“How are you doing today?” Elisa asks.
I take comfort in her soothing tone and sympathetic expression. “I’m okay,” I say. “Just really tired. Chris still isn’t really talking to me. We’re communicating mostly through texts.”
“Do you want some company? I can skip yoga.”
“No,” I say. “Thanks. I think I’ll go back to bed.”
She squeezes my hand. “Okay.”
When I return home I drop a slice of bread in the toaster and when it pops up I spread a thin layer of peanut butter on it. I don’t want to eat it, don’t know if I can eat it, but I have no choice so I do. I gag on the third bite and hold it down by sheer will, then finish the rest. There are dirty dishes in the sink and fingerprints cover every inch of the granite countertops, but I leave everything the way it is. I’ll pull myself—and the house—together later. Chris will be flying home tonight, which means we’ll have to give Oscar-worthy performances if we hope to get through dinner without the kids picking up on the tension. It’s something we know all too well how to do, but I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Tucker waits patiently next to his empty food and water bowls and I fill the metal containers with fresh, cold water and his kibble.
“Sorry, boy,” I say, reaching down to scoop him up. I hug him, burying my face in his soft fur.
Upstairs, I strip down to my tank top and underwear and crawl back into bed, pulling the covers over my head. Anything to temper the sunlight that filters in through the bedroom curtains. I suddenly understand why people like blackout shades. I need a break from the TV, from my life. I toss and turn, but I’m so tired that my mind eventually stops spinning.
I close my eyes and soon the sleep returns.
• • •
“Claire, wake up.” Chris opens the curtains, and the simultaneous assault of his voice and the blinding sunlight has me squinting and wishing I could put my hands over my ears like a child. His voice is so loud, or maybe it just seems that way because the room was so blissfully quiet. I have no idea why he’s here and one glance at the clock doesn’t make it any clearer. It’s noon on Friday. Chris should be getting ready to fly home, not standing in our bedroom looking down at me.
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“I wanted to talk to you. I caught the first flight out this morning.”
“Give me a minute.” Slowly, I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed because I really need to pee. After I pull on my yoga pants I walk into the bathroom to relieve my close-to-bursting bladder. When I’m washing my hands I look in the mirror.
I do not look good.
My skin is ashen and there are dark circles under my eyes. I brush my teeth and then pull my hair back into a sloppy bun. When I come out of the bathroom Chris is waiting for me.
“Let’s go downstairs.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he echoes, and follows me out of the room.
“Why were you sleeping?” he asks when we sit down on the couch. “You hardly ever nap during the day.”
“I was sleeping because I’m tired. I’m tired of you shutting me out whenever we hit a rough patch. I’m tired of worrying about whether Daniel is okay.”
Chris flinches, as though the very mention of Daniel’s name has caused him a fresh wave of pain.
“I’m tired of everything, Chris.” I can’t look at him. I’m afraid I’ll start crying again, and I’m tired of doing that, too. Swallowing the lump in my throat and looking at the clock on the wall over his shoulder, I wait for him to say whatever it is he flew home early to say so we can clear the air, once and for all.
“I know I didn’t handle things very well the other night, Claire. I just never expected you to tell me something like that.”
“I didn’t have to tell you at all,” I say.
“Yeah, well. I almost wish you hadn’t.”
Neither of us says anything for a minute, but then we both try to talk at once.
“Go ahead,” he says.
“When I got out of the hospital I told Daniel I couldn’t see him anymore. Even though nothing physical ever happened between us, we came close.”
Chris’s jaw clenches and he looks as if he’d rather hear anything other than the words that are coming out of my mouth.
“But I felt like you were finally going to fight for me instead of letting me slip away. And I was slipping away, Chris. A little more every day.”
“Why did you spend so much time with him?”
He looks as though he might not really want to hear the answer, but he asked, so I tell him the truth. “I was lonely, Chris. Lonely and sad and frustrated. I spent time with him because he gave it to me.” I angle my body toward his. “I wanted you to be the one I turned to, but you weren’t there.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” Chris says. “For everything.”
“You were doing what you thought you had to do,” I say. “What you thought was best for this family.”
He shrugs and shakes his head, runs his fingers through his hair. “At what cost?” he asks.
I think I’ve already given him the answer to that question. “I’m sorry, too,” I say.
Chris stares out the window at the backyard and doesn’t say anything for a minute. He turns back around and looks me in the eye. “How close did I come?” he asks. “To losing you.”
“Not as close as you think,” I say, because there are some things that a man never needs to hear.
Chris reaches over and pulls me into his arms. He doesn’t speak, but he strokes my hair and holds me tight, like he’ll never let me go. We stay like that for a long time. And I think to myself that maybe Chris talks to me the loudest when he says nothing at all.
66
claire
We join together at Skip and Elisa’s once again, to celebrate the last day of school. I smile, listening to the kids’ excited voices as they chase each other across the freshly cut grass, reveling in the noise of happy children.
Chris stands beside me, a smile on his face. The golden boy shimmers in the sunshine, the way he once did, and I swear that man’s happiness can light a room.
He turned in his resignation at work this morning. He told me what he wanted to do a few nights ago while we were lying in bed. “I want to form a new company. There’s this guy at work named Seth—he’s a software engineer from the implementation team—and we’ve been talking about it for a while, discussing every possible scenario. We’ve mapped out timelines and gone over the budget a thousand times. I feel like we have a pretty solid business plan.”
“So it would be a partnership?” I asked.
“Yes. Seth’s not very expressive—he’s really more of a head-down programmer—so he would design and create the software and it would be my job to sell it.”
“What about the start-up costs?”
“They’d be fairly low. And we wouldn’t have any overhead, at least at first. We’d work out of our homes. I don’t know if you’ve noticed anything about our bank accounts.”
“I’ve noticed that they seem to have a nice balance in them.” I never stopped economizing. I never changed the money-saving habits I formed when Chris was unemployed. I still shop at discount retailers. I clean the house myself. And I maintain a fairly high volume of freelance assignments. Chris spent next to nothing after he went back to work because his expense account paid for everything when he was on the road. Our financial situation has never been better.
“Enough for us to get by for at least a year, maybe longer,” he said.