His Other Wife (17 page)

T
here were eight people in the house, including Emily, and being a teenager’s mom, Hilary was programmed to provide entertainment.
That was how they ended up crammed around the coffee table with the Cranium game spread in front of them. Pam, Ben, and Emily
were lined along the couch. Seth was on the floor next to Emily; Eric was perched on the leather ottoman, with Lily, who was
much too young to be playing according to the box, on one knee, helping move her token to a green space and decide which card
to pick. Alva had dragged in a dining-room chair so she could oversee the rest of them.

Lily selected a card and handed it to her mother. Pam and Ben conferred. They’d gotten a “humdinger.” How to hum a tune so
Eric and Lily could guess it? Ben didn’t know what the song was at first, but Pam said she could absolutely hum it so Eric
could get it. And she did. It was a bit ragged at first, terribly off-key, then the flash of recognition dawned on Eric’s
face as he whispered the answer to Lily.

“ ‘Hotel Cawifornia’!” she shrieked. Her team cheered for her. They got to roll again.

When the other team finally got a chance to play, it was Emily’s turn. Emily tossed the dice and watched as they tumbled across
the cardboard. All the time she was moving her game piece, Hilary kept thinking,
Lord, bless her heart
. Because Emily had been the one who’d saved their lives these past few days. She’d been the one who hadn’t given up on Seth.
She hadn’t let him push her away the way he’d done with all his other friends. She’d been the one who’d convinced Seth to
turn on his computer and check out his Facebook page. She’d been the one who’d made him read and reread his messages, including
the dozens of new ones coming in every day.

Hilary had noticed a slight difference in him. A faint light had returned to his eyes. He’d begun to return phone calls, to
yank his phone out of his pocket every few minutes to check for texts the way he had before. And she prayed, oh, how she prayed,
that he was taking a break from mentally flogging himself.

Emily landed on red and Seth selected the card for her. Their team had to answer a trivia question. “On what television series
did Leo DiCaprio have his first regular role?”

While the three of them were considering the possibilities given, Pam leaned toward Seth and spoke as an aside: “So many people
wrote to say they supported you.” Then louder, a proclamation: “I’m glad so many people wrote to tell you that they supported
you. I’m especially glad someone posted on your site that they’d be praying for you, Seth. I’m impressed with any teenager
who’s brave enough to tell you he’s praying for you.”

Hilary couldn’t help but glance sharply at Pam. Hilary, who’d always been the one at a loss for words when it came to confrontation,
felt the perfect comment lying on her tongue like candy:
Why would you talk about prayer, Pam? How can you act holier-than-thou when you’re the one who committed adultery with my
husband?

Gina would be proud.

But Hilary managed to keep her mouth shut. And as the lozenge of bitterness melted away, Hilary saw that she’d been mistaken.
Pam hadn’t been making the statement in judgment, to remind Seth how he’d done wrong. She’d been making a comment because
as much as the situation had surprised Seth, it had surprised Pam, too. Still, this wasn’t the time.

“We’re playing a game here,” Hilary growled out instead. “Don’t you see that we’re all fighting to keep this light?”

But no. Pam had to bring it up again. “I’m just surprised that a teenager would post about praying. Praying is a private thing.
I don’t always…” Pam faded out.

Well
, Hilary wanted to say.
Me, too.
She just didn’t have the energy to do any more than what she was doing. She didn’t have time alone to get to her Bible. She
didn’t have anything eloquent or smart to say to the Heavenly Father during those hours when she lay awake in a bed that felt
about as populated and warm as an Arctic ice slab floating offshore. Her prayers, if you could call them that, had been something
resembling a drowning cat:
Help. Help me. Oh, help, help, help.
The last thing she felt like doing was matching Pam’s jousts with her own, giving lip service to her faith. She’d probably
rather do something like muck stalls at Lincoln Park Zoo instead of talk about prayer or homeschooling or church programs
with her husband’s new wife. With Pam in her house, Hilary felt like she had to trust Jesus just to
breathe
.

“The answer is ‘b.
Growing Pains
,’ ” Emily told them. Seth looked at her like he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. “The answer is
Growing Pains
.”

“What?” Hilary asked.

“That’s the show where Leo DiCaprio got his start.”

“Oh.” Seth remembered the game before Hilary did. Oh yes. How could she have forgotten herself ? This was supposed to be
fun
.

“Here, Pam.” Hilary handed her the die after they’d answered two or three more questions and made considerable progress toward
regaining the peaceful atmostphere. “Why don’t you roll? See how well you do?”

Alva, overtaken by nostalgia now that Emily had come to visit, chose this moment to launch into the story of how she and Hilary’s
father played canasta every Saturday afternoon while they were dating. The story she told was one Hilary had heard about a
thousand times, how her dad wasn’t supposed to visit when her parents weren’t home, but she got away with it by hiding him
in the closet. Emily and Seth grinned at each other, which made Hilary somewhat nervous.

Because they’d had this conversation before, Hilary knew where Alva was headed. Before Hilary had the chance to head her off,
Alva started sharing tales about the first Christmas Hilary brought Eric home to meet the family, how Eric had bombed the
neighbor kids with snowballs, how he’d built a snowman and dressed it in Hilary’s beach clothes, how he’d given Hilary her
Christmas present wrapped inside a roll of toilet paper — which meant she’d had to unwind about four hundred 2-ply squares
before she got to the pearl earrings.

“Mother,” Hilary said, shooting Alva a wide-eyed admonition that Alva didn’t pick up on. “Maybe this isn’t the time.”

“Oh no,” Seth said. “Go on. I love hearing this stuff about Mom and Dad. It’s so funny.”

There were so many reasons why talking about Eric and Hilary together was a horrible idea. Hilary didn’t want to think of
these things again, didn’t want to feel sad. As quick as that, Alva’s story edited out the past twenty years of life footage
and cut them, without warning, to that punched-in-the-gut time when Eric and Hilary’s relationship had been green, fresh,
raw, that time before they’d fallen apart, that time before they’d devastated each other.

The second terrible reason was Pam. Was Alva doing this because of the competition she’d sensed when Hilary had walked in
from the jail and Pam had been in the kitchen? Was she doing it because Pam had accosted Seth during this game? Shouldn’t
Eric be the one to stand up for his son? Or would they always be like this, families trying to compete with each other? Was
Alva being passive-aggressive for her grandson’s sake or just innocently nostalgic? Hilary could just hear what Pam would say to her friends back home.
Rolling her eyes,
Oh, we had a
lovely
time in Chicago with Eric’s family. I got to sit with Eric’s first mother-in-law and hear all
sorts
of stories about what he did while he was dating his ex. I heard he gave her pearl earrings for their first Christmas. It
was
great.

Hilary wouldn’t inflict that sort of torture on anybody.

None of that seemed to matter, because Alva had her audience. The children were delighted to hear how Eric dressed the snowman,
how he recruited Hilary’s mom to get her bikini out of the drawer, how he got it wet and stuffed the cups with snow and froze
it in the refrigerator so it would retain its proper shape in the front yard.

“Did the bathing suit go all the way around the snowman?” Lily asked, wide-eyed.

“It wasn’t a snowman, silly,” Ben said. “It was a snow
girl
.”

“It didn’t go all the way around,” Seth told them while Emily giggled. “Grandma talked about it all the time. He just sort
of
pasted
it on the front. So the neighbors would get the
idea
.”

Pam said, “Oh, good heavens, Eric. How ridiculous. You’d think you could come up with some better way to spend your time than
that.”

“Hey,” he said. “You can listen to all the old stories you want, Pam. But you know that you are still the star in my sky.”

Hilary’s heart dropped to her knees. In spite of family all around them, when he spoke to his new wife he had gentled his
voice in a way that transported Hilary a dozen years into the past. No matter if Eric was just trying to placate his wife.
Once, long ago, Eric said those sorts of things to me.

If there had been a way to seize those moments and make them last, those rare times Eric had been able to express himself
in the high fever of love, would the two of them still be married? But like the fireflies that sparked beneath the trees in
the evenings at Austin Park, those words had always only seemed touchable when they were just out of reach. The moment Hilary
would try to catch one, the glimmer would go out and she felt like she was grasping empty air.

Hilary had lost count of the nights she woke up alone, always alone, and smothering. It started with the prickle of adrenaline
beneath her skin. Next, her heartbeat quickened. She knew if she didn’t throw the comforter onto the floor and expose her
limbs, she’d be terrified and gasping. She’d be wide awake for hours, trying to swallow the choking panic.

Tonight as Hilary lay uncovered on the mattress, willing her heart to slow and her lungs to fill, she was suddenly struck
by the darkness outside the window. A faint street lamp burned on the corner. Beyond that vague, artificial light, the world
had gone pitch-black.

She padded barefooted to the window and peered through the blinds. For a good twenty seconds she couldn’t see beyond the elm
tree just outside the window. Her eyes adjusted and she could barely make out the outline of the concrete cherub that stood
in the neighbor’s garden.

She found the moon, and gasped.

Just as quickly as she could wriggle her toes into her slippers and knot the belt around her robe, Hilary hurried to Seth’s
room. He was snoring slightly as Hilary pushed open the door. In spite of everything, his snoring made Hilary smile. “Hey.”
She shook his shoulder. “Wake up.”

“Hm-m-mmm.”

There was no telling whether he was responding to her or that was just another deep sigh. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” Hilary tried
again. “I’ve got something to show you.”

For the moment, Seth just slept there with Hilary’s fingers trailing across her son’s temple. Then he jolted awake, rolling
toward her with a tightly clenched fist. He shot up to his elbow, guardlike. One minute he was in a dead sleep and the next
he was surveying the room.

“It’s okay,” Hilary told him. “Seth, nothing’s wrong.”

“What is it? Mom, what are you doing in here?”

“There’s something you have to see. If you don’t come now, you’ll miss it.”

“What?”

“Put on your shoes first. And maybe a sweatshirt. We’re going outside.”

“We are? Why?” Seth asked her.

“Don’t ask questions. Just come on.”

And so he did. Within minutes they were tiptoeing out the door. They stood side by side in grass that felt like thick lace
beneath their feet. Even though it wasn’t too chilly for three in the morning, Hilary hugged herself tightly with her own
arms. Ah, nighttime. As still as glass yet with its own loving, healing song.

No shadows lay at their feet. They had quite the show overhead. “How come I didn’t know this was going on?” Seth asked. “How
come I didn’t hear about it?”

“I didn’t know, either,” Hilary told him. But the answer to his question was simple. Their minds had been way too occupied
to think about things like this. They hadn’t been thinking of anything as inconsequential as the movement of the planets through
the heavens.