Save Me (4 page)

“I thought about telling you right away. But it was just the one time and I told myself that that was it. I knew that if I told you, you’d never forgive me, and I couldn’t face that.”

My stomach is roiling. “But you can now.”

He sucks in his lips and shakes his head. “Daph, the thing is, even though it was just the one time, I’m still confused.”

I feel that leg-buckling feeling again. “
Confused?
” I say. “Confused about
what
? About your feelings for her? About us?” The tears start to come again. I blink them back.

He puts his hands behind his head and looks up at the ceiling. “It’s not about her. To be honest, it’s not even really about you. It’s about me. I’ve started to worry that you and I want different things,” he says, standing. “You know, we’ve been talking about having kids for so long and I know how badly you want that, and I know we can’t keep talking about it forever. I keep waiting to feel the same way—I
should
feel the same way—but I don’t. You know, I’m finally where I want to be career-wise, after all of the years of training, and we have the house, and it won’t be much longer until our med school loans will be paid off. I should be ready but I’m not. And I don’t know what to do with the fact that I don’t want the same things as my wife. I wish it were simpler but things have changed, and I can’t keep ignoring the way that I feel.”

I suppose that it should be a comfort to know that it’s not her that he wants but it’s not. “It’s so like you to make this all about
you
,” I say. “Do you realize how selfish you sound? So what, do you expect me to wait around while you figure out what you want, never mind our vows, never mind our marriage?”

“Daphne, I wouldn’t blame you if you left, not after what I did.”

I shake my head at him. “You should have talked to me,” I say. “I don’t care how confused you are, Owen, it never should have come to this. It’s so cowardly, what you did.”

He nods. “I realize how bad this is—the worst thing, really.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.”

“It kills me, knowing how much I’ve hurt you.”

“That doesn’t help, either.”

He takes a step toward me. “Don’t,” I say, raising my hands.

He stops.

“I don’t know where we go from here,” I say.

“I simply need time,” he says. “I need a break, some time away from us to think.”

“A break?” I say, wiping my cheeks. “We’re not fifteen, Owen, we’re married. You want a
break
?”

He nods and turns away from me. He could never stand to see me cry. “I’m so sorry.”

“And how am I supposed to explain this to people? To my family?” We both come from long lines of together-forever Catholics. His parents have been married for forty years. Mine for thirty-nine. We are not the kind of people who
take breaks
.

“You should tell them whatever you think is best,” he says. “I’ll deal with my parents.”

And your mother will probably send you a big care package to nurse you through it
, I think. Joanne is a seventh-grade math teacher whose wardrobe consists largely of dorky “math humor” T-shirts that say things like “There is a fine line between numerator and denominator.” I’ve never seen her angry or upset (which is saying something, given Owen’s father), and she’s an excellent mother-in-law—I’d like her even if I didn’t have to—but she’s always coddled Owen, who is an only child. It hasn’t always made him the easiest person to live with—obviously, especially, now.
He wants a break?

We stand there for a few minutes, neither of us sure what to do.

I want to ask him to change his mind. I want to plead with him, fall to his feet, prostrate myself, beg for my life. Because that’s really what this is about, begging for the life that I thought I had. The image of myself on the ground, the dirty speckled porch, the thought of being eye to eye with the floor—I can’t take myself there. It takes every bit of my will to keep my rubbery legs from collapsing, but I don’t do it. I don’t say another word. What am I supposed to do with this?
My husband cheated on me. He wants a break—from me.
It’s like he’s described a surgery and I’m the thing that needs to be removed.

Blue pulls herself off of the floor and ambles toward the door and then looks up at me, wanting me to open it. There is a scar over her right eye where the fur hasn’t grown back. One night last November, I let her out before bed and a raccoon that’d found its way into our trash cans attacked her. The sounds that came out of her sent me screaming reflexively for Owen, who wasn’t home. She wrenched herself free by the time I made it into the yard, and I raced her to the emergency animal hospital where Annie’s husband, Jack, works as a vet. So there we were, me cooing in her ear while she got stitches and shots, a patch over her eye, and antiseptic applied to the gashes in her jaw.

The next evening, not even twenty-four hours later, I let her out like always, fully expecting her to be tentative and anxious. Her leash was in my hand in case she needed help. But when I pushed my weight into the door to open it, she slipped past, bounding forward, her legs scrambling down the back steps so fast that she cleared the last two. Her tail wagged as she trotted out into the yard and then she sped up and raced figure-eights into the grass in the dim, gauzy moonlight, because, well, why not? I thought about it for days afterward, how resilient she was. How could I not have, when what I see on a daily basis is the opposite, all of us licking our wounds and aching and griping, our big fucking case of
mired down
. I used to pride myself on being so tough. People have called me a lot of things over the course of my life—single-minded, tightly wound, ambitious—but never meek, never doormat, never victim. How on earth will I ever recover from this? How will
we
?

“I need to get a few things out of the house,” Owen says as I’m going inside. I start to ask where he’s staying but then I change my mind. I don’t want to know. I go to the kitchen. He goes upstairs. And then, while I’m filling Blue’s water dish, I hear his car, and he’s gone.

A
nnie and I are watching a waitress at the end of the bar. On her tray is a bottle of wine and four stemmed glasses, two fat tumblers of something dark and alcoholic, and if she can squeeze it on, a pint with a local microbrewery’s logo.

“Damn,” Annie says, chuckling as she turns back to me. “Are Mary Elizabeth and her girlfriends here?”

“Oh, Annie,” I gasp. “You’re awful.”

She shrugs and makes a face, and I can’t help but laugh. It feels
so good
to laugh. “You are really a terrible person,” I say. “I’m glad you’re not her doctor.”

“That goes for both of us,” she says.

I shake my head at her and then I stab my fork into my plate and collect one last bite of pad thai. I was actually hungry for dinner, and I know that I can credit Annie with bringing back my appetite. We have spent our entire meal discussing my situation (
crisis? personal tragedy? How does one describe what’s happened to me?
), but she hasn’t forced me to pull the thing apart. I don’t have a next step and she’s not pushing me to come up with one. She doesn’t want me to
cry it out
or
find something to take my mind off things
. She is simply being my best friend.

“Another?” she says, pointing at my empty wineglass with her fork.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “But are you up for ice cream? I feel entitled to be a stereotype and drown my sorrows in a sundae.” There’s a place at the other end of the shopping center.

“Works for me,” Annie says. “And when you get to the part where you need to drink too much tequila and sing bad karaoke, I’m up for that, too.”

I pick up my napkin and wipe my mouth. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

It’s just starting to rain when we leave the restaurant, the kind of fat droplets that leave marks on your shirt. I check my bag to make sure I have my umbrella. Annie loops her arm into mine as we walk under the awning lining the shopping center. If any other friend of mine ever touched me in the way that she does, I might find it strange, even off-putting, but with Annie, it is innate and comforting, and I let myself lean into her.

“Oh, look at that!” she says, pulling me toward the storefront of a gift shop that I’ve been in only once, last year, when I was looking for a birthday gift for Owen’s mom. There’s a window display for Easter, with artfully cut paper flowers, tin buckets spilling over with candies, and sweet handmade bunny stuffed animals arranged in a vintage toy wheelbarrow.
I wonder whether he’s told Joanne yet
, I think.
And if he has, why haven’t I heard from her?
“I bet I could make something like that for the kids,” Annie whispers, inspecting one of the Easter baskets through the glass.

I turn away and watch a middle-aged woman across the parking lot helping an older woman out of a car. They have the same hooked nose, weak chin.
I need to call my mother
, I think. I scan the cars and the people milling about. I can’t go anywhere now without feeling like I have to look over my shoulder. What would I do if I ran into him? Or
her
, now that I know what she looks like? Into people I know from residency, from our old neighborhood—innocent bystanders who wouldn’t know better than to ask the questions that should be innocuous:
How are you? What’s Owen up to?

When I turn back to Annie, she’s staring at me in that same funny way that she did at the office. “Please don’t pity me,” I say. “You know I can’t handle that.”

“Listen,” she says. She stops and licks her lips, considering me. “I’m probably going to regret saying this, and it’s completely the wrong time. But you know, this reminds me of what happened with my mom.”

“I know,” I say, stepping toward the store window.
I really don’t want to talk about this.

“What I’ve never told you is that she left us lots of times before she went for good. Actually, the first time that I remember was when I was in kindergarten.”

I turn to her. “I’m so sorry,” I say, imagining five-year-old A
nni
e in wool tights and a corduroy jumper. “You told me that you were twelve when your mom left.”

“Nope, not the first time.” She shakes her head again. “But it’s fine.” She sighs deeply, her shoulders rising and falling as she exhales. “Actually, it was awful. It was the second day of school and I’ll never forget it. But the thing is, she came back.”

“Oh.”

“And then she left a couple of months later,” she says. “And then she was back. And then she left the following June.” She counts off each incident with her fingers. “And then she came back a few weeks before school started—like she’d been away on summer vacation or something!” She snorts. “She stayed for about a year, but when I was in second grade, she left again. And on and on.”

“I didn’t know about that back-and-forth,” I say. “That must have been awful.”

“It certainly was,” she says pointedly, her tone deliberate.

“Have you heard from her lately?”

“Not since her Christmas card. She sent each of the kids ten bucks. Did I tell you that?”

“No. You mentioned the socks.”

“Oh, yes. The socks she gave me.
Sorry for abandoning you, hope your feet stay warm.
” Her mother had come back into her life, wanting to reunite, when Annie was in college. She showed up at the restaurant where Annie was waitressing, sat in her section, and said she wanted to start over. Annie told her to go to hell. Her Christmas gifts are about the only contact they have.

“Anyway,” she says, “I’ve been thinking about you a lot, as you can imagine, and I guess what I want to say is that it took years and years of therapy for my father and me to move past this, and revisiting the details just dredges up all of the resentment that I have for her, which is why I never talk about it. And while she had other issues—I think bipolar disorder, definitely alcoholism—she cheated on my father from the day that she met him and never stopped. I never actually knew about all of it until last year, when Dad and I got into Jack’s bourbon on Christmas Eve after we finished stuffing the kids’ stockings. Daphne, the way she jerked him around…” She stops herself and shakes her head, considering whether to say it. She doesn’t need to, of course. I know what she’s going to say. This is the
cheaters always cheat
speech. I suppose that I should be glad that we’re getting it over with.

“Listen, I know that Owen’s not like my mother,” she hedges.

“He’s not.” I cross my arms over my chest. I don’t know why my first instinct is to defend him, but strangely it is.

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

I chuckle. “Too late.”

She cuffs her hand around my arm, just above my wrist. “I’m sorry. I know that this is so new and I probably shouldn’t have even brought it up. I just can’t believe that Owen did this. It’s like Jack said last night—he must be sick. Only someone who needs serious help could do this sort of thing.”

I shake my head at her, not knowing what to say. I can’t handle the thought of Annie and Jack sitting up in bed with their books opened on their laps, discussing the drama of my falling-apart marriage like it’s something they watched on cable.

“It’s unbelievable, absolutely abysmal,” she spits, suddenly riled. “He really had us fooled, didn’t he?”
I am not going to get angry with her
, I tell myself.
This is her personal stuff talking.
“Are you sure there weren’t any signs? Nothing at all?”

I raise my eyebrows. “I’m quite sure, Annie.”

She shakes her head, looking into the distance as if this is some baffling cosmic mystery. “My father never got over the way that my mother trampled on him,” she says. “He’s never remarried, as you know. Hardly even dated. It’s taken him years to be able to trust people again. You deserve better, Daphne.”

“I know, Annie,” I say. My face is hot and my heart is pounding. I didn’t need this—not from her, not tonight.
Am I going to be like her dad, destined for a lonely life of bitterness, unable to trust anyone?
No. No, of course not.
“I know you mean well but I need you to stop, because what you don’t understand is that I haven’t even begun to consider the possibility of him
coming back
yet because I’m still getting used to the fact that he slept with someone else, first of all, and that he’s left, at least temporarily.” I don’t add how that very phrase has been haunting me ever since this happened—the
leaving
. Break or not, temporary or not, I was
left
. He
left
me.

“You’re right.” She puts her hands up. “You’re absolutely right.”

I nod.

“It’s just the Mama Bear in me, I guess,” she says, smiling sheepishly. She hooks her arm around my neck, pulling me in for a hug. I wish that I could say that I hug back, but I just stand there, arms at my sides, wisps of her hair tickling my cheeks, and I think, for at least the hundredth time today, that I can’t believe that this is my life now.

I’m halfway into the house when my phone rings. I yank it out of my jacket pocket. I wonder how long it will take for me to stop reacting this way to a phone call.

It’s my mother. I feel the dread roll over me. Telling her is going to be like reliving the whole thing all over again.

“Hello, stranger,” she says by way of greeting.

“Hi, Mom.” I collapse into the armchair in the family room. I have a feeling that I will need to settle in for this. My eyes land on a pile of oncology journals Owen left in a corner of the room. I remember him thumbing through them the night before I left for my conference.

“Daphne, where on earth have you been? I don’t think we’ve spoken in a week.” The thing about my mother’s voice is that no matter whether she’s happy or sad, furious or thrilled, she always sounds like she’s talking over a crowd.

“I know, Mom, I’m sorry. Things have been really busy. I had that conference in Philadelphia.” I thought I’d wait and come up with a right way to break my news—or if all else failed, I could tell my sister Lucy first and she could do it for me.

One of my many failings as a woman in my family is that I don’t enjoy the telephone. I’ve been in the room with my mother when she’s called my sister and vice-versa, and I’ve often felt a distinct envy listening to the long, lazy way that they can connect, chatting about the big salads that they had for lunch or the scarf that Mom picked up at TJ Maxx. Lucy says I’m “like a man” on the phone. “It’s like you use it just to communicate information,” she said once, as an insult.

“Busy,” Mom moans. “You’re always
busy
. I should’ve named you that.” My mother actually named me after a character on
As the World Turns
. She often comments about my approach to work—
You’re so busy, slow down, stop and smell the roses every once in a while, take a deep breath, relax.

“So I had an idea and wondered what you two are up to this weekend,” she says, changing the subject. “Oh, and by the way, I called Owen to say happy birthday but he never called back. Did he get my card?”

I suddenly realize that I haven’t checked the mailbox since this all happened and that tiny departure, that simple misstep from my everyday routine, makes my stomach drop. Everything’s upside down. Nothing feels normal.

“I’m sorry that he hasn’t called you back,” I say, anger washing over me as I say it.
Why should I apologize for him?

“It’s okay, honey. I figured he was just tied up at the hospital,” she says. I hear clanking in the background. She’s emptying the dishwasher.

For a second, I consider lying to her, but I can’t.

“Mom, here’s the thing,” I start.

“Oh God, what is it?” she interrupts. She sucks in her breath so loudly that it makes a crackly sound through the receiver, and I can just picture her, plunking down at the kitchen table and bracing herself for whatever it is I’m going to say. This is the way I knew it would go with her. The second that you mention even the possibility of anything negative to my mother, she goes five-alarm fire on you.

“Mom, I need to tell you something, but promise me that you’ll just listen to me explain before you say anything.”

And because it’s not the kind of thing that I’ve
ever
said to her before, she does. I tell her everything, from the moment that Owen told me about Bridget until last night, when I stayed up until three in the morning, twisted in my sheets, watching a self-inflicted picture show on the ceiling of Owen and Bridget.
Owen and Bridget.
It sounds insane, impossible, even grotesque. Owen and
Daphne
. That’s the way it should be, the way that it’s always been.

My mother doesn’t say anything at first, which is the most obvious signal that this has, in fact, devastated her as much as I thought that it would. “Honey, do you want to come up here for a little while?” she finally says. “It must be so hard, being in your house all alone.”

This is the thing about my mother, and about me. If I could only open up to her, she would give me enough tenderness to cushion a lifetime’s worth of disappointments. Once, when I was home from college, I was in the kitchen by myself one afternoon when I came across a tax form of some sort on the counter. Under her occupation, she’d written in big, deliberate letters: MOTHER. It looked like a declaration, and it’s an accurate one. She is a mother with a capital M. If she’d never had my sister and me, she would have found some other way to take care of people. I’ll confess that I like to think that I inherited at least a little bit of that.

“Honey, I’m so sorry,” she says.

I picture her fighting back her tears, holding the phone receiver away from her mouth so that I won’t hear her cry. In a few minutes, she will hang up and tell my dad. I can see the two of them sitting side by side on the sofa in our family room, matching bewildered expressions on their faces.

“So this other person…” she starts.

“Yes,” I say.

“She knew about you?”

“Apparently so.”

She doesn’t say anything. I wonder whether she’s feeling the same swirl of emotions that I am—anger toward them, fear for me, confusion about the whole mess of it all.