“I am a very private person.”
“I don’t talk to anyone about the things you tell me.” She must read the truth on his face, her shoulders relaxing slightly, her voice dropping in intensity.
“I’m sorry.” She looks down, her fingers lining up the pages, making them perfectly straight in their stack.
“No need to apologize.”
“My mother and Simon…” her voice trails off and he crosses his arms over his chest, waiting her out. She presses her lips together, her eyes darting across the table. “I shouldn’t assume that you are the same.” She looks up and his hope disappears that a revelation is coming. Her face is closed, the expression one he’s becoming increasingly familiar with. When she gets like this, there is no discovery to be had, no confessions of the past, no stories to record. When she gets like this, he can only retreat and wait. “Enjoy the movie.” She smiles and there isn’t a bit of sincerity behind the gesture.
He waits for more, but she picks the pen back up, and he loses her to the words, her head dipping, body relaxing, eyes moving. When he leaves, the house is quiet, his truck halfway to the motel before he realizes he never built her a fire.
My earnings have gotten excessive. Simon doesn’t have to work, but he does. I don’t have to write, but writing has never been about the money anyway. So I’m writing. He’s working, and he’s spending.
First, a new Jaguar coupé, one that Bethany’s carseat wouldn’t fit into, one that took up the only spot in a garage that was quickly filling with more and more things. It caused too many fights, and was quickly replaced by a Range Rover.
Then, a sailboat, my name emblazoned on the side as if that would make the terrible purchase okay. An expensive chore, that’s what “The Helena” was. Simon wanted to spend a summer on it, talked about me writing out on the open sea, like it would be exciting to bathe in a gallon of water, and vomit from rough weather, and constantly be on the lookout to make sure that Bethany doesn’t fall over the side. We paid marina rent on that boat for two years before it sold. Every month, I hated him when I wrote that check. Every month, a small dark part of me wished he would go out sailing, catch a storm, and never come back.
Then, skis. A SubZero fridge. Automated blinds that rose and fell with the click of a remote. Heated floors in our master bedroom. Season tickets and a skybox to some football team three hours away.
He won’t stop spending, and I only watch and say nothing. Our house fills with things; I close the door to my office and write. The more I earn, the more he spends.
Maybe we’re normal. Maybe every husband drives his wife crazy. Maybe every wife falls short.
But it doesn’t feel normal. It feels like we are at war. A war I am losing.
I write, outline, then set aside the notepad and build a fire the way I was taught. A core of paper, finely shredded, set against the base of a log. A surrounding tee-pee of kindling. I strike the match and watch the flame, my hand shielding it as I take it to the base of the kindling, the first three matches burning out before anything catches fire.
Then, a glow of ignition, the crawl of the flame up one stick, then a second. The paper catches fire and there is a small WHOOSH of action, the warm crackle bringing a smile to my face. Simon hated fires, his stubborn chauvinism never allowing me to handle the task, his own attempts pitifully inept. Every winter, in this house, he had tried to build a fire. Every winter, there had been cursing, the lighter fluid grabbed from the garage, our living room reeking of failure and chemically-created warmth. Mark’s fire was the first authentic fire in this fireplace. And now mine. I leave the grate open and scoot back until I reach the couch, leaning back against the leather as I watch the flames, their lick and spark, the jump of embers, smoke curling its way up the chimney. The warmth heats my legs, and I close my eyes, appreciating the moment.
When the knock sounds, I almost miss it.
I wrote my first novel about my mother. They say you should write what you know, but I didn’t know her. I wrote about her to understand her. I built a world around a character so that I could live in her shoes, could think her thoughts, could understand her intentions. I wrote a hundred thousand words and barely understood any of them.
The readers didn’t care. They loved the woman I didn’t. They embraced her when her husband left. They rallied beside her when he reappeared. They never read the truth. I buried those pages in the back of one of my journals—my knowledge of the romance world advanced enough to understand the value of a happy ending. So I gave my mother one. When my father returned, they fell back in love. And when the daughter ran from him, he chased her, hugged her, loved her.
All of that second half was lies. When my father came back, I was eight, and my mother was bitter. There was no joyous reunion. There was a lot of shouting. When I ran from him, he called me a nerd. When I woke in the morning, he was gone. And I didn’t, not in my third-grade uniform, nor as a college freshman, give a damn about it.
The last time I spoke to my mother, I was dressed in black and huddled against the wind, staring down at a fresh gravestone. She tried to hug me. She told me she loved me. In response, I told her the truth.
I told her I hated her for turning Bethany and Simon against me. For calling me unfit. For siding with him. For taking my daughter from me. All unforgiveable sins, ones that I could only punish her for with cruel silence, ignored calls, and spiteful words snarled beside a black hearse.
I vowed, in that graveyard, to never speak to her again unless she found a way to return my daughter to me.
I open the front door, and that threat scatters in the wind.
Any other night, Mark would be here. He would be the one to answer the door and deal with this. Instead, I am unprotected, exposed in the doorway, when I’m hit with her eyes.
“Mom.” Just a single word, yet it burns on its way out.
“Helena!” Her head snaps back, and those eyes widen in alarm. “Are you all right? You look terrible.”
My eyes automatically drop, to the space beside her, to see if Bethany is there. It is out of habit, and my stomach clenches, my heart frustrated with my rote memory.
“I’m fine.” I pull self-consciously at the neck of my sweatshirt, grateful for the bulky material that hides my thin frame. Her eyes move into the house, darting into the spaces behind me, and I fight the urge to turn, to see what she does.
“May I come in?” She is wearing a rust-colored sweater and her hair is shorter, now almost completely white. She has a scarf around her neck but no jacket, and she rubs her arms as if she is cold. It’s an odd moment for her, preparedness being a skill she taught me early on. You make lists. You pack appropriately. You prepare for unknown situations. I was the child at school with a back-up set of clothes in my backpack. We had fire emergency routes in our home and first-aid kits in the car trunk. We attended CPR training courses on the weekends, and if I’m ever abandoned in the wilderness, I can create a flame from two sticks and determination. In some ways, I am exactly like my mother, and maybe that was always our problem.
She has to have a jacket. If this shivering routine is an attempt to gain entry, she should know me better than that. “No.” I close the door until just a crack shows, enough for me to see everything and her to see nothing. “Go away.”
“Helena—“ she holds up a hand. “I’m here for a reason.”
Oh goody. I can’t think of anything I want to know less than her reason for coming.
“A woman came by the office today.” The office. That sterile room where relationships are judged and families critiqued. It has been half a decade since I pushed open that door, but I bet my life it’s exactly the same. A black tweed couch. A bowl of peppermints on her desk. A view of the city through streak-free windows. The click of her pen against her notebook. Do you have feelings of love for Bethany? My mother swallows and there are more wrinkles than before, the last four years unkind. She thinks I look terrible? Ditto, dear Mother. “She’s a reporter—”
“Charlotte Blanton.” I interrupt, anxious to get on with this exchange.
“Oh. Yes.” She is surprised, and glances away. “So you know her.”