Chapter XII. 1953 #2
“I’m sorry, love. Guess I don’t know my own strength.
” He let off the pressure, but only slightly, and her fingers throbbed as the blood rushed back in.
“I think it’s best we all got ourselves home.
Call it a night. And I think it’s best, Sharon, if you left Hawthorne Springs altogether and found several reasons to stay away. I can offer a few if you need.”
“Mary is my friend,” Sharon said, her voice clear and strong.
“‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers. What Communion hath light with darkness?’ You remember that passage, don’t you, Mary? Pastor Brighton preached on it not that long ago.”
She did not answer. Did not nod. Her own pathetic rebellion.
“Mary?” Sharon asked, and Mary heard the crack in her voice. She’d tried to stay strong but was crumbling under the pressure of what they were both going to lose. And the awareness that Mary was going to let it happen.
If it were another life, she would pick Sharon. Again and again and again. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but she would not let them fall. Would not let Robert see how her heart was breaking. She did not speak but willed Sharon to hear all she could not say.
Please understand. He would take everything. Everything.
“You should go home,” she said. Mary did not want to watch her world break apart, Sharon’s lovely face stoic even as her eyes betrayed her, but she forced herself to. It was what she deserved. Her cowardice laid bare.
Sharon clamped her mouth shut. There was nothing left to say. They’d said it all back at the tree. Not even Robert could take that from them. Mary knew she would hold those moments close until her body went back into the dirt. A single, shining moment in the dull expanse of her life.
Robert clenched her hand, he and Mary and Vera watching as Sharon made her way back to her car. She paused only once to look back at Mary, but then set her shoulders, a small smile on her mouth as she lifted her hand in farewell.
“Honestly, Mary.” Robert pulled her hand upward once more and pulled the gold band from her finger.
He turned it over in his palm and laughed.
“What a cheap piece of junk. I can’t believe you bought it.
” He reared back and threw the ring in the same direction Mary and Sharon had come; the dark swallowed it almost instantly.
Mary stifled a cry. Wherever it landed, that was where she was also buried.
She would leave that woman behind. The woman who loved Sharon.
The woman who’d finally tasted happiness but had everything to lose.
After all, she knew so much about dishonesty; it would be simple to become that other woman again.
The happy housewife. The content mother.
But how long would it be until she could not exist inside that person anymore? How long until she cut her body open to let her true self out? Until everything she’d chosen out of weakness killed her?
Robert wrapped his arm around her waist and tugged her to him.
That space where she’d learned to shrink herself to fit.
“Don’t worry, love. I’ll buy you something nicer.
You are my wife, after all. A husband should see to it that his wife has nice things.
” He turned, and she followed, her body responding to his even as she wanted to bite and scratch like some feral animal.
“Vera, I’ll give you a ride home,” he said.
Vera had not moved. It was as if some outside force struck her down. Some great, unseen, malevolent hand descended to render her motionless. A curse brought to life. But Robert’s voice startled her, and she blinked. Shivered as if some many-legged thing crept over her skin.
“That’s okay. I was out for a walk. I can get back on my own,” Vera said.
“Nonsense. Gerry would kill me if he knew I let you walk home alone in the dark like this.” He opened both the passenger and back doors.
“I couldn’t impose—”
His voice dropped into what Mary knew was a warning. “Get in the car, Vera.”
Vera scuttled forward, and both women let Robert guide them into the seats. It felt so foreign to Mary. To sit in the same seat she occupied hours earlier, the excitement and anticipation she’d felt now so foreign. A ghost from some forgotten time.
As he drove, Robert fiddled with the radio dial, but all Mary heard was static.
She was keenly aware of Vera in the backseat.
The sudden shift of her body against the leather as Robert took the turns too quickly.
The damp, earthy smell of her sweat. It made Mary wonder what she smelled like.
If she smelled like Sharon. If Robert tried to kiss her, would he taste Sharon on her mouth and tongue?
Every light was blazing when they pulled up Vera’s drive. Gerry sat on the top porch step and stood when he saw them, his arms folded as he watched the car come to a stop.
“You stay put, Mary. I’m going to have a quick word with Gerry,” Robert said. He opened the door and crossed in front of the car.
From the backseat came Vera’s harsh whisper. “I didn’t tell him. Just that you were with her. I’m so sorry, Mary.”
And then Robert opened the door, and Vera was gone.
Her vision blurred. She wanted to weep hysterically.
To scream and kick and break every window, the glass sharp beneath her palm, her blood bright under the moonlight.
There was so little relief in what Vera told her.
There’d been no real threat. Only a dim sort of doubt on Robert’s part.
Perhaps a touch of jealousy that the attention his wife should be paying him was being given to another woman.
Robert might not know the full truth about her and Sharon, but Mary had still lost so much.
They looked unnatural. Robert and Gerry.
Their faces blurred through the windshield and Mary’s screen of tears as they talked about their wives.
Their suspicions. They were not bad men.
They did not dream of the give of their wives’ flesh under their hands.
But they lived in a world of male expectations, and their wives had found aberrant paths. They required correction.
When Robert got back into the car, Mary’s face was dry.
“I talked to Mother this afternoon. She said she’s not going to be able to keep the baby anymore. It’s too much for her. I’ll call John in the morning. Let him know you’ll need to quit without two weeks’ notice. Can’t be helped. He’ll find someone else, I’m sure.”
She would be a caged animal with no teeth. No claws. Forever hungry and haunted by a memory of a life that could never belong to her.
But there was her daughter. If for nothing else, she would try to live for her.
She heard her own voice as if from some impossible depth. “Of course, darling.”
DAYS PASSED LIKE hours. Hours passed like days.
She became a blank space. A projection of wifely duty. A routine sleepwalking through childcare and homecare and church that left her fatigued and listless.
Robert tried to cheer her up. He really did.
Brought her flowers. A cashmere twinset.
Another ring to replace the one he’d thrown—the center sapphire so large she had difficulty lifting her finger when she wore it.
He came home from work on time and spent an appropriate amount of time cooing over the baby.
On Saturdays, he rose before she did and made breakfast. Eggs.
Toast. Brought her coffee in bed and told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
He would have made an excellent husband to some other woman.
At night, she dreamed of Sharon, and it was only then, in the quiet dark of their bedroom when she woke from the dreams with Robert snoring softly beside her, that she would allow herself to cry.
Every morning, Robert kissed her and the baby goodbye. She would wait exactly seventeen minutes after she heard his car leave the drive and then torture herself by sitting beside the telephone, wondering if that day would be the day she would find the courage to pick up the phone and call Sharon.
She never did. She felt that somehow Robert would find out, and she had no reason for doing it other than her own desperation.
His suspicions had been put to bed but not completely undone.
He would see how transparent she was, how he had been tricked.
But she liked the smooth weight of it in her hand.
The click it made as she settled the receiver back into its cradle.
The operator on the other end must have hated her.
When she woke to the first chilly day in October, her mouth ached as if she’d bitten her cheek in the night.
But when she craned her head before the mirror, she saw nothing but pink, spongy tissue.
She swished her mouth with antiseptic, wincing at the sting, and spat, the sink a pink spatter she rinsed away.
By the end of the day, there were two sores on her mouth and another tickling at the back of her throat.
She was not afraid. Women in Hawthorne Springs were sick from time to time. Some strange virus that came and went with varying degrees of intensity. When she was a girl, a woman had died from it—some scandal that no one would talk about but involved a tree—but there’d been nothing like that since.
And there were still mornings when she woke, warm and soft and coated in sleep, that she forgot Sharon was absent from her life, the realization slamming into her with a force that took her breath away. It was on those mornings she wished for the clean simplicity of death.
Robert called doctors suggested to him by other husbands. One by one they came out to the house or Robert drove her to their clinics and held her hand as they examined her and told her they’d not seen anything like this before, and would she like an antibiotic? Painkiller? Perhaps a sedative?
“Don’t worry. We’ll get you fixed up. Right as rain,” Robert would say after each appointment, the worry in his face more and more apparent.