Queen of Broken Hearts (44 page)

I raise my head to see that Lord Vader has entered the waiting room and is heading straight for the two plastic chairs Dory and I have pulled into a corner. My heart sinks; although Austin has given no indication that he'll fight Haley for custody of the kids, I live in fear of it. If he were to, Haley's hospitalization for anorexia would most likely work in his favor. I've seen dozens of cases where mental instability and other such disorders were more of a deciding factor with a judge than adultery. Not only that, I've never known of a custody battle that wasn't nasty; Haley is too fragile for such a thing.

“Hello, Austin,” I say, keeping my voice as even as possible. Dory gives him a withering stare without bothering to speak.

“The Webbs have a friend who works in the emergency room,” Austin says, his eyes flinty and his jaw tight. “So I heard about Haley.”

“The Webbs are aptly named, aren't they?” I can't resist saying. “You've probably heard that Haley's fine, then. She was undernourished, dehydrated, and her electrolytes were off. But it looks like she'll go home as soon as the doctor comes in this morning to sign the release papers.”

Austin and I stare at each other until he becomes uncomfortable and looks down at his feet. “When I spotted the two of you in here, I was on my way to see her,” he says, glancing up at me.

“Are you sure that's a good idea?” I ask coolly.

“You can't stop me, Clare.” His voice is as even and pleasant as though we're discussing the weather. “Legally I'm still her husband, and I have every right to see her. More rights where she's concerned than
you
have, actually.”

With a lunge toward him, Dory snarls, “Now, see here, you shitass—” but I put out my arm to block her.

“It's okay, Dory. I was just making sure that Austin has thought this through.”

At the retreats, I suggest that the participants try to bring out the best in their exes during negotiation: Tell them you know they want to do the right thing. It's a variation of the old you-can-catch-more-flies-with-honey adage. I've heard myself say it a hundred times, but actually applying it makes me want to gag, and I understand for the first time the groans and grimaces of the participants. Seeing where I'm going, Dory settles back into her chair.

“I won't try to stop you, Austin,” I add in a neutral tone, “now that I see how worried you are about Haley.”

He blinks at me in surprise, then nods curtly. As he turns on his heel and leaves the waiting room, Dory and I watch as he enters Haley's room, after first pausing to straighten his tie and pat his hair into place. As soon as the door closes, Dory turns to me. “God Almighty, I see why you're so good at what you do. You're one cool customer. Aren't you afraid he'll smother her with a pillow? No alimony payments then.”

“Be kind of hard to do in front of a witness,” I say, getting to my feet. “Unfortunately, he's right. Until the divorce goes through, legally he's the one to make her decisions if she's not able; it's one of those laws I've worked to get changed, to no avail. So I can't keep him out of her room. But he sure as hell can't keep
me
out.” Dory holds up her hand for a high five as I turn to follow Austin.

Austin scurries out as soon as a nurse comes in with Haley's breakfast, and I take the chair he's vacated. I elevate the head of the bed so Haley can eat, if I can persuade her to. She's pale and listless, with purplish smudges under eyes that appear too large for her small oval of a face. When I ask if she's hungry, she surprises me with a shrug rather than her usual insistence that she can't even look at food. I remove a metal cover to reveal a bowl of oatmeal. “You used to love oatmeal,” I say with a smile. “Remember?”

Her rain-colored eyes fill with tears and spill over, rolling down her cheeks. She swipes them away with the back of her hands. “Oh, Mom. I'm
so
ashamed of myself.”

“I know you are, sweetheart. But we're all going to help you get well, if you'll let us.”

“I heard you tell Austin that Jasmine took the kids to school. They must have been terrified last night, waking up to find me so sick. I can't stand to think about what I've done to them.”

I pour milk and brown sugar into the oatmeal. At first she shakes her head, but I place the spoon in her hand as I reach for a tissue to wipe her tears. “You know what they told you last night. If you don't eat, you're going to get really, really sick. Last night was nothing compared to how you could be.”

“Did you see the way Austin looked at me?” she says with something akin to wonder in her voice. He stayed all of five minutes, shuffling his feet and muttering platitudes, his visit obviously motivated by guilt rather than concern. “His eyes were totally blank,” she adds. “There was no feeling left in them. Nothing at all.”

Absently she dips the spoon in the hot oatmeal and lifts it to her mouth. I hold my breath as she dips it again and again. When she finishes the oatmeal, I casually unwrap a slice of toast and butter it, then smear it with apple jelly. Haley shakes her head when I hand her half a slice, but she takes it. “I don't understand!” she says sadly. “Austin might not love me anymore, but I'm the mother of his children. Not to love me is one thing, but to feel absolutely nothing for his children's mother? What is
wrong
with him?”

Careful to keep my head lowered, I busy myself spreading butter on the other slice of toast as she eats the one I've just handed her. I don't want her to see my elation at her words. Unknowingly, she's taken the first step. Since the day Austin left her, it's the first time she has said “What is wrong with him?” rather than “What is wrong with me?”

Lana Martin is a striking woman, rail-thin, tall, and elegant, with a surprising slash of white coursing through the black hair that keeps falling on her forehead. When she lowers her head to read Haley's list of marital assets, I lean back in my chair with a sigh of satisfaction. Because of her air of calm, no-nonsense competence, I've sent her so much business that it's become a running joke between us. She lives in fear that I'll change my specialty to marriage counseling, she teases me, and she'll be out of work. In spite of our joking, both of us know that my clients who're separated from their spouses and end up in her office don't want to be there. It astonishes me that Haley's here today. Following her hospitalization, she began to eat again, thanks in part to the incredible fare toted in daily by Dory, Zoe Catherine, and Etta. As she regained her strength, Haley began the move from grief and denial to anger. A couple of weeks after the hospitalization, Dory stopped to see me after taking Haley an enormous bucket of white hyacinths. “She's finally gotten pissed off,” Dory declared gleefully, but I reminded her that Haley would feel sad again, too. Even so, her anger has propelled her out of a dark pool of grief into the sunlit chair across the desk from Lana Martin, divorce lawyer extraordinaire.

As is often the case when another woman is involved, the dissolution of Haley and Austin's marriage is moving at lightning speed. A married man receives a lot of pressure from the other woman to file the divorce papers, since the man who keeps promising and doesn't come through has become such a cliché. I remind myself wryly that Austin's paramour is experienced in these matters. Having successfully broken up another home, she can provide Austin with step-by-step instructions. I dare not say anything to Haley, but I believe that Austin got cold feet a few weeks after moving out. When he vacillated, Little Miss Muffet sent the photo to Haley. To think that Abbie and Zach will have a woman like that for a stepmother—assuming Austin marries her, as he seems so hell-bent on doing—makes my blood run cold. The photograph of Austin and Miss Muffet (Austin being the one sitting on her tuffet, Jasmine pointed out) became a source of depression and disillusionment to Haley, and not just for revealing Austin's cheating. Once over the shock of seeing the graphic proof of her husband's affair, she assumed it would be a prized document, leverage in what is turning out to be her inevitable divorce from Austin. Rather than burst her bubble, I took the coward's way out and let Lana Martin do it. I simply couldn't bear to.

Sitting next to Haley in the lawyer's office, I turn my head from the sight of Haley's apoplectic rage on hearing that Austin's adultery will be a fairly insignificant factor in the divorce case. It's the final insult for the wronged party, Lana tells her gently when Haley bursts into helpless tears. Lana's sympathetic eyes meet mine over Haley's bent head, and I'm grateful she didn't tell Haley the really infuriating part. Had Haley been the one caught in adultery, especially with an incriminating photograph, it would've been much more of a factor. When Haley and Austin attended a preliminary meeting with their lawyers, Haley's bitterness increased. Stopping by afterward to give me a report, she cried in outrage, “I didn't want this. None of it! Why did I have to sit there and listen to every sickening detail of Austin's affair only to have the lawyers say it doesn't really matter in the divorce?” Why, indeed, I thought, unable to offer any consolation.

The reality of divorce is an extremely bitter pill to swallow, as Haley will discover. The turmoil of the breakup tends to mask that fact. I find that the adrenaline-fueled drama is a necessary jump start for the process, however. In many ways, it's pure reflex. Prod an amoeba with a sharp instrument, and you'll get a reaction; why not an even more intense response to pain from a million-celled organism? The problem is, getting addicted to the emotional high of this phase is a surefire way of delaying recovery. I've heard every imaginable story from my clients, some tragic, others undeniably comic. One woman got her ex's new weed-eater and chased him all over the yard with it, much to the neighbors' delight; another took a baseball bat and gleefully bashed in the car her husband had spent a fortune and many months lovingly restoring. I've heard numerous stories of shocking scenes enacted during this period, one of the most memorable being a client who crashed her ex's wedding so she could scream obscenities during the church service. When escorted out by the ushers, she promptly found a ladder, stuck her head through a window above the altar, and continued her harangue.

Haley's initial phase had been self-destructive, so I'd kept my silence when she became almost murderously angry with Austin and spent hours with Jasmine, plotting revenge. The good thing about anger is, it's a fiery emotion that usually burns itself out. When Haley finally started attending my weekly group meetings and forming friendships with some of the women who are in the same stage of the process, I allowed myself a small—very small—sigh of relief. She's by no means there yet, and she will go through the usual ups and downs of a breakup. Every time she gets better, something will happen to set her back, like the night Abbie woke up crying for her daddy and pushed her mother away, inconsolable. I know that all of them—Haley, Zach, and Abbie—will have plenty of those bad days. Eventually there will be more good ones than bad, but that time is still a long way off.

The first of March, Wayfarer's Landing Retreat Center is complete, ready for final touches in preparation for the first retreat, scheduled for later in the month. Because of the trauma of Haley and Austin's breakup, my excitement has been tamped down. But the day I take Zach and Abbie to see the new building that's sprung up next to their gramma Zoe's, I feel lighthearted and carefree, full of anticipation, for the first time in months.

Abbie has changed since her daddy left, becoming quieter and more subdued, and I watch her carefully as she takes Zach's hand and runs across the driveway to the new building. She looks impossibly adorable: Jasmine French-braided her flaxen hair into two stubby pigtails, and Haley dressed her in a short pleated skirt with a white turtleneck and tights. Haley tried to tell her that the preppy look is spoiled by the silver-studded red cowboy boots I gave her for Christmas, but Abbie won't part with them. Zach's wearing his, too, but hasn't quite gotten the hang of them, and I hide a smile at his stumbling gait as Abbie drags him along behind her. I wasn't sure what I'd tell the children about the new building, but Abbie solved it. “Gramma Zoe has a new house,” Zach announced, but Abbie shushed him. “No, Zach—you know the ladies who come to see Grams in her office? She's building them a place to dance.”

There's a lot of activity at the retreat site on this bright, briskly cold day. The winter sun hangs high and lemon-yellow, and the air, sweet as cider, is sharp with the scent of pine needles, wood smoke, and freshly turned earth. Dory and some of the White Rings are laying the groundwork for the landscaping today. Hearing Zach and Abbie's squeals, Dory gets to her feet and turns toward them. In spite of the dirt coating her gardening gloves, she sweeps up both Zach and Abbie, one in each arm, and kisses their rosy cheeks noisily. Hearing their chirps of excitement, Etta appears on the porch, hands on her hips. With a big grin, she calls out, “Look who's here—my babies!” We joke about the children being communal property, passed around among us when we crave the feel of soft cuddly bodies and chubby arms and sloppy kisses, all given freely, with pure unadulterated affection. Zach wiggles out of Dory's grasp to run to Etta, knowing she'll let him dig through her purse until he finds a piece of Juicy Fruit gum.

“How's it coming, flower child?” I ask Dory after greeting the White Rings, who are kneeling and digging at different intervals around the ground in front of the porch, which Dory is transforming into flower beds. Or will be, once spring arrives. Everything in Dory's calendar is lunar. She has mysterious ways of determining when to plant, based on the moon cycles and the tide and the number of days after the last frost, none of which make a lick of sense to me. The Landing has been one of Dory's biggest challenges, she told me, not only because of the sandy soil and brackish water but also due to the abundance of critters. She's determined to preserve the wild beauty of the place, so in addition to planting hundreds of azalea bushes, she's adding indigenous native plants such as tea olive and oleander and sawgrass, which will survive anything, even hungry deer, raccoons, and rabbits.