I mean, I’m with Wade and you’re... I don’t know where you were... but there is still love there. I know you think that it wasn’t real then, but it was. At least I thought so.”
“Really?”
“I did still love you then, Judd. Even with everything else, I still loved you. Why do you think I didn’t tell you about my affair? I didn’t want to hurt you. Well, maybe not. Maybe I was just a coward.” She sighs. “So, what do you think? What have you lost?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Innocence, I guess. But I’ve been thinking that although we had a wonderful life before, it was doomed to fail. I think that I didn’t know what I was doing and when I needed to be a good husband, I just didn’t know what to do. So, maybe what I’ve lost is something flawed. Maybe I don’t want that after all.”
“And what have you gained?”
I shrug. “You. Our baby. Insight. Growth.”
She turns the pages until they become blank: an empty canvas for a life that might not have happened. It still might not. Who knows what will happen with the fragile connection between us.
“What about these spaces,” she asks me. “What can you see here?”
“I honestly don’t know. We could put anything in there, whatever we wanted.” I think for a moment. “But you know, maybe whatever we put in there, later on we’ll see it the same way. You know, that it was flawed, it was unfinished. Maybe each picture will show a better life, a better way. I don’t know.”
She traces a finger over the blank spaces and sighs. “Wade and I... we were always going to fail weren’t we? I should have known that. Really, there was no way that wasn’t going to end in tears for everyone.”
“I don’t know,” I say blandly. “But it looks like Wade got off scot free.”
She shrugs. “I’m not so sure about that. He’s on a good thing with Chloe and I think he knows it. But it’s hard to just change direction all of a sudden and he’s got years of bad habits to change.”
I chuckle. “I know what that feels like.”
“But I think he’d have probably left me for her at some point. Maybe he’d have cheated on me like I was doing to you. In the end what we had was just sex, some friendship, but mostly just sex, but it’s not enough. I’m sorry if that hurts you but it’s the truth.”
“I know,” I say.
“And it would have been later, and maybe we’d be too far apart then to find us again, and it makes me sad thinking about that. I’m just glad that things happened the way they did. I’m glad we did find each other again.”
“Me too.”
“Speaking of sex...”
“Oh, yes?” I say suggestively.
“When the time comes... will you be... will you be ready. I’m mean, have you sorted out what you needed to sort out.”
I smile wickedly. “You’ll just have to wait and find out.”
She throws the album onto the floor, as if there was some contempt in the act. She rolls over and kisses me for the longest time. I turn off the lamp and we lay there, with her head on my chest and with me playing with her hair.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks me. “I mean, if you have doubts...”
“No doubts,” I tell her.
“Or if you’re just doing this for Rebecca...?”
“No.”
“Or if you have some notion that you have to look after me...?”
“You do need looking after, but no.”
She sighs. “It’s just... if you’re having second thoughts, I will understand. We can still just be friends.”
“No second thoughts,” I tell her.
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t you know by now?”
“Please, Judd. We can’t guess about this sort of thing. Not any more.”
“I love you, Quinn Altman. I’ve loved you from the moment I met you and I will always love you. There’s nothing you can ever do that will change that. I want to do this. I want to stay your husband. And not because you’re pregnant and need looking after – though they are pretty good reasons. It’s just that I love you, and that’s all that matters.”
She snuggles in, holds me closer. “That’s a damn good answer,” she says. Quinn hardly swears, so I know she’s serious.
“Rebecca?” I ask her.
“No,” she says. Another name crossed off the list.
I wake up later and she’s gone. I look up the dark ceiling and I say a few words. I thank whoever is listening for my beautiful wife and our little baby girl. I ask them to protect them when I cannot. I ask them to help me forget the past, what was, and imagine a future that is big and bold and full of love.
Wednesday
Neither of us is saying it, but we’re both worried about next month. We’re worried that history will repeat itself. We’re worried that we’re going to lose our little girl the same way as we did our boy. And if it does happen, horrendous though the thought of it may be, she’ll blame herself, she’ll blame the decisions that she made that helped pull our marriage apart.
I deserve this, I do. I ruined us.
And then we’ll be back at the start. She’ll be hurting and grieving. I’ll be the same. But I won’t let things end the same way. I won’t leave her to her pain, or double it because she’s believed that she’s lost me too. I will love her on and on. I will let her do what she needs to do to say goodbye to our little girl. She won’t be alone.
I put that out of my mind, try and think positive thoughts. So I start to worry about tomorrow. We’ll be married ten years. Our ninth in some respects was a sham. I didn’t want this anniversary to pass without some recognition. It still gives me pain to think of that night, making love to her when she may well have been thinking of Wade. Maybe she wasn’t. I have to believe her when she says that there was still love between us, even with her being with another man. It sounds unbelievable to me, and perhaps to just about anyone, but I have to believe her. I have to trust her words. Who knows? She is a complex woman, my wife, I am learning every day. And maybe that is one of the new things that I love about her.
“Hey,” I say to her as we sit in my car, the engine off. It’s early evening and the traffic is easing off a little. The lights of the city start their incessant flashing for attention.
“Yeah?”
“Tomorrow,” I say, then I wave my hands about, indicating I want to know more.
“Dinner and a movie,” she tells me. “It’ll be nice.”
“It’s our anniversary,” I remind her.
“I’m well aware.”
“Well, shouldn’t we...”
She smiles. “Let’s not make it too big a deal. I mean, there’s a lot going on, right?”
“Right,” I say, unconvinced. In some respects I do want to make a big deal. Its ten years, for god’s sake. But then, I remember the ninth and what that meant, or didn’t mean.
“All you need to do is dress up nice and meet me where I tell you to meet me.”
“Where?”
“When I tell you.”
“You can’t give me any more?”
“Just do as you’re told,” she tells me.
We drive back home. Sit on the lounge. Stare at the new picture of our daughter, growing well. We’re already starting to add pictures in a new album – sonograms and shots of Quinn’s bare belly. We’re starting the new chapters in our story. She’s tired and I let her go to bed. I lay awake, looking at the vows I’ve written. I cry when I read them. I hope she will too when I read them to her.
Thursday
Wade is in top form the following day. Our program runs like clockwork, efficient and exactly to format. He’s smiling at me and I wonder what he’s up to, but in some respects I don’t want to know. Is he aware that it’s Quinn and my anniversary today? I doubt it. Her picture is back on my desk, but the wedding photo is gone. The picture is new, taken a week ago.
We wrap up and I head back home. Quinn, apparently, is meeting at the ‘to be detailed later’ venue, so I don
’t have to pick her up. I kill some time and then change into my suit. I’m doing as I’m told: dressing up nice.
She messages me before I leave. There is a park in the centre of the city. It’s small and unadorned save for a beautiful, old rotunda in the centre that is lit up every night with a million little lights. We used to go there often on the weekends, lay a picnic rug on the grass and read and just be. We haven’t done that in at least six years. I miss the simplicity of our life then. There was no pressure, no dead baby, no emotional shutdown, no affair. There was just us.
I drive to the parking station nearby, three blocks away from the park. I head up the stairs to the street and run, quite literally, into Allen.
“Hey,” he says. “Judd!”
“Hey, man,” I say back.
“How are you?”
“Fine.”
“I hear things are going well with you and Quinn. Congrats, man.”
“Thanks.”
“What are you up to?”
I shrug. “Meeting her for dinner. Ten years today.”
“Ten years? Congrats again.”
“Thanks.”
“You heading that way?” He nods down the street toward my destination. “I’ll walk with you.”
And so, strangely, he’s walking with me. I don’t know why. Then, a little way along, we see Mike – another husband of one of Quinn’s friends. I know these guys, I even considered them my friends, and they deserted me when I needed friends more than anything. The weird thing is that I’m seeing them tonight one after another. They seem surprised that they’ve met, and the same for meeting me. We have an almost identical conversation, Mike and me, and then I keep going. Only now I’ve got two in tow.
At