Chapter 19
19
NOW
Monday, Gwen moves through the kitchen feeling like a zombie, spent, both emotionally and physically. It’s almost two in the afternoon and she hasn’t eaten lunch. She needs to eat, keep up her strength, but she has no appetite.
This morning, before Barb showed up with the boys, Gwen had researched how to break the news of death to small children. All the experts agreed to use straightforward, declarative language. No euphemisms. No avoiding the hard truth.
She might have avoided it a little longer if the twins hadn’t come into her bedroom as soon as they got home asking where Anton was, asking why they weren’t in school on a Monday.
She sat on the bed and motioned for George to sit beside her while Rafi curled up on the floor with Sababa.
There is no easy way to say this. I’m sure you’ve noticed that Daddy isn’t here. There was an accident. Daddy died. He’s not coming back.
Nothing she had researched online prepared her for the visceral way her boys responded. Not just tears, but guttural wails, like the kind a wounded animal might make. Rafi buried his face in the dog, refusing to look up, while George crawled into her lap, sobbing. Thank God for Barb. Gwen had started crying, too, and Barb tended to all three of them with soothing tones and cool, damp washcloths.
The boys were still upstairs now, spent from their big emotions and their grief. She left them curled in the king-sized bed she shared with Anton, and turned on Over the Garden Wall , a favorite show of theirs.
“That was brutal,” Gwen says as Barb enters the kitchen.
“I think it went as well as could be expected. This is just the beginning, Gwendolyn. You have to give them time to process this. You must be their rock.”
Gwen feels her shoulders tighten. She’s no one’s rock, but at least she’s making an effort and she’d like some credit for it. This morning, she showered, blow-dried her hair, applied her makeup perfectly, and picked out a nice outfit. She even cleaned the kitchen before Barb showed up with the boys, removing the evidence of a weekend spent drinking and eating junk food. “I think I’m doing a pretty good job, under the circumstances.”
“Are you?” Barb arches one eyebrow, a skill that used to both impress and intimidate Gwen when she was a girl. “And that?” Barb gestures to the dining room. “What do you call all that?”
Gwen follows her mother’s gaze, seeing with fresh eyes the result of her meltdown last night.
The fury had been so raw when she came home from Aimee’s.
Le Cannu .
Anton was fucking Lisa, right under her nose. And that bitch had pretended to be her friend.
She opened a bottle of wine, blasted Carrie Underwood, and grabbed everything she could find of Anton’s and dumped it in the dining room. All his clothing, his toiletries, his record player, and his precious record collection, which ranged from punk bands like Fugazi to 1950s jazz like Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon.
The rest of the night is blurry. She moved through each room of the house as she cried loudly, wineglass in hand, music blaring, searching for evidence of the lying, cheating bastard’s crimes.
The cut was deep, deeper than she’d ever experienced. The humiliation of being cheated on once again was bad enough. But Anton screwing her friend magnified it a thousandfold. All those moments she had let her guard down around Lisa, all those times she revealed some vulnerability—Lisa must have been laughing inside. Did they laugh at her together? Did they mock her cluelessness?
Imagining them together felt like a physical assault. Gwen had been sick last night. She’d thrown up all over the kitchen floor. Sobbing, she’d cleaned up her vomit.
After her righteous anger had dissolved into self-pity, she put the song “Take Me as You Please” on the speakers. It was a song she could ugly cry to. And why shouldn’t she? Her life was shattered. She was on her own with two small boys. Her husband and one of her closest friends had betrayed her. She had curled up on the sofa with Sababa, taken a Xanax, and closed her eyes as the song repeated until she’d passed out.
“I just… I thought I would get started clearing out some stuff.” Gwen walks into the dining room to examine last night’s handiwork. She doesn’t remember dragging Anton’s Olivetta Lettera, a robin’s-egg blue vintage Italian typewriter, into the room, but she must have, because it was thrown on top of his winter coats on the floor.
Barb gets up and follows Gwen into the dining room. “Looks like someone had themselves a little tantrum. Well, you’re entitled to one. But, honey, this is no way to go about things. We need to get this cleaned up before the boys ask about it.” She bends down and picks up the typewriter. “I hope you weren’t going to toss this. Did it ever occur to you that George and Rafi might want a few things to remember their father by?”
Gwen feels her face burn. She is as embarrassed at this moment as she was in tenth grade when her mother read her diary and learned Gwen had given a hand job to Skip Blandon after the Christmas party at the club. She’s a child again, emotional and immature, disorganized and hopeless.
“What is going on, Gwen?”
“What’s going on?” She turns to face her mother, seeking some sign of support or kindness. “My husband was murdered a few days ago.” Gwen wipes the tears from her eyes. “Anton was cheating. Okay? He was cheating on me again, and this time it was with someone I know. A neighbor.”
Barb inhales sharply. “Not with that gardener woman? With the curly hair?”
“Who, Aimee? No. Not her. It’s my other neighbor. The one who was watching the boys, actually. The one who called you.”
Gwen can hear her mother’s sharp intake of breath. “Are you absolutely sure? Is there the tiniest chance you might be wrong?”
Gwen pulls out a dining room chair and sits. “Maybe.” Her mother’s question unsettles her. There is the tiniest sliver of a possibility that the Le Cannu pen was actually Anton’s, that Marcus borrowed it, and that’s how it ended up at Lisa’s house. That this whole thing is a giant misunderstanding and she’s jumped to a terrible conclusion. “But I think it’s true.”
Her mother sits in the chair beside her. “Think?”
How can she explain to Barb what her gut is telling her? How Anton’s behavior had changed over the past few months, how he seemed happier and less like a caged cat. How he was spending money that he didn’t have. How the writing was flowing suddenly. How could she explain the writing she found in his notebooks that was supposedly fiction but was obviously not? Or the pen.
No, on its own, not one of these facts was a smoking gun. But it added up to the truth, and every part of her knew it.
“Sweetie, I think we could both use a drink before we tackle this.”
“It’s not even two o’clock, Mom.”
“Well, it’s seven o’clock in Liverpool, and that’s where Grammy Ann is from, so let’s drink to her.”
She stands up. It was the same line she used when Gwen was growing up and she came home from school to see her mother already drinking. Barb comes back with two tumblers filled with a dark liquid and rattling ice cubes.
“What is this?” Gwen asks, taking the glass.
“Jack and Coke. The Jack will dull the pain, the Coke will give you a boost. Now, don’t argue. Just drink.”
They clink glasses and each takes a long sip. “Now, you may be right about Anton. And that witch of a neighbor. But you need to decide how much you are going to let that affect you going forward. You know what they say—history belongs to the victor. And by dint of still being alive, you’re the victor. He may have been the professional writer, but now it’s you who gets to write the story. However you behave, whatever you say—to your boys, to the world, to yourself, and yes, even to that awful woman—will become the truth. Take that responsibility very seriously.”
“What are you saying?” Gwen asks. “I pretend none of the bad stuff ever happened?”
“I’m saying let it die with him.”
Easy for you to say. What Barb doesn’t know is that Gwen isn’t the victor, not really.
Because that luscious woman with devouring eyes that Anton wrote about not only exists in real life but lives on the same block.
And Gwen knew her husband. How talkative he got after sex. He liked to smoke a Camel unfiltered and expound on life like the hero of a French art film.
There’s no escaping the possibility that in one of those post-coital conversations, Anton had chosen to unburden himself to Lisa, just as he tried to confess to Scott.
And that terrifies Gwen, because the chances are close to nil that the whore will keep her mouth shut.