Chapter 67 - The Light We Lost

That year, 2013, sometimes felt like a year of disillusionment. I seemed to disappoint Darren constantly with my choices. And he disappointed me with his reactions. And his expectations. It was small things—Violet started first grade at a new school and he thought I should go in to work later so I could walk her there in the mornings instead of Maria. I got invited to speak at a conference in Los Angeles, and he wanted me to turn it down because it meant I’d be gone for six days, which he thought was too long for the kids to be without their mom. He was still trying to turn me into the woman he’d imagined when he made that inane checklist. But he was not my Pygmalion. I was not his Galatea.

I’m being unfair, though. We had fun times too. We spent two weeks at a beautiful house in East Hampton in August and invited Vanessa and Jay and the triplets to join us for a week. The kids had a great time swimming and building sand castles and digging holes deep enough to stand in, and Darren and I were better together out there, without work getting in the way. We took Violet and Liam to their first Yankees game in September and had seats right behind home plate. Austin Romine signed a ball for each of the kids, and they talked about it for weeks afterward. We hosted our first Thanksgiving and invited Darren’s whole family and mine, and everyone got along wonderfully. On the balance, we were fine, but we weren’t great.

Which is probably why when I saw a woman’s name—Linda—appear on Darren’s phone the week we were both off from work between Christmas and New Year’s Day, my mind immediately went to an affair. The way people interpret a situation often says more about them than it does about the situation. Like how during our five-year reunion, when I saw that woman with her hand on your arm, I assumed she was your girlfriend, or at least someone you were interested in taking home that night. We see everything through the filter of our own desires and regrets, hopes and fears.

When I saw Linda with no last name, my body flushed hot and cold all at once. I’d never imagined Darren would cheat on me. He seemed too stable, too solid, too loyal. So I set out to prove to myself it wasn’t true. I scanned through my mental Rolodex for Lindas—someone from his office, from college, from the gym—but came up blank. Then I went onto his Facebook page to look for Lindas. The only two I could find were a cousin who lived in New Mexico and a college acquaintance’s wife who lived in Philly. I took a deep breath and decided it could be either one of them. I should give him the benefit of the doubt, even though leaving off a last name in a contact entry felt like a deliberate choice, like there was something to hide.

“Have you spoken to your cousins recently?” I asked over a dinner of macaroni and cheese and chicken cubes we were eating with our kids. For some reason, Liam preferred to eat meat in cubes, so that became our default shape. Personality-wise, he reminds me a lot of my brother.

Darren shook his head. “I should call them, though, and wish them a happy new year.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I should do that too.”

So it wasn’t Cousin Linda.

“What would you think about going out to Philly for a day with the kids this week?” I asked. “Have you been in touch with any of your college guys there? We haven’t seen them in a while.”

Darren shrugged. “It’s a long trip, and really I haven’t spoken to any of them since Josh got married last spring. Are we getting to that point where we’re trading in our old friends for newer models?”

I took a sip of the Merlot I’d poured us both, even though it didn’t really go with the mac and cheese and chicken. I never like white wine in the winter. “What do you mean?”

Liam was building his chicken into a tower. Violet was eating her mac and cheese one noodle at a time.

“Just that we’ve been spending most of our time with people in our neighborhood who have kids our kids’ ages. I can’t even remember the last time we saw Kate and Tom and their girls, and they’re only an hour away in Westchester. Maybe we should make plans with them this week.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I’ll give her a call.”

“Auntie Kate?” Violet asked. “Do you think she’ll have new dress-up clothes I can wear with Samantha and Victoria?”

Samantha was a year and a half younger than Violet, and Victoria was six months older, but the age differences didn’t seem to matter as much now as they had when the girls were smaller. “I think that’s quite possible,” I told her.

She nodded and went back to her noodles.

I’d struck out with the Lindas.

Two weeks later, though, Darren left his phone at home when he went to the gym. After staring at it for fifteen minutes, I picked it up and decided to find out, once and for all, who Linda was. I typed in his unlock code—our anniversary—and his iPhone buzzed and shook its dots at me. The hot-and-cold feeling that had flooded my body when I first saw Linda’s name returned. I tried Violet’s birthday and then Liam’s. Then Darren’s. Then mine. Nothing worked, and I knew that if I put in a sixth wrong code, the phone would be disabled. But truly, I didn’t have a sixth guess anyway. Linda’s birthday? I put the phone down on the coffee table, where I’d found it.

I thought about telling Kate my suspicion but felt like too much of an idiot. There was no real proof. Besides, she and Tom were working through their own issues. The last thing she needed was to be dealing with mine, too. But even though I didn’t feel like I had enough evidence to warrant a phone call to Kate, I was still afraid to ask Darren why he’d changed his phone code. Who Linda was. Why she didn’t have a last name. Because once I knew he was cheating for real, there was no going back—the hurt, the betrayal, the arguments, the tears. I shuddered at the thought of living through that, of what it would do to the kids, to me, to all of our lives. It was easier to pretend things were fine.

I kept my ears open for the next few months, and noticed three or four times that he’d be talking on the phone in the hallway as he came home from work, but would say good-bye before he entered the apartment. Could that have been Linda?

He worked a couple of Saturdays in March. Linda?

He went on a golf weekend with some friends from the office. Or did he?

I barely slept those six months. I would lie next to him, wondering how he could sleep so soundly while he was keeping such a horrible secret, while he was betraying me like that. I couldn’t get the images out of my head, him in some other woman’s arms. Sometimes I’d imagine her as a blonde, sometimes a redhead, sometimes a younger version of me. No matter how I pictured it, it was terrible. I ate less. I drank more. I wondered why he’d given up on us. What made him do it.

Sometimes I wanted to hurt him as badly as he hurt me—physically, emotionally, anything to show him what he was doing to someone he’d promised to love until the day he died. Sometimes I just wanted him to tell me that he was sorry, that he’d leave her, that he loved me still and would love me forever; sometimes I thought that was all it would take for me to forgive him everything. My heart felt like a yo-yo, or maybe like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing from one side of the table to the other. Through all of it, though, was this overwhelming feeling that I’d failed somehow. I hadn’t been sweet enough or smart enough or a good enough wife. That it was my fault he was doing this. I was paralyzed by the idea of that failure.

I think that’s why I didn’t tell anyone, really. Once I said it out loud, it became real. Our marriage had failed. We had failed. I had failed.

Darren and I weren’t having sex as often as we used to—maybe once or twice a month—which had become the norm after Liam was born. I didn’t even bother with birth control. Once I saw Linda’s name on his phone, though, there was this paradox of being so upset with Darren that I didn’t want to touch him at all, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give him a reason to fall into someone else’s arms. A few months into my spiral of suspicion, when I was staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, torturing myself with mental images of Darren zipping up some other woman’s dress, fixing her collar, sliding on her shoes, I reached my hand over to his side of the bed and slid it under the band of his boxer briefs. He was already falling asleep.

“Not right now,” he muttered, as he rolled farther away from me.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. The rejection hurt, physically. How could he want some stranger, but not me?

I questioned everything he did or said in my head, my hurt and mistrust growing, but didn’t bring anything up out loud. The only good thing about believing Darren was cheating was that when I fell into a fretful sleep and dreamed about you, I didn’t feel guilty anymore.

I started reading your Facebook page more that spring. I liked more of your photos. Even commented on an article you posted. Did you notice? Did you wonder why?