Authors: Callie Wright
Hugh’s free hand crossed the chasm between them and came to rest on her thigh, just above her knee. She felt a volt of electricity in her stomach but sat perfectly still.
“I don’t want the kids to find out,” said Anne.
“No,” he agreed.
She stood and took the smallest step toward him, ready to retreat if he became Hugh again, but with uncharacteristic confidence he reached for her hips and pulled her in. He rested his forehead on her stomach and she cupped his ears and they rocked, Hugh leaning into her, pushing her away, Hugh leaning back, reeling her in.
For ten seconds they stayed where they were, Hugh hugging her thighs, Anne draped across his back so that she could see the outline of his small love handles through his shirt. The waistband of Hugh’s boxers, which Anne had bought for him at Crossgates Mall, peeked over the top of his jeans. Their lives were knit together in ways she could only begin to imagine. Boxers bought by Anne at a mall reached in Hugh’s car while Anne’s was in an auto-body shop in Fly Creek that Hugh despised because they overcharged but it was Anne’s car although Hugh’s name was on the title because Anne had points on her license from when she was caught speeding—80 in a 45—on the way to the airport to pick up her parents. Negotiation, your turn my turn, back and forth and up and down. Anne was curled over her husband’s back like a single cross-stitch in an impossible pattern, and she took comfort in the fact that they would never completely finish with each other, no matter what decisions they made.
She untangled herself from Hugh’s grasp and this time Hugh let her go.
Upstairs, Anne knocked once on Teddy’s door. “It’s me,” she said. “Can I come in?”
Anne stepped into his room and was immediately assaulted by the sickly sweet smell of wet towels and sour milk, deodorant and sweaty socks. She eyed a wastepaper basket full of balled-up tissues next to his bed, then sniffed delicately and left the door open a crack.
Teddy had changed out of his wet clothes and was now reclined in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts on his bare mattress, sheets and comforter crushed into the footboard, a single, uncased pillow stuffed proprietarily under his head.
“Hi,” she said, searching for a place to sit. His baseball uniform—clean, dirty?—trailed along the rug like a deflated player, and his desk was lined with empty cereal and ice cream bowls, their spoons hardened to the basins. “Your room’s a mess,” Anne reported. With a swipe of her hand, she cleared the desk chair.
Teddy crossed his arms, his newly broad shoulders flexing under his Cooperstown Redskins shirt. Not so long ago he had been all birdcage chest, knobby knees, and hands like bear paws. Now the kinesiology of Teddy was beginning to make sense, and Anne felt years too late for “talks” with her son.
“Do you want to tell me what happened today?” asked Anne.
“Not really.”
“It might help.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know,” Anne admitted. It wasn’t as if she were here to explain his father’s behavior; she’d come to put the gag order on him.
Teddy eyed her warily.
Anne took hold of Teddy’s socked foot and squeezed his ankle. “Would it make you feel better to know that I know what happened?”
“Do you?” asked Teddy.
Anne paused, considering.
“If you already know what happened,” he continued, “sounds like you’re cool with it.”
“I’m not
cool
with it—”
“Because if Kim saw me kissing a girl on the side of the road, she’d fucking kill me.”
Teddy raised his eyebrows pointedly and Anne tried to picture herself running for a carving knife, swinging it wildly at Hugh. Where was her sense of indignation, her moral outrage? A certain kind of woman—Kim, for example—would’ve gone off her head at the mention of a kiss (never mind sex).
“Teddy,” said Anne seriously. “It’s only a hand.”
“Maybe,” said Teddy. “You hope.”
Anne rolled her eyes. She’d been on board with explaining that adult things were complicated, but here her son seemed to think he knew more about it than she did. Looking around Teddy’s brackish room, it was hard to believe he even had a girlfriend. She’d met Kim only once, in the bleachers at a basketball game. The girl was small-boned, with a moon face and layers of bottle-blond hair cascading to a very large chest; Anne’s lasting impression had been that she said “like” too much.
“Listen to me,” said Anne. “You may think you know everything there is to know, but you don’t.” Teddy opened his mouth, and Anne told him to shut it. “I’m not happy. I’m not pushing this under a rug or pretending it’s no big deal. But this isn’t high school—there might be a lawsuit, Teddy. A boy was hurt on the playground at Seedlings and his parents are thinking about suing the school. The woman you saw Dad with this afternoon was the boy’s mother. He was over there trying to talk to her.”
“Did you know Dad was going to her house?”
Anne frowned. “I think,” she said, “that I haven’t really been listening. But I’m listening now. I’m very hopeful that there won’t be a lawsuit, but until we know for sure, you can’t talk about this with anyone. Not Kim. Not anyone. Do you understand?”
“Yep.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“Nope.”
“Teddy, this is serious.” He nodded and Anne stood and pushed his chair under the desk. “You’re grounded, by the way. Terms and conditions TBD.”
Teddy looked away from her and Anne felt a fever chasing into her heart. Teddy—her firstborn—had roamed through nine years of life oblivious to the fact that his was not a planned birth—barely looking up from his waffles the morning Julia, age six, did the math—but she would not undo him for all the world.
Downstairs, Anne found Hugh waiting for her in her office.
“Out,” she said.
“What happened?” asked Hugh.
“Nothing. I told him he was grounded. I told him to keep his mouth shut. For some reason, I implied everything would be okay.”
“Right,” said Hugh. “So now—”
“So now I have about a thousand things to do for tomorrow. I wasn’t expecting to confront a lawsuit tonight.” She stared him into the hallway, then shut the door behind him.
Alone, Anne knelt and opened the cabinet next to the TV, where she shelved her law library. She removed a red-rope file labeled
Seedlings Insurance 9/78
while mentally outlining her case objectives: to arrive at the other side of this moment (1) without the emotional upheaval of an unfounded lawsuit; (2) without the financial pressure of losing the school; (3) without Hugh and Anne’s lives becoming public spectacle; and (4) without turning their children into coconspirators, emotional wardens of a dysfunctional home. How naïve she’d been to think Teddy and Julia didn’t know about their marital problems—if not by details then by sensorial impressions, broken airwaves and protracted silences, a kind of filial ESP. She owed it to them to dispense with this negligence claim.
When Hugh opened Seedlings nearly sixteen years ago, Anne had boned up on compensation insurance, medical and dental, business liability, and “no-fault” coverage, but the nuances of the policies had long since receded to the back of her mind.
She reached across the table for the wine bottle and brought it back to the carpet along with her stem glass.
Anne did recall that, on Charlie’s advice, Seedlings had ponied up for a generous business-liability policy, including $150,000 of “no-fault” coverage for medical expenses, a little palm-greaser of a thing whereby without admitting negligence Seedlings could offer to pick up the bills for the ER and the OR, just to say they cared.
Anne refilled her glass, and when a little chardonnay splashed over the rim, she licked her fingers, not wanting to waste.
So perhaps they could fabricate a few additional medical expenses for the boy, find an out-of-town doctor to sign off on a phantom home health-care aide or cook up a year of biweekly physical-therapy visits—cash in Richard Pennington’s hand might entice him to drop the matter altogether. Insurance fraud was widely covered in Anne’s law journals, the articles themselves practically blueprints for committing the crime.
But it didn’t need to come to that. Graham’s fall had been an accident; Hugh’s affair had nothing to do with it. If the boy should remember the latter, well, children were notoriously unreliable witnesses. If Caroline Murphy should testify to it, they were in deep shit. Really, how well did Hugh know this woman? Because, in Anne’s experience, nothing in Cooperstown stayed hidden for long. Maybe Caroline had already gossiped about it on Main Street or tipped off her ex-husband to Hugh’s unsavory side. The school was likely not negligent, but if the whole town found out about Hugh and Caroline’s affair, Seedlings was finished, anyway.
Anne touched her cool glass to her forehead and stared through the syrupy liquid to her desk, her couch, her French doors. Then she was staring at the television screen, her own image mirrored back at her. Anne lowered the glass. Ink-black hair cut blunt at her shoulders, falling straight and sensibly from a left-center part, in more or less the same haircut she’d had since she was a girl. She was preserved, with makeup and hair dye and hours on the treadmill before work. She’d stayed exactly the same, while Hugh, evidently, had changed.
Anne had to see her. Had to know.
She slipped out of her office and avoided Hugh in the den by taking the front stairs. From the landing, she stared down the hallway at the three blades of light beneath three closed doors: her children, her father. For a moment it seemed as though she were looking back across her own past, at the many versions of herself locked neatly away. She’d been so vigilant, so watchful, and yet she hadn’t seen this coming.
In their bathroom, Anne opened her makeup case and began again with foundation. Concealer. Blush. She shadowed her eyes and coated on mascara and plucked two wayward hairs from under the arch of her right brow. She combed her hair into a neat ponytail, then let it fall back to her shoulders. Now was not the time to try something new. Anne removed her silk top and slipped into a crisp white button-down, fresh from the dry cleaner, then a pencil skirt and wedge heels. After brushing her teeth, she dropped her toothbrush in the cup and watched it chase Hugh’s Oral-B around the toothpaste until her weeping bristles were nuzzled into Hugh’s spine. Fuck you, she thought. She turned Hugh’s toothbrush 180 degrees, forcing it to kiss her soft head, but his gum-massaging bristles were top-heavy and quickly spun away. She took his toothbrush and dropped it in the trash can, remembering where his mouth had been.
At the front door, her hand on the knob, Anne caught sight of Hugh’s reflection in the glass—he’d swapped his coffee for a beer, his button-down for an undershirt. She froze but didn’t turn around.
“Anne,” he said.
“What?” she asked, facing him. She wondered if this was how he’d felt sneaking around their house, knowing he was going to do something he’d vowed never to do. Now it was her turn, and it was titillating to know he couldn’t stop her, that he wouldn’t even try. “Actually,” she said, her logistical mind
click-clacking
into the plan. “There is something you can do for me. I don’t have the address.”
Hugh met her eyes, and she silently dared him to deny her.
“I have to talk to her sometime,” said Anne.
“You’ve been drinking,” said Hugh. “It’s late. Is now really the best time?”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I’m going.”
So he told her how to find the white house set back from Route 166, its driveway a pair of tire ruts cut into the lawn. Maybe he wanted to tell her to drive safely. She started to tell him she would never have hurt him this way. On the precipice of their nineteenth wedding anniversary, she noticed that her husband had a nervous habit: cracking his index finger with his thumb. There was no sound but the motion was continuous, deliberate. Also, he wasn’t as tall as she’d remembered, or as sensible. There were a thousand ways to carry on an affair—he’d chosen extremely poorly. It occurred to her that nothing was as it seemed. Just last week her mother had been alive and her husband had been her husband, but then that wasn’t right either, because by then Hugh had already slept with Caroline Murphy, and the blood vessels in her mother’s brain were already narrowing, and Anne, too, was already moving, getting behind the wheel of her car and turning east toward Cherry Valley, refusing to wonder if Hugh was standing at the door watching her go.
9
They had twenty minutes to get their stories straight, fifteen if Anne sped. Sex this afternoon hadn’t happened. Kissing Caroline in her driveway had been a gesture of gratitude, a wax seal on her vow of silence. It had not been a tugboat maneuver to lower her face to his car window until her breast was resting softly on the jamb and Hugh had what he wanted: her nipple in his mouth. Then he was back out of the car and hustling her inside for round two.
No.
Anne was a seasoned litigator; she’d get the story out of Caroline in a matter of seconds if Hugh didn’t give Caroline a crash course on how to handle the onslaught. His go-to tactic was pretending he was a delinquent child in his own principal’s office. Bamboo shoots couldn’t drive the truth out of uncooperative five-year-olds. They were like tiny members of the KGB.
Hugh made for the kitchen, zeroing in on the cordless phone with a hazy plan to embed in the garage. Through the foyer, past his wife’s office—Hugh averted his eyes. Scene of his inquisition, makeshift ICU for his brother’s ruined baseball card: Hugh felt nothing. A deadened chord had thrummed inside him when he’d seen the card crumpled in Teddy’s hand, then, almost immediately, a switch had powered him down: absolute emotional disconnect.
Regret
and
shame
were words like
sweater
and
steps.
Hugh wasn’t thinking about what he’d done or what he wanted; he was thinking about the maroon crew neck he’d shed on Caroline’s front stairs.
Squaring to the phone mounted on the wall, Hugh’s fingers dialed from memory, 2-6-4, and were skipping toward 9 when Teddy said, “Hey,” and the receiver was a fish in Hugh’s grasp, flipping away from him and skidding across the wood floor.