The Instant When Everything is Perfect (29 page)

Harper reaches out a hand, and she leans into his shoulder. Does he know why she’s crying? And if so, why is he being so kind? How does a sixteen-year-old learn this type of kindness?

“What did you say?” Lucien says to Harper when he sees them.

“Nothing.” Harper pats her shoulder again.

“Mom.” Lucien pulls her away from Harper. “Let’s go sit in the living room.”

Mia feels like her brain has been carved out of her head and replaced with air and light. She’s become one of those zombies in the movies the boys used to watch, mindless and evil. An evil adulteress mother zombie.

“Keep walking,” Harper says, and she does, the rhythm of her feet making her solid, the lightness leaving her.

They walk into the living room and sit down. Mia knows she should take control because she is, after all, the mother, however inept. But she doesn’t know where to start. She doesn’t know what words will take away the pain of what she has to tell them.

Lucien looks at Harper and then starts. “Harp called me at school a couple of weeks ago. He heard some conversations. He didn’t know what to do. Or who to talk to.”

Mia wipes her face and looks at Harper, who meets her gaze. “What stuff? Talk about what stuff? About what conversations?”

She asks the questions but already knows the answers. He must have gotten into her email. He managed to find the folder she’d hidden Robert’s messages in, discovering her secret. It must have been something at the hospital. Or he saw her in Walnut Creek. Maybe that day at the restaurant. Maybe that instant by the Volvo when Robert kissed her.

“I can explain,” she begins. “Listen—“

Harper looks confused. “You know? I thought you must. How could you not have noticed? It’s been so obvious.”

Lucien sits back. “When did you find out? Did he tell you?”

Mia blinks, her head light again. “What are we talking about?”

The boys pause and then look at each other.

“Dad,” Lucien says finally. “His affair. With that woman he works with. Karen.”

Mia swallows, tries to look at both Harper and Lucien, but sees nothing except the little lights that keep swirling in front of her. Something inside her body—a muscle, an organ--clenches and unclenches. Finally, she closes her eyes, and the lights slowly fade. Her breath finds a rhythm. Her body stops pulsing.

Of course. Of course. Karen. All Ford’s late nights and sudden business trips. Of course.

Mia bites down on her lip and opens her eyes. Ford, her husband of twenty-two years, is with another woman. Ford. Her husband. So much betrayal.

She struggles to find the appropriate feeling. These words should burn and twist and scratch. She should feel the deep, keening pain. But the pain is not there. It’s not there because for so long, she’s lived in the tunnel of her own secret, a separate place in her brain, the place where she’s admitted that she’s no longer in love with her husband. the place she goes to when they make love and her body does not respond. This tunnel is the place of fantasies of other men, of hopes for another life. The tunnel is where she meets up with Robert, again and again and again.

At Harper’s and Lucien’s words, the wall between where she kept her “real” life and her secret tunnel collapses, and she knows, more than anything, she’s relieved. Free.

Her sons watch her carefully, and she knows she owes them the truth about her own life. But how to tell it?

“This is a family problem,” Lucien says, the exact words the counselors always told them during his drug rehab.

“A family disease. The denial. The excuses. The problems,” the counselors said, righteous eyes on all the parents who had somehow missed the signs: the drop in grades, the listlessness, the weight changes, the new friends. “Don’t blame the children solely. You all have to take responsibility for this.”

But how could Ford’s and her own adultery have anything to do with anything the children have done?

“Yes,” Mia says finally. “And no. None of this is your fault, either of you. It’s about your father and me.”

Lucien shrugs, turns his head away. “I didn’t help.”

“No, Luc,” Mia says, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not about you.”

“But it effects us, Mom,” Lucien says. He crosses his legs, and for a second she imagines he will take out a notepad and pencil.

“I know.”

“You didn’t notice?” Harper looks like he’s about to cry, his eight-year-old boy face slipping through the new solid bones of his sixteen-year-old one.

“I think I did,” Mia says, finally feeling the pain she needs to feel. The pain she should feel. Harper is the person who will be torn up by what is happening, the last boy, the person who will need to jump from the sinking ship. He is the innocent, the unknowing, the one who will wish it could be fixed. For a second, she imagines that she feels her breasts let-down, the prickly tingle of milk flowing to the ducts. When the boys were nursing, their cries, whines, upset would cause her milk to flow, drenching her blouses and shirts.

“His diaper is just wet,” Ford would say. “He’s not hungry. He just ate.”

But it didn’t matter; Mia’s body responded to any discomfort, any pain. Like now, but Harper is almost a man, and somehow, he is going to have to survive this on his own.

“Did you notice, Mom?” Lucien asks into her pause.

Mia nods. She did notice. His refusal of counseling; his urgent lovemaking; his attempts to tell her something. His appearance at the reading in Emeryville, such a shock after a couple of years of no-shows. She felt responsible for him as he leaned against the far wall, needing to make him feel at home as he listened to her, watched her, waited for her. And she had to admit that it felt good to see him there, his dark eyes—the eyes that had always seen her—taking in her show, her talent, her shtick.

But all of the lovemaking and attention were a smoke screen for the understory, the true narrative of his desires. And her own.

“Are you okay?” Harper almost whines. “Should we have told you? Is it going to be all right?”

Mia reaches out and strokes his face, his skin smooth despite a whisk of stubble. “I don’t know if it’s going to be all right, sweetie. I don’t know what all right is now.”

Lucien leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “There’s something I never told you.”

She shakes her head, wondering if she can bear another truth, especially one from her own child. But Lucien, his gaze on his shoes, doesn’t see her indecision.

“That last LSD trip? You know, the one with the musical notes?”

Mia nods. How could she forget his psychotic reaction in this very living room, his belief that he was the creator of all things and the rest of humanity was nothing but musical notes that emanated from him. For hours, he begged them to call Gert Rouffler-- a colleague of Mia’s in the music department—to come to the house to prove his point until finally, Lucien came down off the drug and remembered they were all simply flesh.

“So, when I looked at you and Harper and even my own arm, I saw that we were like the same sound, the same pulsing color. Sort of a red. Dad was like a blue, and he wasn’t merging with the rest of us, kind of held back, the sound low and far away.”

“Lucien,” Mia begins, but he holds up his hand.

“I know, I know. You think it was only a hallucination. My whacked out brain. But I saw it. I saw what was happening back then.”

Lucien has been clean for three and a half years. For three years Ford hasn’t gone to her readings. For three years, he’s been working late. For three years, he’s been trying to tell her something she hasn’t been able to pay attention to.

She thinks of Ford’s hastily taken off ties, looping the kitchen counter night after night after night. He must be waiting for Harper to leave for college. He must make love to her out of anger and fear and because she is there—to keep her there until it’s safe to leave.

Mia rubs her forehead and then pushes her hair back, thinking as she does of Robert, his smooth, thick hair.

“I know this was hard to talk about,” she says, “but I need to talk with your father, just he and I.” Mia holds up her hand as Lucien starts to protest.

“Luc, it’s ours. You and Harper go out. See a movie. I’ll call your father as soon as you leave.”

“Mom,” Harper says, “you don’t have to.”

“Harp!” Lucien says.

“You don’t. Or it can be like your story, with Rafael and Susan. You know, how it ends on the deck. The way it ended?”

“You read it?” Lucien says to his brother. Then he looks at Mia. “It was that story--that’s why I thought you might know.”

Again, it’s obvious. She’s known everything all along, her stories like volcanoes bringing everything to the surface. At night in bed with Ford, she must have stolen into his dreams, his brain waves, taking in all the information she needed, just enough so she could find Robert. But not too much--who wants to see the destruction, feel the fire? Who wants to live through the time when the dead have to be buried, the village rebuilt?

Mia stands up, looks at her handsome, dark boys on the couch, the two who sought to save her.

“You go. I’ll call your cell phone later,” she says, and then she walks away, down the hall to her bedroom to call her husband.

Ford is pale, his tie clamped tight against his neck. He sits at the kitchen table, his hands folded as if in prayer. For a second, she thinks of how he used to sit at their first dining room table, so serious, reading a textbook or editing an essay. Back then, she’d walk into the room, and he’s look up, smile, say, “What’s up?”

But now he doesn’t smile or even really look at her. He sits back and then leans forward again, running his hand through his hair.

“Lucien came home from school to tell you?”

“Harper called him last week. He didn’t know what else to do.”

Ford shakes his head, shifts, stands up, sits down. “Shit. Shit.”

Mia can’t say anything, but knows that shit is exactly the right word.

“Really, I wanted to tell you. I’ve been trying to tell you.” Ford watches her.

Mia stares back at him and knows he’s not lying.

“Ford,” she begins.

“No.” He stands up again, walks into the living room and then back. “I wanted—I thought maybe I could . . . And there’s Harper. He only has two more years of high school. I thought I could make it. And maybe I thought that one day—it would just be over. I’d be here, at home, with you. It’s not like I don’t love you, Mia. It’s not like it’s been bad.”

“Ford.”

He blinks, and she almost cries out. How many times has she seen him looking at her just like this, full of surprise and indecision? Through college and job problems and moves to new houses; when she was in labor, especially with Lucien, the whole event wondrous and strange. There he’s always been, Ford in front of her, his shoulders straight, his mouth slightly open, his entire gaze begging her to give him the answer.

“I’ve been seeing someone, too,” she says.

His body sags; he covers his eyes, sits back down in the chair. For a long while, he is silent, his eyes cast down, his breathing slow and deep.

“What have we been doing, Ford?” she asks finally. “Why have we let it go so long? Why don’t we know each other any more?”

“I know you,” he says quietly.

“But I didn’t know this about you, the part that counts.”

A breeze pushes past the open window, and a squawk and flutter of purple finches fills the air. Mia runs her finger over the oak table, waiting for an answer to her own question.

“I don’t know what happened,” Ford says softly, wiping his face. “Maybe we forgot how to know each other. Maybe—“

“You never wanted to go to counseling.”

“It was too late. Way too late. I didn’t think it would be—“

Mia interrupts, not wanting to hear aloud the truth, the idea that for so long, something was wrong. “Are you in love with her?” she says.

Ford breathes in again, deeply, the sound wet and sad in his lungs. He nods. “You?”

She wants to tell him yes, but when her mouth moves on the word, she sees Robert’s email in her mind, sees
won’t work out
. “I don’t know.”

“Who is it?” Ford’s eyes narrow, and Mia remembers his old love for her, a possessiveness pinching his face.

Mia looks at Ford, starts to cry, letting her tears fall onto the table. “One of my mother’s doctors.”

He sits back, breathing in. “So it just started.”

She shakes her head. “It could have started earlier, with someone else. It hasn’t been right with us for so long.”

He wants to argue, lifting his hand, but then he doesn’t. He sighs. “I know,” he says finally.

Outside, Mia hears a squabble of squirrels, a high pitched chatter, a scramble of claws. She suddenly feels like joining the animals, scrabbling up a tree, jumping away from the house, Ford, all of this. She hates that her long marriage can end this quickly, in one conversation, on a sunny afternoon.