And then, when he started to pay attention to me, I was drawn to that. Falling in love with him was a direct result.”
I nod sadly. I can see myself starving her of what she so desperately needed, but at the time I told myself that this was the way we were. She’d pulled herself back from me after we had lost Thomas, and I pulled myself away from her because of that. But I should have been stronger. I should have been better. I should have loved her. I should have gathered her in my arms and given her my heart and my soul and my life. If she’d had me like that then she would not have sought it from another.
“You won’t have to worry about that again.”
And to prove it, I take her to our room, slowly take off her clothes and make love to her – gently, tenderly. Intimately.
Friday
“Okay,” Wade says into the microphone, “there’s been a lot of talk lately about just what happened between my producer, his wife and me. And really, it was nobody’s business but ours, but it seems that people aren’t just going to let it go. So I’m going to talk about it. We’ll be taking calls a little later so don’t even think of ringing in yet. So, let’s get down to it...”
And so he tells the story - the whole story from the beginning. He didn’t mean to get in the middle of a failing marriage, but his producer’s wife came on to him. He has a history or poor judgement when it comes to women, not that she was a bad person, just that the decision to sleep with her was not one of his best. She was hurting badly in her marriage, but her husband did not know, and her decision to have an affair was poorly made as well. Over the space of a year it became more than casual, but she did not leave her husband, or would even consider it. Then her husband found out about them and the marriage collapsed. Then she found out that she was pregnant with her husband’s baby and they came to a crossroads. In the end he stepped aside so that she could build her family again.
“I loved her,” he says, “but in the end it wasn’t enough. There was a baby and there was history between the two of them that I could never beat. I made the right decision for the first time in my life, and I don’t regret that. What I do regret is the pain that I’ve caused my friends, and I can’t undo that. But you know forgiveness is a wonderful thing. My friend has forgiven me. She has forgiven me. We’re friends again, maybe better than we’ve ever been.”
He sighs. “And there is one other person that I’ve hurt that I need to talk about: my wife. She’s stood by me these last few months while I’ve tried to make this show into something better. And it hasn’t been easy. She’s had to deal with a lot of my shit – what I’ve done, what I keep on doing. But what I haven’t done is what the paper has said I’ve done. I’ve never cheated on her and I never will. I hope she believes me and I hope she starts taking my calls.”
“Speaking of calls,” he says, a little too jovially. “Let’s open up the lines. Let’s hear what you have to say...”
To be honest, I’m over all of this drama and controversy. I just want to get away from it all for a few days and not think about it. And I’m going to start tonight. I’m going to start with Quinn.
She looks so beautiful to me, so full of life and love. She loved being pregnant before, she was always smiling. This time it is different. She smiles, but there is fear behind her smile, there is fear behind mine. Her hair falls down over her shoulders and back in long, brown waves. She rarely puts it up these days, and I confess that it’s a look that I’m beginning to like. She’s different these days and I guess her hair is a sign of that. She’s in her pregnancy clothes all the time now. I’m used to seeing her in her stylish outfits, swanning about and making every man she meets jealous of me. She’s still turns heads, even with her dresses that accommodate her swelling belly.
We eat at one of our usual places. We don’t talk about Wade and the show. We don’t talk about the newspaper. We don’t talk about the past and the mistakes we’ve made. We talk about our future and how bright it is to have each other and Rachel in it. We know that there are still things to talk through, unresolved issues that lie just below the surface, but we’re content to at that moment to leave them there. Not ignore them. Just acknowledge them and set them aside for a time.
Saturday
Quinn talks on the telephone while I make finishing touches to the spare room. Everything is in place now. There is a cot, a change table, a cupboard for Rachel’s clothes. This morning I hang pictures and a mobile above her cot.
Quinn comes in a little later to appraise my handiwork.
“You’re getting better at this,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“I might even get you to do other things, like fix that dripping tap and the broken hinges on our wardrobe.”
“We’ll see,” I say.
She smiles sadly.
“You okay,” I ask her.
She nods slowly. “I’ve been talking with Mary.”
“How is she?”
“She sounds okay, but I can only imagine what she’s going through.”
But the thing is: I can. When I was apart from Quinn it was like she had died. The wife that I knew, that I loved, was gone. And I also knew the miracle of resurrection. She was returned to me, but she was not the same. And I didn’t want that old Quinn back. I am in love with the renewed Quinn more than I was with the other.
“She’s lost the love of her life,” I tell her. “You don’t get over that quickly.”
She hangs her head and closes her eyes. I don’t know if she understands what that means, but she looks like she’s beginning to. And as I watch her, I realise that there is more to this conversation than I first thought.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?”
She nods and I take her in my arms.
“Do you want to tell me?” I ask.
“Tomorrow is the day. The same time we lost him. Eight months.”
“I know. I remember.” That day is etched in my mind. The days after were indistinct, made fuzzy by supressed grief and time. And the truth was that I never fully brought my life back into focus. I missed the subtle, I think sometimes obvious, signs that Quinn and I were in churning seas heading for the rocks.
“I’m afraid.” Two words. Succinct. Important. I didn’t miss them. Not this time.
“Me too,” I say.
“Really?”
I take a deep breath. “I’ve been dreading this time. I’ve been expecting the same tragedy to keep happening over and over again.”
“Oh, Judd.” She starts to cry into my chest and I hold her tightly.
“But it won’t. We’re going to keep this one. We’re going to have this baby. You’re going to hold Rachel in your arms and we’re going to be a family.”
“You believe that?”
“I have to. I can’t keep thinking that we’re going to lose her like we did Thomas, like I’m willing it to happen. I have to believe that she’ll make it, the same way I had to believe that we would find a way back to each other.”
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t hold onto him.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“But I blamed myself. And then, after, when you stopped holding me, even looking at me, I thought that you blamed me too.”
“I never blamed you.”
“I know. But that was grief talking. I thought I’d failed you. And then I went to Wade because I hadn’t failed him. Every time I looked at you I saw our little boy and it was slowly driving me mad. Every time I was with him I felt differently. I didn’t feel like a failed mother. But I was a failed wife, and I know I should have talked all this out with you but there were walls between us by then that I couldn’t get past, and by then I couldn’t stop being with him. I was addicted. He was my drug to dull the pain.”
She cries and cries and I let her. I let her until my shirt is wet with her tears. I don’t talk. I don’t accuse. I just listen. And I love.
When she’s spent her tears I pull away and wipe them away with my fingers, ove
r her cheeks. “Whatever happens, I’m here,” I tell her. “I can’t take away your fears, but I can hold you while you walk through them. I can do that at least. You don’t need to be afraid that I’ll push you away again.”
She nods. There is a slight, shy smile on her face.
“Can you make love to me?” she asks quietly. “But gently. I feel so close to you, and I want more. I want to feel you inside me, like you’re inside my heart and my head.”
So I take her by the hand and take her to the bedroom, and we make love like she asks, slowly, tenderly, looking to each other’s eyes.
She’s right about her using Wade like a drug. What she had with him was never like this. It was raw and animal, but it wasn’t full of tenderness like we share now. It was addictive and destructive and selfish, demanding more and more until it ruined every good thing in her life. This was the opposite. This was life and love and light. This was joy and hope and family. This was us at our best. Giving. Sharing. Being.
“Mary was telling me there is another seminar,” Quinn says. “Next week.”
We lie there, eating lunch naked on our bed, looking at each other’s bodies, enjoying the intimacy of even that. We know each other in ways that we have never known before.
“You want to go?”
“Don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I was thinking...”
“Trouble,” I say wryly and she hits me playfully on my arm.
“Wade and Chloe. They’ve got themselves in this place. It’s heart-breaking.”
“It is