2. Cali #2
I stand there holding the mug for a long while. It's so easy for this picture to take place in my mind. I have two essential details already.
A long, messy tangle of blond hair, recently ravished but still somehow flawlessly arranged.
A pair of pink lips. Puckered. Kiss-swollen. Luscious.
The rest of the story writes itself. A high, bright, girlish giggle. Long, thin legs. A flat tummy, stretch-mark-free. "Oh, Todd, don't stop!"
I think I might be sick.
I set the mug down where it was, carefully, like it's this anonymous woman's home I'm disturbing and not my own. Then I pivot slowly in place and look at the final bit of evidence.
I saved the bed for last on purpose. Maybe I was hoping I'd disprove this whole crackpot theory before I got there.
But no matter what kind of story you're telling, the end must come eventually.
This is the end.
Right away, I see what's wrong.
It's made.
Not just made, but beautifully made. The duvet is pulled tight and smoothed flat, no wrinkles, the corners tucked under like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket just did the thing himself. We're talking hospital corners. Folded and pressed at a forty-five-degree angle.
Todd Bradshaw does not make hospital corners.
Actually, he doesn't make the bed at all.
In two years of dating and ten years of marriage, I've made that bed every single morning.
On the rare occasions I've been away and Todd's been left to his own devices, I've come home to a tangled nest that looks like a small woodland creature died fighting in it.
There's literally not a single fraction of a scrap of an iota of a chance that Todd did this himself.
Which means that someone else did.
And the throw pillows… I get made fun of for this all the time, but there's an order to these things.
The big square linen one goes in the back, then the two smaller velvet ones in front of that, with a little karate chop so the corners pucker up right, then the little lumbar one with the embroidered lemons that my mother-in-law gave me before she got sick propped at the very front.
They're all there. But they're wrong.
The lemon pillow is at the back. The velvet ones are split, one on each side, like bookends.
The big linen one is dead center. It's not a happy accident, like Todd did his best and came up with an arrangement that could plausibly work.
This was done by someone with an eye for design, because honestly, it looks better than the way I do it myself.
I sit down on the edge of the bed before my knees do it for me. As half a dozen different emotions—rage, sorrow, bitterness, self-loathing, more that don't have names—all war for pole position in my chest, I fold in half like a lawn chair and go facedown in the pillows.
Do I cry? Do I scream? Do I take my children and run? Do I show up at Todd's office and go American Psycho on his ass, or do I hunt down the little hussy who violated my marital bed first?
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I'm just breaking down. I've been running on fumes for ten years now, and this is the point where the engine ceases to operate.
Or at least, it would be.
If something else didn't catch my attention.
It's a scent. A faint scent, but I've always had a good nose and I trust what it picks up. It's not the lemon pillow I'm face-planted on, though. Frowning and suddenly frantic, I pick that one up and toss it aside.
But when I press the closest velvet one to my face, I decide it's not that one, either.
Nor is it the other velvet throw. The big linen square is just my normal laundry detergent; nothing strange there. Those both get dropped off the side of the bed with the rest.
I lean over, pick up the sleeping pillow on Todd's side, hold it up, and breathe in.
For a second, I'm sure I'm crazy. Like the linen one, all I can detect is the fresh Rain Water scent of the Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day liquid laundry detergent I've used every day of my life.
Beneath that, it's Todd's fourteen-in-one Every Man Jack sandalwood soapiness and the lingering musky salt of his sweat.
I could pick those things out of a lineup while blindfolded. They're so beautifully boring. The normal, happy smells of my normal, happy life. I start to breathe a sigh of relief.
But then.
Then.
Underneath it, woven all the way through the fabric… there's her.
Perfume.
Floral and warm and a little powdery, with something sweet at the bottom of it, like vanilla or spun sugar. It's pretty. Truly lovely.
And it is soaked into the pillow on my husband's side of my marital bed… but it is definitely not mine.
Just like that, the picture is complete.
The laughing blonde, petite and delicate like Thumbelina, raking French-tipped nails down my husband's back as they tumble post-coitally across this pillow, in this bed, the exact same place where Todd held my hand the night before each of our children was born and told me I was the strongest person he'd ever known.
The scale wasn't broken.
The scale was the only honest thing in this entire house.
Because the woman ruining my life weighs 142 pounds. She stood barefoot on my bathroom scale at three in the morning, and somewhere in a distant server farm, a piece of software that I bought to track my own slow, stubborn, post-baby pounds saw that incoming data and decided I'd reached my goal.
Congratulations, Cali. You did it.
I wish I could cry. I want to. I keep waiting for it to come, the way it always comes at the end of sad movies, at the kids' birthdays, at the part in the wedding where the dad walks the bride down the aisle. I'm a crier. I cry at insurance commercials.
But not now. There's just this cold, clear, flat thing where the panic used to be.
Because the gremlin in my chest has finally, mercifully, shut up.
I'm not crazy. I never was. Todd has been telling me I'm crazy for months—you need a therapist, Cal, you should look into some anxiety meds, you're really losing it lately—but the whole time, the whole entire fucking time, I was right.
The question that remains is…
What am I going to do about it?