Monday's Lie (23 page)

The spent adrenaline burned in my legs. I sat down and retrieved my wineglass from the floor. I picked a bit of fuzz from the rim and refilled it from the bottle.

“I should go get some club soda for that.” Patrick pointed to the stippled trail and ragged rose of wine in the carpet. It looked like blood.

“It doesn't matter. It's ruined. Leave it.”

“I'll get a new one.”

I sniffed. “Maybe we'll even get a new one together.”

Patrick took up his own full glass and sagged into the chair opposite me. Nearly half the generous pour went down in a single, open-throated swallow. “I'm sorry I wouldn't kiss you.”

I floundered in the pause. The lying pause. “I'm sorry you didn't want to.”

Fibber. Both of you.

I tried to imagine us in the morning, awkward and grimly shy in our sunny kitchen. I reached further out to cast us into next week, next month, our retirement to old age spent treading all the inevitable uncomfortable silences, enough of them to fill a library. A dozen libraries.
Shhhhhhhh.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't see us in any future.

But wasn't it supposed to be one day at a time? Wasn't it folly at best to invent futures for ourselves? Wasn't it almost a sin to do the math and live in any time but the Almighty Now? That was what they told you to do. Don't project beyond the moment. Live in the now. That was what you did when you were successfully normal and inspirational-poster healthy. It didn't matter that I didn't love him or that he didn't love me. According to the experts, we had an endless parade of nows in which to deal with those details.

But in this now I was too tired. In this now, I wanted only to buy some peace.

So I launched the bid for a happy intermission (never to be confused with a happy ending). I laughed to get Patrick's attention, a little shaky, a little sad, and very much a lying white flag to keep his hands off me. It was just a short-range goal anyway, not for the now, but something to take care of the hours, and maybe even days, just on the other side of now. It was the best I could do so that I could go to bed and get the hell out of Monday. “Well, we'd better figure out a way to get along before our trip or that's going to be the tensest the Danube's been since 1944.”

“I'm not worried about the trip,” Patrick said. And then he cried.

W
e
slept in the same bed with no negotiation. With no discussion at all. After a blowup like none we'd ever had before, it surprised me. He'd slept in the living room over much less. I thought there would have to be a summit. A treaty adopted. Something formal and announced. Something.

But all the aggression drained from the silence while Patrick cried quietly—three tight sobs and maybe half a minute of refuge behind his hands. He wiped his eyes, took a deep, shuddery breath, and drained his glass.

He fetched a towel for the spilled wine and spent a pointless few minutes blotting the stain, folding the towel over to a clean spot, dabbing at it again and again to soak up a little more. In the end, and much like our argument, the juice was out of it but the flaw remained. The rug was wrecked and it would be carted out and replaced, sooner over later most likely. Nothing useful would come of fretting over it. I tried not to measure that against the state of my life, but the stain and its verdict plagued my peripheral vision as I moved through the house.

Our evening routine came back on autopilot, only minus any chitchat. We were armored, each hunkered down in our own shadowy little shell, but both breathing easier with no more steam to weigh down the air from our collective boiling. For the first time in days, my mind wandered as I got ready for bed. There was no more urge to disappear from Patrick's radar; no need to walk carefully, cringing at every knee pop. I didn't miss the obligation to try to appear both invisible and put-upon every time I found myself in the same room with him.

In the past few mornings, I'd been self-conscious of the coffee gurgling into the carafe and the knife scraping the butter over the toast, as if breakfasting was a sign of weakness, an embarrassing admission of need. The hours of setting things down quietly and of scanning the background noise to keep track of where Patrick was in the house had put my teeth on edge even more than I'd realized.

With the tension of the past days blown to vapor, my jaw unclenched and I was left with my thoughts and the smooth, solid, automatic gestures of home. Just for the span of the rest of that evening, I didn't even worry myself with imagining what Patrick was thinking.

As for what I was thinking, I pointedly ignored the throbbing finger marks in my arms and planned my search.

I checked my e-mail before turning in, as I always did. The only message of any consequence was from my brother. The blue car was part of a fleet belonging to a company, Carlisle Inc., that built metal-skinned self-storage and warehouse facilities. The name meant nothing to me.

•  •  •

I woke before the alarm, snapping alert with a blaring
Where is he?
clanging in my head. Patrick wasn't beside me. I listened for his breathing and reached out for a sense of him in the room, primed for any echo of ill intent from the dark corners. Then the toilet flushed and I tried to laugh at myself, but succeeded in only laughing at myself for wanting to laugh at it.
Don't be a fool. You know damned well you should worry.

Patrick shuffled into our room and rolled back into place on his side of the bed.

“My turn,” I mumbled, and scooched out of the blankets, calculatedly graceless, as if I, too, were barely awake.

As soon as the door clicked shut behind me, I lifted the toilet lid and let it thunk purposefully against the porcelain tank. I braced the vanity drawer for stealth and slid it open to pick carefully through Patrick's toothpaste, razor-head refills, and floss picks for just a bit longer than it would have taken me to pee. The bottom two drawers took their rifling under the screening rush of water as it ran into my sink. I rattled the towel ring while I pried open the few boxed sundries under his vanity cabinet. Nothing but the usual stuff, in the usual amounts.

I went back to bed and waited for the alarm.

•  •  •

Sleep recharged us—and in the most electric sense. As the dawn dialed up the light seeping in through the curtains, I could feel Patrick awake in the gloom, but pretending not to be. The energized air tickled like spiders' feet. He eased up from the pillow, bracing his arm in an effort to turn out of the bed without creaking the springs. I murmured and snuffled and turned toward him, freezing him halfway through a stealthy sit-up. He held it for an uncomfortable stretch while I made a production of snuggling down into a new position.

He eased back down and waited for the radio to kick on.

•  •  •

“Morning,” Patrick said in the kitchen. It was a greeting neither of us had ever used.

“Howdy, Sheriff.”

Patrick rolled his eyes.

“You okay?” I said.

“Yep.” He put his cup in the sink. “You all done in the bathroom?”

“Um, I guess. Are you going to lock me out or something?”

“I just wanted to know if you were done.” His bristles were fully extended now.

“Okay, okay.” I put up my hands. “I was only teasing.”

I tossed over his car while he showered. There wasn't so much as a credit-card receipt or a gum wrapper.

I dallied over breakfast with a third cup of coffee and a book.

Patrick's unease rose like mercury in a hot thermometer. “You're not going in?”

“Of course I am. Everybody's just kind of enjoying Jordy being out, though. All last week it was a mini-vacation of tardiness, long lunches, and ducking out early.”

“Must be nice.”

I put down my book. “You know, it really has been. He'll be back next week, and for the first time in a long time I can't say I'm looking all that forward to the weekend. For a change, when Saturday comes, this time it means the fun's all over for me.”

I shrugged and held his gaze steady in mine while I watched him flinch at every reference to Saturday I could work into the conversation. “At least I've got my spa day to perk me up. That'll be nice, right?”

It would have looked to Patrick as if I'd dropped my glance back into my book, but from the corner of my eye I watched him go gray, then flush back to life, then crest over to full sunburn red.

His voice chirped out past a knotted throat, sounding not like his voice at all. He stopped and coughed and tried again. “Well, the traffic isn't getting any better, so you're only making that part of the day worse for yourself.”

“It's okay. I'll find a radio show to keep me company. I've got that new audiobook, too. It'll be fine. I don't have any early meetings, so I'm not in a hurry.”

He fidgeted another minute off the clock. “I can't be late.”

“Okay. Have a good day.”

He started out the door, then doubled back to my side. He kissed my temple, a dutiful hammer tap that rocked my head sideways, and then he stiff-legged it into the garage.

I stared for ten minutes, unseeing, at the blur of words on the unturned page. Then, of course, I took the house apart.

Every scrap of workaday debris was gone from his wake. There was nothing that indicated he'd even ducked into a grocery store or hit an ATM in the past several weeks. It didn't fit. He hadn't left any glitter on his collar from Angela or any blatant signposts to his more recent distraction, but he was only as careful as I ever appeared suspicious, which was hardly at all. There had been plenty to find, if you knew where to look. Being my mother's daughter a good deal more than Patrick ever realized, knowing where to look had never been much of a hurdle. But now there was nothing, and somehow that worried me much more than even the Carlisle man in the blue car did.

The itch wasn't scratched and I couldn't even write it off to the fact I hadn't found anything. The absence of any writing to analyze or receipts to puzzle over or any empty, dust-bordered spots on the bookshelves to reverse engineer, all of that was only part of the problem. There was careful and then there was too careful. And still it wasn't the Thing. Whatever it was, I'd overlooked it somehow.

•  •  •

Easter-egg hunts, hide-and-seek, and scavenger quests were some of my mother's favorite games. Simon loved them, too. I generally approved of the results of the contest, but I was more impatient, more easily frustrated than both of them. In some fit of grace, they were both perfectly comfortable to stand in admiration of other people's cleverness. Both of them could somehow be delighted to find themselves stumped. I, on the other hand, learned to curse.

“Shit!” I yelled to the foyer ceiling.

My phone rang in response.

I found it and looked at the display before it could drop into voice mail. Of course, it was Patrick. I studied the background photo I'd set for his number, an ancient picture of us in college, one that had made it through the stacks of the scanning project. I tried to remember the last time Patrick had called me on a weekday morning. I couldn't remember one.

I hit the red button and declined the call. “Yes, I'm still here, you squirrelly bastard,” I said to the screen.

The wine stain on the living-room floor was even more garish in the daylight.

I wandered back into the den. With the possible exception of the kitchen, this room had the most variable contents. Even so, it was still mostly all the same—all the time. The bills and the letters on the desk changed in amount, creditor, and subject matter, but the stack rotated through the same general acreage on the polished wood. We'd swapped out a desktop for a laptop a couple of years earlier, but the computer had been in the same spot since the day we moved in. Current catalogs were where there had been older ones, and all of them had fluttered out exactly nothing when I'd shaken each by its spine. The pens changed color and size as they broke their springs or ran out of ink, but they always bristled from the same cup. Even then, I'd not overlooked the thought to take them out and scan the bottom for any miniature clue.

I had already played spot-the-difference in here.

There was an advantage to not knowing what you were looking for, though. In my mother's version of the game, when it wasn't Easter eggs, she'd wind us up with a gasp.
Ah! I'm thinking there's something hiding in this house,
she'd say.
And I'm thinking there's fun riding on it if one of you finds it before supper.

Sometimes it was movie tickets, or a new board game, or a coupon for a two-for-one dessert special down at the diner. Once it was a brochure for Disneyland, and another time it was fishbowls for each of us, Mother included, a coppery, chiffon-finned fish turning laps in each of the three. Sometimes she'd even pick one of us to do the hiding so that she could play along in the search for a change.

But before the find, before my inevitable irritability set in, there was the little thrill of possibility—it could be anything, and it could be anywhere.

The wide-focus perspective forced a keener vision. You played the game to secure a goal, but in the meantime you saw,
really
saw, your surroundings. By imagining what each thing could conceal (and how it could manage it) you knew it better.

Everything is more yours for wondering at all that it could disguise.

Patrick and I had lived in our house for more than eight years. All the furniture and belongings were more or less in the same place where they (or their equivalent predecessors) had been set when we unpacked them. Certainly there were places to hide things, big and small, but as frustrated as I would get with the game when I was young, I had learned that the best way to avoid the crawling annoyance of being baffled was to win.