Jen feels like a child skipping school as she pads around the kitchen, fussing with the coffee maker and gazing out the window at the river. The early summer day is slipping away, sun full and high and kissing the gentle waves smoothed by the gathering wind. She feels strange without Chris. She hopes the coffee will lift the soft cotton that swaddles her senses in groggy comfort. She feels like there’s something she should be doing.
Alby is still asleep in the guest room, and Jen debates whether to wake her. It’s 1 o’clock now, six hours since they arrived home from their trip to 3East with Rosemary.
The gurgling stops with a last long hiss and Jen pours herself a tall cup, excited by the promise of caffeine. She wanders out to the back sunroom and curls up in her oversized, circular rattan chaise. She is still for a while, musing over her recent immersion in so many memories she’d held down for so long. She feels like she’s lived out the last few years a stranger to herself. Glossed over so much, just operated over top of it. It’s little wonder she’s shut down with Jace. Jace, she realizes, has not been real to her, any more real than a subject in a sculpture. Something happened to that emotional connection, cauterized it. Did she start out running from herself, but in the end, running from him? Did he remind her too much of where she’s been, or was he the place she hid herself, exhausted from the sheer effort of being, and ready to melt into a reinvented life. She rises and moves toward the file cabinet. Slowly, she sinks to the ground, with her back to the exterior wall. She pulls open the bottom drawer and roots through the rainbow of colored files until she finds the one she’s looking for. Their love letters, emails, poems to one another. Their wedding vows and silly stag party flyers. As she scans these dog-eared documents, this evidence of emotion, she is overwhelmed by his gentle, dreamy love. Where did that go?
“Oh my, Jen, tell me you’re not in the file cabinet,” teases Alby, her voice still ragged with sleep.
Jen turns toward the doorway, caught in the act, and beams a stiff grin.
“Caught me,” Jen says. Her lip starts to tremble.
Alby walks up to Jen and lowers herself to the ground. She seems able to tell Jen’s about to cry.
“You wanna talk about it?” she asks.
Jen nods, the tears now betraying her, hot and salty. Alby waits patiently, was trained to do this. Jen remembers.
“It’s just, it’s just everything,” Jen manages to say, between sobs.
“It’s Jace, who’s like a Martian to me, a mean Martian. It’s Rosemary, I mean, what the hell really went on there? And it’s Gary, well not so much Gary as the specter of Saint. I just feel like I’ve disappeared. And taking Rosemary to the hospital seems to have unleashed this flood of memory that, well, it’s like I was emotionally detached from it. It was just a story I read somewhere. But now I feel it,” Jen says, rushing the words, lest she lose her nerve for candor.
“It’s a lot,” says Alby, soothing. She takes the folder from Jen’s hand, glances quickly at the poem vows from Jace and Jen’s wedding program. She smiles to herself.
“You know, your vows were beautiful,” she says. “I’m sure the problems you’ve been having with Jace are part of what has you feeling so vulnerable. What’s flooding back now is maybe a sign that you never really worked through it. I mean, released it completely. We tell ourselves we’re over things, but they bubble up like an infection at every moment of life stress if we really haven’t made peace with them. It means that you’re now strong enough to put it to bed. God knows, I’m going through that with George now, because of the baby. Because of our history. So if you had to pick, what’s your strongest feeling about it all?”
“Shame,” Jen blurts.
“You mean embarrassment?” she asks, “About the suicide attempt?”
“No, the shame of what led me to it.”
Alby is silent for a moment. She sets the folder aside. Her brow, normally high and clear, furrows slightly. Alby only knows part of the story from their early conversations. Jen can tell she’s wondering now if there’s more. After a few long beats, Alby decides to dig in.
“Okay. What exactly lead you to it?” she asks. “If you want to say.”
Jen takes a deep breath, as if she’s about to plunge into cold water. “Everything I said before is part of it, was true in its own way. And I did not know I was pregnant. But what I did know is that I’d slept with Gary behind Saint’s back. Most of that night is still foggy, and at the time. I was drunk, there’d been a party. Saint had gone to bed early and had been a miserable bitch that night…”
“Holy shit, Jen. That makes so much more sense than anything you’ve shared before. So it’s simple, really. You hated yourself for doing it. For betraying her,” Alby said.
“Wow, yeah. So much so I couldn’t even face up to it. I mean, here she was, sacrificing herself for this “prole” as I’d called him, asshole that I was, for love or something. A love she thought she could control. Then one night I accuse him of using her for her money and you know what he said?”
“What,” says Alby, wrapping her arms around her knees and forming a human rocking chair.
“He said that for a guy like him who’d had a hard go, it didn’t hurt that she made good money, had nice things.”
“So then you slept with him?”
“Yeah. But I think what was in my mind was that then I’d have something over him, or be able to prove to her that he wasn’t worthy. The problem was it just kinda happened, and after it was over, I felt so sad, so guilty, I could never tell her. I started to notice how happy he made her, and yet I knew – or I thought I knew – it was all a lie. It was just so shitty, and I was part of that shitty.”
Jen reaches for a Kleenex from the box on the desk and begins to wipe her streaked face. She feels a million times better already. To have allowed that conscious passage, admission, confession. It didn’t seem so smothering now, that faint memory. She now could see clearly how real it all was.
“Okay, so riddle me this, bat girl. Why didn’t you ever tell her and apologize. I mean, you were in therapy with Mitch for six months, and you talked to me a lot that first year after. You must have realized there was a way to free yourself of it, to heal. Instead you carried it, and it festered,” Alby says, cocking her head, but smiling gently.
“Yeah, and burden her with it. I mean, she’d married him by then. What was I going to do? Turn up and say, hey, by the way, your loving husband loves your lifestyle more than he loves you and I know because I fucked him? I think that’s why I avoided her, cut off all contact. I couldn’t tell her and I couldn’t not tell her. But seriously, what’s weird is I haven’t even thought about it all consciously for a good few years. When things started coming back to me at Rosemary’s the other night it was like a movie I’d watched or something. And I seriously didn’t even connect that that was how I’d come to be pregnant. I mean I shoved it so far down I thought I’d had an immaculate conception or something. Even now, I’m unclear whether we actually had intercourse. I know I woke up naked.”
“Wow. Okay. So now it’s time to let it go. You see what this story is costing you with Jace, right?”
“What do you mean,” Jen asks. She does not see a Jace connection here.
“Well, our unconscious minds are childlike and straightforward. If that was how a husband was, her husband, then yours could be that way too. Deceitful. Unfaithful. In it for different reasons. “Wrong” reasons. I mean, I’ve heard you speak the words, suggest that Jace only wanted you because he perceived you as “going somewhere” – then he put up the road blocks, just to make sure you never went far enough to leave his orbit…”
Jen saw she was right. She’d said and felt that a million times. And she could see how Gary shattered her ability to trust. In her mind’s eye, Gary wasn’t so different from Jace.
Jen and Alby are making a very late brunch of cinnamon French toast when the phone rings. Jen turns down the gas and searches for the errant cordless while the spitting grease crackles. The phone fills her with dread, likely because it has heralded nothing but bad news of late. Just as she finds it laying innocently in the magazine rack and answers it breathlessly, the line is dead. She checks the call display. It is a private number. She sets the phone it on the kitchen table and resumes cooking. Then it starts to ring again.
Jen sighs, and this time Alby reaches for it and answers.
Jen steals a glance at her while flipping the browning pieces of egg-soaked bread.
“Hello? Hellooooo. Hellooooo there,” Alby says. She shrugs. “A hangup.”
“Shit, I told him to stop.”
“You think it’s Pete?”
“Who else,” Jen asks.
Alby groans. Jen realizes this is not the time to deal with Pete.
After brunch, they decide to go visit Jen’s mom and pick up Chris. As they open the front door, they hear a spray of gravel from a car accelerating. Before Jen can register what’s happening and look out to the street, the car is gone. She’s certain it’s Pete, and feels sick about it. They get into Alby’s car and Jen asks her to stop so she can reach into the mailbox. There is a large manila envelope with no postage and no return address. She opens it, setting the other mail down on the console while Alby carefully pulls out onto the road.
“Holy fuck,” Jen gasps.
“What is it,” Alby says. She seems uneasy, but she does not take her eyes off the winding road to look at Jen. She never looks natural driving a car.
“That wasn’t Pete,” Jen says. The book is a leather-bound pre-fab type of journal, the expensive blank ones you buy in a stationary store. Jen recognizes Saint’s handwriting, and marvels at the dates. The journal starts the summer before her suicide attempt, when Saint and Gary were first dating.
Jen’s vision blurs, the scrawling words swim.
“Who was it, then,” Alby wants to know, braking slightly as if speech and following a curve don’t go together.
“Had to be Gary…I think,” Jen says.
“I thought Gary left for the east coast.”
“So did I, but it couldn’t be Saint. I can’t imagine her parting with a journal,” Jen says, a sour realization dawning in her mind.
She flips through the pages, date by date, to the weekend of her indiscretion, suspiciously blank, then the entries that followed. She scans the pages, flushing. So she knew. Saint knew all along. “Holy fuck…” Jen mutters.
“Tell me,” says Alby, knowing but waiting confirmation.
“She knew, that’s all. She knew what happened. Heard us,” Jen says.And she married him a year later. In her mind, Jen was the traitor, not Gary. Which was likely true, Jen thinks. “This changes everything.”
“How so?” Alby wants to know.
“She could have told me she knew.”
“You could have told her too,” Alby reminds her.
“I don’t like this,” Jen says, snapping the book shut. She will read it another time. She is not in the right frame of mind to work out the meaning of this, although she’s dying to see it, to see the situation from an impossible vantage. Her own curiosity is in some ways macabre. She leans her head against the window and watches the budding trees glide by. She clutches the leather book under her arm, afraid to let it go, set it down, forget it. She feels certain that there is a full understanding inside. An answer she has been searching for, and hiding from.