Prologue
October 26, 1988
When Adam comes home, I’m downstairs in my nightgown. For the past four hours, I have paced from window to window, watching the driveway. He called at six, said he had to take a client to the airport. Said he’d be home in a couple of hours. A couple equals two, right? It’s now half past midnight.
When the headlights on his Jeep flicker through the bathroom window, I dash through the kitchen and upstairs for bed. I dive beneath the covers and shut my eyes. Silently, I plead with my lungs to regulate and not give me away. I don’t want him to know I’ve waited up. He’ll say I’m hovering too much, smothering him. He’ll say he doesn’t need another mother, that the one he has is quite enough.
I’ve left his supper in the oven on low. Probably he’ll see the oven light and eat before he comes upstairs. By then, if I try hard enough, I might be able to will myself to sleep. I wedge my arm beneath my pillow and tell my body to relax.
The back door opens and closes. I hear it clearly and feel the slight shudder through our old house. In another moment his feet hit the stairs, each step creaking as he climbs. Either he missed the oven light or ate somewhere else. God, let him be sober I pray, then tell myself it doesn’t matter. He’s home. That’s the important thing.
He comes straight into the bedroom as if he senses me pretending to be asleep. He touches my hip, his hand warm through the quilt. “Sarah?” He gives me an easy shake. I lift my head. His figure is a silhouette in the light from the hallway. “Are you awake? Please get up.”
I rise from the pillow. Something in his tone makes me forget to act sleepy. It’s that word please. It sounds so formal, so foreign, so un-Adam-like. “What is it?”
“Can we talk?”
“Talk? What time is it?” I ask, as if I don’t know, as if I haven’t been watching the clock for the past four hours.
“Come downstairs, please.”
There it is again. That please. My stomach tightens.
I follow him out of the dark bedroom and into the hall. The doors to both boys’ rooms are closed. They’ve been asleep for hours. School day tomorrow.
We descend the stairs in a line, me behind Adam, matching my steps to his. I feel like Marie Antoinette being led to the guillotine. My brain scans through possibilities: The client’s flight was delayed, or maybe the plane crashed. Ridiculous—that would have made the news. He’s been in an accident. No, he’s home and unscathed, walking right in front of me. Light from the window on the landing catches the blond whirl at the back of his head. Could it be something’s happened to his parents? Mine are still on vacation in Europe, so it would have to be his. Adam’s dad, Oliver, has a bad heart.
Once we’re down in the den, Adam switches on the lamp beside the couch. The room smells like the new varnish and wallpaper paste from the recent remodel, all mixed together with the complicated, musty, hundred-year-old-house smell.
He waves me over to the couch, then begins to pace in front of me, the same steps I’ve taken for several hours. His stride is uneven, listing to one side and then the other. So he has been drinking. His tie is missing, his collar open and wrinkled. His hair looks wet.
The leather couch against my back feels cold. It causes an involuntary shiver. “Why is your hair wet?” I ask, breaking the silence. “Where have you been? Adam?” I soften my tone. I don’t want to sound confrontational.
He stops pacing, gives me a strange, piercing look. “With Carolyn.”
“Carolyn?” My voice is thick. Carolyn Jeffrey is my best friend. She lives in west Austin, in a new apartment complex halfway between Adam’s office and the airport. But until this second I didn’t realize he even knew that. “You were at her place?” Why hadn’t she called me? “What’s going on, Adam? What do you want to talk to me about?”
He puts his hands on his hips. His face is tight, mouth pale at the edges. He keeps his eyes on the floor, the rug under his feet. I look where he’s staring and see nothing but his brown tasseled loafers.
“I don’t think I love you anymore, Sarah . . . I mean, I just don’t feel like I love you—”
“What do you mean you don’t feel like it?”
“I don’t want to sound cold, I really don’t. But I don’t know how else to say it. I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m just not. I feel like we’re friends, or . . . I don’t know . . . roommates.”
“You do too love me, you know you do.” I move to the edge of the couch. I feel hollowed out suddenly.
He hurries to sit down beside me, takes my hand. His thumb presses my knuckles. “That’s not how I meant to say it. I do love you, I’m just not in love with you anymore. I feel like we’ve lost that . . . like we’re just living together. Like brother and sister. Or like—”
“Roommates. I heard you.” I pull my hand away from his. “I think we’ve just hit a lull. We’ve talked about this, remember? We both said it’s normal for good marriages to have hills and valleys. We said that. You said that. Well, I think we’re just in a valley. That’s all.”
His eyes are Paul Newman blue. I’ve always loved the color of his eyes. They waver away from me. A single tear slips down his cheek. I resent that tear. I’m the one who gets to cry right now. I haven’t just told him I don’t love him. But I sit there dry-eyed, numb.
“This is more than just a lull,” he says finally. “I don’t want to argue, Sarah. Please, let’s don’t argue. Carolyn said I should come tell you before I left.”
My mouth goes dry. “What do you mean before you left?”
“I wasn’t planning to do this tonight. I thought I would just check into a hotel and call you tomorrow. But Carolyn said—”
“Carolyn said what? She told you to leave me?”
“No, you’re not listening to me. You never listen. She made me come home and tell you before I just walked out.”
“She made you?”
“Christ, Sarah, I’m trying to do this the right way, OK?”
“You mean you’re leaving now? This minute?”
“I just came home to get some of my things.” He stands up. I grab hold of his arm. I want to pull him back down on the couch beside me. I only manage to make him bend a little sideways.
“Don’t go, Adam. Not tonight. It’s late and you’ve been drin—” I stop myself, quickly course correct. “You’re tired. We’re both tired.”
“Drinking? You were about to say drinking.” He flicks my hand away. “You think I’m drunk and don’t know what I’m saying?”
“No—listen, Adam . . .” I stand, too. I don’t want to make him angry. Not right now. “It’s late. We’re both tired. Let’s talk about this in the morning.”
“Nothing will be any different in the morning. This isn’t going away.”
“You can’t leave like this. Not so abruptly like this. Let’s talk tomorrow. I want to understand, I really do, Adam. Please. Think about the boys. What will they think if they wake up in the morning, and you’re gone? Just like that. Without a word.”
I hold my eyes wide and unblinking, until the air stings them, and finally, finally—they start to water. Two tears drip off my bottom lashes and slide down my cheeks. Adam has never been able to withstand tears. He’s softhearted that way. When he sees my tears his own eyes well up again. I reach my arms around him, press my cheek against his chest. I hear the familiar thud of his heartbeat. His hand ventures up to pat my shoulder.
He doesn’t leave. In fact, he doesn’t go anywhere for four days—not to work, not outside. Neither of us do. We sit in the den or at the dining table, while the boys are at school, and we talk—and talk and talk—until we both feel crazy.
He has needs, he says, needs I’m not providing. I want to throw up. Needs? I’ve given him children, a home, a life. What more could he possibly need from me? But I don’t say any of it out loud. I’m afraid to provoke him into leaving—not just me but two children and fifteen years of an unfinished marriage. I don’t think I could make it on my own. I wouldn’t know where to start living without him.
At one point I ask, “Is this about Carolyn? Are you having an affair?”
He gives me a disgusted look. “Jesus, Sarah.”
I sit quiet; try to listen. He feels trapped. I don’t understand him. I pay more attention to the boys than I do to him. He wishes I’d put on a dress once in a while, wear heels, comb my hair a different way, get a manicure, be somebody who isn’t me. At the end of those four days, when school lets out for the weekend and the boys are home all day, we stop talking. I feel drained, stripped to bare bone, ugly and undesirable. At times during these long, too long, conversations, and during those first days afterward, I wish I had just let him go.
Gradually, without any resolutions, promises, or apologies, we drift back into our old routines, except maybe there’s more politeness, more caution. There’s definitely a new distance. I work hard at smoothing things over, like spackling a hole in a wall. But we aren’t newlyweds anymore, and quietly I wonder if marriage is supposed to be this difficult. And if this is just another lull, a valley, can we drag it back up the hill again?
