that I want, but what that is exactly isn’t obvious, but it is tangible.
We have our coffee and leave them, walk back to our car.
“What do you think?” I ask her.
“What do you think?” she fires back.
“You want me to make the decision here, don’t you?”
“You know me so well.”
“But we’re both going to do this, and you’re going to have to talk to Mandy and... Okay. The answer is yes. We’ll see them.”
“Good decision.”
“I can’t help get the feeling that the answer was always going to be yes. If you didn’t want to talk to her then you would have said. So, there was really only one option.”
Quinn sets her mouth into a grin. “And you came to it all by yourself.”
“How come you’re allowed to use sarcasm and I’m not.”
“I can get away with it.”
“And I can’t?”
“You’re not as good looking as me.” She takes my arm as we cross the road. Our car is only a block further.
“That’s true,” I say. There is no debate there.
The more I listen to Rex’s grand design, the more I like it. Quinn is writing furiously, but I’m not. I’m going to by his book. I’m sure it’s all in there. When Quinn and I get home we’ll read it together and make some sort of start with it.
Wade and Chloe make steady but slow progress. Wade is good at talking women into bed with him, but he’s no good at all at keeping them there. They realise that he has little substance and grow tired of his boyish ways very quickly. But he’s changed as well, I’ve seen it far too many times to pass it off as an anomaly. But the fact remains that he just doesn’t have the skills to win Chloe back.
I don’t have any right to gloat. I was the same. I was emotionally inept and it destroyed my marriage. Well, almost destroyed. There was the smallest of hopes that I was able to build upon when I started to learn the things that I needed to learn. And that was the step that Wade needed to take.
He can’t do it alone, any more that I could have.
He needs a push, a nudge. A shove in the right direction. And Chloe needs to know certain things too.
After dinner we all retire to our rooms. Wade has gone back to his motel further up the road. I can see that Chloe misses him but there is still a considerable amount of distance between them. I can feel the pain that they have acutely because it was my pain, not so long ago. It doesn’t matter to me that Wade was the source of this pain, like he is with his own now, I still wouldn’t wish that feeling on him, on anyone.
Quinn gathers her things before heading into the shower.
“I need to talk with Chloe for a minute or two. Is that okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” she asks me.
“I just don’t want the same misunderstandings between them to happen to us.”
She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t trust Wade, but I do trust you. What do you need to talk to her about?”
I scratch the back of my head. “She doesn’t believe him that he didn’t sleep with that girl.”
“And you do?”
“I don’t think he did.”
“Good luck convincing her. You haven’t convinced me yet.”
“I don’t need to.”
“I suppose not.” She sighs. “I can’t believe that we’re here, still talking about him. Every time he comes up I think about what I did to you and you can’t imagine how I feel. People have committed suicide when they found out that their wife has been unfaithful. That could have been you.”
“I thought about it.”
She puts a hand over her mouth. “Crap,” she says. “That would have been my fault. I would have killed you.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I only thought about it for a second. I wouldn’t have done it, you know that.”
“Well.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
I come to her, kiss her, show her how I have forgiven her.
I knock on Chloe’s door. I hear her moving about in her room, come to the door. I suppose that she looks through the peephole because she opens the door without asking who has knocked. She stands there, in her pyjamas, a hand on her hip, her face in a half smile.
“Judd,” she says, “I’ve been hoping that you’d come to my room.”
“Stop it,” I say. I hate the games she plays with me, because they’re a little to close to the truth for my liking.
“Fine. What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“You already are.”
I shake my head. “Can I come in?”
She moves aside and lets me pass.
“Does Quinn know you’re here?” she asks me.
“Of course,” I say. “Anyway this won’t take long.”
“You’re going to try and get me to take Wade back, right?”
“Not quite. But I do want to talk about him for a minute, then I’ll go.”
She sighs. “Let’s get this over with then.”
I shrug. “You know about what happened between Wade and Quinn, right? You know the story?”
“He told me enough.”
“Okay. So, you know then that I haven’t always had the greatest amount of trust for him.”
“Understatement.”
I chuckle. “Right there. So, if I say that I trust him when he says he didn’t sleep with that intern, then you can believe me.”
“What intern?” she says sharply.
“What?”
“What intern?” she says again.
“Damn,” I say. “You only know what the paper said.”
“What intern, Judd?” she says a third time.
“Look...” I take a breath. “He was flirting with this new intern. I talked to him about it. I don’t actually think he was aware of what he was doing. And then they were talking in the copy room. But it was just talking, Chloe. And I believe that. He loves you, and although he’s a complete idiot sometimes, I don’t think that he’d ever stop loving you.”
Her eyes are wide, her mouth opens and closes with silent words.
“Now I think I may have made things worse,” I tell her.
“Worse than it already is?” she asks me. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Don’t underestimate my stupidity,” I tell her. “Look. He’s got these bad habits, and I can see he’s fighting against them every day. And he’s going to need some help – you both will. But you can’t give up on him, or you marriage. I think it’s worth fighting for, the same way I believed that Quinn and I were worth fighting for. He says he didn’t sleep with that girl and I believe him. That’s all I’m going to say.”
I leave her, head back to my room. Quinn is in the shower and I consider joining her, but I think she’s had a big day and needs a little bit of free time without my wandering hands.
Quinn has a small, leather-bound book next to her side of the bed. I open it, flip through the pages. She comes out of the bathroom, sees me looking at it.
“What’s this?” I ask her.
“You know what it is.”
I shrug. “Are you reading this now?”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“Why not. I’m going to church now. I’m praying. Why would you think I wouldn’t be reading that as well?”
“I don’t know. I guess that we’ve never gone in for that sort of thing before. Why now?”
She shrugs this time. “I guess everything that we’ve been through has made me think about where I’ve been and what kind of person I’ve become. And so I’m making some changes. I don’t know what I believe yet, I just know I want to be a better person.”
“I understand.”
“And talking to Mary, praying, going back to church, that’s helped me. Maybe reading that will help me too. I don’t know.”
I nod, place the book back on the night stand.
“I’m tired,” she says.
“I get the hi
nt,” I say. “Get in the shower and come to bed.”
Sunday
We sit again in the last row. I sit next to Quinn, she is next to Chloe. Wade sits on my other side. They have spoken a few times this morning over breakfast, more words than I’ve heard them say in the last week. It will be slow progress with them, painfully slow.
We’ve seen this scene before, on the last seminar that we attended. People speak, stories are told. Tears are shed. It’s never been my thing, this unrestrained outpouring of emotion, and I’m feeling a little on edge. I don’t know why. I’m not getting up there.
Story after story is laid out in painful detail. Some have joyous endings that lift up the soul. Some are still walking through dark times. Some, like ours, are out in the sunshine finally after years of gloom. Quinn cries at times. I don’t know if it’s the baby that’s making her emotional, or that she still has raw places that haven’t quite healed, but she can’t hold it back. I hold her as she does because it’s right. Chloe has tears too, but Wade doesn’t go to her. I think he’s afraid. I think he’s completely out of his depth. He’s good with the fun times but when things get hard he bails. It’s clearly an indication of his growth that he’s here at all.
And then the stage is empty. The microphone stands alone.
Rex stands quietly to the side, looking over us all, looking for some sign. And he gets it. Quinn stands, lowers her gaze to the floor. I’m still holding her hand.
“What are you doing?” I ask her in a whisper, but she doesn’t reply.
Rex waves her over and she pulls against my hand.
“Let me go, Judd,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
She nods and gives me a little smile. I let her hand slip from mine and watch her walk slowly down the aisle between the lines of chairs. She stands before the microphone, says nothing, looks down.
I guess she’s praying.
“You’d better get up there,” Wade says, but I shake my head. I can’t move, I can barely breathe. I’ve talked about us on television, but I can’t talk about us to these damaged, hurting people.
“Hello,” Quinn says in the smallest of voices, “I’m Quinn.” A quiet chorus echoes back.
I feel like I’ve been transported into some strange AA meeting and I’ve discovered that I’m not an alcoholic after all. But this is not that kind of meeting and I’m in the right place. I deserve to be here as much as anyone. I deserve to have my story told. I just can’t tell it and I don’t know why.
“This is the second one of these seminars I’ve been to. I’m here with my husband and some friends.”
She gathers her strength as she gathers her thoughts.
“I might have never been here at all if some things hadn’t happened, but they did and here I am. You see, I’ve hurt my husband so very much. I hurt him even though he didn’t know I was doing it, and then when he did I almost destroyed him. I’ve cheated, I’ve lied, I betrayed his trust in the worst possible way. And even though I loved him I couldn’t stop. I just did it over and over again.”
She starts to cry and I want to stand but I can’t move. I’m frozen with fear. Mary comes to her, brings an arm around her, says a few whispered words in her ear.
“I told myself that I needed to do those things. I was grieving and I was hurting and it did make me forget that for a while but it never went away and the only way that I could dull that pain was to keep doing what I was doing. And I was losing myself and I was losing my husband and I was slowly destroying the only thing that really mattered in my life.”
Maybe she needs to say these things. Maybe me being there will stop her. Maybe this is not about me at all. Maybe this is about her exercising her demons.
“And then it all came apart. My wonderful husband, who didn’t deserve what I’d been doing to him behind his back, found out. We separated and we weren’t talking and we were done. I broke us, I broke him, I broke everything.”
She places a hand upon her belly, closes her eyes. “And then I found out I was pregnant. We lost our first baby years ago and that was the start of when things went so terribly wrong with me. And this new baby was a miracle. But my husband, even though he was hurting so bad, even though he knew that another man was going to bring up his child, came and supported me. We almost lost this one too, and he was there. And then the man that I was with, that I cheated with, left me.”
Wade lowers his head. He starts to weep. Tears fall onto his lap. Chloe gets up, comes around, and sits next to him, wraps her arms around him and holds him as he cries.
“And my husband forgave me. I still can’t believe that he did that, after what I did to him. It hasn’t been easy. It took us another two months before we knew that we could fight for us and win. And we’ve been seeing Grant and Mary Upton and they’ve been wonderful.”
Mary steps forward. “Quinn is eight months pregnant. She’s been very brave through all of this and I’m so very proud of her. And I think Judd is too.” She looks to the back of the room.
Before I know it my legs are moving, propelling my down to the front. I stand before my beautiful, pregnant wife, tears running down my cheeks. She stretches out her hands and pulls me up and I take her into my arms. We cry together, me weeping into her hair and Quinn into my shoulder.
When we turn around finally every eye is full of tears. They applaud us, call encouragement. People are around us, putting their arms around us, crying with us. I’m overwhelmed with love and joy and hope and fear and sadness all at once. A cacophony of emotions wash over me and I find my knees are weak. If I wasn’t held up by those around me then I think I might just fall and take Quinn with me.
We’re the last couple out of the room. We wait patiently until everyone has left. Wade and Chloe have gone, out into the gardens to finally talk. Rex and Mandy walk over to us. They’re walking hand in hand and I guess I expected that of them.
“I’m a little surprised that you stood up there,” he says to Quinn.
“I don’t know why I did that.”
“I think I might have an idea. But that’s for another time. You guys wanted to speak to us?”
I look at Quinn, she looks at me. She nods, smiles.
“We’d like to come see you, if that’s okay,” I tell them.
“Great,” he says with a warm smile.
“When can we start?” Quinn asks.
Rex and Mandy look at each other. “Well,” he says, “I think the Uptons have given you are good start. I think we can afford to wait until after your baby is born. How about we stay in touch and in case you need us for any emergency, and then start in two months. You might find that you’ll need us then anyway. New babies bring in their own set of pressures.”
He hands us their card and I put it away.
“Remember,” Mandy says, “call us if you need us.”
We check out a little after midday. Chloe drives back to the city with Wade and we see this as a very encouraging sign.
“I can’t believe I did that,” Quinn says.
“I can’t believe it either.”
“I guess theirs no point in having a story like ours and not tell it.”
And that’s true. People want to know it. Whether it’s the callers from the show or the television networks or the newspaper reporters, or these people – who in the hearing rejoice in the ending of our story.
And it’s the ending that matters, or so Rex says. Sure, the beginning is important but its how things end that is far more telling of your marriage. And ours could have ended badly, in a fireball of anger and pain. It didn’t matter that we once loved each other with every fibre of our being, if we let that all burn up in its final moments. All those memories, all those joyous times, gone in an instant, made null and void, destroyed.
I don’t really understand that. I don’t get that people risk pulling down all of those things for some fleeting feeling. The cost is too great for me to pay, and I thought that it was the same for Quinn, but obviously not. But tha
t is the complexity of addiction – that the behaviour is hated and yet enacted over and over again regardless of the cost. I know she loved me then, but the call to forget the pain that I had caused her was too great for her to ignore.
She jumps, jumps me out of my musings.
“You okay?” I ask her. We’re almost back into the city, half an hour from home.
She rubs her belly, breathes slowly, evenly, like she’s been taught.
“Contraction,” she says.
“What?” I’m suddenly having visions of us delivering another dead baby and I almost run us off the road.
“She’s not coming,” Quinn reassures me. “Not for another month. These are test contractions. They just kind of hurt.” She catches her breath. “There,” she says exhaling deeply.
This is a stark reminder to me. Rachel is coming. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. No matter what we do we’re never going to be ready. Our lives have already changed so much these last few months and another change is in the wind. We will never be the same again.
In the next episode of Twenty Four Weeks…
Judd makes a decision about his future… Quinn and Judd rush to hospital… Judd makes a terrible discovery…
We fist-pump like we’ve done countless times before and he takes a seat in front of my contract.
“You haven’t signed that yet,” he observes.
“No,” I reply.
“Is there a problem?”
“No.”
“So...?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “It’s a big decision.”
“Really? More money. Better hours. A new direction in your career. What’s there to decide?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“I am right. Sign the damn thing.”
…
“Are you okay?” I ask her, but it is a stupid question. She is far from okay.
“More contractions,” she tells me. “Worse than before.”
“Are you bleeding again?” My blood is running cold. We are here again. Eight months. Too early.
She shakes her head as another contraction takes her.
“She’s still moving,” Quinn tells me. “She’s okay. God. It’s too early.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think she’s coming.”
I go instantly into action. I help her out of bed, down the hall to the dining room. I sit her there while I grab the bag that we had prepared a month ago.
“She coming too soon,” Quinn says with a slight quake in her voice.
…
I sit there, staring ahead now. I can’t fathom why it would be here. I can’t understand why Quinn would want to keep it. Unless she didn’t believe that we would make it. Unless she knew we would fail and she had this ready when it happened.
And then I see something else. Another box. Different than the shoe boxes, slightly bigger, and red like blood. All the other boxes, and the papers, would have hidden it, like it was a secret.
But we had no secrets. We told each other everything. We held nothing back.
I take the box out and sit back down. I’m hoping there are old birthday cards or blank Christmas cards, or car insurance papers – anything I’d be happy with, just not what I find inside it.
…
“Judd?” she says.
Then she sees what is sitting in front of me. A yellow envelope and a red box. Both are unopened and both accuse her. My eyes accuse her too.
She’s shaking her head. Her eyes are wide with something like terror.
“I can explain this,” she says.
“I