Save Me (3 page)

“Listen,” I say. “This has to stop and you know it. You have to take better care of yourself. This is about you leading a long, healthy, and happy life, and you’re not nineteen anymore, not that this would be okay even if you were younger.”
Nineteen.
I think about Michael, my boyfriend when I was nineteen. Last I heard, he was living out West and working for a federal judge. I bet he’s happily married. I bet he’d never cheat. We used to drive an hour south from our college campus to the beach, where we’d put his dorm room quilt on the sand and stay up all night to watch the sunrise. He was my only significant relationship before Owen. And Owen had only had one serious girlfriend before me, Ainsley from New Hampshire. They dated in college and during his first year of med school. She was nice and they stayed friends. She even came to our wedding. My husband’s not—
was
not—the kind of guy who runs around.

“Are you okay, Dr. Mitchell?” Mary Elizabeth asks. I notice the cracks in the corners of her lips. “You seem like you drifted off somewhere for a minute.”

I clear my throat before I speak. “Listen, I don’t want to sound like your mother and if I could grasp your shoulders to shake you, I would, but you need to find a way to blow off steam that doesn’t involve alcohol.”

She sniffs hard. “I know.”

“We can’t keep having this conversation.”

She smirks. I almost think she’s about to laugh.

“What is it?” I ask.

“You do kind of sound like my mother.” She smiles at me. A sorority girl smile. A
Bridget
kind of smile, I think.

I walk to the door, closing my laptop. “You can get dressed now,” I say.

I
almost always arrive home from work before Owen, and while I didn’t really expect him to be here when I head up our long driveway at the end of the day, I’m bothered when I don’t see his car, because where
could
he be? And shouldn’t he be here, begging for forgiveness, fighting for the marriage that I thought we had?

I sit in the car for a moment after I turn off the ignition and lean back against the headrest, looking at the house. On the night that we moved in last October, we drank a bottle of champagne together on the porch swing that we’d installed just hours before. Our muscles ached from the strain of moving and we’d spend the next several weeks unpacking boxes, but in that moment, I felt so settled. People love to use that word to connote something negative—you
settled
, do you think you’re
settling
—but I mean it in the best possible sense. Everything I had ever hoped for, had ever planned for, was working out how I’d envisioned it.

I was a kid who spent hours playing doctor’s office, making patient beds for my Barbies out of shoeboxes that I stacked on their sides in my closet, and I am now an M.D. living in a town that the city limit signs declare is “The City of Medicine.” My home is slowly becoming the exact replica of the magazine pages I’ve been tearing out of
House Beautiful
and
Country Living
for years. My husband—my
husband
—is a man I’ve known for most of my life. He is a lovely, funny, gentle, smart, good, and generous man. Or so I thought. We were on the cusp of the next phase of our life together. It was all happening.

That night on the swing with the champagne, Owen got up at one point to walk the invisible border where we thought we might put a flagstone patio. We talked about where the swing set would go, pointing at potential spots with our tilted champagne flutes. There would be Thanksgiving Day football games and maybe someday a swimming pool. The possibilities were endless.

He slept with Bridget three months later, which makes me think that when I was rattling on about paint chips and rearranging the furniture and making unsubtle comments about the spare bedroom that I wanted to use for a nursery, he had possibly, probably, already met her. Their friendship, if I can bring myself to call it that, was likely well under way.

I finally pull myself out of the car. After I greet Blue and take her outside, I find myself walking aimlessly around the living room. I fold the afghan that Owen’s mother knitted for us after we moved into the house and lay it over the back of a chair. I go into the kitchen, opening the refrigerator and then closing it. Owen’s birthday present is still on the table. I carry it into the mudroom and shove it into a cabinet next to the washing machine.

What should I do? When will I hear from him? Will he call? Do I want him to? I feed Blue, then go upstairs to unpack my suitcase from my trip. I take a shower, using the fancy lavender body wash labeled “stress relief” that I’d splurged on a few weeks ago, as if I’d even known what stress was then, as if I might be able to scrub this thing off of me, and then I pull on some old jeans and a T-shirt and go outside.

Right on schedule, we got married just a few months after I finished my residency. We were living in a small apartment just off Duke’s campus, within walking distance of the medical center, which was convenient because Owen still had two years of training to complete and spent more time at the hospital than he did at home. I was settling into the five-day schedule I’d been daydreaming about for years, and with Owen always at work, the weekends rolled out before me, unrestrained acres of hours to be filled. One spring Saturday morning, I woke up when Owen went to work and couldn’t fall back asleep. I eventually got in the car and started driving with no plan or destination. It was still early, and I could go anywhere—out for a long quiet breakfast to read the newspaper, for a walk in Duke Forest, or even the short two hours to the coast for the day. Instead, I ended up in the concrete expanse of the parking lot of the local Home Depot, deciding that I was going to learn how to garden. Our only outdoor space was a sad, rusted excuse of a balcony that was really a glorified fire escape. I bought a bougainvillea. Little did I know, bougainvilleas are like Hollywood starlets: Without relentless fawning, they wither away. Mine was dead by Thursday.

But I was hooked. Our balcony soon resembled a local garden center, and Owen joked that I was becoming the horticultural version of a crazy cat lady. It wasn’t lost on me that my newfound hobby stemmed from the same place that led me to become a doctor. In both, there’s a certain manipulation of life, a discovery of cause and effect, a doting and hopeful attempt to make things better. And most of the time, you can.

But then, sometimes things just happen. You till the soil, accounting for its composition and drainage, you consider sunlight and seasons, pests, disease. You plant carefully, choosing just the right thing for just the right place, thinking you’ve covered all of your bases, and then, despite everything, you fall flat. The dahlias wither days after they’ve bloomed, the tomato plant produces barely enough fruit for one salad. The same goes with patients. You prescribe the treatment that works for
almost
everyone. You give advice and provide referrals, knowing that you may or may not be heard. Usually, the formula works. Sometimes—as with Mary Elizabeth—it’s not enough. I suppose now that the same could be said for relationships. Sometimes things just happen.
How the hell did this happen?

I have filled a plastic cup halfway with wine and am kneeling, pulling up weeds, next to the family of tangerine-colored tulips that has poked up in the side yard like a gift. It was a lucky accident that the previous owners of the house had once been avid gardeners. There are dignified, hearty boxwoods bordering the house, roses climbing a trellis near the chimney. Blue settles in near me and gnaws on a stick. Gardening has always helped me feel better. Last month, on the day after another one of our go-nowhere baby talks, I spent three hours clearing two of the larger beds behind the house and tilling the soil to prepare it for spring planting, thinking that one of the beds would be a perfect spot for a vegetable garden. Early that evening, when I went into the house, Owen was finally home and taking a shower. I dampened a washcloth to wipe the specks of dirt from my face and after he’d wrapped a towel around his waist, he walked over and hugged me, a long, swaying,
we’re going to get through this
kind of embrace. He kissed me and looked into my eyes and assured me that we’d figure this out. It only now occurs to me how odd it is that his first priority after coming home from a few hours at the office on a Saturday was to shower.

I wipe my nose with my sleeve and move to a spot toward the back of the house, where I’ve wanted to do some sort of pergola and train wisteria to grow around it. I stand there, trying to plan it out, but my mind starts wandering.
What am I doing? Really, what kind of future is going to happen here next week, much less months from now? Let’s say I plant the goddamn wisteria. Will I even live here by the time it blooms? Will Owen? Is it even a possibility? Do I
want
it to be a possibility?

We all know what people say about men who cheat—take them back and they’ll do it again. But Owen’s not a cheater. He’s
Owen
. I can’t connect the two, no matter how many times I replay the scene of him sitting in our family room—our
family
room, how ironic—last night breaking the news about his mistress.

Mistress.
What a stupid word, meant for daytime television and romance novels, not real life. Not
my
life.

This is the problem: I don’t have an answer for anything that’s happened to me. I throw my pruning shears across the yard, as if that will help.

And then I’m walking over to get them, and I hear a car crunching up the driveway. I stare for a minute, looking at his familiar silhouette in the driver’s seat of his Wagoneer and the white coat hung over the back of the passenger’s side. The front of his car—the headlights, the wide grille—looks like a face, sneering at me.

Maybe I shouldn’t just stand here. My heart thumps. My shoulders ache.

Part of me wants to run at him, claw at his clothes, and demand, with all of the anger that pulsates behind my eyes, that he explain to me how he could do this to me.

We lock eyes, and so I stand there, angled toward him—there’s something about facing him head-on. Blue leaps up and jogs toward him, and it pinches at me.
He’s done this to you, too, you know
, I think, watching the way that she licks his chin when he kneels down to scratch her. The back of my throat burns. The aftertaste of the wine I’ve been drinking is suddenly too strong and too sweet.

I’m not ready for this. I turn and go around back. Not a minute later, I hear him following behind me.

“Daph?”

I turn.

Blue lumbers up the steps to me, tail wagging.
Good girl.

“We should talk.”

I glare at him.

“Can we please sit down? Just for a minute?” He twirls his car keys in his hands and then walks toward the old iron scrollwork bench left by the previous owners. I rest against the door, if only to keep myself from falling to the floor. I feel light-headed and it’s not from the wine. He sits and leans on his knees, still twirling his keys in his hands. I notice his simple gold wedding band that we picked out together at a jewelry store in Chapel Hill. He rocks back and forth on his heels.
Who are you?
I think.

“I can’t imagine what this has done to you,” he says.

“What
you
have done to me,” I correct him.

He nods but doesn’t look at me. His voice is even. I can’t tell whether he’s angry or contrite, calm or nervous. I want so badly to hate him.

“I know that it’s not what you want to hear, and I know that it sounds canned, but, Daphne, you have to believe me when I say that I didn’t want this to happen.”

“I don’t have to believe anything.” My voice breaks. I can’t get out
one sentence
before my voice breaks. I swallow hard, as if I can force it down. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“I know you don’t,” he says, under his breath. “Trust me—”

“Please!” I interrupt. “
Trust
you? I don’t even know who you are.”

“I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say,” he says. “But I want to make this better.”

“Do you understand the enormity of this, Owen? What you’ve done?”

Blue is lying on the ground with her paws on either side of her wide head. She looks just like a bear rug, like we always said.

“Of course I do,” he says. “And that’s why I told you, Daph. The guilt has been eating me up inside.”

I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. “Then why?”
Dammit.
The tears well up and I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to hold them back. Forget it. Let him see me cry. He should see how he’s hurt me. “Then why, Owen?
Why?
” The sobs come quicker and harder, straight from my gut, from some deep horrible place inside of me. “Why would you do this to us? Do you know how crazy it is, Owen? How fucked up?”

His head falls deeper between his shoulders. “I know.”

“I need to know why you did it.” I’m shaking. I take a deep breath and try to collect myself. I need information. Information will make this better. If I can understand it, maybe it will fix it. When I put my hands to my face to wipe my tears, we both notice how I’m trembling. I see the way that he looks at my hands. The same thing happened—for entirely different reasons—on our wedding day. We were standing beneath the canopy of a massive oak tree in a grassy corner of Owen’s grandparents’ backyard in the Berkshires. The minister, a family friend, had just proclaimed it:
I now pronounce you husband and wife.
I started to shake, I was so happy. I was trembling, bursting with euphoria. We were laughing as he started to kiss me.

“Tell me how it happened.” I can feel the acid churning in my stomach, corkscrewing through my center.

He takes a deep breath. “We’ve been friends for a while,” he says.

“How nice,” I say. I look up at the ceiling, where the planks are painted a color that people call
haint blue
, a Southern tradition thought to help keep out evil spirits. “Amazing that I never heard you mention her.”

He rubs his hands over his face and then looks at me. “It’s hard to explain. I can’t even explain it to myself. I know that you don’t want to hear that and I don’t expect you to sympathize.”

“I realize that there are a lot of people in my situation who probably wouldn’t want to know the details, Owen, but unfortunately for both of us, I do. If I know the facts, then maybe my mind won’t keep replaying everything I’ve imagined over the past twenty-four hours. Tell me,” I continue. “How did it happen?”

He clears his throat and jingles his keys again. “When it first started, it wasn’t…it wasn’t anything involved,” he finally says. Owen is never like this in an argument. He is direct, even, and steady. I was always the one who had trouble articulating what I needed to say.

“
Involved?
Come on, Owen. Be frank with me. So it was purely physical?” Once it’s out of my mouth, I second-guess how much I really want to know.

“It started out as just flirting, harmless office flirting,” he says.

“Harmless?”

He shakes his head and starts again. “We got to know each other better, started getting lunch every once in a while. And then, in January…”

“You slept together.”

He nods. “Daph, I was so guilt-ridden, it fucked me up so much, I cut things off with her right away.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

He sighs.

“Where did it happen?”

He looks up at me.

“I want to know, Owen.”

“Her apartment.”

“And I was where?”

“Here.”

I nod. I feel sick thinking of myself at home reading, shopping online, folding laundry, oblivious to what was really going on.