“What? Why?”
“Um, I don’t know. She wasn’t very… communicative. She’s, you know, on a mission. She thinks she can fix everything.”
She issued a sigh that turned into a sob. It surprised her, the sheer force of it. She couldn’t have held it back if she wanted.
“Linda. I need you with me, okay?” His request echoed Ben’s demands, making her sob harder.
“Are you still at the hospital?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Take the kids to my mother’s. She’s expecting you. Then come to the precinct.” He gave her the address.
“I’ll have to leave Fred here alone,” she said. “I promised Mom I’d wait for her.”
“She’ll understand.”
She nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her.
“Linda,” he went on, “we’re going to be okay.”
“I’ve made mistakes, too. Big ones,” she managed, wiping at her eyes, trying to catch her breath. She wanted to confess so badly, tell him everything right then. But there could hardly be a worse time.
“Just come here,” he said. He sounded strong, in control. He was always exactly what she needed him to be. “And call that lawyer.”
“Okay,” she said, standing up, pulling herself together. “I’m coming.”
She didn’t know if Ben was still idling in the parking lot, and if he was, how she’d get herself and the kids out without him seeing her. But she would.
She quickly splashed some water on her face and exited the bathroom. In the wide empty foyer, she saw a frail, worried-looking woman gazing about, confused. She wore a trim navy blue coat and was toting a suitcase on wheels. It was a split second before Linda realized it was her mother; she seemed so out of place in the context of the mess of her life somehow.
“Mom.”
“Oh, Linda,” Margie said with relief. “What in the world is going on?”
Margie seemed to take in the all the details of her daughter’s being, her tousled hair, the shadow of mascara under her eyes, the coffee stain on her coat-all the things Linda had just been focusing on in the mirror. Margie’s brow sunk into a deep frown.
“What,” she repeated, “in the world is going on?”
17
What surprised me the most about marriage was how quickly it settled, became not mundane, necessarily, but normal. After the euphoria of finding love, the magic of courtship, the thrill of engagement, the busy fun of planning a wedding, there’s the lovely honeymoon and then all the little pleasures of setting up house, putting away the extravagant gifts, adjusting to life as married people; we, not I, us, not me. Everything shines, everything is new and fresh. And then-it’s not as if it goes bad or sour, nothing like that. It’s just that it becomes normal in a way I didn’t expect. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Linda was a very canny tour guide.
“When you’ve really chosen well, when you really love your spouse, it’s not as if the fire dies precisely,” she told me one time. “It just goes from being an inferno to a pilot light. If you’re not vigilant, you won’t notice it until it’s gone out completely.”
“You and Erik still have romance,” I said.
“Yes, but we work at it. The main part of our life is our children and our work. I never go to dinner or the movies without some barely conscious worry of Trevor and Emily at the back of my mind. Sometimes when we make love, I’m wondering if he remembered to paid the electric bill.”
“Linda!”
A quick shrug, a flutter of the eyelids (so like Margie). “That’s married with children. It’s not as bad as it sounds from the outside.” She smiled the smile of the older, wiser sister. “You’ll see.”
Not me, I thought. Never us.
And it never was quite that way with Marcus and me-not sexually. Though we fell into that domestic rhythm of work, dishes, laundry, bills, he always excited me; I never thought about the electric bill when we made love. But then again, we never had children, leaving us free from that special kind of fatigue I saw in Linda and Erik after months, going on years, of spotty sleep and an endless monitoring of needs.
And then, of course, I never really knew Marcus. I was always sleeping with a stranger, maybe subconsciously never comfortable enough, never intimate enough to allow my mind to wander. Maybe it is the unknowing that excites passion within me, the desire to understand that keeps me interested. Maybe that’s why, even when things were bad-his apathy about the pregnancy and miscarriage, his affair-I stayed. Curiosity. Who are you?
JACK WAS TALKING, pacing the room like a preacher giving a sermon, hands waving, voice raised. I wasn’t listening; I was sinking into a deep well of self-pity. I felt a barren place inside me, a place where no life could grow, where no love could last.
He’d fed me a tuna melt and made me take my antibiotics and was now lecturing me on my stupidity, threatening to call the police, or physically drag me to the lawyer himself. Jack was prone to ranting. Something to do with being born and raised in Manhattan, this loudmouthed, totally self-assured dissertation on whatever.
“This is not some novel you’re writing, Isabel,” he concluded. “This is your life.”
“What’s the difference?”
He stopped moving and fixed me with his gaze. I don’t know how to describe Jack; he’s so familiar, it’s almost as if I can’t always see him. His dark hair was a careful mess, his darker eyes always kind, always in on the divine joke of it all. There’s an interesting shape to his nose, broken during a fistfight in high school and never healed quite right. He was fit, beefy, muscular in the way of someone who spends just enough time at the gym, soft in the way of someone who can’t quite give up the foods that bring pleasure.
“You’re telling me you don’t know the difference between fact and fiction.” His eyes rested accusingly on the cut he’d just bandaged, as if this might be the culprit responsible for my mental instability.
“Not at the moment.”
“Are you just being existential, tortured? Or have you officially walked over the edge?”
The edge: the outside limit of an object, area, or surface; a place or part farthest away from the center of something. Which edge did he worry I’d stepped off-the edge of sanity, reality, reason?
“Neither. If I were writing this, right now I’d be wondering what my heroine should do next. I’d be exploring the field of possibilities. Which is precisely what I intend to do.”
“In the real world there are consequences for mistakes, Isabel.”
“In fiction, too.”
“Fine,” he snapped, frustrated with me. “But no edits, no rewrites. In the real world? Consequences are a stone wall.” He smacked fist against palm for emphasis.
I turned away from him and stared at a huge engineer’s sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge that was framed and hung on the wall-precise lines and exact measurements, tiny hand-scrawled notes about cable lengths and river span. I’d always envied engineers their exacting spirits, their certainty of tools and craft, their faith that the world would be as it was measured. My world seemed so liquid by comparison, everything shifting and changing so often as to be incalculable.
Jack had a point. A good one, which drained what little was left of my energy. I returned to the place of doubt I’d visited on the street. I thought of Detective Crowe and his number in my pocket. Everyone I cared about and respected wanted me to turn myself in to the lawyer. Why was I being so stubborn? What did I think I was going to do?
“Your phone’s ringing,” I said, lying back and examining the high white ceiling, the ornate molding, the sleek track lighting-a lovely blend of original and modern features. He really had done a stellar job with the place. I noticed a hairline crack in the ceiling, some insect corpses behind the glass in the lamps. We both listened to the faint chirping of the phone.