“Piper, we need to settle things.”
Piper gazed bleakly at him over the peaks of her own knees.
“Don’t do this,” she said, pleading.
Kyle met her eyes. “Oh, Pipe,” he said, “if only I could help it.”
It was the first Monday in March, exactly a week after Kyle had moved out the last of his belongings, that Piper and her children spent the night at the Donahue house for the first time.
At least, that was how it felt to Piper. It wasn’t literally true. They had spent the night there before, during Elizabeth’s three days of dying, but it was impossible for Piper to think about those days as existing within the ordinary flow of time and events. Those three days were exempt; they counted too much to count. Anyway, back then, the house had not been, in Piper’s mind, the Donahue house, but Elizabeth’s house. And Kyle had been there, too. They had been two families together, keeping vigil.
Piper tried to tell herself that she had not meant for it to happen. Then she told herself that, for God’s sake, it was no big deal, a onetime thing. But even the next morning, hurrying home in the pearl gray, gathering light, she knew: she had made it happen; it was a big deal; it would happen again.
Tom had had a business dinner, and Ginny had her grandchildren for the weekend, so Piper had brought Meredith and Carter over to spend the evening with Peter and Emma. She fed them organic chicken nuggets, peas, and the sticky instant mashed potatoes that Ginny had introduced to them and that Emma adored. They cut flower-shaped cookies from dough Piper had made earlier that day and decorated them with colored sugar, the two little children making a mess, pressing their tongues to the sugar on the table, Emma and Carter sprinkling with heartbreaking carefulness.
Sweet, serious Emma, potty trained since age two, had begun to wet her pants at school. The first time it happened, she’d hid it from her teachers, and when Piper picked her up at the end of the day, Emma had turned mutely around to show Piper her sodden red corduroy pants, cold and sticking to her legs. The bewilderment on the child’s face was even more painful to see than the shame. Piper lifted Emma into her arms, kissed her, and said, “No worries, Em-girl. We’ll pop you into a warm bath, just as soon as I get you home.”
For a few long seconds, Emma held Piper’s gaze with an expression that said, “How did this happen to us?” so clearly that Piper could hear the words inside her head. Then Emma smiled slowly and said, “You’ll pop me? Like Pop-Tarts.”
“Like popcorn!” added Carter.
“Exactly,” said Piper, with an ache in her chest.
After that, Tom put a Ziploc bag full of clean clothes in Emma’s backpack, and almost every day, Emma came home wearing them, her wet clothes sealed away inside the plastic bag.
Tom told Piper that Peter would wake up, now and then, in the middle of the night, sobbing and asking for his mother, but during the day, he seemed fine. Gradually, though, Piper began to see how he clung to her, scrambling onto her lap as soon as she sat down, wrapping his arms around her leg as she stood at the kitchen counter. He’d always been a child who stuck close. My remora, Elizabeth had called him, my fat little barnacle.
Once Meredith had pushed him and said hotly, “She’s my mommy, not your mommy.”
“My mommy died,” said Peter, without hesitation, looking from one face to the next, as though reminding them all.
Piper had been about to scold Meredith when Tom stopped her with a glance. Later, he told Piper, “It only makes sense that she’d feel that way sometimes. But the kids are good for each other.”
Piper knew they were, as she watched them together, all four on the giant armchair listening to Danny Kaye tell the story of Tubby the Tuba, an album Elizabeth had loved as a kid, draped over each other with the gorgeous indifference of children who haven’t yet learned that it matters where one body ends and the next begins.
She put them to bed, Meredith in Peter’s new toddler bed, Peter in his crib, Emma and Carter in Emma’s double bed. It was something she’d done many times, both before and after Elizabeth had died. She’d put the children to bed, Tom would come home, Piper would go back to her house and then walk over early, around the time the kids would be waking up. The children were all good sleepers, and it was a good system. It worked.
Only on this particular night in early March, the idea of going home to her house was unbearable. Just picturing herself removing her clothes and lying down in her own bed made Piper’s stomach churn and her head pound, but even so, she hadn’t known up until the last few seconds what she would do. Until she heard Tom’s car in the driveway, she was just a woman lying on the sunroom sofa reading a book, but as soon as the headlights swung their way into the room, as though on cue, Piper placed the open book on her chest, one hand resting limply on its spine, turned her face toward the back of the sofa, and pretended to be asleep.
She heard Tom open the kitchen door, shut it behind him, and then for a few seconds, she heard nothing, no footsteps, no thud of his briefcase on the tabletop, and she imagined Tom standing in his dimly lit kitchen, feeling the stillness leaning in from every side.
In the seconds that she listened to Tom walk toward the sunroom, there was still time for Piper to change her mind, but she didn’t, not when she heard him pause at the door, heard the faint creak of the doorjamb as he rested his shoulder against it, heard the soft half chuckle that meant he was smiling at the sight of her, not even after he turned and walked upstairs. She deepened her breathing, kept her eyes still under their lids, settled into the game of feigning sleep, just as she’d done countless times as a child. Deliberately, she relaxed her forehead, smoothing out the space between her brows. She remembered her mother’s mocking voice chilling the air around her bed. “I know you’re faking, Piper. No one frowns like that when they’re asleep.” The forehead was the dead giveaway, the detail most people forgot.
By the time Tom had reentered the room, Piper’s imitation of sleep was so complete, she had almost fooled herself. Gently, Tom slid the book out from under Piper’s hand, then he lay a blanket over her, one that Piper, without opening her eyes, recognized as the goldenrod-colored one that Elizabeth had ordered from the Garnet Hill catalog and that she kept in the trunk at the foot of the guest room bed. The blanket smelled faintly of cedar. Through all of this, Piper stayed motionless, and then something happened that made her fling open her eyes and sit up so fast that the blanket slid onto the floor in a heap.
It was nothing. Nothing. Just the back of Tom’s hand brushing her neck as he pulled the blanket up over her shoulders, a touch so small and accidental it should have gone unnoticed. It should have been relegated immediately to the discard pile of meaningless events, and Piper would swear forever afterward that the touch had been meaningless. To her abstract, conscious, voluntary mind or whatever they called the part of a person that typically assigned meanings to things, the touch meant nothing.
It was all her body’s doing. In the space between one breath and the next, her nerve endings had seized the touch and run with it, driving its tingling heat along her network of internal telegraph lines and straight into every hidden peak or tip her body held. Piper could taste the touch on her tongue, and when she opened her mouth, the touch came out as a single, ragged note: “Oh.” Piper shot upright, her face flaming, one hand jammed against her chest, the other against the flat place between her hip bones.
“Jesus God,” said Tom, jumping back, aghast, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Piper just stared at him, helpless, waiting for everything burgeoning to subside, for her heart to stop beating too much blood into all the wrong places. Jesus God is right, she thought, and then, unaccountably, she was laughing, a big, loose, Julia Roberts blast of a laugh that rang and rang inside the sunroom, inside her own ears. You have lost it, she thought. After all these years, the old bod was asserting itself; it had decided to have a mind of its own. Great fucking timing, she told it. And she laughed harder.
Tom smiled in a
confused way, never taking his eyes off Piper, backed up until his legs hit the seat of the armchair behind him, placed a hand on each arm of the chair, and lowered himself into it.
Piper pressed her palm to her mouth in an effort to force the laughter back. “Tom,” she gasped out, giggling, “come on. That’s the way people look at a crazy person.”
Tom smiled. He had changed into gray sweatpants, a T-shirt, and wore shearling, moccasin-shaped slippers. Piper remembered Elizabeth teasing Tom about his aversion to being barefoot indoors, no matter what the weather. “Winter, spring, summer, and fall!” she’d sung at him, and he’d looked down at his feet and said, good-naturedly, “I wouldn’t call it an aversion. A disinclination, maybe.”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” he said now. “But you’ve probably earned a little crazy time.”
She rolled her eyes. “Kyle, you mean. His big exit.”
“Kyle and everything else.” Kyle and Elizabeth he meant. Elizabeth first, and then Kyle.
“He hired a professional packer, did I tell you that? For the wine cellar. A man showed up at my house with boxes and a roll of bubble wrap.”
“You’re kidding,” said Tom. “Did you tell him to help himself to a bottle of Château Latour?”
Piper snickered. “And canned goods. Kyle packed those himself. I went to the pantry for tuna fish, and the case from Costco was gone. Tuna fish, refried beans, cling peaches.” God knows Kyle could keep the cling peaches, his favorite since childhood. White-trash food, Piper had thought scornfully every time he ate them. Just picturing the orange slices, flabby and fleshlike, crowded into all that gluey juice made Piper gag.
“Not that I gave them tuna fish much, not more than once a month. Because of the mercury. But how was I married to a man who would steal his kids’ tuna fish?”
Tom shook his head in disgust. Then he said, wryly, “I knew that at least, about the mercury. It’s always a relief when I realize I know something about how to take care of the kids.”
“You’re doing great,” Piper told him. She meant it. For years, Tom had brought the same distracted geniality to parenting as the rest of the dads they knew. But in the past six months, he had undergone a process that Piper could only think of as, despite her distaste for any term with even a whiff of spirituality about it, a deepening. It wasn’t that he loved his children more than before. All the fathers Piper knew loved their kids, Tom included, Kyle included.
But Tom had developed into a father who was attuned to his children. She’d seen it on his face at the playground. He might be talking with another parent, but, all the while, part of him was alert to the sound of his children’s individual voices, was listening for shifts in the general tenor of the playground noise that meant trouble. Piper had once watched a Discovery Channel show with the kids about the African desert or, possibly, the Australian outback, some impossibly foreign place, and suddenly there had been a tiny fox on the screen. The fox stood perfectly still, poised, except for its large, triangular ears, which swiveled around, sometimes each in a different direction, a posture of dogged and fine-tuned attentiveness Piper recognized immediately and that she had, until Tom’s transformation, associated exclusively with mothers.
Tom listened to his children when they talked, carefully searching their faces for fear or sadness (both of which Piper knew he often found). He was learning to read them, just as mothers learned to read their newborns’ various cries, discerning hunger from sorrow, anger from tiredness, loneliness from pain. He wasn’t an expert yet; he made plenty of mistakes, but he was getting there. He was trying.
“Thank you,” Tom told Piper, sincerely, “I hope so. But we were talking about you and Kyle.”
Piper said, “I feel selfish complaining to you of all people about my stupid marriage.” Saying this startled Piper a bit because while she had, very occasionally, felt selfish before, selfishness was so out of keeping with her view of herself that she had never admitted it to anyone. While her senses had fallen more or less back into place, she still felt a slight interior reverberation from Tom’s touch. Good Lord, is this how it would be now? Would she just feel and say anything? She wondered, drearily, if this happened to all newly separated women, then realized that even though she would have died before asking another such woman, it was depressing to think that she didn’t know a single one.
“Don’t feel selfish. Especially with me.” With a groan, Tom leaned back in his chair, his legs stretching out, his hands locked on the top of his head. “Man, I feel like all I’ve done for a year is talk about my problems. So go ahead and talk. Talk about it all you want.”
Piper raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Really. And I promise to try not to do that thing men do, the solve-it-instead-of-listening thing. Elizabeth hated that.”
Piper laughed. “Are you kidding? I do the same thing. She hated it in me, too.”
So Piper began to talk, not the guarded, flippant talking she’d done with Kate on the subject (“leave it to Kyle to pick a pasty-faced trophy wife with a double chin just so everyone will think he really loves her”), and not the emotion-laced, naked talk of talk shows, not confession, but a kind of straight talk that was new to her. Direct, honest, but unadorned and detached, like the voice-over in a historical documentary.
Calmly, setting down fact after fact, Piper told Tom about the bathroom breakup scene, including Kyle’s socks and the way the water turned cold when he told her he was in love with Colleen Mullins. She told him about telling Meredith that Daddy was going to live somewhere else, the excitement in her daughter’s voice when she said, “Will there be puppies there?” And about her house, how every room screamed failure and tawdriness, how she secretly wished a contained, efficient fire would burn the place to the ground while she was picking the kids up from school.
True to his word, Tom listened. He asked two or three questions, leaned forward once in concern, but never tried to solve anything (what was there to solve?), never acted angry or amazed by Kyle’s betrayals (she wanted neither anger nor amazement, not that night anyway), and never, thank God, touched her.
They talked for almost two hours. It seemed a much shorter length of time to Piper, although afterward, she realized she was sleepy.
Just after Piper had refused his offer of the guest room, just before Tom went upstairs, Tom said, “You guys stay here whenever you want, okay? I mean it.”
“We couldn’t,” demurred Piper, although just then she couldn’t think of a single reason why. Later, she’d think of plenty, but at that moment, she was drawing a complete blank.
“Why not?” he said, with mild impatience. He raked his hair with his fingers. “You know, it wouldn’t be us doing you a favor. More like the other way around.”
“What do you mean?”
His blue eyes were tired in his long, sharply angled, tired face. “I mean that I like it when you’re all here. Emma and Peter do, too. It feels more…normal.”
“Oh,” said Piper, blinking, “okay.” Then she added, “Nice talking to you, Tom.”
“Likewise, Pipe.”
She turned out the light, and, very quickly, wrapped in the smell of cedar, she fell asleep.
As soon as the first trace of light glazed the sky and filtered through the overgrown rhododendrons outside the sunroom windows, Piper sat up, abruptly, wide awake, panic in her throat, her hands flying upward into her rumpled hair.
“Look at you,” she scolded, “just look at you.”
She scrubbed a forefinger across her unbrushed teeth, yanked on her shoes, shrugged on her coat, and rushed home so quickly and so weighted down with regret that she was panting by the time she opened her front door. As soon as she’d shut it behind her, she ran to the bathroom, taking the stairs two at a time, and brushed her teeth.
It wasn’t until she had changed her clothes and was making coffee that she began to realize what she did not regret. She did not regret the conversation with Tom, not even when she recalled describing to him
the moment in the tub, gooseflesh pebbling her skin under the harsh light.
As she poured milk into her coffee, she realized that she did not even regret spending the night at the Donahue house. Or, more accurately, she realized that she harbored no personal regret for having done it. How could she? Even now, sitting on her own sofa with her coffee, her legs tucked under her, she loathed being at home. She put down her mug and ran her hands over her arms, wiping off the invisible film of wrongness that seemed to coat everything. From where she sat, she could see the yawn of the empty wicker basket that used to hold Kyle’s golf magazines. Of course she didn’t regret spending the night at the Donahues’. In her personal opinion, it had been a very good idea.
However, when she saw past her personal opinion and thought about the opinions of others, she felt regret drop into her stomach like lead. Shit. Shit. Shit.
When Tom had said that their being there felt normal, she hadn’t disagreed, but now she wanted to. She wanted to knock some sense into the man. She considered marching straight over there, even though he was probably asleep and the kids wouldn’t be up for a good two hours, to tell him that whatever he thought, most people would not find it at all normal for a newly separated woman (and just then the term seemed especially apt, as though she were pulled into pieces and scattered on the living room rug) to sleep over at the home of a recently bereaved man and his family.
“You are a widower, asshole.” Piper said it out loud to the empty room in a poisonous voice. “So it’s fine for you. No one would blame you. But guess who gets to be the desperate, abandoned, conniving slut down the street taking advantage of her dead best friend’s husband? That”—she stabbed a finger into her chest—“would be me!”
After this outburst, she finished her coffee, then after some thought, went to the garage, found a stepladder and some tools, and set about removing the window treatments from the living room windows, the awful pleated swags and heavy drapes, the one decorating choice she had allowed her husband to make. Using a screwdriver, she even removed the brackets holding the carved gold-finished wooden poles with their elaborate pinecone finials (Who did Kyle think he was? Napoleon?) and considered using the poles as firewood (she could just feel the ax in her hand, although they probably didn’t own one; Kyle outsourced all manual labor, chopping included), but instead shoved the whole mess into two garbage cans and put them out at the curb.