Save Me (5 page)

“Have you called your sister?” she asks.

“Not yet.”

“
Oh, honey
,” she moans. I know what she thinks—the fact that I haven’t told Lucy, coupled with the fact that it took me this long to tell her, must mean that I’m in dire condition.
Because if I’m too weak to pick up the phone…
“I hate to think of you in that house all by yourself. Do you know where he’s staying, during this…time apart?”

“I don’t,” I say. “I assume a hotel or something.”

“And you don’t think…” I know what she wants to ask.

“No, he said it was over between them. He said it’s about
him
, and figuring out what he wants.” As the words come out of my mouth, I realize how naïve it sounds, but I have no choice but to believe him, even if it’s only to keep my sanity intact.

“Well.” She huffs. “I just can’t believe this, Daphne. It’s just not
like
Owen.”

“I know, Mom,” I say, as Blue nudges her head under my arm. I hoist myself out of the chair to walk to the pantry and get her a biscuit. “I’m sorry to have to tell you.”

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “Oh, Daphne.”

I’m worried she might go on and on like this, and if she starts to cry, I won’t be able to handle it. “So what were you going to ask me about the weekend?”

“Oh! Well. Your sister and Bobby might be coming down.”

Ah.
She was calling because she wanted Owen and me to come up, too. I bet she’d already dog-eared a few recipes in her cookbooks for a Saturday night dinner for six.

“Honey, why don’t you come home?” she says.

“You know, I’d like that,” I say, looking around the room. “I think it’s a good idea for me to get away.”

“Good, honey. That will be good.”

“I’ll come up on Friday.”

“Perfect,” she says, her voice trilling. “That sounds great. I’m going to call you in the morning to check in.”

“Okay,” I say. I clear my throat. “I’m really fine, Mom. Really.”

We both know I’m lying.

“Just promise you’ll answer when I call this time, honey,” she says.

“Don’t worry about me,” I say. “I promise, I’m fine. And I’ll answer.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t mind breaking the news to Dad?” I ask, praying she won’t offer to put him on the phone. I don’t have it in me to tell the story all over again, not now.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’ll call him tomorrow.”

“No need, we understand. But you can call us whenever you want. You go get some rest and we’ll see you in a few days. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I say, choking back tears. I hang up quickly, before I stumble over my good-bye.

When I get off the phone, I text Owen, telling him that I need him to watch Blue from Friday to Sunday. I’d take her with me but Lucy’s allergic. It’s an hour before I hear back from him. He writes that he can watch her, saying that he was planning to come by the house on Friday during lunch to pick up a few things anyway. I don’t ask where he’s staying. He doesn’t ask where I’m going.

When I’m lying awake in bed later, I find myself thinking about the morning six years ago when he proposed at his grandparents’ farm in the Berkshires, the same place where we decided to marry. Over the four years we’d been together, we’d spent several sunny weekends there, sitting at his grandmother’s Formica table playing cards late into the night, gorging on her famous apple turnovers, climbing into his grandfather’s ancient pickup truck for long country drives. At some point during these weekends, we always pulled their old wooden canoe into the water and glided on the lake, where we’d have the grown-up version of the long, lazy conversations we’d had as kids at camp.

On that morning, he woke me just after six o’clock and I groaned, turning over in the creaky iron bed as he nudged me to get dressed. He coaxed me out with a plaid Coleman Thermos filled with coffee, led me across the wide lawn and then down a narrow path through the woods. I started to catch on. He turned and smiled, laughing a little. The canoe was already edged into the water. A flannel blanket was folded carefully over my seat in the front of the boat.
What on earth are you up to?
I kept saying, and he continued to grin at me, barely saying a word until he’d paddled us out to the middle of the lake.

He knelt down in the center of the boat, looking like a boy with his bedhead, his bare feet, his fraying khaki shorts. He took my hand in his and started talking, saying all of the right things, none of which I can remember now because, in the moment, all I could think was to repeat to myself:
This is happening, this is happening, my God, he’s proposing, it’s happening.
The next thing I knew there was a ring on my finger and we were hugging and kissing and the sun was coming up over the trees and the air smelled grassy and sweet and it was perfect. I loved him. He loved me. It was perfect.

We were married a year later, and after the buzz of being newlyweds wore off, we settled into the kind of married life I’ve always assumed is the universal experience. Our daily lives were like separate parallel tracks, each with our own individual responsibilities and to-do lists, but we were never more than a figurative arm’s distance away from each other. No matter what I was doing, I was always aware of the third life we’d made together. We shared voicemail messages, an address, a laundry hamper. He was always
around
in some sense, even when he wasn’t physically present.

So it’s incredibly strange to imagine him just going about his life without me now—pumping gas, getting money from the ATM—as if our marriage doesn’t exist, when, meanwhile, I’m here, unmoored, flailing, questioning how I’ll make it through the next few hours, much less the next few days. I wonder whether he realizes what this has really done to me. I wonder whether he’s even thinking of me at all.

I kick the sheets off the bed and sit up to check the time on the alarm clock across the room. It’s past three. I lie back against my pillow, cursing the hour, the burning tension pulsing in my shoulders, everything.
Did he notice her first? What was their first conversation like? How did it happen, when they went back to her place? If I’d done something differently, would it have happened at all?

M
om opens the front door before I’ve even put the car in park. When I get to the front stoop, “Honey” is about all she can manage before she starts to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” she stage-whispers into my ear, her nails digging into the back of my shoulder. “I just hate this for you.”

“I’m fine, Mom.” My mother has a distinct and wonderful scent—a mixture of Nivea cold cream, which she’s famously used since her thirteenth birthday, when my grandmother presented her with her first jar, and Good & Plenty candy, which she eats by the handful from the crystal dish that she keeps on the kitchen counter.

I let go of her and step over the threshold into the house, then toss my bag into the same corner of the hallway where my backpack lived every day after high school.

“I’m going to go use the bathroom,” I say, trying to sound cheery and light, like there’s nothing more to my being here than a desire to visit.

“Was there a lot of traffic?” Mom follows me down the hall. I can almost smell the worry coming out of her pores.

“Just around Richmond. Nothing unusual.” I keep walking, down the hall past the spot where my wedding photo sits on a table next to my parents’. I can feel it there. I don’t look. “Where’s Lucy?”

“She’s upstairs napping. She got in late last night.”

“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”

I close the bathroom door and push the lock and stand in front of the gold oval mirror that’s been over the sink since the day we moved into this house. I examine the bags under my eyes, my chalky complexion, and note that I have the unmistakable look of
Someone Going Through Something
. My mother, being a woman who not only keeps a tube of lipstick in the front pocket of her pants at all times but actually thinks to reapply it throughout the day, has already noticed this, surely, and I’m certain it has only compounded her anxiety about me.

When Lucy and I were eleven and thirteen, Mom signed us up for an “Etiquette for Young Ladies” class at the Lord & Taylor at the mall. In a cheerless fluorescent-lit conference room, where an ancient “20 percent off” poster hung cockeyed on the wall, a middle-aged woman in a too-tight skirt spent three hours of an otherwise perfectly good Saturday morning instructing our gloomy table of awkward preteens on everything from how to set a table to how to properly wash our faces. But what I remember most from this
training
, antiquated even then, is the distinct realization, as I squirmed and sweated in my suntan-colored pantyhose, that this was another thing that separated me from my mother and my sister, who had not only applied her lipstick perfectly during that particular lesson but had raised her hand and taught the teacher a new trick about how to hold the tube.

Standing in front of the mirror in my parents’ powder room, I am certain that the next forty-eight hours will mean defending myself against Mom and Lucy as they preen around me, poke the tender spots of my psyche, and make me face things that they, as a team, have surely already decided I need to deal with, regardless of whether I am ready.

An hour later, my sister, just up from her nap, flops down on the opposite end of the couch from me. She stabs a cracker into the log of goat cheese that Mom set on the coffee table along with a pile of Triscuits, the ritual cheese and cracker plate that she puts out every time people are in her house.

Twenty minutes after I broke the news to Mom the other night, Lucy called to check on me, and in a rare moment of sensitivity, she said that she’d meet me in Virginia. She would leave her boyfriend Bobby in the city. (“He’s on my nerves anyway,” she moaned, which irked me, of course, since I would kill to have Owen simply be on my nerves right now.) “We’ll have a girls’ weekend,” she said. “We’ll drink wine, eat junk food, watch old movies, paint our nails,” proving once and for all that my sister still thinks that the cure for a grown-up heartache is the crap we used to read in
Seventeen
magazine and, more to the point, that we really are polar opposites.

“Daphne,” she says now. “I can’t believe this. It’s just…” She throws her hands up in the air. “It’s unbelievable.”

“It sure is,” I say. She and Owen have a normal brother–and–sister-in-law relationship—nothing more, nothing less. Their interactions are essentially polite cocktail party chatter. They pretend to be interested in each other’s jobs. They talk about movies, current events, books.

When we were kids, Lucy was an obsessive reader. I yanked books from her hands to get her to come to dinner and knocked them out of her grip when it was time to get ready for school. I thought for sure that she’d be a great writer someday, or a book critic, an editor, an English professor. But then she surprised everyone when she decided to become a beauty editor at
Glow
, a woman’s magazine. From what I can tell, this means that she spends her workday sifting through the crates of cosmetics sent to her by the manufacturers and zipping around to events at high-end Manhattan hotels to celebrate a new mascara’s “lash technology” (these are the terms that she uses) like it’s the cure for cancer. She is pretty and always has been, in a young Faye Dunaway sort of way, but now she’s as well groomed as a contestant at the Westminster Dog Show, all polish and sheen. Bobby, her longtime boyfriend, is a hedge fund manager. They make piles of money, will likely get engaged within a year, and will live a glossy, superficial existence. It’s not for me, but it seems to make her happy.

“So you took the train down last night?” I ask, changing the subject.

“Yes, after work. You’re lucky to have a car. Bobby offered to let me take his but, God, I haven’t driven in almost a year.” I remember Bobby’s car. He is one of those BMW owners whose license plate references being a BMW owner: BBYZBEEM.

“It worked out anyway,” she says. “I actually like taking the train, and I had a ton of work to get done.”

I’m tempted to ask what kind of urgent beauty editing would require such attention but I bite my tongue. I don’t want to endure a twenty-minute monologue about moisturizer.

“So he did this a few months ago?” Lucy says, stretching her legs out on the couch and flipping her hair to one side. I once heard a story on the radio about a person’s
definitive gesture
—a physical trademark like Bob Hope’s imaginary golf swing, Bruce Lee’s air-punch, Carol Burnett’s tug on her ear. With my sister, it would be the hair flipping, the incessant, never-ending hair flipping.

“Sure did.”

“Ridiculous,” she says through a mouthful of food.

Our mother is in the laundry room, just off the den, not missing a word of this. She is many things, but not a housekeeper, and from the spot where I sit, I can see her folding my father’s undershirts as methodically as if she were packing away my sister’s and my baptismal gowns. I can feel her looking at me. I wish she’d give up the act and just come join us.

“And the girl?” Lucy says, her left hand swiping at her phone.

“What about her?”

“She’s younger? Works with him?”

“Yup. A classic tale.”

“What does she look like?”

My mind flashes to the pictures I found on the Internet. “Like the girls in your magazine.”

This gets Lucy’s attention. “Hmph,” she says quietly, almost as if she’s saying it to herself. She shakes her head. “So he’s confused or something? That’s what you said the other night on the phone.”

“Apparently. I haven’t really talked to him since the other day.”

Mom can’t help herself—she puts down the laundry and rushes over to where we’re sitting.

“You haven’t talked to him?” Mom asks. She sits on the arm of the sofa and clasps her hands tightly in her lap like she’s cold.

“I really haven’t, Mom. Why would I?”

“Umm?” Lucy says. They exchange a look.

“What?”

“If I were you, I would demand more of an explanation from him,” says Lucy. “Not just about how he let this all go down but also about how he plans to fix it. You can’t just let someone walk out of your life like he’s walking out of a restaurant. Not without some repercussions. I mean, you guys have been together for how long?”

“Ten years.”

She looks at me like I’ve just told her that it’s been that long since I’ve been to the dentist.

“I see you’re still wearing your wedding ring.” She points at my hand.

“And?” I
knew
she would say something. “I’m still married, Lucy.”

“Really, Lucy.” Mom pats my hand. “It’s not like they’re getting divorced or something.”

Lucy’s eyes widen. “Of course they are!” she says to Mom, as if I’m not sitting right there. “She can’t stay with him—not after this.”

I pick up a cracker and jam it into the cheese. When I crunch down on it, I immediately wish that I hadn’t. It tastes like glue.

“Nobody’s getting divorced,” Mom says.

Lucy looks at me, obviously wanting me to clear this up for them.

“Guys, this
just
happened,” I say. “Do we have to analyze it right away? Can’t we just
hang out
?”

“Of course,” Mom says, squeezing my shoulder.

“Sure, let’s just hang out,” Lucy says unconvincingly, picking a piece of lint off her top. It is gray and thin and hangs off of one shoulder, reminding me of when we were kids and used to cut up Dad’s old running T-shirts to make what we thought were fashionable late-eighties nightgowns for ourselves.

“Lucy, come on.”

“I just…” She sits up, her spine snapping straight. “I know that I don’t know him the way that you do but I just never would have pictured him doing this. Do you think he’s always been this fucked up?”

“Lucy, this is your brother-in-law you’re talking about,” Mom says.

“My brother-in-law who slept with his coworker!” she says.

“Well, you could be more delicate with your choice of words,” Mom says.

“Why are you defending him?” Lucy says.

“I’m not defending him!” she says.

“It sounds like you are,” Lucy says. “I mean, something could legitimately be wrong with him. You’ve met his dad.”

“Lucy, be nice,” Mom says.

I clear my throat. “Don’t mind me,” I say, waving my hands in the air.

“Daphne,” Lucy says, leaning forward. “I’m just saying, maybe this is for the best. Again, look at his father. Is that the kind of man you want to be married to?”

“You’ve only met Owen’s dad once or twice, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The truth is, she’s right about Owen, Sr. He’s a total asshole. On several occasions, I have heard Owen describe his father as “200 pounds of tough-guy bullshit,” and I agree. He is not even a teaspoon friendly, and the worst part is that he doesn’t have good reason to back it up. I might be more inclined to let his lack of personality slide if he was a veteran with a war story, say, or had a scrappy, Scorsese-movie childhood. But the bottom line is that he’s just a jerk. He owns a sporting goods store with a room in the back where they make trophies for local sports teams—bowling tournament championship cups, Little League plaques, swim team medals. It’s obvious that he has a hang-up about Owen’s choice of profession. I’ve heard the digs—about Owen thinking he’s a big shot, about the amount of money he’ll someday earn. I know that when Owen told him that he got into med school, his response contained more complaints about the cost than compliments about his son’s high achievement. Owen took on the student loans himself, of course. We said we’d take a big trip to celebrate paying them off. We were thinking about Spain.

“Lucy, listen,” I say. “I appreciate your concern but I’m really not in the mood to dissect Owen’s character. To be honest, I’d like to spend the weekend keeping him
off
my mind as much as possible.”

“Fine,” she says, her voice softening a little. “I’m sorry, I’m just so pissed off at him.”

Mom reaches over and hugs me. “We’re here for you, honey.”

Later that evening, I am collapsed on Lucy’s unmade twin bed, watching her examine herself in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door. We assumed these exact positions at least 100,000 times during our teens.

“So what about your friends?” Lucy says. “Have any of them taken you out to get rip-roaring drunk yet?”

“I’m not twenty, Lucy.”

She shrugs and fiddles with her hair, then starts pinching at her cheeks.

“So get this,” she says.

I stretch my arms up toward the ceiling, making a diamond shape with my thumbs and index fingers. “What?” I manage through a wide yawn. I put my hand on my stomach, where the hefty portion of roasted vegetable lasagna that my mother served for dinner sits like a brick. When Lucy and I went away to college, Mom discovered a penchant for recipe competitions. She’s always testing something—a pot pie for a Pillsbury contest, crab puffs for the Virginia state fair. The lasagna (a tomato sauce contest) was one of her first blue ribbons.

“My assistant, who’s from somewhere in the South—Mississippi. No, wait,” she says. “Texas.” I drop my hands to my sides.
Texas. Land of the Glamazon Husband Stealers.
“One of those places where beauty pageants are a really big deal. Anyway, she told me that somebody from home swears by Monistat Chafing Relief for makeup primer.” She laughs. “But it has to be the chafing relief stuff, not the regular, yeast infection kind of Monistat. I tried to find it in the city but they didn’t have it at Duane Reade. Apparently, it’s kind of hard to find. We should go to CVS and see if they have it.”

“What the hell is makeup primer?” I ask.

Lucy’s mouth drops and she glares at me through the mirror. “Makeup primer, my dear sister, is what you put on your face before you put on your makeup. It helps it last.”

“Oh, oh, of course,” I say. “That’s very important.” I roll over and examine the doodads on my sister’s nightstand—an ancient ceramic Miss Piggy figurine that she painted years ago (we loved those craft kits), a mall photo booth photo of Lucy and her giggly girlfriends—lots of hairspray, big earrings. A couple of her books.

“Are you reading these?” I ask, reaching for the one on top—Wallace Stegner. And beneath that, a Princess Di biography.