WORTHY, Part 2 (12 page)

“Nothing happened!” I cried. “Nothing happened between us! You told me that!”

“Well, do you remember anything?”

“No!”

“Then in your mind, nothing happened.” Brock’s placid explanation enraged me beyond what I was able to express.

“But you sent my husband pictures of me — of us,” I said. “How could you sit there and fucking lie to me, you bastard?”

“Look, I don’t know what truth you want to believe,” he said. “What I believe is that I did the right thing by letting Jonathan know what was going on back home while he was away.”

“We’re through,” I said. “Does that make you happy? My relationship with my husband is through.”

“If that’s not what you wanted to happen, then I’m sorry,” he said. “But remember that you dug that grave yourself, Michelle. It’s not my problem that you don’t like the consequences. And hey — if you’re really single now, we should hook up. We’re pretty good together, you and I. Hot stuff.”

I ended the call, too angry to respond to him. It felt like my heart was about to leap straight out of my chest like something from a horror movie.

Then, suddenly, all the anger went out of me with a whoosh. I felt nothing except for a tiny bud of knowledge that took up a tentative residence where my heart used to be.

Even backed into this corner with my heart torn out of my chest, I still had a place to go.

I’d go back to where I belonged. I’d go back to the cottage, my cottage, in the woods, away from all of this.

It was a mistake, I realized now. It was a mistake to ever come to the city. I only belonged one place, and that place was the cottage — in the wilderness, away from everyone else.

That was the only place in the world for me.

Jonathan being abroad hadn’t been the problem. I’d been alone this entire time. It had just taken the terrible fight with my husband — my soon to be ex-husband, now — to understand that fact. I’d never belonged in Chicago or the Wharton compound. I’d never been meant to marry Jonathan Wharton. I’d known my destiny for years, and it was to live out the rest of my life in the woods.

I packed a bag of my simplest clothes, laughing at all the finery I had amassed during my time at the Wharton compound. My wedding dress still hung in my closet. Lucy had offered to put it in storage to preserve it somewhere, but I had insisted on keeping it close to me.

I’d planned on wearing it again when Jonathan returned so he could properly remove it from me, as he’d promised to do before we got married.

Now, I wanted nothing more than to get as far away as possible from that dress and the life it had made me think I might have. There was no use for that kind of fancy shit in the woods. The woods didn’t require that you put on a face and a pretty dress just to try to be yourself. The woods were simple.  That was what I wanted — a place where I could just exist without having to constantly come up with explanations for behaviors I didn’t understand. I thought Brock was my friend, but I’d been wrong about that. I thought that I could always trust Jonathan, the man I’d married, but I’d been even more of an idiot about that.

By the time I packed my bag, it was well past midnight. I looked around the room, peering into each corner and nook and cranny as if they would give me some answer as to where my life had gone. I should’ve been happier when Jonathan was still here. I shouldn’t have taken those days for granted. I should’ve tried harder to adapt, tried to make him see that I’d do anything for him.

Maybe then he wouldn’t have turned to Violet for company while he was abroad.

And maybe then I would never have gone out with Jane and Brock, or gotten as drunk as I had, or done what everyone seemed to be convinced that I’d done.

I searched my mind hard, clutching my bag of clothes and toiletries, trying to look back at that night, but my memories were severely limited. Brock and Jane kissing. A long alleyway. A swerving car ride. They were the same dreams I’d had trying to sleep off all those shots, and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them.

It didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. I just needed to get out of here, to put this place behind me. To try to move forward with my life.

Before walking out of the room, I checked my phone out of habit and saw a text from Jane. It was time stamped from about an hour ago.

“Proud of you for confronting this head on,” it read. “Let me know if you need a drink or ten to forget about it. I’m always here for you.”

A drink was about the last thing I needed right now.

The house was quiet, but I was still cautious, not wanting to run into anyone unexpectedly. I almost felt nostalgic, knowing it was going to be the last time I saw it. There was the place where Jonathan’s mother made me her personal slave. There was the place I’d sat and allowed myself to be scrutinized by the rest of the Whartons, staring at me like I was some freak of nature who’d laid eggs of evil in their son’s brain.

Goodbye to all of it, and good riddance. I’d never belong here, and the thought was a comfort.

I wondered if I would’ve saved myself any grief if I had fled the Wharton compound the first night I’d taken a mind to it. It was right after Jonathan and I had found out he was engaged to Violet and me at the same time, and I realized that I was in too deep. How had I been so clear-headed back then? How had all the shit that was wrong with this relationship been so apparent?

In the end, Collier had been out in the courtyard to stop me. He’d been able to convince me to give this life a chance because he’d seen the potential within Jonathan to be something great. Collier was a shrewd businessman. I couldn’t help the feeling that I’d been played back then, kept around as some sort of twisted bait for Jonathan to try to do well. Maybe Collier had even told Jonathan that I wanted him to succeed, that I needed him to be the Wharton Group CEO for our continued success as a couple.

Would Collier do something so callous, so coldly calculating? All I had were theories and regrets. I should’ve just left that night. Jonathan and I wouldn’t be married, and it would’ve been easier to slip back into obscurity at the cottage. Things would’ve been different. I bet I would’ve even been over Jonathan by now if I’d left instead of stayed.

Tonight, though, the courtyard was empty. I was going to be able to leave, to get away from all this madness.

I let myself into the open space, shivering a little at the cool air, then took a set of stairs that led to the parking garage. Jonathan’s car was in here, as much as he used it. Everyone in the Wharton family preferred to have someone do their driving for them.

I, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone knowing where I was going.

In the private area of the parking garage, accessible by Wharton family and staff only, no one thought anything of leaving the keys in the vehicle. I took what had been Jonathan’s prized BMW convertible — the Jonathan before, anyway. From what I understood, he’d been the only person in the family who’d liked doing things like driving for himself.

When the engine roared to life, I knew why: it sounded like freedom.

It had been a long time since I’d driven anywhere, and a longer time still that I’d even had a desire to drive. But driving a car was like riding a bicycle — you never really completely forget how. It took a couple of blocks of grinding gears and inadvertent revving, but I soon had the convertible purring comfortably, pointed in the direction of my cottage in the woods.

The end goal helped outweigh the fear I felt at driving. It was one thing to give your trust to someone else and ride in a car somewhere. It was another thing to have your life in your own hands, to control each minute movement with the wheel and the gas pedal and the brakes. I drove cautiously through the city, but more freely once I hit the open road. At this time of night, there was almost no one driving but me.

By the time that I pulled off the paved road and onto the long gravel road that would lead me to the cottage, I was feeling woozy but hopeful. I knew this place. I was familiar with this place. I knew what was expected of me in this place.

When the headlights of the convertible illuminated the cottage, it looked smaller than I remembered. It looked smaller, and the dark woods around it seemed bigger. For the first time, I was frightened at being by myself, scared of what lurked through those trees.

Why now? Why had I only just now started feeling like this? What had changed since the last time I’d been here in my place of refuge?

Even as I asked myself that question, I knew that everything had changed. I’d let somebody into my heart and experienced the damage that he had wrought. If my heart were a china shop, he was the bull, tossing his head and breaking every plate displayed in there. Maybe he was subconsciously just like his mother. I’d seen Amelia’s nostrils flare more than once, thought of her as a creature of destruction too many times to count.

The cottage and the woods were the same, I realized, peering around. I was the one who had changed.

When I got out of the car and stood up, stretching after so many hours crammed inside, my stomach gave an alarming lurch. I realized I hadn’t eaten at all that day. My stomach had been too upset for breakfast, and then the rest of me had been too upset to eat lunch after Jane showed me those photos of Jonathan and Violet. I knew I had canned goods and frozen foods inside the cottage. I just had to get to them before I passed out from starvation.

As long as there hadn’t been any power outages, everything should still be fine. I had kept paying the electric bills, even after I went to Chicago with Jonathan. I always figured I’d see the cottage and the woods again. Just not under these dire circumstances.

And, if I were being perfectly honest, maybe I’d expected something like this the entire time I was with Jonathan, some abstract need to provide an exit for myself, an escape in case anything ever went wrong. I’d never been more thankful for this kind of planning ahead. I could’ve always stayed in a hotel or something, but the cottage was far better. It was my home, the home I never should’ve left.

I let myself into the cottage and flipped on the light switch. There was dust everywhere and a musty smell I was sure would be dispelled after a day and night of open windows, but nothing appeared to be too terribly damaged.

In fact, it seemed more like home than the grand Wharton compound ever had.

I checked the refrigerator before realizing that Jonathan and I had cleaned it out before shutting the cottage and barn for good, back when we were in love and hopeful and curious about the future. I found a jar of string beans in the cupboard and popped it open, chowing down with a fork. My stomach gave a little heave before accepting the sustenance. It had to accept something sometime, or else I’d go hungry.

I walked around the cottage, doing a quick inspection in the dark — several light bulbs burned out almost immediately after I turned everything on. I’d have to replace them. There were a couple of spots on the floor that told me the roof had developed a leak over the winter. I’d have to get up there and see what I could do to patch them up. The damage was minimal, and I knew it was nothing I couldn’t handle.

The damage inside of my heart was much worse, anyways, and probably a bigger bitch to repair. It would probably always be leaking for the rest of my life, no matter how many times I tried to patch it.

Pushing some windows open to dispel the damp and mustiness of a place that hadn’t been lived in for a year or more, I checked my phone again out of habit — a habit I hoped to be breaking soon. Nothing. Not even one bar of service. Being cut off so thoroughly from the outside world was something of a comfort. Nobody could reach me. Nobody knew where I was. And, in a couple weeks, when Jonathan did return from abroad, I wouldn’t have to deal with him as long as I was all the way out here.

Had I run away from my problems? Sure. Had I out and out fled when the going got tough? Maybe. But it was a tactical retreat, something I felt needed to be done, especially since I didn’t understand the enemy I was fighting.

The enemy that was the man I loved.

I thought I would’ve been tired after my emotionally impossible day, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to lie down in my bed and try to rest. The ghost of Jonathan’s presence haunted me there. I was too sure I’d feel his arms slip around me, hold me, promise me that everything was going to be all right even though I knew that nothing could be.

The happiest times I’d had at this place were with him.

I found an unopened can of coffee and plugged in the coffeemaker, intent on exorcising Jonathan’s pervasive presence from the cottage. If I were the type to light sage and waft it up into the corners of every room, I’d do that.

As it was, I gathered my cleaning supplies as the coffee brewed, taking careful inventory of what I had and what I needed to replace. I needed to reorganize myself, to take careful stock of what I had and what I didn’t.

Had: A full pot of fresh coffee.

Didn’t have: Enough ammonia to wash the windows of the cottage both inside and out.

Had: A reliable broom, mop, and dustpan.

Didn’t have: Clean rags for dusting and wiping down every surface.

Had: My relative health, my continuing existence, my tentative hope for a better future.

Didn’t have: The love of my life, my husband, Jonathan.

I poured a cup of coffee and sipped on it, the warm brew pooling in the pit of my stomach, which pitched and yawed in protest. Why was it reacting like this? I loved coffee. It was as if everything inside me had changed, from my thoughts and feelings to my most basic needs and wants. I was nowhere near the girl I used to be when I last lived out here. That person was good and innocent, perhaps a little hung up on her past and her scarring, but open to love. Being with Jonathan had made me grow so much as a person. He’d helped me realize that I couldn’t run away from life forever.