10. Bill
CHAPTER 10
Bill
When Bill wakes up on the fifth of July, Margaret is still dead. The woman from Desert Sage who’d called to talk to him had told him in no uncertain terms that his first wife had died. She had no pulse. There was no life left in her.
That part of Bill’s history had been erased. Margaret is gone, and with her their tiny wedding in a chapel in the desert.
With her, the fumbling, excited, nervous lovemaking of two kids in the back of a car.
With her, the baby girl who had never had a chance to take her first breath.
With her, the emotional strain of caring for a mentally ill ex-wife halfway across the country. Gone is the stress that Margaret’s sheer existence put on his marriage with Jo. Bill is torn between feeling a guilty sense of relief and feeling extreme sadness.
“Hey,” Jo says, carefully setting a mug of coffee on the nightstand next to Bill as he rolls over to look at her. His lovely second wife; the mother of his children. “Good morning. Did you sleep? I was worried you didn’t.” She strokes his bare arm with her hand as she looks at him worriedly.
Bill clears his throat. In fact, he did not sleep. He tossed and turned and dreamed of Margaret’s face on prom night, and, repeatedly, of the haunted look in her eyes when he’d flown out to see her in Arizona last year. “I slept,” he says hoarsely, knowing that Jo won’t believe him.
She lifts the mug of coffee as he sits up in bed, handing it to him once he’s leaning against the headboard with a pillow behind him. He takes it and blows on the hot liquid before sipping it.
Talking to Jo about this is hard. Her sympathy for the loss of his first wife is muddied by her nearly tangible relief that Margaret is out of their lives. It sounds callous to think of his wife that way, but he knows Jo, and furthermore, he understands her feelings. How would Bill feel if Jo had been married before she’d become his wife? If she had a whole life and a whole other love story in her past? He isn’t sure he could handle it even half as gracefully as she has.
“What do you need to do next?” Jo asks gently, swinging her legs up so that she’s sitting next to him in bed, her legs pressed up against his, both of their backs against the headboard. It’s early, and the children are still sleeping. They’d been confused the night before by the abrupt end to the party, the disappearance of their playmates, and the way their father had behaved. Wisely, Jo told them simply that Daddy had lost someone important from his past and that they needed to give him space. Bill knows that Jo has always been keen on telling them about Margaret—she believes that their history is also the children’s history, though Bill has never entirely agreed about that—so he needs to decide how much he wants to share with his kids.
“Well,” Bill says with a sigh, “I think I need more information. I need to call back and speak with May Ogilvy.”
Jo nods slightly. May Ogilvy is the strong but grandmotherly woman in charge of running Desert Sage, where Margaret has been in full-time care for years.
“Did they tell you how it happened?” Jo probes gently. The night before, when the call had come in, the person on the phone had informed Jo of Margaret’s death, thinking that they were simply speaking to an adult family member of the deceased. The person clearly had not been privy to the complicated relationship and feelings between Bill’s first and second wives.
Bill’s eyes glass over as he stares at the way his feet tent the sheets at the foot of the bed. Unbidden, the image of Margaret’s still body lying beneath a sheet comes to mind. He blinks to make it go away, turning his head to look at Jo.
“She stole a bedsheet off a cart as it passed by and hid it beneath her mattress. They think she ripped it by hand and tied it into a—“ Bill’s throat closes and he stops talking for a moment, swallowing hard around the lump that’s forming there. “A noose,” he finishes. “They think she made a noose and tied it to a doorknob, then used it to choke herself until she passed out. No one found her until they came through for bed check, and by then it was too late.”
Jo laces her fingers through Bill’s and holds his hand. Her fingers are cold, and he can feel her shiver next to him as he delivers the details.
“God, Bill…” Jo moves her body just a bit closer to his, and the warmth of her skin beneath her thin nightgown is a juxtaposition to the temperature of Margaret’s skin as she lies in a morgue somewhere, waiting to be claimed by Bill.
The thought of this makes Bill pass his coffee to Jo hurriedly, sloshing it onto the white bedsheets by accident as she takes the mug with a surprised “Oh!”
Bill rockets out of the bed and rushes to the bathroom, dropping to his knees in front of the toilet just in time. The heaving and retching empties his stomach completely, and he breaks out in a cold sweat. His mouth tastes like acid and burned coffee.
Once again, Jo is there. She puts a reassuring hand on his shoulder and then goes to the sink, running a clean washcloth beneath the cold tap and then wringing it out so that she can place it on the back of Bill’s neck.
“Shh,” Jo says, guiding him back to the bed. “Just get back under the cool sheet, honey.” She tucks him in the way she might do for one of the kids in this situation, and Bill lets her. Without a word, Jo closes the curtains tightly, smooths the sheets over Bill’s body, and leaves with a quiet click of the door.
In the semi-darkness, Bill’s mind takes a trip back in time. He and Margaret had only been married a short time when she’d gotten pregnant, and the very thought of a little human in his wife’s stomach had both terrified him and filled him with joy—much like every other man on the planet, he would imagine. He’d stared at her in wonder, trying to see the ways she looked different, but at first he could find none. Her moods seemed not to swing as wildly, which he loved, but she looked the same. And then, one day, her eyes had shone just a bit differently, and her skin had seemed luminescent. Slowly, her stomach began to swell in a way that was only noticeable to him when he saw her stepping from the bath naked, or as she lay next to him in bed, with his large hand resting on her soft belly.
“Do you think I’ll be a good mother?” Margaret asked one night as they curled against one another in the darkness. “Do you think I can do this?”
Bill couldn’t lie: he’d had misgivings. Margaret’s moods were ever-changing and not stable under the best of circumstances. But this pregnancy seemed to have calmed her in ways he hadn’t anticipated, and he was beginning to think that perhaps she could do it. Maybe she could be a good mother, and with a little luck, somehow the baby or the pregnancy might change her internally, easing over her ragged edges.
“I think you’ll be a wonderful mother,” Bill said honestly. “I think this baby is going to love you, and you’re going to love him, and it will all be perfect.”
The words had seemed like the right ones as they’d crossed his lips: perfect. Perfect baby. Perfect mother. A perfect life. But Margaret sat up in the darkness, enraged.
“Nothing is perfect, Bill,” she said, pulling her body away from his. “Nothing.”
“Okay,” he said soothingly, reaching for her and finding her smooth skin. He ran a hand over her hip and pulled her gently until she was close by and stretched out next to him again. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “And I know nothing is perfect, but to me, it will be. I’ll have my wife, and our beautiful red-headed child,” he teased, tugging at her long, red hair gently. “And I’ll be so happy.”
Margaret breathed in and out, her body relaxing slowly and melting into his once again. Finally, after several minutes of silence, her voice split the darkness. “Bill?”
“Mmhmm?” he said, his mind elsewhere.
“If anything goes wrong with this baby, I’ll kill myself.”
His heart leaped in terror in the dark. Bill turned his head to face Margaret. It wasn’t the first time she’d threatened to kill herself, but the other times had been over stupid things: girls she’d thought were interested in Bill; fears she had about the way people looked at her. He’d never truly believed that she would, but in her voice now he heard a steely resolve and he believed her—if anything went wrong with this baby, Margaret would kill herself.
Rather than debate it with her, he put one arm over her and rolled so that his naked body was pressed up against hers beneath the sheets. “Nothing will go wrong,” he said, putting his lips to her neck and kissing her there. “Nothing can go wrong.”
Famous last words , Bill thinks to himself now. Because things had gone wrong; things had gone very wrong. At six months of pregnancy, Margaret’s body had stopped nurturing the baby they’d both wanted so badly, and she’d given birth to a little girl they’d named Violet. Margaret was catatonic, and he’d buried Violet alone because she wouldn’t get out of bed. Or maybe it was that she couldn’t get out of bed; the distinction had been lost on Bill at that point, as he was living in a hell of his own. Margaret had never really come out of it, and after a year or so and two vague suicide attempts, Bill had decided—along with Margaret’s parents—that she needed more help than they could give.
Out in the kitchen, the children are going about their breakfast routine in relative peace and quiet, but Bill is restless. He gets up, showers, dresses, and goes out to the front room, where he sits on the couch quietly. Jo sees him and brings him a fresh cup of coffee. She’s still in her robe over a nightgown, which is uncharacteristic for Jo at this hour.
“Sit with me?” Bill says, patting the couch next to him. Jo sits. “Kids?” Bill calls. Jimmy, Nancy, and Kate come into the room hesitantly. Kate has a smear of strawberry jam on one cheek. “I’ve got something I’d like to tell you.”
Next to him, Jo’s body stiffens. He can tell she’s on alert, but ready. The children sit on the shaggy throw rug in front of the couch. Nancy puts her elbows on the coffee table and rests her chin in her hands. She looks curious and a little afraid. None of the kids have ever seen their father in the state they’d seen him in the night before, because whenever he has one of the episodes that have plagued him since returning from Korea, he makes sure to hide himself in a quiet, safe place until it passes. The storm of the news about Margaret had been impossible to keep caged, and they’d heard him rasping as he cried at the kitchen table. They’d seen Jo help him back to the bedroom and close the door tightly behind him. For once, they’d gotten ready for bed with very little oversight from Jo, and none of them had complained about being put to bed without a story or an extra hug.
“Your mom and I have been married for thirteen years now,” Bill begins, “but before I met her?—“
“At the dentist’s office!” Kate interrupts gleefully, glad to be able to interject some bit of knowledge.
“Yes, at the dentist’s office,” Bill confirms. “Before that, I was married to another woman.” He stops, watching the kids’ faces. They look intrigued, but not shell-shocked by the news. “I was married to the girl I fell in love with in high school. Her name was Margaret.” Bill puts an arm around Jo and pulls her closer, not because he needs to feel her there, but more because he knows she needs it.
Over the next half hour, Bill tells them as much as he thinks they need to know, including the baby girl who hadn’t lived, and then he ends with a cleaned-up version of the way Margaret had chosen to end her own life. It’s a lot for three young children to process, but for the first time in their lives, Bill can see that the things that affect him will also be things that feature largely in their own lives. Parents in crisis can inadvertently thrust their children into crisis, and Bill doesn’t want that for them. As he’d lain awake for parts of the night, he’d realized that by being more open and honest with them, Bill can essentially ensure that they’ll be less confused about who they are and where they come from. It’s hard to be open and to share these personal stories, but in the end, he wants his children to know where they come from. He wants them to understand their parents so that someday, God willing, they can be better parents themselves.
“Are there any questions I can answer for you?” Bill asks. This is hard for him; he wasn’t raised in a family where the kids were invited to ask questions or to understand grown-up issues, but he can feel Jo’s approval, and he senses it in the way she’s turned herself so that she’s leaning into him.
Kate raises a hand like she’s at school. Her eyes are wide.
“Yes, Katie-bug?” Bill says tiredly, trying not to sound as exhausted as he feels.
“Can I give you a hug, Daddy?”
That’s all it takes for Bill to break. Tears flood his eyes and stream down his cheeks as he nods, one hand over his eyes to shield them. His baby girl gets up and comes to him, wrapping her arms around his neck and whispering in his ear: “I’m sorry about the baby, Daddy. And I’m sorry about Margaret. You loved her.”
Bill can’t say anything, but fortunately he doesn’t need to. He just sits there and lets his wife and children hug him, and somehow they get through the day just like that—together.