”

He gave me a cold stare. “No,
you
keep going round and round on them. You nitpick everything. If anyone needs a therapist, it’s you.”

Did he really not see we had problems? Could he be that self-absorbed? My eyes went dry and a cold sensation crept into my chest. I suddenly realized that not only was I unsure if I still loved Martin, I was pretty certain that I didn’t like him anymore. I met his stare with one of my own. “Are you saying you won’t even try to fix this with me?”

“There’s nothing for me to fix. I’m being the provider we agreed I would be. You and Charlie want for nothing. If you think we have issues, they’ve got nothing to do with me.”

I did go see a therapist briefly, who agreed that if Martin was unwilling to work on our marriage, it was most likely doomed. I also asked her about Charlie, since I worried about how a divorce might affect him. “Happy kids have happy parents,” she said, peering at me over her bifocals with kind gray eyes. “Witnessing the two of you constantly at each other’s throats could inflict much worse damage on his development.”

Armed with this knowledge, and after a few more months of Martin’s continued denial of our problems, I gathered up the courage to contact a lawyer and tell my husband I wanted a divorce. He was shocked and angry, but surprisingly didn’t put up much of a fight when I asked him to leave. I decided my son and I would be fine. My mother had been a single parent. So had Alice. I had no doubt I could do it, too. Martin was gone all the time anyway. I’d been on my own all along.

The day Martin moved out for good, he stood in front of me in our living room, bags packed. He searched my eyes with his. The fury in his face was so pronounced it almost looked like he was wearing
a mask. He inhaled deeply and released the breath with a hiss, like a punctured tire. My gaze traveled the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the high, smooth forehead, the full curve of his lips. I thought how Mother Nature took the best of both of us and put it all into our son.

He took a step toward me and I immediately stiffened, anticipating his touch. He saw this and stopped just short of me. There was barely an inch between us. I could smell him, the woodsy warmth of his favorite soap, the cinnamon spice of his skin.

“Are you sure?” he whispered.

I nodded, a sharp, quick movement, my lips pressed together in a straight, hard line. A new coldness resided in me after his final refusal to even consider counseling; a chunk of ice moved over my heart and froze any feeling I had left for him. I felt distant, detached. It’s not something I chose, just something that was.

“Okay, then,” he said, turning around to grab the last of his bags. “I guess that’s it.” The door closed behind him and a moment later, though he’d only just left, it was almost as if he’d never lived there at all.

C
harlie! You need to
turn off the television and come talk with me.” It was nine o’clock on a cool June morning, and I stood in his bedroom with my hands on my hips, staring at a scribbled mess on the wall. Only a month shy of his fourth birthday and my son considered himself a Van Gogh, regardless of the medium upon which he chose to display his work.