Acts of Contrition (2 page)

Sally arrived earlier than we had planned, approximately eight months after we were married. And while my daily-Mass parents weren’t born yesterday and pretty much knew I had spent most nights at Tom’s prior to the wedding, we all did our part to pretend Sally was a honeymoon baby. I wasn’t the first Catholic bride in history to walk down the aisle wearing white, and pregnant.

Following Sally’s birth, I fell into a deep depression. My sisters and my mother thought I was suffering from postpartum blues and I was only too glad to grab onto that as the reason. Tom felt guilty he was at work so much, putting in ten-hour days, traveling, but I was grateful he wasn’t around to see me heaving and sobbing out tears I couldn’t explain. Each day before he came home, it was all I could do to bathe, put on some makeup, and try to hold myself together for a few hours. Put a happy face on the hysterical new mommy.

“Why are you so sad?” Tom would ask, because it was so obvious how much I loved Sally.

“I’m not sad,” I would cry.

“Then what?” Tom would ask patiently.

“Being a mother, having a daughter, becoming a family…It’s huge,” I’d blurt, gasping for air. “Her
life
is in my hands. What if I do it wrong? What if I’ve already done it wrong?”

After I slide Sally’s two fried eggs onto her two waffles and add a scoop of Ovaltine to her mug of milk, my eight-year-old, Emily—with her dimpled cheeks and giant chocolate eyes—floats her way down the stairs, our modern-day Mary Poppins. I meet her at the bottom, placing my hands under her arms and hoisting her up. It’s a promise I’ve made to both the girls: no matter how big they get, I’ll still be able to lift them.

“What about when we’re thirty years old?” Sally asked one day. “Will you still be able to lift us then?”

“Of course,” I assured her. “I’ll work out. I’ll still be able to lift you. We’ll just look very silly.”

I nuzzle my nose into the crook of Emily’s neck. She exudes sweetness from her pores, like rose water, because she appreciates beautiful things: music, art, dance. Her latest thing is to declare everything either “gorgeous” or “dreadful.” The middle ground is too boring to notice.

Emily wraps her legs around me, pulls back to see my face, and plants a juicy kiss on my lips. “Good morning, pretty Mommy,” she says in her best Cockney accent. Her theater group is rehearsing for
Oliver!

I return her kiss and issue a sigh of relief, grateful that I haven’t fallen into the dreadful category.

“Morning, Em,” I say, kissing her freckled nose. “Breakfast?”

“Do we have any fruit and yogurt?” My budding actress is already concerned with her calorie intake.

By seven thirty, Tom has already done an hour’s worth of computer work and is now rushing down the stairs, his small suitcase in one hand, his briefcase in the other. Tom was a boxer in college and has the been-crushed-more-than-once, off-center nose to prove it. He’s stocky and strong and can still lift the girls effortlessly, flying them through the air like winged fairies. He has the brownest eyes and a beautiful wave to his amber hair. Most people assume Sally takes after Tom because of their matching hair. I think Sally resembles Tom because of their special bond, their mutual admiration of each other.

“Do you have everything?” I say, standing before him like an MP. “A change of clothes, underwear, socks, belt, shoes? Did you bring your exercise clothes, your tennis shoes? Do you have your money, your credit card, your driver’s license, your cell phone?”

“Mary,” Tom says, leaning in, kissing my mouth. “I have it all. I only make this trip to Chicago about twenty times a year.”

“I know, I know,” I say, rubbing his arm. “You’re right.” Tom is an engineer for a software company whose major customers are the government and the defense industry. Every couple of weeks he makes a trip to Chicago to update the status of their latest projects at his company’s corporate headquarters.

The girls wrap their arms and legs around Tom like protesters coiled around a redwood. “We’ll miss you,” Sally says, kissing Tom.

Emily sings from
Oliver!
, snuggling into him.

“We love you,” Sally says, and the depth of emotion in her voice nearly chokes me.

“That’s nice, Sal,” Tom says. “And maybe someday your love will grow up and be as big as my love for you, but for now, your love is a puny little weakling.”

Sally smiles. My most competitive child loves playing her special game with her father: whose love is bigger. “My love could kick your love’s butt.” She steps back and assumes a boxer’s stance, just as her father has shown her, left foot forward, dukes up.

“Your love dreams of kicking my love’s butt,” Tom says, throwing little punches in the air for Sal to block. Then he pulls her into a hug and she melts, because her love for her father is a landslide, the kind that sometimes buries her, leaving her breathless.

When I issue a little squeal, Sally looks up, points at me, and smiles her know-it-all smile. “We made Mommy cry,” she says to Tom.

“Our love is so big it always makes Mom cry,” Tom says.

It’s true, seeing Tom love our children puts my heart in a vise. Sometimes it’s just too much—seeing my bounty. It makes me remember how fortunate I am; how much is at stake; the risk in having a cup so full. Sometimes I’ll see families—less
happy,
for lack of a better word: divorced, disobedient kids, financial troubles—and I’ll think: their hearts are actually on firmer ground
, those people
. They’ve already fallen from the top rung we’re clinging to. Looking up the ladder might not be as glamorous, but wouldn’t there be a safety in the steadiness of it, rather than fighting to keep balance at the top?

After a few more minutes of proclamations and declarations of the best and biggest love, I walk Tom to the car. He’ll fly out of Reagan, the closest airport to our home in Woodville, Virginia, a sleepy suburb only twenty miles outside the beltway.

“So what are you going to do with your three hours of freedom?” Tom asks.

“Think. Breathe,” I say. “Go to the bathroom without a kid climbing onto my lap. Maybe take a walk. After that luxury, I’ll
get down to the usual business of paying bills, cleaning house, and managing the kids’ schedules.”

“All that sounds good,” he says, kissing me once more, then sliding into the driver’s seat. “Don’t get sucked into watching the news all morning…”

He stops. Intentionally or not, sometimes Tom can’t help jabbing me in the side where Landon James is concerned. In this instance, he’s testing me to see if I’d be tempted to sit around all day watching the news, mooning over my ex. Remarks like these used to crush me, not because he was being unreasonable but because he had every right to be wary. My past, my reappearing ex-boyfriend, the phone calls—the reported ones and the ones he rightly suspected I didn’t report—were more than a man should have to bear. The guilt I carried from dragging my past into his future nearly killed me. I’d cry, we’d talk—but of course we couldn’t talk it all the way through. We’d just have to decide not to talk about it anymore, walk up to the wall and stare at it, then at last turn away.

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.