The Girl Next Door (38 page)

This was how it would be, if she didn’t take David back, went ahead with this divorce. This is how it would always be. She felt old.

Things didn’t seem so grim the next morning as the bright sunshine woke them. All four of them had slept, miraculously and simultaneously, for twelve uninterrupted hours, and the sleep had worked its magic.

David emailed her constantly. He’d been doing it since the day they’d had lunch in October. She’d called her mother when she got home that day, and told her. She’d expected her to brush it away, but she’d surprised her. Her reaction was fierce and furious. She knew too many women, she said, who’d turned a blind eye to one transgression, only to find themselves the victims of serial cheats and liars. It was her mother who’d suggested the lawyer’s letter.

‘Darling,’ she’d said. ‘I’m not saying you’ll go through with it. But you’ve got to start strong, if you plan on staying. You’ve got to put the absolute fear of God into him. If you’re going to move past it, it has to be on your terms. Completely. And if you’re not, you need to be protected.’

She’d called the lawyer. She’d driven down, and stayed for a week, lavishing attention on her grandchildren and love on Rachael. Rachael didn’t remember a time, actually, when her mother had been more gentle or attentive. It was like she was sick, and her mother had come to nurse her. And she had been sick. Physically ill with the stress of it. In all the time that she was there, Rachael’s mother never once offered an opinion on what she should do long term. She never asked for details or castigated David. She and Milena just took over the running of the home, and the care of the children, and let her concentrate on work, where she was sure things were sliding because she was so damn preoccupied, and on figuring out what to do next.

Her copy of the letter her lawyer sent to David had shocked her almost as much as it had shocked him, although she had instructed that it be drafted and sent.

And then the emails had started.

At first they made her angry. He hadn’t been able to articulate things to her in the restaurant, when he’d had days and weeks to think about it, and now she was expected to wade through paragraphs of explanation and apology and remorse via the computer. She’d wanted a grand gesture so badly that day – it wasn’t until the email traffic started that she’d realized that. She’d wanted him to do something or say something that would give her a place to start to move forward from. He hadn’t come close.

Millie had told her, at the beginning of November, after Halloween, that she had to start being there when he came to see the children. It wasn’t right, Millie said, that the children never saw their parents together.

Being with David in front of the children was peculiarly painful. It was the dreadful combination of the habitual and normal with the new and strange. Mia still hadn’t cottoned on, despite everything, but the boys knew things weren’t as they should be. Jacob had started looking at her strangely when he spoke about his father, trying to gauge her reaction, and Noah had stopped sleeping through the night, something he’d been doing since he was three months old. Most nights now, Rachael would be awakened at 2 or 3 a.m. by the sound of his feet, padding into her room, and the feel of his compact, warm body sliding in under the duvet next to her. She knew she should take him back, but she couldn’t. He comforted her, just with the shape of him. He made the bed smaller.

She hadn’t expected to still be this angry. She was sad, and confused and frightened for their futures. But often, she was just mad. Rage bubbled deep in her stomach. How dare he do this? To her, to them. To himself, for God’s sake.

She knew he was staying with an old college friend, in a loft down near Bleecker. Sometimes the emails he sent came with a lighter tone – an attempt at humour in the bleakness, she supposed. He wrote about doing his laundry, and his inability to ever have cereal and fresh milk in the apartment at the same time. She saw flashes of the humour she had lived with and loved for so long. But really, they were sad.

At other times he wrote a stream of consciousness about why he thought he had done what he’d done. Initially, those emails made her maddest of all – she wasn’t his shrink. But she read them, because she couldn’t not read them. He wrote reams about his mother, and about how he had never felt good enough for her, and how he had never really believed himself to be good enough for Rachael. He wrote about her mother. About the way she’d been with him, in the beginning… as if that began to explain it to her. She thought all night about that one. About the two of them at college, as newlyweds, building their careers, putting together a home. Why hadn’t he felt like he was good enough? What had she ever, ever done to make him feel that way?

She missed him, too. Physically – the very presence of him. She missed him every day, in the spaces of their home, and the faces of their children.

But nearly three months after he’d blown their world apart, she was no nearer, lying on a beach in the Bahamas, or sitting at a desk in midtown or lying in a bed full of memories uptown, to knowing whether she wanted him back or not.

Jason

Jason ate Chinese on Thanksgiving, from a grotty little noodle bar on 67th. He would have stayed in, but there was no food. He thought the fresh air of the walk might do him some good – shake him out of the funk he was in. He felt like he’d had a tension headache for days. His eyes were red and sore. He was the only Caucasian in the restaurant, and the only person alone. For a few moments, after he walked in, the noise of chatter stopped, and everyone stared at him, like in a Western, when a stranger comes into the saloon. For a ghastly moment he wondered whether he’d inadvertently stumbled into a private party. But then a waitress gestured frantically for him to sit at the table in the window, and once his Tiger beer and plate of noodles had been delivered, he was forgotten. He chewed each mouthful far more than usual, and stared at the hygiene certificates on the wall.

Afterwards, he wandered slowly back to the apartment, past restaurant windows, feeling like a pauper in a Victorian melodrama. Families. Families everywhere. He wondered what his wife and child were doing.

He was too tired to sleep. Eventually, at around 3 a.m., he went to the medicine chest in the bathroom in search of something that would knock him out for a few hours. He squinted at the labels on the bottles, almost all of them paediatric. Tinctures for dry coughs and runny noses and creams for burns and cuts, medicated plasters and allergy capsules. Right at the back, he found a homeopathic sleep remedy Kim must have bought at some point. Only one sheet of pills was left in the box. As he pulled it out, he saw, behind it, a pink ovulation testing kit. It had to be years old. He remembered her buying them – she’d come home with the first one really early on in their quest to get pregnant. He’d laughed at her as she studied the leaflet, pretending to be offended that she was attempting to assist his virility and her fecundity. He’d said it was a waste of money – that they didn’t need it.

What a time of innocence that had been.

Charlotte

It was almost too cold in the park today to walk. The air stung Charlotte’s cheeks, and made her eyes water. She was walking into the wind. Veering left, she cut down behind the Delacorte Theater, past the Puppet Theater. Only the dog walkers were out, besides her. The usual Sunday parade of strollers and toddlers and smooching couples had been driven out, into the wine bars and Starbucks, where the heating blasted out. She’d grabbed a Venti decaf latte as she passed by, but didn’t stay in the warm cacophony. She loved the park when it was like this – practically deserted. She couldn’t conceive of the Central Park of a few years ago – a dangerous no‐go area for a woman. She was never afraid here. She was free here. This was her thinking time.

For weeks now, she’d been thinking about Che, and what the incident had meant. She almost laughed out loud at herself – ‘incident’. Hardly. One exchange in an elevator on a hot night. Weird how hot New York had been just a few months ago. The severity of each season made the others before it seem like folklore. The night it was so hot the power failed, and she sat on the floor of the elevator with a man she barely knew but who had been the romantic lead in her daydreams since the first time she’d seen him.

It hadn’t been the ending she’d imagined for herself. It hadn’t even had an ending, she realized, any more than it had had a beginning, not really.

He was in Florida. She was here. She’d never see him again. The sadness she had felt the night she found out he’d gone, the tears she’d shed in Emily’s lap weren’t shed for Che, but for herself. And what she’d lost hadn’t been Che. It had been the ability to hide behind foolish dreams.

Strangely, it wasn’t so awful on the other side of that imagination as she had always feared. At least what she had felt had been real, even if the relationship hadn’t. It had been muddled with the pages of her novels, perhaps, but not entirely fictional. She would always believe there had been something behind his eyes that night. Something just for her. And it hadn’t been strong or compelling enough for him to want to do something about it. And it wasn’t real enough for her to do anything about it – there would be no dramatic flight to Florida, no using her new Spanish to trawl through the Hispanic community there trying to find him. No falling into each other’s arms, weeping with gratitude that the gods had allowed them to be reunited. None of that crap. But there had been something.

On a bench south of the Puppet Theater she spotted the old woman she sometimes saw in the park. The one with the leather corset and the grey plait, and the big, military‐style backpack. The lady who lived here in the park and sometimes ate lunch early on a Sunday morning at the Boathouse.

Who had she loved? Who had she dreamed about? Who did she dream about still…?

The woman made her wonder if everyone felt like she did. Whether, for everyone, the search for love, for a partner, for the other half that made you whole, was the rhyme and the reason and the song. She was so… separate – this woman. So alone. But was it by choice? Sometimes the set of her shoulders, the slightly imperious way she looked at people who were staring at her made Charlotte think so.

Did she envy that? No.

Today, something made her, for the first time, walk straight up to the woman where she sat on the bench and proffer her the undrunk coffee. Maybe it was the cold weather. Maybe it was a test.

‘Would you like this? I haven’t drunk it. It’s still hot.’

The woman nodded, but didn’t speak, and she didn’t look at Charlotte when she took the white cup, or say thank you after she took the first long sip from the lid.

Charlotte felt shy then, standing there, waiting for God knows what. She sidled away, sticking her hands in the pockets of her quilted coat. She’d gone maybe fifteen feet when the woman called to her. ‘Thanks.’ One word, said loud, in a deep, husky voice.

Charlotte nodded briefly, but kept on walking. She knew she didn’t ever want to be that way. To keep fifteen feet between herself and the rest of the world.

December

Rachael

Jacob was in bed with her again. Rachael woke up at 5 a.m. with his warm shape pressed into her back, forcing her to the edge of the mattress. Most nights now it was one or other of the boys – sometimes both. Only Mia – too young to realize what was happening – slept on, as she always had, oblivious and peaceful. This was the third time this week. She turned round and moved him, as gently as she could, back into the middle of the bed. He stirred, and she put her arm around him, stroking his chest and murmuring to him. It was too early. Mia would be up at 6, clambering in and demanding a cuddle.

Her early starts were a thing of the past. She hadn’t run in the morning since she’d asked David to leave – she couldn’t leave the kids alone, and there was no one else at home. In fact, she struggled to leave the bed herself. Her energy levels were in her boots.

Her mother said she was worried. Rachael knew she rang Milena, when she was at work, to talk about her. She attributed permanent exhaustion and a lack of interest in life to depression, and thought a doctor and a pill were the fix Rachael needed. Rachael, in turn, attributed her mother’s diagnosis to a woeful disconnection with reality. She was permanently exhausted because she never stopped, and her lack of interest in life (for which read refusal to drive out to Southampton every weekend) was simply an unwillingness to spend time with her mother. She needed to focus on the kids. She couldn’t worry about herself. Jacob’s class teacher had called last week. She’d asked if everything was okay at home. Jacob’s concentration was off, she said.

She’d taken them to Connecticut a few times, although opening up the house made her sad, and she couldn’t lay the fire. David always did that. She’d sat back on her ankles for ages, building the damn thing the way she thought she’d seen him do it a hundred times. Once it was lit, she couldn’t figure out why the house was filling with smoke. It was Jacob, in the end, who told her she hadn’t opened the flue. He must have been watching more closely.

It was him that she was watching closely. This bed‐hopping wasn’t all. There was the stuff with school. Even at home Jacob was quiet and there was a new neediness she hadn’t seen in him before. He followed her around the apartment, when she was home. He seemed always to need to be with her, almost touching her. She shouldn’t allow the bed thing, she knew. But she couldn’t turn him away. Besides, his presence was a comfort to her, too.

He was stirring again. In the light from the hallway, she saw him open his eyes.

She smiled, and stroked his cheek. ‘Hey, baby – it’s early. Go back to sleep.’

He yawned, and curled up again, resting his cheek in his hand. But his eyes were still open. ‘Is Daddy coming home, Mommy?’

It was a direct question, the first one, really, that she couldn’t avoid answering. Noah and Mia asked for David, but were, thus far, happily mollified with an answer about the weekend, or next Wednesday evening. She guessed their sense of time was different. It had been more than three months. Jacob was starting to get it. She knew exactly what Jacob meant, and she knew, too, that she had to answer.