15. Margot
Margot
He asks for one conversation.
Not the phone. A note, folded, left with my mother on the porch along with a bag of the nursing pads I'd texted her to buy and forgot she'd have to drive for. His handwriting, which is terrible.
I'm not asking you to make a decision today, but I am asking for a chance. For Nora. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.
A.
I put it in the drawer with the compression socks and the tea. I’m not ready to think about him just yet. And I’m not ready to work out what I need from him, I don’t even know so how can I tell him what to do?
Vanessa sent me the lab report two days ago. Probability of paternity: zero percent. Under it she forwarded Anders's message. It changes nothing about what I did.
She then sent me his public post the same afternoon.
No photograph of me. No plea for forgiveness.
Just the birthday picture, the time it was taken and the truth about where I was while he smiled in it.
Two hundred and eleven people had been allowed to congratulate him on replacing me.
He told every one of them what he had done.
It did not repair anything, but it closed a door that Becca had left hanging wide open.
Nora is now two weeks old. I'm sleeping in two-hour pieces on a mattress that still smells like the perfume I wore in high school. My body is a construction zone, but day by day it’s getting rebuilt.
Renovated, now that I’ve kicked out my tiniest tenant.
It’s not the same as it was, it never will be, but I’m slowly starting to feel like myself again.
My mother has started saying, “You don't have to decide anything,” in a way that means she thinks I should decide something.
On day sixteen I finally text him a time to come over and talk.
He sits where I tell him. The kitchen chair with its back to the window, so the light's on his face and not mine. Nora is asleep in the next room in the bassinet my mother bought and I've got the monitor on the table between us, the little green light steady.
He's lost weight. He's shaved again. He's got his hands folded on the table like a man in a waiting room.
I put my phone on the table. "There was a camera in the kitchen. I installed it after the bracelet disappeared."
He looks at the screen.
"You need to see what I saw."
I play the recording. I do not watch Becca. I watch him. I watch his face when he realizes what happened, when my hands hold Nora, when the man on the screen crosses the room and passes me. He does not look away. When his recorded voice says give me a minute, something in his changes.
The video ends. He keeps looking at the black screen.
"Don't say anything," I say. "Not sorry. Not anything. You asked to hear it. Hear it."
He nods.
I don't have the paper this time. I don't need it. I've been saying it to the ceiling at three in the morning for more than two weeks.
He sits where I tell him, at my mother's kitchen table with the window behind me and the light on his face. Nora is asleep in the next room. The monitor between us glows green.
He looks thinner. Older. I hate that I notice.
"There was a camera in the kitchen," I say. "I put it in after the bracelet disappeared."
I set my phone between us and play the recording.
I watch him instead of the screen. When Becca hits me, his face tightens. When the man in the video walks past me, all the color leaves it. He does not look away. He watches until his own voice says give me a minute and the kitchen goes quiet.
The screen turns black.
"I remembered it differently," he says.
"Better for you?"
"Yes." His eyes stay on the phone. "I remembered coming in too late to understand what was happening. I remembered trying to keep everyone safe."
"Everyone except me."
"Yes."
I expected excuses. His agreement leaves me with nowhere to put the anger I brought to the table.
"Why did you ask for this conversation?"
"Because I know what happened. I don't think I understood what it did to you."
"You want me to explain it?"
"I want to understand how I lost you while I was still coming home every night."
I look toward the doorway where Nora is sleeping.
"You didn't lose me when you missed the birth," I say. "I think I was already gone by then."
He takes that like a blow.
"When?"
"I don't know. That's what frightens me. There wasn't one day. I kept giving up small things because each one seemed too small to end a marriage over."
"The money."
"The money. My office. The highchair. Her calling you in the middle of our evenings. You telling me I was cold when I was trying not to fall apart. None of it sounded big enough by itself. So I kept telling myself to be reasonable."
"And I used that."
"Yes."
His hands close together on the table.
"I didn't know I was using you."
"You knew I would stay calm. You knew I would make room. Maybe you didn't plan it, but you counted on it."
"I did."
We sit with that.
"Do you know what hurt most?" I ask.
"The kitchen."
"No. The kitchen was when I finally believed it."
He looks up.
"What hurt most was that she got the version of you I thought I had married.
She called, and you came. She was frightened, and you believed her.
She needed something, and you found a way to give it to her.
I kept asking you to come back to me, and you treated me like the obstacle between you and being a good man. "
"Jesus, Mar."
"I needed you too." My throat closes, but I force the words through. "I did not need you to rescue me. I needed you to stand beside me. You looked at me and saw the woman who could handle it. Then you looked at her and saw someone worth handling it for."
He bends forward with his elbows on his knees. For a few seconds all I can see is the top of his head.
"You are right," he says. "I liked being needed by her."
The honesty of it cuts clean.
"Did you want her?"
"No."
"Did you miss her?"
"No."
"Then why?"
He sits back. His eyes are red.
"Because with Becca, I always knew what part to play. She had a problem. I fixed it. She cried. I could make her stop. I got to feel like the man my father never was."
"And with me?"
"With you, I had to be your husband. I had to listen when there was no quick fix. I had to admit that sometimes I was the problem." He wipes his face with both hands. "Every time you told me I was hurting you, I ran toward the place where I could still feel like a good person."
"Becca."
"Becca."
For the first time, her name sounds small. Not harmless. Just small enough to see around.
"I kept waiting for you to choose me without being forced," I say.
"And I kept thinking coming home meant I had."
"You slept beside me while I disappeared."
"I know."
"I don't think you do."
"Then tell me."
It is not a command. It is barely a voice.
"I became someone I didn't recognize. I checked bank accounts. I counted phone calls. I put a camera in my own kitchen and didn't tell my husband. I started building a case because facts were easier than admitting I was begging you to love me in a way I could feel."
"You should never have had to beg."
"But I did."
He cries then. Quietly. I let him. I am too tired to protect him from anything else.
"When I called from labor," I say, "I still believed some part of you would hear my voice and become the man who rescued me before.”
He shuts his eyes.
"I heard you," he says. "That's what I can't forgive in myself. I heard you. I knew you were scared. I just thought I had time to be everything to everyone."
"You thought I would wait."
"Yes."
"Even then."
"Even then."
The monitor hums softly between us.
"There is something else," he says.
Every muscle in my body tightens.
"The night you left, Becca called after midnight. She said Milo wouldn't settle. I went to her apartment."
I stare at him.
"After you came here?"
"After your mother told me about your face. After I found your ring. I sat on Becca's couch until two in the morning with it in my pocket."
"Why would you tell me that now?"
"Because if I ask for another chance while hiding the worst thing, I'm still doing the same thing to you."
I get up so fast the chair scrapes. At the sink I grip the counter and breathe through the sick, hollow feeling opening inside me.
"You knew why I left," I say.
"Yes."
"And you did it again before the night was over."
"Yes." His voice breaks. "I kept choosing the person whose pain did not accuse me."
I turn around. He has not moved. There is nothing defensive left in his face.
"I loved you," he says. "I love you now. But I made my love useless to you. I made you lonely, then blamed you for not being generous about it. I let another woman take up the space where our marriage was supposed to be, because she made me feel necessary and you made me face myself."
"That is not an apology."
"No. It's the truth I should have found before I came here.
" He draws a shaking breath. "I am sorry I made you compete for a husband you already had.
I am sorry you called me from labor and heard me hesitate.
I am sorry our daughter entered the world while you were looking at a door I should have been standing in.
I am sorry I taught you that loving me meant surviving me. "
My eyes burn. I look away.
"I don't know if I can come back from this."
"I know."
"And I don't want you sitting on my mother's porch until I feel guilty enough to try."
"Then I won't ask you to try."
"You'll see Nora here. My mother will be home."
"Thank you."
"That isn't forgiveness."
"I know."
He stands. At the doorway he stops, but he does not turn around.
"For what it's worth," he says, "you were never hard to love. You were only easy to take for granted. That is uglier, and it is mine."
Then he leaves.
I wait until his truck pulls away before I go to Nora. I lift her from the bassinet and hold her against the ache in my chest, and for the first time since the hospital, I cry for the marriage instead of the things that happened to it.