Acts of Contrition Read online

  Just then the bus pulls to a screeching halt and Sally and Emily pile off. We walk home immersed in everyday chatter, and for a moment everything feels excessively normal, so average I wonder for just a split second if it is going to be all right. Tom’s at work, I remind myself. There’s a chance that he hasn’t even seen the photo. There’s a chance that he won’t see the photo. As long as he’s stuck in meetings all day, as long as he’s tied up on the phone, as long as today is one of those days when he barely looks up from his desk. This could be yesterday’s news before it gets to him.

  But by six o’clock I have dinner on the table and still haven’t heard from Tom. I’ve left three messages for him, texted twice, e-mailed once. Clearly my naive notion of Tom not seeing the photo was just that—naive.

  “Blessing,” I say, and cross myself. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.”

  “ ‘God our Father,’ ” Dom begins to sing.

  “I want to do ‘We Are Thankful,’ ” Danny whines.

  “ ‘God our Father’!” Dom screeches, an angry furrow pitched between his eyebrows.

  “ ‘We are Thankful’!” Danny rebuts, equally determined.

  “ ‘Bless us, O Lord,’ ” Sally chimes in, steamrolling over her brothers.

  “Just say whichever one you want!” I snap, pounding my fist on the table.

  All four children look at me like I’ve just yanked the Easter Bunny by his ears.

  “Sorry, guys,” I say. “Mommy’s so sorry. I’m a little tired today. Go ahead and say your blessing to yourself tonight, whichever one you want. Your choice!” I pull my face into a smile, but it feels strange, like too-elastic pizza dough that doesn’t want to be stretched. Lord only knows what it looks like to my children. I wonder how many days, weeks, or months I’ll be faking happiness in front of them. What if it’s forever?

  “Where’s Dad?” Sally asks.

  “Working late.”

  “Dad never works late,” she says. “He’s always home for dinner.”

  “Daddy loves dinner!” Emily says. “Remember when Daddy won us free dessert for eating that gigantic steak?”

  I can’t help but smile because it’s true—once Tom did polish off thirty ounces of a porterhouse just to win a free brownie sundae for the kids. He lay in bed that night, sick as can be, grinning ear to ear, saying that it was worth it to see the joy in the kids’ faces.

  We eat dinner and the children fill the silence, thank heavens. Sally’s irritated with me, I can tell, but still doesn’t want to miss her opportunity to talk about her day. She chatters on about her literature class. They’re reading Tuck Everlasting. Though many of her classmates beg to differ, Sally’s certain that immortality would be torture.

  “I wouldn’t mind being Aphrodite,” Emily says. “Being an immortal goddess would be awesome.”

  Before Emily even finishes, I brace myself for Sally’s rebuttal, a know-it-all response that will criticize her sister.

  “These are humans, not gods, Em. There’s a difference in living a human existence forever versus a divine existence.”

  “I don’t see the difference,” Em says as she rakes lines in her mashed potatoes.

  “The difference is expectation,” Sally says. “We’re humans. It’s our expectation that we’ll someday die. That someday all this will be over. It’s natural. It’s not natural to live forever. Besides, some say that our human existence is hell on earth. The goal is getting out of here…moving on to the next world.”

  “Moving where?” Dom wants to know.

  “What’s hell on earth?” Dan asks.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Em asks her sister.

  “What’s natural?” Dom pipes in.

  “Where’s the next world?” Dan interrupts.

  “Never mind,” Sally harrumphs, as if her siblings are too beneath her intellectual acumen to engage in conversation.

  “I still think it would be cool to be Aphrodite,” Emily says.

  “There are better goddesses.” Sally sighs, exasperated. “Ones who hunted and lived with their animals, ones who didn’t choose to bet everything on love.”

  “Why wouldn’t you want love?” Emily wants to know.

  Because love can kill you, even if you don’t die, comes to my mind.

  “Love’s fine, I guess,” Sally concedes. “But it’s not everything. A woman needs to be her own person, first.”

  When Sally looks at me, all I see is indictment, as if she knows that I was never such a woman.

  After dinner I send the kids up to get ready for bed.

  “Why don’t we have to do dishes tonight?” Emily wants to know.

  “I’ve got them, honey,” I say. “Go ahead up.”

  “But it’s only seven thirty,” Sally balks, and her snotty tone hits me wrong. It’s all I can do not to lash out at her.

  “Please, Sal,” I say. “Just take some quiet time tonight.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Since when do you not want to read a book?” I ask, feeling the heat fill my cheeks.

  “I just want to stay down here,” she says. “I don’t want to go upstairs yet.”

  “Do it anyway!”

  “I want to wait for Dad! Where’s Dad?”

  “J. C., Sal. Can you possibly pick up on the fact that I’m not feeling well tonight?”

  “ ‘Not feeling well,’ ” Sally repeats skeptically. “I thought you said you were tired.”

  “Either way,” I say.

  Sally stomps away in a huff. I listen to her exaggerated heavy footsteps pound up the stairs. Hear her flop onto her bed.

  I stand at the kitchen sink, staring into my own reflection in the window. The eerie lighting makes my face look drawn and ugly, like I’m looking into a fun-house mirror. I hate that I talk to Sally like an adult, that our relationship is already there, that I expect her to pick up on my nuances and facial expressions like one of my sisters would. I hate that she knows not feeling well or being tired is code for something worse.

  I stare out the window into the darkness. Where are you, Tom?

  By nine o’clock the children are all asleep, and my nerves have passed through jittery and are well on their way to panic. I sit on the floor with Tom’s dresser drawers dumped out in front of me, neatly folding his undershirts, T-shirts, shorts, boxers. I lay each one out flat, smooth it with my hand, over and over, until there’s not one wrinkle. I fold and press. Fold more, press more. Perfect. Make it perfect for him. Show him how much I care, with my expert folding. He’ll come home, he’ll open his drawers, he’ll see the tidy stacks, he’ll know how much I love him. I hold my hands out in front of myself. Watch them shake.

  In his top drawer I find a stack of cards that I’ve given him over the years, for Valentine’s Day, his birthday, our anniversaries. Each one gooier than the last, words underlined for emphasis, my handwriting at the bottom: I love you so, so, so, so much! Forever and always, Mary. Hearts drawn in pink and red, pierced with arrows. An abundance of smiley faces.

  When Tom and I met it was like breathing fresh air after being stifled in a muggy, hot jungle. Tom was easy; we believed in the same things, we wanted the same things. He loved family, wanted one of his own, treated his parents well, didn’t carry self-aggrandizing aspirations. My parents loved him the first time I brought him to dinner. Without preamble and coaching, he held the chair for my mother, devoured three servings of stuffed shells, and cleared the table afterward.

  Only months into our relationship, we were talking about getting married and buying a house. After years of being with Landon, it threw me for a loop when Tom considered me part of his plan. What’s wrong with this guy? I remember thinking in the beginning. Maybe he just wants to get married and I’m the girl he happens to be dating. Then, later, I found out that there was an abundance of low-hanging fruit dangling from Tom’s little black book. I’d heard of Tom’s ex-girlfriend Cassandra, a willowy waif with giant doe eyes
who liked to cook but never ate. The realization that Tom chose me came to me one night when we were snuggled on the sofa watching a movie. I’m not just the right girl at the right time. He really wants to be with me.

  Being with Tom was easy, but he wasn’t predictable. After only three months of dating, he swept me off my feet, flying me to Napa Valley and proposing on the hillside of an olive grove. I remember feeling such a rush of gratitude for his showing me that a relationship could glide along easily; that it didn’t have to be a battle, an uneven power struggle in which one party wanted one thing and the other something different altogether.

  Thank you! I wanted to say in the most appreciative way. It was as if the curtain had been drawn back and behind the small life I had been leading was an entire city, an entire world. I remember thinking about my college philosophy studies, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, how the prisoners down below believed that the shadows on the walls were reality; that they hadn’t a clue that there was actual life being lived only steps away from where they sat.

  “I’m ready,” Tom had said the night he proposed on that Napa hillside. “I’m all in. I want to marry you, Mary, but I want to be real. We need to acknowledge that you’ve just gotten out of a long-term relationship. I’m all for getting engaged, but I think we should take it slow.”

  I took Tom’s hands and squeezed them, looked him in the eyes. “I think we should take it fast. I’ve wasted enough time with the wrong guy. I don’t want to waste another minute.” Then I tiptoed up to him and kissed him hard on the mouth. I must have been convincing because we were married three months later. Had I not answered the phone when Landon called only weeks before my wedding, had I not gone, had I the courage to refuse him, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, waiting for the earth to open up and swallow me whole.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Heartily Sorry

  IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK WHEN TOM finally pulls into the driveway. I’m sitting in the living room on the sofa in the dark, his plaid flannel shirt wrapped around me like a cape. Before I know it, he’s standing in front of me. His eyes are bloodshot, his face is blotchy, his jaw is clenched. His fists are balled and he smells of whiskey. Whiskey! The poison that corrupted his father and brother. The poison he swore he would never touch.

  “I’ve been calling you for hours,” I say. “Where have you been?”

  Tom finds a dusty bottle of whiskey under the cupboard, a bottle we’d bought for a party years ago. Pours a few inches. Downs it in one sip. The curse of the Morrissey men, wrapping her slimy arms around Tom’s neck. On a night like tonight, it doesn’t seem that Tom needs too much coaxing. He’s ready to jump into bed with the alcoholic seductress.

  “I’ve been at a bar, obviously,” Tom says. “Sitting and thinking and trying my hardest to find one logical, reasonable explanation for why there is a photo of you and Landon James flashing across every television in America. A photo of him kissing your cheek as you two come out of a hotel room.”

  “It’s not what you think! I had Sally with me. She was in her carrier. We were just talking, Tom,” I plead.

  “I’m not a stupid guy,” Tom says. The coolness in his voice makes me shake harder. “And I feel that I’m a reasonable guy, a guy who doesn’t jump to conclusions without considering every possibility.”

  “You are!” I agree. “You are the most reasonable person I know. I love that about you.”

  “But I couldn’t do it,” Tom says. “I sat there for hours and I couldn’t think of one good reason why you would have seen Landon James.” He looks up at me briefly. His eyes are red and swollen, his mouth pursed tightly. I want to go to him, put my hands on his face, assume his suffering. “So let’s have it, Mary. What gives?”

  I had rehearsed this exact moment a thousand times in the past few weeks. Would I play dumb? Would I deny that it was me? Would I feed him the story I had fed our neighbor Susan? Or would I just come clean? I decide on telling the truth. All at once my defenses slough from my body. I have nowhere to run and the truth is my only way out, even if it leads Tom out the door.

  “I met him that day,” I say, “because we had some business to discuss.”

  “Business? What the hell does that mean? Were you giving money to his campaign?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of business did you have to discuss with Landon James?” Tom’s only inches from my face. I can feel the heat from his breath. This is my doing, I think. I’ve driven him to drink just like his good-for-nothing brother and father.

  “Can we sit down?” I ask.

  “Please, Mary,” Tom scoffs. “Just tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “I saw Landon that day. After Sally was born. But I also saw him one other time. The month before our wedding.”

  “You saw Landon James two times. After you were with me?” The words slip through his teeth like smoke.

  “Just those two times,” I say, swallowing back the flood of tears. “I swear to God, Tom. Since the day you and I met, I only saw Landon those two times.”

  “Okay,” Tom says, pulling at his hair. “Let’s take them one at a time. Why the hell did you see Landon before we got married?”

  “That was forever ago. He had called and was in really bad shape. He had given up his Virginia senate seat to run for attorney general, and he didn’t win and he was feeling really bad.”

  “So what?”

  I take a breath. Say it. “So…he was begging me to come back to him.”

  “Come back!” Tom says in disgust.

  “I know.”

  “And you were considering it?”

  “God no!” I say. “That was the last thing on my mind. It was the opposite of what I was feeling.” I take another breath, unable to look at his face as he waits for me to go on. “For the first time, I felt highly superior to Landon. He was down and out, and I was getting married in a month to the best guy in the world. For the first time in ten years, I had the upper hand with him. I know it’s stupid and juvenile, but there was a part of me that wanted a little revenge for all of the years he strung me along. So, yes, I went to see him. I went to flaunt my good fortune in front of him. I went to show him that I was finally truly happy.”

  “Okay, fine,” Tom says through clenched teeth. “So you went to wave your engagement ring in his face. What happened when you saw him?”

  “He was a mess!” I say. “He said he’d made a huge mistake letting me get away. He said he didn’t care if he lost everything as long as he could have me. I actually felt sorry for the guy, but I also felt so proud that I was about to start the life I always wanted.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then my plan of kicking him while he was down flew away. You know me,” I say, wiping my face with my sleeve and then forcing myself to look him in the eye. “I’m not like that. I ended up feeling bad for him. So I sat with him and tried to make him feel better. We discussed a plan to get him back on his feet. I cheered him on, like an idiot. I sat there and told him that he could do it; that he could make his dreams come true; that he’d be back up on top before he knew it.”

  “Then?”

  “He started to feel better and asked if I’d stay for dinner.”

  Tom’s face darkens, and when he speaks his lips don’t move. “Did you?”

  “It seemed harmless. You were out of town. It was just dinner. We talked about old times—I mean, hell, Tom, I’d known this guy since I was nineteen years old. He asked about you. And I told him. I told him how great it was to finally be in a relationship like ours. I told him that he should try it sometime.”

  “Then what?”

  I swallowed. “I had a couple of glasses of wine,” I say.

  “What happened, Mary?” Tom says, knowing what a lightweight I am—two glasses of wine leave me silly and affectionate.

  “I can’t say it,” I say.

  “Say it!” he demands, eyes snapping now.

  “You know what happened!” I yell, stepping back. �
��Don’t you? Can’t you guess?”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  The words alone are apocalyptic. A wave of nausea engulfs me. I run to the toilet and vomit.

  Tom stands in the doorway, offers me nothing. I wipe my mouth with a wad of toilet paper, stand up, and push myself back into the corner of the small room.

  “Oh, God, Tom, I’m so sorry,” I cry. “Please, you’ve got to know how sorry I am. How sorry I’ve been all of these years. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted him to feel bad for the rest of his life about losing me, and it just happened, Tom. You’ve got to believe me. I’m so sorry.”

  The look on my husband’s face is indescribable, devastating. I know I’ll never forget it, like I’m disgusting to him.

  “Please, Tom,” I beg. “I made a horrible mistake.”

  “A mistake?” Tom says, his voice a broken, raw whisper. “A mistake is forgetting to send in a mortgage payment, or…or…bumping the fender of the car in front of you. Sleeping with your ex-boyfriend when you were engaged to me…” He can’t finish. Can only slowly shake his head.

  “I know, I know! I can’t even explain why it happened. You’ve got to know I was young when I met Landon, and he had some strange power over me—it’s like he pulled my strings. I hate to say that. It makes me seem like such an idiot.”

  Tom cocks his head and releases a shell of a laugh. “Believe me, Mary, you’re not helping your situation. Telling me that you were helpless to Landon James’s charm.”

  “It wasn’t charm. I don’t know what made me do it. I just wanted him to feel like he’d missed out. That he lost his chance with me.”

  “So you thought you’d give him one last fuck to remember you by.”

  “God, Tom!” I cry. “This is me you’re talking to. The mother of your children, and you’re talking to me like I’m a whore. I don’t deserve the f-word.”

  Tom stares at me; the stone-cold look back on his face begs to differ.

  “I can’t say anything right.” I’m panicking. “Whatever I say is going to be misconstrued. It shouldn’t have happened, but for God’s sake, Tom, haven’t I been a good wife and mother all of these years?”