My head was throbbing, my throat felt like it had been beaten from the inside with fists. Amelia looked at me and then down at her peas. “I’m not hungry,” she said. Moments later, she asked to be excused, and I didn’t even try to keep her at the table. What was the point, when I didn’t feel like being there, either?
I set the dirty dishes into the dishwasher. I wiped down the table. I put up a load of laundry, all with the motions of an automaton. I kept thinking that, if I did these ordinary things, maybe my life would bounce back into normal.
As I sat on the lip of the tub, helping you with your bath, you talked enough for both of us. “Niamh and me, we’ve both got Gmail accounts,” you chattered. “And every morning at six forty-five, when we wake up before school, we’re going to get online and talk to each other.” You twisted around to look at me. “Can we invite her over sometime?”
“Hmm?”
“Mom, you’re not even listening. I asked about Niamh-”
“What about her?”
You rolled your eyes. “Just forget it.”
We dressed you in your pajamas, and I tucked you in, kissed you good night. An hour later, when I went to check on Amelia, she was already under the covers, but then I heard her whispering and pulled back the sheets to find her on the telephone. “What!” she said, as if I’d accused her of something, and she curled the receiver into her chest like a second heart. I backed out of the room, too emotionally wrecked to wonder what she was hiding, distantly aware that she’d most likely learned that skill from me.
When I went downstairs, a shadow moved in the living room, nearly scaring me to death. Sean stepped forward. “Charlotte-”
“Don’t. Just…don’t, okay?” I said, my hand still covering my hammering heart. “The girls are already in bed, if you’ve come to see them.”
“Do they know?”
“Do you even care?”
“Of course I do. Why do you think I’m doing this?”
A small, desperate sound rose in my throat. “I honestly don’t know, Sean,” I said. “I realize things haven’t been great between us-”
“That’s the understatement of the century-”
“But this is like having a hangnail and getting your arm amputated as treatment, isn’t it?”
He followed me into the kitchen, where I poured powder into the dishwasher and stabbed at the buttons. “It’s more than a hangnail. We’ve been bleeding out. You can tell yourself what you want to about our marriage, but that doesn’t mean it’s the truth.”
“So the only answer is a divorce?” I said, shocked.
“I really didn’t see any other way.”
“Did you even try? I know it’s been hard. I know you’re not used to me sticking up for something I want instead of what you want. But, my God, Sean. You accuse me of being litigious, and then you go file for di vorce? You don’t even talk about it with me? You don’t try marriage counseling or going to Father Grady?”
“What good would that have done, Charlotte? You haven’t listened to anyone but yourself for a long time. This isn’t overnight, like you think. This has been a year. A year of me waiting for you to wake up and see what you’ve done to this family. A year of wishing you’d put as much effort into our marriage as you do into taking care of Willow.”
I stared at him. “You did this because I’ve been too busy to have sex?”
“No, see, that’s exactly what I mean. You take everything I say, and you twist it. I’m not the bad guy here, Charlotte. I’m just the one who never wanted anything to change.”
“Right. So instead we’re just supposed to sit in a rut, trying to keep afloat for how many more years? At what point do we face foreclosure on the house or declare bankruptcy-”
“Stop making this about money-”
“It is about money,” I cried. “I just spent a weekend with hundreds of people who have rich, happy, productive lives, and who also have OI. Is it a crime to want the same opportunities for Willow?”
“How many of their parents sued for wrongful birth?” Sean accused.
I saw, for a blink of an eye, the faces of the women in the restroom who’d judged me just as harshly. But I wasn’t about to tell Sean about them. “Catholics don’t get divorced,” I said.
“They don’t think about aborting babies, either,” Sean said. “You’re conveniently Catholic, when it suits you. That’s not fair.”
“And you’ve always seen the world in black and white, when what I’m trying to prove-what I’m certain of-is that it’s really just a thousand shades of gray.”
“That,” Sean said softly, “is why I went to a lawyer. That’s why I didn’t ask you to go to counseling, or to the priest. That world of yours, it’s so gray you can’t see the landmarks anymore. You don’t know where you’re headed. If you want to get lost in there, go ahead. But I’m not letting you take the girls down with you.”
I could feel tears streaking down my face; I wiped them away with my sleeve. “So that’s it? Just like that? You don’t love me anymore?”
“I love the woman I married,” he said. “And she’s gone.”
That was when I broke down. After a moment of hesitation, I felt Sean’s arms come around me. “Just leave me alone,” I cried, but my hands clenched his shirt even more tightly.
I hated him, and at the same time, he was the one I had turned to for comfort for the past eight years. Old habits, they died hard.
How long until I forgot the temperature of his hands on my skin? Until I didn’t remember the smell of his shampoo? How long until I could not hear the sound of his voice, even when he wasn’t speaking? I tried to store up every sensation, like grain for the winter.
The moment cooled, until I stood uncomfortably in the circle of his embrace, awkwardly aware that he didn’t want me there. Bravely, I took a step backward, putting inches between us. “So what do we do now?”
“I think,” Sean said, “we have to be adults. No fighting in front of the girls. And maybe-if you’re okay with it-I could move back in. Not into the bedroom,” he added quickly. “Just the couch. Neither of us can afford to take care of two places, and the girls. The lawyer told me most people who are in the middle of a divorce stay in the same house. We just, you know, figure out a way so that if you’re here, I’m not. And vice versa. But we both get to be with the kids.”
“Amelia knows. She read the letter from the court,” I said. “But not Willow.”
Sean rubbed his chin. “I’ll tell her we’re working some things out between us.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “That suggests there’s still a chance.”
Sean was quiet. He didn’t say there was a chance. But he didn’t say there wasn’t, either.
“I’ll get you an extra blanket,” I said.
That night in bed I lay awake, trying to list what I really knew about divorce.
1. It took a long time.
2. Very few couples did it gracefully.
3. You were required to divide everything that belonged to both of you, which included cars and houses and DVDs and children and friends.
4. It was expensive to surgically excise someone you loved from your life. The losses were not just financial but emotional.
Naturally, I knew people who had been divorced. For some reason, it always seemed to happen when their kids were in fourth grade-all of a sudden, that year in the school phone directory, the parents would be listed individually instead of linked with ampersands. I wondered what it was about fourth grade that was so stressful on a marriage, or maybe it was just hitting that ten-to fifteen-year mark. If that was the case, Sean and I were precocious for our marital age.