“No,” Claire said. “God, no.” The last thing she wanted was some kind of messy confrontation in the kitchen with everyone watching. Claire would never be able to look Julie in the eye again.
“You just accused me of fucking her,” Jason said. “After fifteen years of being together, thirteen years of marriage, and four kids at home. You think I would desecrate all that by fooling around with one of your friends at a party? Is that how little you think of me?”
“She’s very pretty,” Claire said.
“
You’re
very pretty!” Jason was screaming now. “This has nothing to do with pretty! This has to do with you accusing me. This has to do with you not trusting me—me, Jason Crispin, your husband! Do you honestly think I would
cheat
on you?”
He was hot now, hopping mad. First her best friend, now her husband. Why tonight? What had she done wrong?
“You didn’t want to fool around at home,” Claire said.
“We were going to be late,” Jason said. “And my back is killing me.”
“Then you drove like a bat out of hell . . .”
“So you thought what? That I couldn’t wait to get here so I could take Julie Jackson upstairs?”
“Well . . . ,” Claire said.
“Do you really think I’m having an affair?” Jason said. “Do you really think I’m that kind of lowlife? That kind of skunk?”
“It’s dark upstairs,” she said. “Pitch-black. What was I supposed to think?”
“You think I’m a cheating scum. Like your father! Come on, we’re leaving.”
“No.”
“We’re leaving. I’ll get our coats.”
Claire sat down on the bottom step and held her burning face. In the other room, the music was getting louder, couples were probably dancing, and Siobhan had probably popped the cork on a bottle of vintage Moët, but Claire and Jason Crispin were leaving.
Jason threw her pashmina at her. “Here.”
“But Siobhan . . .” Siobhan would really be mad at her now, for picking a fight at her party, for leaving early.
“Let’s go,” Jason said.
They marched out of the house, slamming the door. When they were on the sidewalk, Carter stuck his head out.
“Jase, man, where are you going?”
“My wife’s dragging me home.”
“Already? Dude, we still have food coming. I’m grilling sirloin . . .”
“Sorry, man,” Jason said. He climbed into the truck and Claire climbed into the truck and they sat there, cold and silent and seething.
Claire said, “You stay.”
“No,” Jason said.
“Fine, then I’ll stay.”
“No,” Jason said.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” she said. “You don’t own me.” She kicked her high heel at the glove box. “I hate this truck.” Jason said nothing, and this infuriated her. “I think it is so stupid the way you’ve named this truck Darth Vader. Ever considered what an imbecile it makes you seem like to drive a truck named Darth Vader?”
Jason deftly extracted the truck from their parallel parking place and gunned it for home. Claire braced herself with one hand against the dash. She saw Jason’s face when they passed under a streetlight. His mouth was a pinched line.
When they screeched into the driveway, Jason yanked the keys from the ignition. His eyes were filled with tears. He said, “I call the truck Darth Vader because the kids like it. They think it’s funny.”
Claire stared at him, defiant. She would not be a shrinking violet; she would not wilt. But Jason, in tears? This was new, this was awful, this was something she had done. She bowed her head. Jason was not an imbecile. He was not stupid, small-minded, backward, or limited. He was a man who liked to see his kids smile, who liked to hear squeals of terrified delight (Shea) when he revved the truck’s engine in a menacing way. And Jason was not a cheater. When Claire had seen Jason coming down the stairs with Julie Jackson, she had thought:
I know what that means.
She had seen herself. Claire was cheating, Claire was lying, Claire had had sex with Lock Dixon on the conference table in the Nantucket’s Children boardroom—she’d had sex with Lock, countless times, in her own car, the Pilot, which she now did not allow Jason to ride in. Claire had projected her behavior onto Jason; she had splattered it all over him like paint.
Claire was the skunk.
The following morning, Claire woke up with the worst hangover of her life. It wasn’t just the alcohol, although her head hammered with pain and her stomach squelched and she released foul gas that Jason certainly would have complained about, had he been in bed. But Jason’s side of the bed was empty, smooth; it had never been slept in. He had spent the night in the guest room, which they had agreed never to do except in case of marital emergency, because J.D. and Ottilie were both old enough to construe what this meant, and neither Claire nor Jason wanted stories, true or false, about their sleeping arrangements leaving the house. So the fact that Jason had spent the night in the guest room indicated that matters were dire indeed. Claire had insulted him; she had called his love, and his character, into question, and what offense was worse than that? Once they were inside the house and once Pan had slipped away to her room, Claire tried to explain that she had been upset by her conversation with Siobhan and she’d been drinking her fourth or fifth glass of wine, and when she’d seen Jason and Julie coming down the stairs, she’d jumped to conclusions. She’d accused him, yes, but she was sorry and she begged him to take into consideration the circumstances.
The circumstances are,
Jason had said, stumbling over his own soapbox, located six feet from the TV, remote control in hand,
that you suck
. He’d turned the set on and begun hunting for
Junkyard Wars
.
Claire, meanwhile, got a glass of water for herself and said,
Come to bed. I’ll make it up to you.
She was not used to fighting with Jason. They had divided up their life into his territory and her territory; they ruled peacefully, side by side, and their common ground—the marriage—rarely came up as a topic of conversation the way it had tonight. Tonight, their marriage was the Gaza Strip. But even so, Claire was pretty sure she could win Jason over in the usual way.
No,
Jason said.
You’re turning down sex, again?
she said.
I’m sleeping in the guest room,
he said.
She had alienated her husband and she had alienated her best friend. The first had happened suddenly; the second had been taking place slowly, over the course of six months. Claire felt despicable; her heart was pumping out black blood, sludge, sewage. She could barely lift her head off her pillow or move her feet to the floor.
Could she go back to six o’clock last night and start over? Could she go back to that lunch at the yacht club and politely decline, say to Lockhart Dixon,
Thank you so much for thinking of me, but I have to decline?
Could she simply stay in bed all day, as she used to in college, on any one of the mornings when she woke up full of hungover regret: she had done six tequila slammers, hooked up with a frat boy from URI whose last name she didn’t know, and then stopped by Cumberland Farms at two in the morning and chowed two hot dogs with chili and onions—but at least back in those days, despite her regrettable behavior, she could sleep.
Now she heard Zack upstairs, crying. God only knew where the other kids were. It was Sunday, Pan’s day off. Insult to injury.
Claire pulled on her yoga clothes, brushed her teeth, and climbed the stairs. Her head felt like a glass ball blown out too thin, one that was sure to shatter in the annealer. Zack was howling. J.D. was on the computer in the hallway playing the god-awful race car game—he was obsessed with it. Jason allowed it because the game wasn’t violent. Wasn’t violent but
was
so hypnotizing that J.D. didn’t seem to hear his brother screaming in the other room.
“Do you not hear your poor brother?” Claire said.
“What do you want
me
to do about it?” J.D. said. “He doesn’t want me. He wants you.”
Claire felt like smacking him, but J.D. was unconsciously mimicking his father. It was
Jason
who spoke to Claire like she was his feebleminded servant, Jason who conveyed the preposterous idea that Claire was the only person in the family responsible for Zack—perhaps because she was the one who had almost killed him. Claire peered into the guest room. The bed was empty and made up.
“Have you seen Daddy this morning?” Claire asked.
“He went to work,” J.D. said.
“Work?”
“Deadline, he said.”
“Right, but it’s Sunday. Day of rest.”
J.D. did not see fit to respond to this; he got sucked right back into his game.
“Where are your sisters?”
He did not answer this, either. Claire went into the baby’s room and lifted Zack out of his crib. He was red-faced and nearly inconsolable, hiccupy, hysterical. He was the saddest baby Claire had ever seen, and even after she picked him up he bellowed and struggled for breath, perhaps because he sensed she was not really there.
Ottilie came out of her bedroom wearing her nightgown over her jeans. There had been one inexplicable morning when she’d asked to wear this exact ensemble to school.
“Come on down in a few minutes,” Claire said. “I’m going to make breakfast.”
“I’m not hungry,” Ottilie announced.
“Doesn’t matter,” Claire said. “You have to eat.”
“I’m not hungry because Shea threw up in her bed and the smell made me lose my appetite.”
“Shea threw up in bed? No, she didn’t.”
Ottilie nodded her head at the closed bathroom door. “She’s in there.”
Claire put her ear to the door. She heard Shea, gagging and spitting.
She knocked. “Shea, honey, are you okay?”
Moaning.
“And it’s all over her bed,” Ottilie said. “And there’s some on the rug. It smells disgusting.”
“Okay,” Claire said, thinking: Jason working (to spite her, to punish her), Pan’s day off, one kid screaming, one kid puking, two kids aggressively unhelpful. Hurting head, heavy heart. No best friend anymore, and lover in Tortola. It felt just, though; it felt right. Claire thought of Father Dominic. This was her penance.
Claire jimmied open the door to the bathroom. She rubbed Shea’s back while Shea expelled the contents of her stomach into the toilet. (And Ottilie was correct, it did smell disgusting. It made Claire want to vomit herself; all those mini crab cakes churned in her stomach.)
“Any idea what it was, honey? Did you eat too much candy last night? Or too much greasy popcorn?”
“No,” Shea moaned.
No, which made Claire fear it was a virus that would mow down the family.
She stripped Shea of her pajamas and put her, naked, teeth brushed, into the bed in the guest room. The guest room linens were among Claire’s most valuable possessions—crisp, white, about six thousand thread count, embroidered with sage green thread around the edges. There were ten pillows on the bed, including two foam slabs encased in European shams that were emblazoned with the letter
C.
The guest bed was an extravagance; it was fit for a Turkish pasha, and Shea was so delighted to be allowed to snuggle, naked, beneath the fine, smooth cotton and the green chenille blanket and the fluffy down comforter that she seemed to perk up immediately. Either that, or she was experiencing the imminent sense of wellness one felt after vomiting. Claire hoped, prayed, that Shea would not vomit on the sheets. On the guest room nightstand was a glass pitcher and cup for water, which Claire filled in the bathroom. She set it down for Shea.
“Don’t drink too much right away, okay, honey?”
“Okay.”
“And if you feel sick, you have to promise me you’ll run to the bathroom.”
“I promise.”
Claire looked at her daughter. Her red hair was damp and matted and her round cheeks were flushed pink. Only her slender torso and two toothpicky (but deceptively strong) arms were visible above the bed’s fluff. Shea was a miracle, Claire thought, and her eyes filled with tears. All of her children were miracles, especially the one whimpering in her arms.
“I love you,” she told Shea.
“I know that,” Shea said, unaware of or unimpressed by Claire’s gush of emotion. “Can I watch TV?”
Yes, there was a TV in the guest room, hidden in a cabinet opposite the pencil-post bed. With so many amenities for guests, it was amazing they didn’t have more visitors (the idea of four kids frightened many off). But Matthew would stay in this room in August. Claire really did not want Shea to throw up on the million-dollar sheets. She went to the linen closet and pulled out a bucket, placed it by Shea’s bed.
“Just in case,” she said.
A note from Jason on the kitchen counter said,
Working
. Claire poured herself coffee, then a glass of water, and she took three Advil. It was a beautiful day outside, sunny, springtime; they only got two or three days like this, and they should be taking advantage of it. Picnic at Great Point, a walk around Squam Swamp, something outside, wholesome, as a family.
She hugged Zack, kissed his eyelids, his nose. “I love you,” she said. “Can I put you in your high chair, please? So I can get breakfast?”
He clung to her. He would not be set down. It was impossible to deal with frying bacon, mixing up pancake batter, or stirring chocolate powder into milk when she didn’t have hands. She poured J.D. and Ottilie bowls of cereal and then called upstairs for them to come down. She tried to interest Zack in a banana, but he just stared at it.
“Banana,” she said. “You eat it.” She took a bite, then regretted it. “See?”
Claire eyed the phone. Should she call Jason on his cell and try apologizing again? Should she call Siobhan? It wasn’t even seven-thirty yet, and unlike Claire’s kids, Liam and Aidan had been known to sleep until noon on the weekends, so no, she couldn’t call Siobhan. (And what would she say when she did call? Should she promise to call Edward and deal with the catering issue? She couldn’t! She had delegated the catering to Edward, he and his committee had made a decision, and now Claire’s hands were tied.) The other, more substantive issue rested like a boulder between them. Claire hadn’t told her about Lock; Claire wasn’t going to tell her about Lock.