Chapter 3
The swirling mist turned out to be nothing, if it even existed in the first place. I didn’t know for certain. Many times lately I imagined Jonathan beside me, watching me with love in his eyes, teasing me, enfolding me in his arms and telling me how much he loved me.
Now, hours after the movers left, I lumbered upstairs and stood in the expansive hallway, looking from one closed bedroom door to the other. Should I see Katie first and save Benjamin for last? The best for last? I never compared my children or loved one more than the other, but lately Katie’s behavior taxed my patience. At the moment, I preferred my son’s sunshine smile to my daughter’s glum expression. That and the fact when I looked into her eyes I saw her contempt for me and knew she blamed me for the divorce.
The silence in the old house creeped me out. Shouldn’t there be some noise? The clang of a water pipe? The rattle of a window pane? The creek of a floorboard under my weight? I stared at my feet. It was as though I turned stone deaf, suspended in time. A few loose tendrils of hair, escapees from my ponytail, kissed my neck.
My first instinct told me that Benjamin snuck up on me again and fanned the air behind me. I pivoted. No one stood at my back. A warm breath caressed the nape of my neck. I whirled around. Still no one. I didn't know what was going on, just that something was. Maybe an intruder found his way into the house and played games with me. This was something I never had to contend with during my marriage. With Jonathan at my side or nearby, I'd always felt secure. A woman could steal my husband, but no one would dare break into our home, not with Jonathan in it.
I ran into my bedroom, checked the windows and found them closed and locked.
Now, in addition to seeing things, I imagined sensations. Great. Maybe I was going crazy. If I were, would I know that I was?
Shaken from the experience and feeling the need for Jonathan's muscled arms protecting me, I sprinted across the hall, rapped my knuckles against Katie’s door and waited for her to invite me in. A moment passed, then another. “Katie. Honey?”
“Whadda ya want?”
“May I come in?”
“Like ‘no’ would stop you.”
I turned the doorknob and pushed, but the door didn’t budge. “Katie, I can’t open the door. Is something against it?”
“Like that would stop you.”
Ignoring her retort, I applied more pressure. It still wouldn’t open. Putting my shoulder to the door, I shoved with all my might. The door gave. I flew into the room, stumbled, caught my balance and stopped inches away from toppling on her.
“God, Mom, what’s the matter with you? Have you been drinking again?”
One bottle of wine — an isolated incident — and she never let me forget it. “The door was stuck.”
Katie sat up in bed and curled her legs beneath her. “If you say so.”
I plunked down next to her, noticing the tight set of her lips and cold look in her eyes. My daughter hated me. I didn't know what to do to make her love me again. “You’re still upset with me.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” She stared past me.
I wished I were all seeing, all knowing, all wise. It would take that to make her understand I wasn’t to blame for everything. “Probably.”
“Yeah, right.”
I ignored the sarcasm in her voice and traced the outline of a square in the quilt I’d stitched by hand. Wanting with a desperate need to break through the wall Katie had built around her, I said, “You're feeling disillusioned, sad, resentful, afraid and angry, huh?”
She didn't answer.
“I'm feeling all of those things too." I bobbed my head. "It sucks when things don't go our way, doesn’t it?”
“I wish you would get back with Daddy.”
She loved him because he was her father, but he not only dumped me, he also dumped her and Benjamin. He was a louse. Maybe someday he'd realize what a shit he was. “I tried, but sometimes, honey, there’s no turning back once a decision’s made. Maybe one day your father will find his way back to us.”
“You could have tried harder.”
“I did my very best to make him stay, Katie,” in fact, I told him he could keep his girlfriend if it meant staying with us, “but I know now if I'd talked him into staying, it wouldn’t have worked out. He would have ended up resenting me and you and Benjamin for forcing him to stay when what he wanted was to leave.”
She turned on her side and smothered her head in the pillow. “I hate him for what he did to us. I never want to see him again.”
“Please don’t say that,” I said, placing my hand on her shoulder.
She sat up. “I can’t help it. Because of him we have nothing. You’ll probably never find a job, and when the money runs out, what will we do? We’ll probably have to go on welfare and eat in soup kitchens.”
“Honey, you’re going to have to trust that your father and I will look after you and Benjamin.” She had a point, though. My job prospects would be few and my degree in political science would get me nowhere fast in the unemployment line. I inched closer and smoothed spirals of chestnut hair from her face. “I’ll find a job. I’m pretty smart.”
“Not smart enough to know your husband was humping your neighbor down the street.”
How many cutting remarks would I endure before she stopped blaming me for the divorce or before I slapped some sense into her? The time had come where I had to make my daughter see the reality of her life.
“Here’s the way it is, Katie. Your father and I are divorced, or at least we will be shortly, and in all likelihood, we won’t be getting back together. I sold our house and bought this one. Get used to it. I have custody of you and your brother and unless you want to live with your father, get used to that, too.”
The sound of her sobs impaled my heart. Some truths were never easy to accept. After a moment, she lifted her head from the pillow. “You’re a bitch.”
I laughed. “Tell me something I don’t know. That’s why your father left me, didn’t you know?” I hoped she would soon realize I was not a bitch, that I loved her and Benjamin more than life itself, and buying this house was a wise move.
I straightened my shoulders and walked out of her room. It was difficult. My inadequacy to resolve this matter to her satisfaction weighed like an anchor on my back.
“Knock, knock,” I said at Benjamin’s door.
“Who’s there?”
“Ima.”
“Ima who?”
I’m a complete idiot, that’s who. An unfit mother who thought only of herself. Katie would agree. Benjamin, on the other hand, would argue. “Ima knockin’.”
“Enter Ima knockin’.”
Bum into the air, Benjamin was heavily immersed in searching through one of the many cardboard boxes scattered across the floor when I entered.
“What are you looking for? Maybe I can help.”
“My flashlight. Do you know which box it’s in?”
I wished I had the foresight to label the boxes with each item contained in them instead of ‘Benji’s Toys’. “No, but I’ll help you look.” I took the utility knife from the back pocket of my jeans and cut through the packing tape on the nearest box. “Why do you need your flashlight?”
“I’m going to investigate the attic and the light bulb up there is burned out.”
“There’s nothing for you to see in the attic.” I didn’t want him going up there before I checked it out first.
“Have you been up there?”
“No. No, I haven’t.”
“How do you know then?”
A mom knows these things, I wanted to say, but it was undetermined how much I knew at the moment. “It’s late. We’ll check out the attic tomorrow.”
“Mom, ghosts only come out at night,” he said in that tone of voice he used when he told me something I should know.
“Ghosts?” My eyebrows reached my hairline. “There ar
e no ghosts in this house.”
He nodded so rapidly I thought he might get dizzy. “There is. I easedropped on Mr. August talking to Mrs. August. I know it’s not polite ....”
“It’s ‘eavesdropped’, and who’s Mr. August?”
“The guy next door. Santa Claus.”
“Ah.” The crazy old coot who told me this house was cursed. He probably wanted one of his relatives to buy it and was trying to scare me away.
“He said this house is haunted and weird things happen here. Like things going missing. He said — ”
“Sweetie, there is no such thing as ghosts.” I smoothed back the hair from his forehead, wondering about the sanity of our neighbor.
“Shure, there is, Mom. Ghosts are lost souls who can’t get into Heaven because they did something really bad on earth. They have nowhere to go so they roam the earth.”
“Mr. August?”
He shook his head. “Miss Anderson.”
“Oh.” His catechism teacher.
“Didn’t you have ca...te...giz...zim when you were young? Probably didn’t have it back then, huh?”
To a seven-year-old, forty was ancient. I thought that of my own mother, too, even into my teens. I stared off to a corner, thinking about our neighbor. He worried me. Tomorrow, after I showed Benjamin that no ghosts inhabited our house, I’d pay him a visit and make it clear he was to stay away from Benjamin.
“So, can I, Mom? Pleeease.”
I ruffled his hair. “Tomorrow, okay?”
Benjamin agreed, but he wasn’t happy about it. His quivering chin told me so.
After leaving his room, I soaked in the big old-fashioned bathtub. I closed my eyes and breathed in the heavenly fragrance of jasmine. Within moments, sleep captured me. I dreamed Jonathan lay on me, his slender fingers exploring my body as his lips captured my mouth.
He kissed the hollow of my throat, my shoulders, down my arms, leaving a trail of goose bumps in their wake. With his tongue, he drew a line down the center of my chest. Answering my yearning, he kneaded my breasts. I arched my back, wanting more and never wanting it to stop. He dipped his hand to the pit of my back and rolled us over. I nestled between his thighs. His kisses grew hungrier, more urgent, more demanding, driving me wild with desire. He flipped us over and kissed my stomach, my navel.
I lost myself in the sensations coursing through me.
His hand descended to my inner thigh, then moved higher and higher. I begged for mercy, writhing and moaning, and raking my fingernails down his back. When I thought I couldn’t wait another moment, he entered me. My legs wrapped around his hips of their own volition, it seemed. I embraced him as he moved inside me.
I awakened with a start. My arms flailed the air and I slid under the water, then surfaced, gulping bubbles and coughing. It took a moment for me to regain my equilibrium.
“Jesus.” I only had one lover my entire life, but comparing the sex with dream-Jonathan and sex with real-life Jonathan, it was no contest.
Why did my husband turn to another woman when we could have had sex like that?