Acts of Contrition (29 page)

As I’m getting ready to leave the next morning to drive back home, I learn that Tom plans to stay another week, to see his father through a string of follow-up visits, physical therapy, and a meeting with the nutritionist. When I ask Tom why he needs to stay so long, why Patrick can’t do what Tom’s planning to do, he shrugs, and I realize that he doesn’t really have an answer other than not wanting to come home.

He walks me to the car.

“Do you have any stuff?” he asks.

“Just my purse,” I say. “I kind of left right away when your mom called.”

“Give the kids a kiss for me,” he says.

“I can’t wait to see them. It feels like it’s been a lifetime.”

“Two and a half days with my father can do that.”

I smile, slip into the driver’s seat, start the car. Tom pats my forearm resting on the window, a slight rub. “Okay, then,” he says. “See you when I see you.”

The old Tom would have given me a list of safety precautions, would have reminded me to fill up the tank before I hit the highway, would have made sure that my cell phone was charged and the spare tire was in good shape. The old Tom would have programmed the GPS, warned me against creeps at the rest stops, would have made me promise to call the second I got home. The old Tom would have kissed me good-bye.

I’m only a block away when I start to bawl: fat, giant, soaking tears that make my chest heave and leave me fighting for breath. I rub at my face, smearing mascara. Blow my nose and cry some more. The old Tom would have cautioned me against driving while having a nervous breakdown, but the new Tom is rationing his compassion and affection, doling it out in scant pieces, storing up the rest in case there’s another war.

When I enter our home, the kids are schizophrenic. At first they tackle me—literally
tackle
me—with hugs and kisses until I’m splayed on the floor with four suckerfish feeding on me.

“Mommy,
Mommy
!” Danny pleads. “It’s
you
!”

“You’ve been gone
forever
!” Dom cries.

Sally cups my face with her hands and turns it in her direction, so that she has my full attention. “Mom, I read a 527-page book in two days!”

Emily weaves her head under her sister’s arm until her mouth is an inch from mine. “Mommy, oh, Mommy, you are a
beautiful
sight!”

This devotion, this uninhibited gush of pure love, this dam breaking is followed almost as vehemently by a chorus of “We
don’t want Nana and Pop to leave! Can they stay? Do you have another trip to go on? Pop was just going to play a game of checkers with us. Nana was going to make snickerdoodles.”

That night I let my parents take care of me along with the kids. Mom cuts me a gigantic wedge of lasagna and I eat it in a matter of minutes. I wash it down with a glass of pinot and then use my leftover bread to sop up any sauce left on my plate. Other than a little Chinese food last night, I realize I’ve barely eaten in two days. My full stomach pushes against the buttons on my pants. I slouch into my chair with another glass of wine. I tell Mom and Dad the whole story, about Sean and the heart attack, about how Colleen broke down when he wasn’t looking, how Tom flew to Ireland and back in a matter of seventy-two hours.

Mom fills me in on the kids.

Later, after the kids are in their rooms and on their way to a good night’s sleep, I settle in next to Mom and she asks me how it really went. I tell her about Tom, how he’s still mad but how he and I shared the sofa last night. A smile pours across her face like sunshine and her eyes glisten. “See!” she says. “He’s coming around.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Humble

TOM RETURNS HOME FROM VIRGINIA
Beach with his shoulders relaxed and his fists unclenched. I take that as a good sign. It seems that our relationship is
veering
in the right direction, a few degrees of leaning, a
tilt.
It certainly hasn’t yet turned a corner; we’re still degrees and degrees away from forming a U-turn back to our old life, but the blinker is on. That first night we settle into bed, the gap that usually occupies the space between us is smaller, more a backyard than a football field.

The next night, I take a chance and place my hand on top of his as we watch a
Seinfeld
rerun in bed. A few nights later, I pull his head onto my lap and rake my fingers through his hair. The following night, we make love for the first time since last summer.

“I’m sorry,” I cry afterward. “I’m so sorry for all of this hurt you’ve been put through. I’m so sorry for everything. I’m mostly sorry about the lie, how I carried it all of these years. How I didn’t trust that our relationship was strong enough to survive it. I just want to be sure that you know that I am sorry to my bones.”

“I know you are,” Tom says. “And I know that marriages have recovered from worse. We’re still a family. We can rebuild.”

“I know we can,” I agree, so thrilled to hear those exact words.

“We stand a chance,” Tom says. “But Mary, I’m different now. I’m changed.”

“Changed how?”

“What we went through,” he says. “What it meant to our family. There’s no turning back. It’s part of us now. We can’t pretend that it’s not. We can move forward,” he says, “but there’s no going back.”

We hold each other throughout the night, but once again I feel anxious. What I want more than anything
is
to go back to exactly how things were, our state of being, our familyhood, our constancy. But I know Tom is right. Whether I accept it or not, our world has been bombed. We’ve been through a war, and now we’re battered veterans, covered in scars, traumatized, but also maybe stronger. This thought bubbles inside me: the irrevocability of it all, my wish for things to stay the same, the knowledge that it is no longer an option. By three in the morning, I drift off to sleep. I dream of bombs and ashes and every bit of life turning to dust, and when I wake up with a start, I wonder if I will ever feel peace again. With my heart thumping in my chest, I place my hand over it and stare at the ceiling. For the briefest moment, I gain the sense that there is life sprouting from this death, buds peeking through the soil of our ruin. The road back has been destroyed, and the road forward is riddled with land mines. But the truth has laid a new path, cobblestones spaced in leap lengths apart.
Maybe,
I think.

As affirmation, and confirmation, and validation of life, the morning sun sneaks through the blinds and I hear the birds chirping. When the children-grenades bomb on our bed, there
is an explosion of love and bonding that we haven’t shared in months. There is no separation between Tom and me. We are a pile of people, crisscrossed kindling, indomitable. A pile of sticks that together cannot be broken.
We’ll make it,
I think.

The following Sunday we’re seated in the pews of St. Andrew’s. We’re a few minutes early, so I crane my neck around to check out the line for confession. Only one lady. I ask Tom if it’s okay if I slide out for a second.

When the light turns green I slip into the box. “Hello, Father,” I say, making the sign of the cross. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“What are your sins, my child?”

“I’ve housed a lie that has hurt my husband, but he and I have worked through the deception. Now I wonder about my daughter. She, too, was part of the lie. What responsibility to the truth do I have to her?”

“Your responsibility is to be her mother. A child should not be concerned with adult matters.”

“What about when she’s older?” I ask.

“When she’s older, you’ll make decisions based on who she is then.”

The days that follow are anything but normal. Tom and I attempt to get back our normal footing, but our house—our life—is booby-trapped at every turn, land mines buried just below the surface. On a Saturday morning the girls are playing Monopoly and Emily storms away in a huff.

“She’s a cheater!” Emily yells, accusing Sally of stealing money from the bank. “A cheater!”

“Am not!” Sally counters. “You’re a liar!”

Tom and I issue uneasy chuckles, try to settle the girls down, but the words
cheater
and
liar
are now loaded, as inflammatory as racial epithets. They’re hard to ignore. They hover, and make Tom and me even more sensitive to each other. I want Tom to act like old Tom, mussing my hair, coiling his arm around me, snapping a towel at me, but the new Tom is polite, says, “Excuse me,” asks for items to be passed, misses jokes.

And I’m the same. Tom and I are a pair of damaged goods that have been repaired, but we’re far from whole. Look close and see the cracks in our foundation. We’ve been glued back together, but we’re not strong.

At night we flip on the television to watch a show. Every channel is a drama or comedy about a cheating husband, a wife stepping out, a ludicrous string of lies knotted with betrayals and deceits.

Then the news: photos of Landon, the upcoming election. Coverage is thick.

By the time our heads hit the pillow each night, we’re exhausted. Exhausted from trying so hard.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Make Amends

ON JUNE 15 SCHOOL LETS
out. A day later, with our minivan crammed with suitcases, coolers, and boogie boards, and with Tom’s and my hopes for a healing and restorative vacation, we head south to Hatteras Island, the serene coastline that washes up the edges of North Carolina.

After renting for years, we finally wrote the check for the down payment and bought a small house only about a hundred yards from the beach. Tom found the place one morning while he was out jogging and drove me and the girls by it later that day.

“Where?” I asked back then, my eyes darting in every direction. “Where’s the house?”

Tom pointed it out. Shrouded in overgrown bushes and sea grasses, the house sat pitifully. Its windows were covered with plywood, and its roof sagged, as if tired of providing shelter.

“Seriously, Tom?”

“Can’t you see the potential, Mare? A little work, and it’ll be great.”

“Maybe they’ll pay us to take it,” I said, but Tom just slung his arm around me and squeezed me tight. “You’ll see.”

That first year Tom made four trips down, twice with his brother and twice with my father. Collectively they repaired the roof, painted it, mowed down the jungle of bushes and grasses. By the time we arrived as a family the following June, the dilapidated shack we’d seen the summer before had emerged as a cozy cottage. Not quite a swan, but certainly no longer the ugly duckling.

That was a nice summer. The girls were four and five years old and Patrick was better than ever. He had been sober for nearly two years, had met Kathy, his soon-to-be wife, and was employed as a project manager for a thriving housing company at the peak of the real estate market. It was a happy time for Tom, having his brother strong and healthy, working on the house side by side with him.

Patrick and I even became close that summer, as I welcomed Kathy into our lives, became her friend, and helped her plan their wedding. Patrick appreciated my gestures, and he and I entered a period of truce, a détente that lasted until a few years later, when the bottom fell out of the housing market, and he lost his job and went on a bender, ending up on our doorstep—belligerent and cursing like a mean drunk in front of our two young daughters.

Each night at the cottage we rolled out and opened sleeping bags, Tom and I lying on our sides, Sally and Emily wedged firmly in the cave of our curves. We’d tell stories of the nights when they were born, how the moon was bright, or the sky was a magical shade of blue, or how there were oodles of fireflies. “More,” the girls would beg, and Tom wouldn’t disappoint, embellishing the embellished stories even more until he’d spun a blanket out of chocolate and pillows stuffed with marshmallow, all because our
darling daughters had entered the world, deserving no less. They’d fall asleep with smiles on their faces and I’d think about what it would be like to be carefree, truly free from my cares, and I would fall into slumber, too, pretending it were so.

Today we make it to the house by one o’clock in the afternoon. The kids are ready to get out. Before the girls’ feet even hit the driveway, they’re already begging for the beach.

“We’ll go,” I say. “I promise! Just give me a few minutes to get situated.”

“I have to pee,” Dom says, holding his crotch, doing the pee dance.

“Follow me,” I say, grabbing the plastic shopping bag that holds the extra roll of toilet paper, just in case. I sit on the edge of the tub while Dom cheers on his wee-wee—“Come on, potty! You can do it!” I can hear the girls storming through the house, remembering, reacquainting themselves.

“Look at all of the board games!” Emily exclaims, as if she’s just been given front-row tickets to
The Phantom of the Opera
. Board games! At home the girls scowl at me when I suggest a board game. At the beach it’s like tasting soda for the first time.

I hear Tom humming, pulling the blinds, and adjusting the thermostat. Even before our crisis, At the Beach Tom was an infinitely more relaxed version of Everyday Tom. I’m praying that this trip has powers, a touch of ambrosia that bestows permanence to our marriage.