Monday's Lie (10 page)

He let it go with a sigh, and I trusted the net of patient confidentiality. The net held, but my tightrope didn't.

•  •  •

The birth control pills had been stashed away in an old box of hot-oil hair treatments that I had kept through two moves for no other reason than that I'd paid for them. They didn't work as advertised and left my hair a sad, limp mess, but by God they were mine, a fixture in the landscape of my toiletries. The skyline of boxes under the sink wouldn't look right without it. The carton had flipped over, spilling its secret across my bathroom cabinet's floor when Patrick rummaged for my hairdryer.

It was a completely traceable pain. I could step back through each casual choice I'd made, each assumption that I'd used to cover my tracks to keep it all a secret—my plan and my reasons to stall baby-making. It was so ridiculous that I hadn't thought it through better or even opted to be a better person in the first place, an honest person.

But I wasn't rejecting Patrick. I only wanted more time. And that would have spurred the inevitable question of what in my life needed more time. Then, the answer to that, sadly, meant acknowledging my decision to play to a picture of life instead of playing to the actual game of it as it came. All of which chased the tail of not rejecting Patrick. It was going to be hard to explain, so I figured I could wait it out until there wasn't anything to explain. I would get over my doubts, surely, or . . . or what? I didn't know. I'd never got all the way there. I'd always let distraction drag me away from getting to the heart of the “or what?”

If I'd only done this or only said that, then an errant snag of a hairdryer's cord could just have been a mild chore of putting my toiletries back in order instead of a full-on life derailment.

That Thursday, the fight was quieter than I would have guessed it would be, but there were tears of the worst kind. Patrick was humiliated. I had never seen him go more than red in the nose and shiny at the eyes at sad movies.

“Why would you do this? Why would you let me think—” Breathless, he stopped and heaved in a lungful of air past the tears in his throat. “What are we doing this for?”

I opened my mouth, knowing there were no words waiting, only mute dismay.

Patrick pushed away from the table and staggered out of the room toward our bedroom. He pushed the door shut without a slam. Something hit the wall with a leathery thump, heavy, but not too big. His day planner? A shoe?

Then he was quiet.

I was hollowed out, echoey. I could float away on any current, but the unbreathable air wouldn't move. It left me there at the table, knowing I should go into the bedroom to pad my apology with at least some effort to explain.

I don't know why I didn't insist on reeling in that moment. I didn't heed the warning of his embarrassment. Later, over and over, I would revisit the memory of his flushed face and my own hesitation and wonder if this hadn't been the moment I lost, the all-important one that got away.

But I was distracted from my guilt, my thoughts returning over and over to the unexpected restraint he'd shown in not confronting me the evening before when he had first found the pills. His quite-justifiable anger should have been in my face as soon as I walked through the door on Wednesday. That he'd waited to see if I was taking the pills was cleverer and cooler than I knew him to be. I'd thought it was in his DNA. He couldn't even wait a day to give a present if he'd shopped before an anniversary or birthday. It was one of the things I loved about him. I thought he was always direct with me. I thought I would never have to consider hide-and-seek to feel at home.

But we were both doing it, changing our ways and being coy about the adjustments. Patrick's little stash of money proved that he hadn't trusted the setup of our lives for some time. It wasn't all that different from the pharmaceutical trick I'd played to hedge my bets. Recognizing my own tactic in him tickled in the unease that had always been part of our background music.

•  •  •

“Can we try?” Patrick asked into the dark a week and a day later when he'd moved back into our bedroom. “Or is this it? Just you and me?”

I rolled onto my side toward him, my body stretched out along his, close enough to feel his heat, but not touching him. I was afraid to touch him, not knowing if he wanted me to. I was ashamed. And also still reluctant. I thought it might telegraph in contact.

“Yeah. We can try.” I risked the reach, trailed my fingertips down his chest and heard his breath catch. I'd startled him. “But, Pat, no calendar, okay? Let's just see what happens and not push it.”

“Why don't you want to have a baby?”

“I do. Or I don't know that I don't. It's just a lot of pressure.” I scooted closer and kissed his bare shoulder, a peace token to steady the scales.

“How is it a lot of pressure? It's just what people do. They have kids. You always said you liked my family. You liked the way I grew up. But I grew up with brothers and sisters. It's so damned quiet around here.”

“I know. But, Pat, you like the quiet. You say so all the time.”

“I do like it. Or I did. But after almost ten years, I think we need more.”

“More what?”

“More of everything. More life.”

I tried not to be offended. More did sound good. He wasn't wrong.

“Look, I'm not saying I want a zoo around here, Dee. I had more than enough of that my whole life growing up. We don't have to have half a dozen, but even your mom had kids. Obviously.”

“Well, if she's the example to follow, I'll need a new career. . . .”

“She was awesome. You could do worse.”

“But could I do better? Or even half as well? It's a lot to think about. I just don't want to force it. We don't need to. There's plenty of time. Can we just see what happens?”

Patrick sighed. “You know what happens.”

“Then I'll go with it.”

“You will?” He didn't completely believe me; I heard a stubborn edge of a dare in his voice. A
Prove it
that went unsaid.

“I will.”

The pills had never been to hurt him. Not then and not when I renewed the doses two months later after a short lull of détente. They would protect us both for just a little while longer. It was a cautious testing of the bridge, a bridge that, once crossed, would transform an abstract vow made at a church's altar into a very real baby in a pastel, converted guest room.

In my hope for a change in my own heart, I only hid the package better this time.

The memory of his confrontation in the kitchen mugged me now and again. I couldn't get the replay of it to leave me be. It jumped out of nowhere when I was having a sip of coffee or stepping out of the shower or fuzzing out of focus during a call at work. I could still hear the bright rattle of the pills against the foil and feel the same scalding fear that had burned through me when he'd thrown them down on the counter on that Thursday afternoon.

The whole plot with the pills had always been a hedge against my growing concern that I'd probably got it all wrong, from the very beginning. It was a common enough mistake, and that was somehow comforting.

I had chosen Patrick for what he represented, not for who he was. But he should have forgiven that, because I had forgiven him for it. We shared it as a common bond. It wasn't just my error. I had certainly disappointed his expectations of me, but I always would have. His forecast of who I would be was made of wishes, not evidence.

Because I had no blueprint for what I imagined normal should look like in the details, I knew now that I may have drawn it all cockeyed. In which case, unlike some mothers I knew, I would never put a cradle in the middle of a minefield.

•  •  •

As often as I cited her as the cause for my troubles, though, thoughts of my mother propped me up through the twitchy awkwardness of reconciling with Patrick. Unlike me, I'm not sure she had been capable of feeling graceless. Merely remembering her made me stand taller, and replaying the stories she told, and the way she told them, it guided me to the right things to say. He thawed when I mimicked her. So I mimicked her.

“Hey, Patrick,” I said into the phone before he'd got through his rapid-fire work greeting. “There will be daffodil gimlets on the deck when you get home. So don't be late.” I used my mother's voice, which was more cadence than accent. “Today's the day, I'm happy to say. But it's bullshit this year. We're going to have to wear sweaters. It's not getting out of the fifties. Brrrrrr.”

Patrick laughed, his younger-days, not-mad-at-me laugh that had been on leave of absence for longer than I'd admit. “I'll be there.”

“Or you'll be square.”

My mother celebrated the first bloom of daffodils with a vodka-gimlet party. The challenge was to drink the exact amount of Grey Goose and lime juice, and not a sip more, that would leave you as sunny between the ears as the little green-sworded, lion-headed harbingers of spring looked on the lawn's border.

I smiled over our good-byes and sagged, both happy and sad, back into my office chair. I'd win him over first, then tempt myself back into line.

•  •  •

If I had reason to still doubt Patrick's devotion and to play it coy with my brother after the pill debacle, it was rooted in guilt, as many suspicions are. And not just my guilt either.

My brother understood what I'd done with the birth control and my husband forgave me. Well, not forgave, perhaps, although that's the word we used for a while. We moved on as a new couple afterward, relocated as it were, hand in hand, a little closer to the cliff 's edge than we had ever been before.

I watched Patrick and I watched myself, uterus on pause, as things grew calmer and somehow stranger. The peace felt insistent over natural, less happy than trying not to be mad. I sensed his impatience vibrating in the air, the expectation of return on the investment of ten years' time. I held on to the misgivings as they were transmitted down the tingling antennae of intuition. Vodka gimlets honoring the daffodils and extra effort celebrating the glow of reunion eventually gave way, as they must, to business as usual. Only it wasn't our
usual
usual.

Patrick didn't know that I realized he'd taken up a dark and distanced perch for an entirely new view of our lives, but I sensed it in every exchange. I felt it every time his shadow crossed mine, and I felt him try to hide it when we moved closer than that.

I folded down the unease to a portable, neatly hidden size. In the moonlit murk of our bedroom, listening to the rhythmic sigh of his sleep, those doubts grew paranoid flowers that, for the longest time, I pruned off in the rational light of day.

•  •  •

As Patrick drifted away, even before the frequent extended golf weekends and late nights at the office, my radar that I so hated pinged the truth time and again. I resisted snooping and calculating to the extent that I could, for as long as I could, soothing myself with the knowledge that national statistics bore out that at least four women on our street were flagging in the same quagmire I was. They just didn't know it. I steadfastly looked the other way and tried to suppress what was in my blood. I never hassled him over my discoveries, so he assumed I'd never made them.

His shortcomings breached the vows no more than I'd failed an unwritten clause in our agreement—to be interesting and to make babies. And I was just happy we weren't constantly, but casually, vigilant for a call on a special line in the den that hardly ever rang. No dedicated line, no stuffy diplomats dropping in with or without preamble, no hoodlums in military green skulking in for a conference under cover of night. The lack of it all meant that we'd got it right, according to me. I'd kept the parts of life that my mother had used only for set decoration, and I'd jettisoned the rest.

I bided and abided. I could change it if I chose to. I could start and he could stop and we could be what we'd set out to be. I felt guilty that my hyperprimed intuition was an unfair advantage over him.

But I always thought of my mother when a wedding anniversary loomed. I counted off on my full complement of fingers and smiled at her little saying. I'd kept my man already for more years than my mother had fingers. But now I was down to my last pinkie, and Patrick had drawn dark on me.

Friday

W
ell,
I've had my first look at Carlisle Inc. The highway engineers cut in this road around these low hills in wide, skirting loops in the most level ground they could find. The view just opened up in the last left-hand sweep I took, and there it was: an eight-foot-high chain-link fence that pens up half of all the eye can see from this side of the hill. A baby-blue sign, with plain white, block letters announces the company's name and at the same time makes the point that there aren't all that many places to buy aluminum dome sheds. There wasn't any sense in paying for a fancy logo to set themselves apart.

I'm not ready to be there yet. I've had one glimpse of the place and already my heart is thudding in my temples. I pull in each next breath with greater effort, forcing the air down a narrowing path. The muscles in my arms are jumping under my skin.

I coast to the shoulder of the road and push the gear selector to park. For now, I'm still a good citizen. As such, I hit the button for the hazard lights, just as a good girl should; just as a normal person would. The rhythmic clicking jacks dread right up my spine. It sounds like panic and insanity marching in step. I slap it quiet.

I know why I'm here, and any reasonable person would say it's Patrick's fault. Or my own. And they're not wrong, but I'm not reasonable. Not right now. I stalk myself through the flashing memory of my life. Everything I'm upset about, everything I'm angry about, everything I don't have that I want and everything that I
don't
want and somehow still have, and everything I've always wanted to know, but wasn't told, they all have one thing, one source in common: Paul Rowland.