Acts of Contrition (7 page)

He stares at the television. He looks at me like he wants to say something but then doesn’t.

“What’s up, Dad?”

He looks at Sally, who is engrossed in the sports reel, and then arches his eyebrows over his horn-rimmed glasses and says, “Sal, honey. Why don’t you go check on your father?”

“Okay, Pop,” Sally says, sliding out of the recliner and clomping down the stairs.

Dad takes a breath. Rubs his eyes. “I’ve been seeing a bit of news coverage on that Landon character,” Dad says.

“I know, I know,” I say, waving it away. “It’s been nice and quiet these last few years with him as attorney general. Not a lot of news coverage anyway.”

“And now he wants the Senate,” Dad says.

“Lofty goals,” I say. “But who knows, maybe he’ll make it.” I pray to God that he does make it. So long as Landon is in the public eye he’ll stay out of my life. It’s in his times of defeat when he wallows and grasps at what might have been.

“Why not?” Dad says. “He doesn’t have a bad message.”

“True, but a lot could happen in a year,” I say. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“What’s Tommy say?”

“He hates seeing him. Wishes he didn’t exist.”

“Talk to him,” Dad says. “You know it’s not easy on him, seeing your ex-boyfriend, your ex-fiancé, whatever, plastered across the television.”

“I know,” I say. “It sucks that we can’t ever get away from him completely.”

“As long as he’s a public figure—a politician, of all things—I don’t think you ever will.”

At dinner we stuff ourselves on spaghetti and meatballs, until we’re slouched back in our chairs with our buttons popped on our pants. Mom pours coffee and asks Sally to dim the lights and bring in the cake. We do our most dramatic, operatic, over-the-top singing of “Happy Birthday” to Emily, a girl who appreciates grand style. She claps and takes a bow and throws kisses to us all. Then we shove down more food, each of us polishing off our generous slices of Mom’s chocolate layer cake with fudge frosting. Tom asks for seconds, sealing his status as the best son-in-law
ever.

When we get home from my parents’ house, Tom and I start the nightly turndown service: While he feeds Daisy and throws her a tennis ball in the backyard, I usher the girls in and out of the shower and bathe the boys in the tub. Once the boys are in their jammies, Tom reads them a stack of books. I start another load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, and fill my hands and arms with a million small items that have somehow popped out of drawers and cupboards and trunks throughout the day.

It’s ten thirty by the time I fall into bed against a stack of three pillows with my book in hand. Tom’s on the computer in the corner of our bedroom. When a text message issues its burbling-water sound, I look up and see that my cell phone is on the desk.

“Toss me my phone, babe,” I say. Tom lobs it onto the bed.

I assume it’s from my sister Angie. She and I text each other frequently. But it’s not Angie. It’s Landon James. I drop the phone instinctively as if it’s hot, look at Tom, and steady my breath. The walls pull in, the room seems smaller, the air thicker. My heart thumps in my chest. Despite Tom’s worries, Landon hasn’t contacted me in years—not since the life insurance phone call seven or eight years ago—so the fact that he’s texting me now is as alarming as an intruder in my house. I pick up the phone again. Read the message again.

We need to talk,
the message reads.

“Who wrote?” Tom asks.

“One of the moms from preschool,” I lie. “I forgot that I’m supposed to send in cupcakes tomorrow.” Meanwhile I type
Why?
and hit send.

“You want me to run to the store?” Tom asks. “Or can you stop in the morning?”

Can I call you?
he writes.

NO!
I text.

“Mary?” Tom asks. “The store?”

“I’ll go,” I say, trying to rearrange my face into something that feels normal, but my skin feels tight and tingly, like I’ve been shot with Novocain. “I think one of the kids has an allergy. I’d better check the ingredients.” I’m disgusted by how easily the lies flow, like I do it all the time.

I stare at my phone. Wait.

Call me then,
Landon writes.

“Sound good?” Tom asks.

“What?”

“I asked you if you wanted to watch a
Seinfeld
rerun when you got back.”

“Yes!” I say, shooting my arm in the air like a cheerleader. “Definitely! A
Seinfeld
!”

Behind the wheel, I wait until I’m around the corner and then dial Landon.

“Landon?” I say, like I can’t believe it’s him. It’s been forever, so long that it’s almost incomprehensible to make sense of my past life squeezing like this into my current life.

“It’s been a while,” he says, and the sound of his voice ignites nostalgia in me like the flick of an arsonist’s match. Not lust—I no longer crave Landon—but familiarity, like our shared past is still connected by live wires.

“Why are you calling me?” I say in almost a whisper, because talking to my ex is the equivalent of cheating, and I already have enough judgment bearing down on me.

“I’m running for Senate.”

“I saw that.”

“There is a potential problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Listen, Mary, don’t freak out, but there’s a photo,” he says.

“A photo?”

“Of us.”

“From when? Doing what? And why’s it matter?” I flip on my turn signal, pull into the shopping center, and into a parking spot.

“It’s when we met in DC at the Mayflower.”

“As in ten years ago?”

“I haven’t seen you since.”

“I had Sally with me that day.”

“The photo is of just you and me. You can’t tell that you’re holding a baby carrier.”

“So they have a picture of you and me in the lobby of the Mayflower,” I say. “So what?” As though flippancy on my part will make this matter less.

“I’m leaning into you,” he says. “I’m kissing your cheek.”

“Oh, God.” My heart plummets to the pit of my stomach like on the antigravity ride I took the girls on last summer at Kings Dominion. I remember Landon’s harmless kiss. “We weren’t in the lobby then.”

“No, we were leaving the hotel room. That’s the problem.”

That day is etched in my memory.
Is there somewhere private we can talk?
I had asked, and then followed Landon up to his tenth-floor room.

“But we were just
talking
. There’s got to be some way to prove that we were just talking.”

“That’s beside the point,” Landon says. “What matters is how it looks.”

“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why was someone taking a photo of you? You weren’t even the attorney general then.”

“They weren’t after me,” he says. “The photographer was a snoop PI hired by the wife of one of my firm’s partners. She
suspected him of running around and using the room at the Mayflower to meet his ‘friend.’ We just got caught in the crossfire.”

For a moment neither of us says anything. Then I ask, “Have I been identified in the photo as your ex-girlfriend? Or whatever it was that I was to you.”

“If it’s any consolation, you can’t entirely see your face. Your head is down and your hair is everywhere.”

I reach up and grab a handful of said hair. A wave of relief floods over me. “So maybe it’ll be okay.”

“Let’s hope. I don’t know what this guy intends to do with the photo.”

“Can’t you make a deal—buy it from him?”

“If I make him an offer, he’ll know it’s worth something. It’s better to give him the impression that it’s worthless.”

“Can
you
tell that it’s me?”

“I can, of course. There’s a slice of your profile that you can see, plus if you know what you look like, you’d be able to tell.”

“So my husband will know?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“God!” I say, squeezing the steering wheel. “How will you explain who I am, why we were together?”

“I don’t know. I’ll just say you were an old friend and we happened to run into each other. I’ll explain that you were holding a baby carrier. That I invited you up to my room so that you could nurse. Yeah, that’s it. That’ll make me sound very pro-women, pro-nursing.”

“That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it!” I seethe. “What about me? What am I going to tell Tom?”

“Tell him the same story I’m going to tell. That you happened to run into me.”

“In the lobby of the Mayflower? He’ll want to know what I was doing downtown. I had just had a baby. It’s not like I was working then.”

“I don’t know, Mary! Make up some goddamned story. Say you met a girlfriend for lunch to show off your new baby and you happened to run into me.”

“You can’t let this hurt me, Landon.”

“I’ve got my eye on a US Senate seat. You think I want a scandal on my hands?”

There is a pause across the phone lines. I listen to Landon breathe. I lift my chin to slide the impending tears back into place, exhale slowly.

“The last thing in the world I want is to hurt you, Mary,” Landon says in a tone I heard only occasionally throughout our relationship, a tone that soothed me, like crawling into his arms after days of not hearing from him. “God knows I’ve hurt you enough.”

I look down and watch two fat teardrops fall onto my thighs.

“What am I supposed to do?” I ask because I have no clue.

“Just go about your normal life,” Landon says. “There’s a chance this photo will never see the light of day.”

In the grocery store I walk through the fluorescent-lit aisles in an equally fluorescent daze, buying two dozen cupcakes I don’t need. At home I check on the kids and then crawl into bed with Tom. I curl into my husband, and instead of paying attention to our
Seinfeld
rerun, I pray for forgiveness for my decade of sins, and try to breathe through lungs that are too small for this crisis.

That day at the Mayflower, the day the photo was taken, I went into DC to meet Landon.

We settled into two overstuffed floral chairs in the lobby.

“I can’t believe you called,” he said, struggling to cross his long legs in the too-soft chair.

“I wouldn’t have, obviously,” I answered, rocking Sally’s carrier with my foot, a mom skill I had already acquired in three short weeks. “If it wasn’t important.”

“How are things?” he asked. “How’s marriage? Motherhood? You look great.”

I looked fat, actually, having gained fifty pounds with Sally, and still holding on to a good thirty of them.

“It’s great,” I said. “Tom is a great guy and I can already tell that he’s going to be the best father.”

“That’s good, really good,” Landon said. “I’m happy.”

“Great, good,” I repeated. It seemed that our combined vocabulary had been reduced to
good
and
great
. “Is there somewhere more private where we could talk? Maybe down a dark hallway, the ice room, the laundry facilities?”

Landon gave me a look like he didn’t know if I was joking or not. “There’s a room,” he said, haltingly. “I mean, my firm keeps a room here. For clients. We could go up there.”

“That’d be great.”

Sally had started to fuss. I unbuckled her and lifted her out of her carrier, reached down to grab for the handle.

“I can take that,” Landon said, reaching for the handle. “Or her, if you’d like.”

“I’ll hold on to her,” I said. “Thanks.”

I held Sally against my chest, put my mouth on her velvety forehead, and inhaled her powdery scent as I followed him up to the tenth-floor room. Inside I went to the window, pulled the heavy fabric and then the sheer lining, looked across Connecticut Avenue, and strained to see the tip of the Washington Monument.

After we talked, I strapped Sally back into her carrier and stood in the hallway while Landon closed the door behind us.

As I revisit the scene, snuggled against my innocent husband in our marital bed, my fevered brain recalls him for me: the guy with an ice bucket at the end of the hall, loitering at the vending machine. The photographer. As Landon leaned in and kissed my cheek, neither of us would have seen him snatch our secret in his shutter.

CHAPTER SIX

Defects of Character

IT’S EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, AND
the six of us are already in the kitchen, our central gathering post. Today is Sally’s tenth birthday, but none of us is too concerned with it at the moment. We’ve hugged her and squeezed her and covered her face with kisses, branding her with wishes for the best birthday ever. But right now we’re focused on her soccer game at nine o’clock, and the fact that I have forgotten that we’re the “snack family,” the ones responsible for bringing halftime and after-game goodies. Sally’s sending me plaintive messages. “You
never
forget these things. How could you have
forgotten
?” she wants to know, in her most accusatory tone. Easy, I want to tell her. Riddled as I am with anxiety over the photo that might clobber me—clobber us all—surely forgetting to stop for Gatorade and Doritos packs could be overlooked, couldn’t it?

I rummage through the cupboard and find a box of Thin Mints from last year’s Girl Scout Cookie drive, a few apples in the crisper, and some powdered lemonade. Sally seems satisfied.

It’s chaotic and loud and we’re all knocking into each other. I close my eyes and take a deep breath, reminding myself to relax so that the mayhem doesn’t overwhelm me. Because aside from the craziness and the fact that there isn’t a square inch of clean space on the counter and I’ll have an hour of serious cleaning to do later, all is well in my life. At this moment in time, all is well.

With five minutes to spare we make it to the soccer field and Sally barrels out of the van and runs off to her team. Tom unpacks the back while I help unbuckle the boys. A few minutes later we’re settled on the sidelines and it’s turned out to be a nice morning, crisp and clear with a deliciously warm blanket of sun wrapped around us. Emily has run off to play with another player’s sibling and the boys are collecting acorns under a nearby tree. “We did it,” I say to Tom, letting my eyes settle on him for the first time this morning. His face is rough with morning stubble, and I can’t help but reach for his chin and rub at his whiskers.