Acts of Contrition Read online

He stands before me and says, “I’m not leaving my house and my children. I thought about it, leaving you and the kids, but screw that, Mary. They’re my kids, too, and I’m not going to leave. If you want to, you leave.”

  “Tom!” I plead, and again my heart slams into my chest like the recoil from a shotgun. “Stop talking that way. No one is going anywhere.”

  “I want to make sure that I’m clear, Mary,” Tom says with pure, cold hatred. “You and me, we’re finished.”

  I stumble back into the sofa and fold at the waist and cover my ears, because they’re ringing as though a bomb has gone off and I can’t tell if I’m still whole or blown to bits. I look up. “You can’t possibly mean that.”

  “For the children’s sake I’ll be cordial to you, and if you want to stay we’ll find a way to live in this house together. If you want to leave, I’ll find a way to take care of the kids. Either way, I’m staying. And for now, the children will know nothing. Nothing! Do you understand?”

  “This is crazy,” I say, and again start to cry. I slide off the sofa and fall at Tom’s feet and grab his ankles and cry teardrops onto his shoes.

  He pulls his feet away. “There are things that I need to know,” Tom fumes bitterly. “The day Sally was born…you delivered a lie as much as you did a child. How’d it feel, Mary?”

  “How do you think it felt?” I croak, sitting back and covering my face. “Knowing the truth and wanting it to be something different. I can’t describe what it was like to see you with her. You were the proudest father in the world. You cradled her like she held the keys to the kingdom. She was your girl from the start.” I stand, look him in the eyes. “Love’s love, Tom. You can’t possibly think that you no longer love her.”

  “Of course I still love her!” Tom yells.

  “I get it,” I say. “I’m the one you no longer love.” I look at Tom, wait for him to argue, try to find something in his eyes that tells me he still loves me, but he’s stone-faced and cold and when it sinks in, my legs almost buckle. He really doesn’t love me.

  “Tom, dear God, you have to know how sorry I am. I fell. After all those years of Landon not choosing me, he finally did, and I fell for it. That’s all I can say.”

  “That’s not enough,” he says.

  “Please, Tom, we have to work this out. We’re a family. For God’s sake, we’re a family.”

  “Leave God out of this, Mare. If you recall, adultery is a sin.”

  “Well, aren’t you the picture of perfection!” I yell.

  “I’ve never claimed to be perfect,” Tom says. “But since I’ve known you—for eleven years—I’ve never once lied to you.”

  “That’s only because you’ve never had anything worth lying about!” I holler, taking a stab at a rather iffy argument. “You’ve never had a gun put to your head like the one that was put to mine! How could you possibly know what you would have done in a similar spot?”

  “That’s your argument?” he roars. “That everyone has a breaking point? That everyone has a price?”

  “Don’t they?” I cover my face and begin to cry because I know my argument sounds lame, like trying to acquit a murderer because he was really mad. “How can you possibly know how far you would go if it had to do with the kids, with your brother, their health and survival? My lie has given you a family! If I had told you what happened, where would any of us be?”

  “It wasn’t your choice to make alone!” he yells. “I should have known the situation. You should have told me the truth! Maybe we would have still ended up a family, maybe we wouldn’t have, but at least our lives would have been honest. So cut the moralistic bullshit about how your lie has given me a life. There is no silver lining to your lie, Mary! No matter how hard you try to convince yourself that there was virtue in what you did, there’s not!”

  “What are you saying, Tom? That I’m unforgivable? Unredeemable? That there is no getting past this?”

  “There’s a lot that I could get past, but you know the most unbelievable part of all of this?” I stare at him, but my vision is betraying me, making the features on his face grow larger and then smaller. “The most unbelievable part is that Landon knew Sally was his and I didn’t. Why was that, Mary? I don’t agree with it, but I could at least understand why you didn’t tell me—you thought I would leave. I could understand even more why you wouldn’t tell Landon—he’d never know if you hadn’t told him. But here’s the kicker, Mare: You told Landon. You sought him out and told him. Why? What were you hoping for in telling him? Were you hoping he would sweep you off your feet, and you and Sally would run away with him?”

  “No! God, no!” I scream. “I never once had that thought. That’s not why I told him.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I was going to tell him and get his word that he would stay out of our lives. And then I was going to tell you! That was the plan. To come clean. To live the truth. But I told him, got his word, and then I never told you. Never could. I tried a million times, but I could never get the words out.”

  Tom walks to the mantel, lifts a framed photo of the kids from a few years back. I brace myself for him to pitch it into the fireplace, but he doesn’t, just stares at it, traces his finger across their younger faces.

  “You say you never chose Landon over me, but Mary, there’s no denying that you did. You trusted your secret would be safer with him than it was with me. That’s all there is to it.”

  With that, Tom storms out the door, and the next thing I hear is the shriek of rubber on the driveway.

  For the rest of the morning I sit on the edge of the fireplace with my face in my hands. The flue is open and an icy stream of air has chilled me to the bone. In my daze, I rock back and forth until a new thought collides with the one I had clung to all along. That I have been lying to Tom for ten years, I knew. What I didn’t know was that I was lying to myself, too. Why did I tell Landon? What was I hoping for? Was it what Tom said? Was I hoping for Landon to steal me away from Tom? Not once had that thought knocked on my door…until now.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  All My Heart

  AFTER SALLY WAS BORN, AFTER I saw her resemblance to Landon James, after I had fallen into a deep depression, I picked up the phone and called him. We made plans to meet at the Mayflower on Connecticut Avenue.

  We sat awkwardly in the gigantic lobby chairs.

  “I was very surprised to hear from you,” he said.

  “I’m sure,” I answered, lulling Sally by rocking her carrier.

  “Did you want to see me for any reason in particular?” Landon asked. “I mean, you don’t need a reason.”

  “I have a reason,” I said.

  “Oh, okay. Great.”

  “I have something I need to tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is there somewhere more private where we could talk?”

  Once inside the hotel room, Landon asked, “Would you like something to drink?” He waved to the mini-refrigerator.

  “Sure,” I said. “A soda, something without caffeine. I’m nursing.”

  Landon opened a Sprite for me and set it on the ledge by the window.

  “So what’s this all about, MM?”

  I turned to him, took an enormous breath, and looked down at Sally. “We named her Sally,” I said.

  “She’s adorable,” Landon said, reaching out with a finger to touch her hair.

  “I don’t know why we chose the name Sally,” I said. “It just seemed nice, not too pretentious, not too cute.”

  “I like the name,” Landon said.

  “It fits her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Landon?”

  “Yeah, Mary?” he said, still fingering Sally’s silky hair.

  “You’re Sally’s father…biologically.”

  “W-what?” Landon stammered, pulling back his hand. “I am? How’s that possible?”

  “The last time we saw each other, remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” he s
aid, sitting down and bending at the waist. “How do you know?” he said, his eyes on his shoes.

  “Look at her,” I replied, and turned Sally outward in his direction, hanging her from my forearm like a floppy newborn cub.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you see it?” I asked. “Can’t you see the resemblance?”

  “To me, she looks like you.”

  “It’s easier for someone else to see,” I said. “But that’s why I need a DNA sample. Just so we’re sure.” I reached my hand into my purse, pulled out a little kit I had purchased on the Internet, a cluster of Q-tips and sterile envelopes.

  “Whoa, hold on, Mary, you’re nearly giving me a heart attack. Give me a second to breathe.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve had time to think about this. I understand that it’s a shock.”

  “What about the test?”

  “You just swab your cheek, and then I send it off. I’ll make up a fake name. None of this will be ‘on the record.’ ”

  “What about your husband? Tom, right? What did he say?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “Are you planning to?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you first and have a discussion about how we’re going to handle this.”

  “How are we going to handle this?”

  I took a deep breath and released it, looked at Landon with pleading eyes, and kissed the top of Sally’s head. “I want you to stay out of her life.”

  He stood and walked to the window, placed his forehead against the cool glass, and breathed little clouds of fog onto the pane.

  “I want to raise her with Tom,” I went on. “With the other children we’re going to have. I’m asking you to give up any right to her, Landon. I mean, my God, you’re running for attorney general again. You have your law firm. The last thing you need is an ‘illegitimate’ baby, right?” As the word illegitimate floated from my mouth, I felt guilty instantly for my little innocent baby, who was anything but illegitimate.

  Landon exhaled noisily, furrowed his brow. “Goddamn, MM, why’d you tell me, then? What kind of man would give up his right to his own child?”

  “She doesn’t fit into your life, Landon. And she fits perfectly into mine. I’m asking you to let me have her. You owe me, Landon. For a decade of my life when you promised to love me and you didn’t. You owe me. Let me get on with my life.”

  Landon covered his face with his hands, and when he removed them his eyes were red and puffy. “I know I owe you,” he said. “But still, what you’re asking…”

  “I know, Landon,” I said. “It’s a lot. But it’s not like you want a baby in your life right now, is it?”

  “No, God no,” Landon said. “It’s the last thing I want. It’s just the point of it: giving up any claim to a child I fathered. It makes me feel like my good-for-nothing old man, that’s all. A de facto lowlife.”

  “You’re nothing like him.”

  Landon stared into space, as though trying to will that to be true. Then he turned to me. “You didn’t have to tell me,” he said. “Why did you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “For some reason, I just had to.”

  Landon walked briskly toward me, and my first thought was that he was storming out of the room, but instead he lifted Sally from my arms. He held her awkwardly in front of himself, and then he sat in the chair and draped her across his legs. She didn’t seem to mind. Tears welled in his eyes, then he shook his head, wiping them away. “Goddamn, MM. She’s…she’s really my daughter.”

  “No, Landon, she’s not,” I said. “A daughter belongs to the father who raises her. Biology doesn’t matter. You, of all people, know that. I want Tom to raise her.”

  “What if I say no?” he asked. “What if I want to be her father?”

  “Do you?” I asked, because I knew from experience that Landon James didn’t want to be a husband, much less a father.

  He didn’t. Landon agreed to my terms, and then a few months later he was elected as attorney general. That was when I learned that Landon’s success was my ticket to freedom. The more successful, the more public his career became, the less likely the chance that he’d want anything to do with Sally and me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Loss of Heaven

  THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW ROLL through like a heavy fog. I’m a stranger in my own home. My children think I’m acting weird. I’m despised by my husband. I can see in his eyes the raw disgust he feels for me, and I don’t know how to act. I’m torn. On the one hand, I still need to be Mom to my kids. They need me to be up and happy and cheerful and here. They need me to be present in every minute of their days. Running away, crawling into a hole, seeking shelter under a pile of thick blankets isn’t an option.

  But on the other hand, Tom needs me to be sorry. He wants to see me suffer. He wants me to hurt as badly as he does. And then there’s Sally, my intuitive lawyer-to-be daughter, who is scrutinizing me and analyzing my every move as though she’s a forensics expert, ready to testify as to the competency—or lack thereof—of our family.

  The needs of my children are at odds with the needs of my husband. The two are incompatible, and every move I make feels wrong. If I laugh at something the boys say, I feel as if I’m betraying Tom’s pain. If I’m gloomy and quiet for Tom, I feel guilty that I’m not the mom my kids need. I’m being pulled, and my heart—the anchor that once rooted me against the tugs—has given up, separated from the rope.

  Each day Mom and Dad call. “It’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine,” I whimper over the phone. I don’t have the vocabulary to put this crisis into words, can’t craft a sentence around this catastrophe, can’t even begin to explain what I have done. On the third day, they show up at my door. I collapse into my mother’s arms and fight for breath, because at the sight of her I lose it and cannot breathe. I want to breathe in, but the cries are forcing their way out. There’s a traffic jam in my throat and just as Dad’s going to get a paper bag for me to breathe into, I fall to my knees and catch some breath. “I’m okay,” I say, and then start to cry again.

  For the next hour I cry and my parents hold me without saying a word. I lie across them like I did when I was a kid. Dad strokes my hair and Mom draws shapes on my back. I soak Dad’s pant leg with tears and snot, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Maybe I can go home with them, move back into the room I shared with Angie, organize my shelves of stuffed animals, write in my key-lock diary, and pretend I never grew up and built a life on a lie.

  Mom’s loving and caring, but she’s also efficient. “Okay, then,” she says. “Let’s sit up, get a cup of coffee, and talk this through.”

  Once Mom has started the coffee and we’re back on the sofa, I say, “I saw Landon.”

  “Saw him?”

  “I was with him.”

  “With him…in the biblical sense?” Mom asks.

  “In the I-was-a-giant-idiot sense,” I say.

  “Recently?”

  “God no!” I say, shocked, forgetting that this is their first time hearing a story I’ve known for a decade. “A long time ago. Before Tom and I got married.” I swallow. “Right before we got married.”

  “Oh, honey,” Mom says in a sad voice, like she pities her stupid daughter who couldn’t say no to Landon James.

  “Did it happen again?” Dad asks.

  “Of course not,” I say, offended, but Dad’s question is valid; if I did it once, why not twice?

  “And Tom knows,” Mom says.

  I nod. “But there’s more. It wasn’t just that I slept with him.”

  Mom and Dad look at each other. My poor parents, who raised me with perfect morals, who took me to church every Sunday, who said the Rosary with their girls every night, who focused on family and gratitude and making smart choices.

  “He’s Sally’s biological father.” I say the words, and though I said them to Tom the other night, today—in the light of day, not fueled with adrenaline—they seem dirtier, more
tawdry, like seeing a seedy nightclub in the daytime. A creepy feeling fills me, like watching the sex scene of an R-rated movie with Mom and Dad in the room.

  Mom and Dad nod, rock backward and forward, fiddle with their hands, and pull their mouths into tight lines. “Well,” Mom says. “Saints preserve us. That’s big.”

  “I know,” I cry.

  She puts her arm around me and I bury my nose into her neck. Dad reaches over, too, and rubs my back. After a while Mom goes to the kitchen to pour us coffee. When she returns, she says, “Her hair. Tom’s hair. You’d never guess that he wasn’t her father.”

  “The hair,” I repeat. “Same color as Tom’s.”

  “But also the same color as my mother’s.”

  “It had to come from somewhere,” I say, because the jig is up and there’s no point saying that it came from Tom anymore.

  “My mother, your grandmother, was widowed early with two small children—my older brothers. When she remarried, to my father, he was a widower, too, with a daughter. When they got married, they went on to have three more children—my brother, Mike, my sister, and me. So they had yours, mine, and ours, if you will. But they never once treated any of us different and we never talked in those terms. We were all siblings. We never said ‘your dad’ or ‘my mom,’ and it wasn’t until we were older that we used to sit around and sort it through. We were just a family.”

  “I know, Ma,” I say. “I can never remember who belonged to whom in your family.”

  “That’s the point,” Ma says. “We all belonged to each other. So much so that we couldn’t remember either. We were just a family, brothers and sisters all the same.”

  “I love that story. I wish Tom had known the truth from the beginning. Maybe we still would have gone on with our lives, had our children. But I didn’t play it that way. I was too scared he’d leave.”

  Day four of our new coexistence, and nothing much has changed. Tom wakes up, heads to work early, is home in time for dinner. He spends more time than usual outside with Daisy, our golden retriever, throwing her a tennis ball. We barely speak to each other, yet we still sleep in the same bed and all sit down as a family for dinner every night. Pretending.