Acts of Contrition Read online

  One day Tom made a biting comment and, rather than letting it leave marks, I sloughed it off. It worked—we slid, laughing, past the moment—and I’d since made a habit of it. I had come to grasp the nuances of marital subterfuge, though it made me a little sick to do so. Minimizing my husband’s concerns is more like a cheap trick than mere artifice, but it’s better than engaging in a conversation that might show my cards.

  “I was thinking of taping it,” I joke, leaning down and sticking my face goofily in front of his. “So I can watch it over and over.”

  Tom smiles stiffly, attempts a conciliatory chuckle, but the light behind his eyes has dimmed.

  “Seriously,” I say, kissing his mouth, then looking him straight in the eyes. “I have no interest in watching the news.”

  He smiles a bit. It’s forced, but he’s trying.

  “I love you, okay?” I say. “I really, really love you.”

  “No mistakes,” he says, our family’s safety motto.

  “No mistakes,” I repeat, though the fact that it’s a little late for no mistakes is not buried far from the surface for me.

  After I watch Tom drive away, I go back into the kitchen and check on the girls. As I pour and sip another cup of coffee, I study Sally in her “so Sally position,” slumped over the counter drinking cocoa through a straw with her eyes plastered on her Nancy Drew, her plate of waffles and eggs scraped clean. Then I look at Emily, sitting up straight, holding her cup with her pinky perched high.

  I am the youngest of four girls, and when I look at my daughters, their relationship reminds me most of my connection with my sister Teresa—less primal, more situational. Sally and Emily love each other because they’re sisters, but if they weren’t, they might not choose each other as friends. That’s how Teresa and I were, and still are now. I’ve always felt Teresa’s lifelong compulsion to try to crack my moral code springs from her desire to assert her superiority over me. I see some of that in Sally’s know-it-all attitude toward Emily.

  My relationship with my sister Angie is different. Only separated by two years, we’re both highly emotional, excessively demonstrative with our love, chronic touchers. When her high school boyfriend cheated on her and broke her heart, I cried alongside her. When my mother asked me what was wrong, I wailed, “It just hurts so bad.” I was a surrogate for her pain.

  And then there’s my big sister Martina, who’s ten years older than me, and whose children are grown. It’s undeniable that my life could have taken a path similar to Martina’s if circumstances had been different. That I made it through college, law school, and a few years of a career wasn’t so much because I was a modern woman who wanted to make something of myself; it was more because I was holding out for a guy who didn’t love me enough to marry me. The diplomas on my wall are thanks to his indifference to me. Certificates for hanging in for too long.

  Tom has one brother, Patrick. Four years his junior, Patrick struggles to stay sober and employed, a frequent guest at the Virginia Beach Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center. He and his wife, Kathy, have a five-year-old daughter, Mia. Kathy puts up with his shenanigans until she reaches the breaking point, then packs a suitcase and heads to her mother’s house.

  Yet Patrick and Tom are close, a bond I don’t always understand and one I don’t always support as strongly as I should. Partially because there is no love lost between Patrick and me. He’s never been too subtle in hiding his opinion that I’m not good enough for his big brother. The morning of our wedding, I overheard him say to Tom, “You barely know her. She’s got a lot of baggage. It’s not too late to bail. I’ve got a twelve-pack in the trunk.” I locked myself in the bathroom and cried into a wad of toilet paper with my eyes wide open, for fear my mascara would run, prompting questions that would have to be answered. The room spun and the corset of my dress dug into my ribs as I tried to rationalize my impending walk down the aisle.

  It was true, Tom and I had been dating for only six months, and I had just gotten out of a six-year relationship with a guy I had pined over for a decade—a guy who, I’d proven all too clearly to myself, still had his hook buried deep in some disgustingly helpless part of me. I knew I wasn’t everything Tom deserved, but still, I wanted my marriage to him, wanted the children I had been craving for so long, wanted the fairy-tale life I’d dreamed of. And I wanted to slam the door on Landon James for good. I had to do that, even if it meant deceiving my new husband.

  Dear God, I prayed that day, I promise to come clean, I promise to tell Tom everything, and more than anything, I promise to be the best wife and mother in the world. That was the deal I made that day—that I’d be so good, it would overwhelm all bad. I would confess my sins, do my penance, and amend my life. My acts of contrition would be transformative.

  And I clung to Tom’s reaction to his brother’s warning about me. “She’s the one,” he said, completely unruffled. “Trust me, she’s the one.”

  Ever since then, my relationship with Patrick has been fragile. There have been times when I have tried hard to make him like me, and other times when I was partially glad to see him fall. His failures served as evidence in my corner that maybe he wasn’t the greatest judge of character. In case Tom ever recalled his brother’s concerns about me, Patrick’s stumbling would give him pause before giving them too much weight.

  By seven forty-five, Tom’s gone and I’ve awakened the twins, Domenic and Danny—both named after their great-grandfathers. They’re still half asleep and in their jammies when I strap them into the double stroller and corral the girls out the door.

  “Sal, you got your backpack, your lunch box, your sweater?” I list. “Em—how ’bout you? Your binder, your composition book, lunch box?”

  Both acknowledge that they have their stuff.

  “Teeth brushed?”

  “Yep,” Sally says.

  “Me, too,” Emily says.

  I reach for a wipe from the package on the washer and swipe it across Emily’s face.

  “Then why is there milk still on your lip?”

  “Honest, I brushed my teeth,” she says, baring her teeth for me to inspect. “Swear to God.”

  “Don’t swear to God,” I remind her.

  I push the button to open the garage door, and we begin the walk to the end of the road where the bus picks up. The other moms, who are my friends and neighbors, whistle and catcall at me like it’s my wedding night.

  “Congrats!” my friend Susan says with a wide smile, patting me on my back. “You made it.”

  Another friend, Sarah, wants to know what I’m going to do now that I’m a lady of leisure.

  “Don’t jinx it.” I shake my finger at her. “It’s not a done deal yet. I’ve still got to get these guys to school.”

  “Do something fun!” Susan says. “I don’t want to hear that you went grocery shopping.”

  “Grocery shopping without kids doesn’t sound so bad,” I say, imagining a leisurely stroll through the aisles of Wegmans, sampling Gouda and French bread along the way.

  While we wait, I pull a brush from my pocket and run it through Sally’s hair amid her cries that I’m killing her. “Brushing your own hair is always an option,” I remind her. She’s reading her myth book, a tattered hardback she’s read a million times. One time I overheard Sally telling Emily, “Mom is like a Greek tragedy, the way she fusses and worries over us, very Persephone and Demeter.”

  Emily shrugged. “I think it’s cool that she loves us so much.”

  Sally harrumphed. “I’m not complaining about being loved. Sometimes I just wish she would chill out.”

  When the bus comes, I pull Emily over near Sally and kiss each of them, covering their faces. I touch my palm to their cheeks, place my mouth on the crowns of their heads, and kiss them again.

  “Enough, Mom,” Sally says.

  I step back, not wanting to be so Greek tragic. “Safety first,” I say.

  “Never last,” they chime.

  “Love you, girls.”

&n
bsp; “Love you, too,” they sing.

  “Stick together,” I say.

  “We will.”

  “Make good choices!” I holler after them, but they’ve had their fill of my bus-stop affirmations. I’m the affirmation queen. I dose them out each morning with their vitamins, scratch them on notes in their lunch boxes, pack them in the kisses I cover them with each night. My promises manifest in words, notes, and flesh. If no one else, you always have me. I open my mouth and then stop. It’s time to let them go, to trust that they won’t be swallowed into a chasm in the earth.

  The boys and I wave furiously at them as the bus pulls away. Like that, 50 percent of my kids are on their way to school. I kick the lock off the stroller, holler, “See ya, ladies!” to my friends, and head home at breakneck speed. I’m in the final stretch.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Transgressions

  TOM

  I’M NOT EVEN INSIDE THE beltway and I’m already stuck in traffic. It’ll free up after I get beyond the merge. DC traffic is the worst. Maybe not LA bad, but bad enough. A twenty-mile drive could easily take an hour. Longer, on any given day.

  I was thinking of taping it, plays over and over in my head—not just Mary’s words, but the tone of her voice and the dopey look on her face, like I was being paranoid. Like she would be completely okay if the tables were turned, if my ex-girlfriend were on every television.

  Sometimes I think about my ex, Cassandra. She’s a nice daydream when I need a break from the Mary-and-Landon nonsense ricocheting in my mind. Cassandra was a knockout by all standards: a dancer with stick-straight posture, a tight little ass, and perky breasts. She and I met at an office party. She came with another guy but left with me. I don’t deny I felt like a million bucks that night, her arms wrapped around my waist. We went back to my place, and I learned that everything guys said about going to bed with dancers wasn’t just wishful thinking. She was still there in the morning, her willowy limbs crisscrossed over mine.

  We went on to date for almost three years and I have to admit she wasn’t a bad girlfriend. She used to say she was the “nesting” type. She’d cook me dinner, we’d watch movies, she even knitted me a chunky Irish sweater for Christmas one year. She was loyal, too, leaving me notes written on scraps of paper. Lots of x’s and o’s and a smack of her red lips. As hot as she was, she sometimes worried I would leave.

  She might have been needy, but she didn’t care for anyone else who was. She never volunteered to do a damn thing; in fact, she’d make up excuses to get out of anything that didn’t benefit her directly. I’d catch her in little white lies. One day I overheard her telling our neighbor she wished she could help him out with jumper cables, but she didn’t have any. She had them, all right. I had packed them in her car just the month before, after her battery died. When I asked her about it, she said it seemed like a hassle and she was on her way out the door for a pedicure.

  One night we were in DC, on Pennsylvania Avenue, walking back from dinner out. We passed a homeless guy sprawled across a grate, warming himself against the winter cold. “God, that sucks,” I said to Cassandra after we walked by. “It sucks that he has to be there.” I was speaking philosophically, politically, from a humanity standpoint. Without knowing this man who was on the ropes, I wanted more for him, wanted his existence to be something other than seeking refuge on a warm grate.

  “No kidding,” Cassandra said, wrinkling her tiny nose. “Go to a shelter and take a shower.”

  It bothered the hell out of me that she wasn’t compassionate. I’m far from a bleeding heart and am the first to say that a man needs to fend for himself in this world and not ask for handouts, but at least I could sympathize. I guess I could thank my brother and father for that, each of whom could have easily ended up sprawled across a grate, homeless, following one too many rendezvous with whiskey.

  Mary and Cassandra couldn’t be more different. One time Cassandra and I were watching television and our show finished and a paid program for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital came on. A toddler named Cailey was being profiled, a cutie with giant blue eyes, a can-do attitude, and a perfectly shiny scalp. Cassandra grabbed the remote, said something like, “Add that to my list of eighty reasons why I don’t want kids,” and turned the channel. I remember watching her walk away: her giraffe legs and sashaying hips, her blond hair fanning down her back. That was when I realized it would never work with her. I wanted a family. I wanted to be a dad. And I wanted a woman who cared whether Cailey lived to see her next birthday.

  Then came Mary. The first time I met her was at a softball game. I was filling in for a guy on her law firm’s team. My buddy Joe was an associate at the same firm and had called and asked me to come. Mare says we met on the field, which is true, but I actually saw her about a half hour before the game started. She was walking down Connecticut Avenue. I was walking behind her, though at the time I didn’t have a clue we were going to the same game. I remember watching her, thinking she was cute. Short as hell, like five foot four, if she was lucky. A curtain of shiny brown hair, swinging side to side. And she was wearing athletic shorts and an oversize T-shirt. She looked like she was barely twenty years old, but God, she was cute. I remember thinking how Cassandra wouldn’t be caught dead in a T-shirt and how her athletic clothes were always clingy spandex that framed her perfect curves.

  There was an old lady who was struggling to hold her grocery bags. Why she thought she could carry so many bags was beyond me, but she had them lined all the way up her spindly arms. Mary went right up to her and asked if she could carry her bags. I trailed behind as she walked two blocks down D Street and into the lady’s building. I waited for about five minutes to see if she came out. Finally she did, holding a stack of cookies the old lady must have given her. Mary proceeded to chomp her way through the entire stack as she walked briskly in the same direction as me. A girl who eats, I thought, as if it were the most interesting observation. I was so used to Cassandra and her cardboard protein bars and six-packs of cottage cheese—Cassandra who would cook for me but never eat anything herself. Hell, Cassandra wouldn’t even eat fruit. Too many carbs. All I could think was that I wanted to take this short girl eating cookies out to dinner. Carmine’s, maybe, to share a gigantic bowl of pasta and a basket of bread.

  When she and I walked to the same softball field, my heart flipped. The older guys greeted her like she was their daughter and the women welcomed her with hugs. She was loved. People wanted to be around her. I want to marry that girl, I thought at that moment. I found my buddy Joe, and asked him about her. He said she was great. He thought maybe she was just newly single.

  What I saw that day in Mary is truly who she is: open, loving, giving, accessible. She made our house a home. She taught us to be a family who loves deeply, who puts each other first. She loves our kids with excess and abundance, like Santa’s bag, with all of the gifts magically multiplying. Scrapbooks, photo albums, artwork covering our shelves, paintings plastered on the refrigerator, a hallway covered in school pictures. She’s the mom who serves herself last because she wants each of us to have the best of everything. Take mine, she says, sliding her helping of dinner onto Sally’s plate, leaving herself with bread heels and overcooked ends of the roast. I like it this way, she says, and the thing is, she does like it that way: her family having the best.

  Mary and I were only together for a month when that same St. Jude commercial came on. Mary was dressed in a suit for work. She was a new associate at the time and putting in a sixty-hour workweek was typical. She was running late, her arms clutching a stack of files, trying to find two matching shoes—following a screwup a few days earlier when she went through her day wearing one blue pump and one black one—when she saw the commercial. She sat down, rested the files on her lap, and leaned forward. She sat there for maybe a half an hour and blubbered as she watched the sick kids fighting for their lives. Afterward her face looked like it had been stung, so swollen and red. I helped her gather her mountain of
Kleenex, and when she hugged me tight she just kept saying, “We’ve got to help. We’ve got to help.” That was eleven years ago and we’re still making monthly contributions to St. Jude. Mare says our children are healthy and we’ll support St. Jude for the rest of our lives just to thank God for our blessings.

  So why am I daydreaming about careless Cassandra instead of Mary? Why does Mary, the sweetest, most compassionate person I know, sometimes leave me unsettled, as though I’ve witnessed a crime I’d never be able to report? Because Mare dated that dickhead for six years before she and I met, and at times it’s like the bastard never left. Mary doesn’t lie. Ever. But she lied about Landon. He called and she didn’t tell me. I found out later. Mary and I are as close as a married couple can be, but whenever Landon James is involved, somehow I end up feeling like someone has moved the goalposts. I dated Cassandra, a real knockout, and she never once made me feel as insecure as Mary has.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Moral Inventory

  “OKAY, BOYS, LET’S DO THIS!” I clap my hands together and set the twins up at the counter. I never meant to raise my kids according to gender stereotypes, but it just happened. I find myself all of the time calling the boys “sports fan” and “buddy” and “champ.” We are always hitting the ball out of the park or scoring goals or touchdowns.

  I place bowls of apple oatmeal in front of them with small glasses of milk. I lean over the counter to get their attention.

  “Boys, do you know what today is?” I ask. My voice is as enthusiastic as an infomercial.

  They look at me blandly.

  “It’s the first day of preschool!” I gasp, my hands flying in the air. “Can you believe it? You’re going to school! Just like Sally and Emily! You’re big! Are you excited?”