Chapter 9 – Cora
CORA
The day after the garbage disposal incident, I wake up with Pearl in my bed, which usually only happens when she has a nightmare. She’s dry, and she says she slept fine.
I didn’t. I slept too deeply. It takes me hours and several cups of coffee for my brain cells to start firing, and when they do, the mortification and panic sets in. I lost it. In front of Adrian. I kicked him. Probably left bruises. That’s evidence of assault.
What is he going to do?
I worry all morning. I can’t settle, can’t decide what to do with myself. The girls and I eat breakfast in the nursery, and I get everyone ready to go to the library, but then Pearl gets into a TV show about truck drivers in Canada, and I give up on the idea.
I straighten the toys, weed through Winnie’s clothes for onesies she’s outgrown, and watch out the window for Adrian to leave for work. He doesn’t. Eventually, I give up, collapse in my nursing chair, and watch dudes drive trucks in the snow.
By the time we have lunch, I can’t stand being stuck in this room anymore. I get the girls bundled up and take them outside to play. It’s November in Connecticut, so it’s brisk, but not unpleasant yet. The sun is bright, and the leaves are magnificent.
Pearl is giddy. She runs ahead, straight through the formal gardens, making a beeline for her playset.
It’s a doozy, built to look like a fairy tale castle with two turrets and a swinging bridge between them.
Every side has different features—a slide, a climbing wall, fireman poles, a ladder.
It’s really made for a slightly older child, but Pearl is a very cautious kid, and she never pushes the limits I set.
It would’ve blown my mind to have a playset like this all to myself.
Pearl is unfazed. It’s her normal. It doesn’t make her act spoiled, either.
She loves inviting kids we meet at story hour or the park over to play, and she’s such a generous little hostess.
Sharing makes it more fun for her. She never worries that she won’t have enough or that what she has will be taken away.
Adrian makes that possible. And me, I guess, because I chose a rich man to convince myself that I loved.
We’re at the castle less than five minutes when Pearl screeches, “Daddy!”
She’s up in a turret, pointing toward the house. I’m sitting on a wrought iron bench with a sleeping Winnie in her carrier. I twist my head. Adrian is making his way through the formal gardens toward us, wearing a brown suede jacket and jeans and carrying a cooler.
I’ve always loved his outdoorsy look. Even with the new shadows under his eyes, and the tightness in his jaw, he’s the most stunning man I’ve ever seen. A stranger would see a perfectly unbothered, movie star of a man. The fact feels like a slap.
I slept eight hours, five of them in a row, and my eyes are bloodshot, my hair is dull and flat, and my cuticles are shredded from picking.
“Mommy!” Pearl hollers. “It’s Daddy!”
My teeth clench.
Pearl hurries down from her tower with the exaggerated steps she uses to show that she is not running, even though she’s totally running.
Adrian arrives, setting the cooler down next to me on the bench, and stands like an outfielder, waiting to catch Pearl when she throws herself into his arms.
“What are you doing here, Daddy?”
Probably checking up on me.
“I brought lunch. I thought you girls might be hungry.”
“I’m starving.” She literally just ate a turkey roll-up, an apple, and a bag of goldfish before we came outside.
I get it, though. As soon as I saw him, my heart sped up, too.
He’s never home during a weekday, and he never, ever comes out to play with us.
Family time is scheduled, and we have to drive somewhere to do it.
Adrian walks over to me with Pearl on his hip. “Are you hungry, Cora?”
He’s smiling—smirking—like this is normal, like nothing happened yesterday, like we haven’t been in a cold war for days, that I didn’t see him fuck another woman before he told me that our marriage was a farce that I couldn’t possibly have been stupid enough to believe was real.
Hot anger rushes over my skin, from my thumping heart, down my arms and legs to my cold-numbed toes and fingertips.
Winnie lets out one of her indignant squeals that she does when she’s waking up. I place my hands protectively on her back. She cranes her neck to see what’s going on, one eye still stuck shut.
“We ate before we came out,” I answer because the girls are listening. It’s a slight lie. Pearl and Winnie ate. I don’t have much of a stomach lately.
“Well, I’m sure you have room for dessert, especially after playing so hard.”
“We’ve been playing so hard.” Pearl straight lies, too.
“Then it’s definitely time for dessert.”
“We’ve only been out here a few minutes,” I say, surly. Adrian and Pearl smile into each other’s faces. I feel left out and at fault and wrong-footed.
“What did you bring?” Pearl demands.
“I thought we could make s’mores. You like s’mores, right?”
“Yes!” Pearl shouts, right into his ear. He can’t help but wince. Ha. “What’s s’mores?”
“Toasted marshmallow and chocolate between two graham crackers.” Adrian turns his smile at me, a sly light in his eye.
I love toasted marshmallow. At the local orchard we visit around Halloween, they give you a marshmallow at the end of the hayride.
I make Adrian go ask for extras. I’m pretty sure he slips the teenagers in charge an obscene tip because he’s always come back with at least half a bag.
He thinks he can buy anything he wants. And why wouldn’t he? He can.
God, I was so impressed with that? And it never occurred to me that I’m a bag of extra marshmallows?
“Does that sound good?” Adrian asks Pearl.
She nods enthusiastically.
“How about you play while I make them?”
“Okay!” She squirms loose, clambering down him like a tree before he has the chance to set her on her feet.
Instantly, she’s off like a shot, scaling a turret.
When Lucian comes over, he shows her all these parkour-style moves, and she loves to practice so she can impress him.
He says he’s teaching her how to get out of a tight spot and get the drop on her targets.
I suppose the kidnapping made him as security conscious as Adrian and Logan.
Adrian turns to me. “Will you come sit with me while I start the fire?” He holds out his hand. I glare at it.
On the far side of the playset, there’s a fire pit on a stone patio overlooking the river. When we first moved in, after Pearl was born but before I got pregnant with Winnie, we used to share a bottle of wine out there in the summer sometimes while Vera watched the baby monitor.
More than a few evenings, he laid me down on his coat on the grass bank, and I’d count the stars as he fucked me. The flames from the fire would backlight his dark, brooding face, and I’d shiver, thinking I was so lucky that he was a good man because if he was a bad man, I’d ruin myself over him.
“Come on, Cora.” He gets tired of waiting and grabs my hand.
He leads me around the playset and down the gentle incline to where the fire pit patio is built into the side of the hill. Pearl’s castle towers above us. Adrian seats me in a chair facing the playset and proceeds to stack logs.
Winnie is squirming now, beginning to root. I reach behind my neck to undo the carrier and ease my arms free. Adrian stops building the fire to see what I’m doing. I expect him to glance away when he realizes that I’m going to nurse. That’s what he usually does.
I push my sweater and cami up and pop my boob out of my bra. He keeps looking. The air is cold on my achy breast, and my nipple puckers painfully tight as Winnie fusses. She doesn’t like to wait with a boob in view.
I maneuver her into the customary cradle hold. Usually, if I’m not in the nursery, I have a cover at hand, but my brain was so foggy this morning, I didn’t bring one, and I also forgot my jacket. Winnie gets to work quickly. She’s a good nurser now.
Adrian is still watching. Something clenches low in my belly.
“I brought her a bottle of your milk,” he says. “In case.”
“In case what?”
He shrugs a shoulder.
“In case what?” I repeat. I don’t understand what he meant, and I don’t like it. I don’t like any of this. He’s not this guy. He doesn’t pack picnics or hang out with his family if it’s not planned in advance with a firm cutoff.
For a second, I think he’s not going to answer. He picks up another piece of wood and considers where to place it. Then, while he’s studying the firewood, he says, “In case you didn’t want to nurse her in front of me.”
“It’s not sexual. I’m feeding her.”
“I know,” he easily agrees, which pisses me off even more.
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
“Yeah,” he agrees again.
“I don’t understand you.”
“These days, I find it’s mutual.” He has the audacity to give me a wry smile. Placing a final piece of wood, he stands and brushes his hands on his jeans. “Here,” he says, striding over as he slides off his jacket. “It’s cold.”
He places it over my shoulders and bends to touch Winnie’s cheek, tentative as always, like he’s dusting an eyelash away.
If she were a boy, would he touch her more confidently, like the “involved” fathers you see at the farmer’s market and the library?
Would he hold a boy and feed him? What would make that baby worth millions more dollars than this one?
I shrug his jacket off, letting it fall to the ground.
Adrian’s head turns, and he pauses for a second on his way back to the fire. He raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “That was petty, don’t you think?”
“I don’t want your jacket.”
“Then you could have set it on the seat next to you.”
“My hands are full.”
He sighs, shakes his head, and squats to light the fire.
“Why are you out here, anyway?” I ask. “Why aren’t you at work?”