10. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
I sign the papers on a Tuesday.
It seems important, somehow, that it’s a Tuesday. An ordinary day, a nothing day, a day that carries no special weight. I want the end of my marriage to happen on a day that doesn’t mean anything, so that every anniversary of its ending is just another Tuesday.
The attorney’s office is on the mainland. I chose them specifically because they have no connection to the Deans, no Boston ties, no reason to tip anyone off.
I sign everything they put in front of me. The attorney warns me about contesting, about dragging things out, about the complications of leaving money on the table. I tell her I don’t want his money. I want out.
The office is all mahogany and framed diplomas and a view of a parking lot, and the paralegal brings me water I don’t drink, and the whole thing takes less time than a haircut. Six years, signed and notarized before lunch.
In the elevator afterward, a woman compliments my coat.
I thank her. The doors open on the ground floor and the world is still running - meters being fed, a dog tied outside the deli, ordinary Tuesday commerce - and I stand on the sidewalk with my copy of the paperwork in a manila envelope and wait to feel the building fall on me.
It doesn’t. That’s the strangest part. The building stays up. I walk to the ferry under my own power, carrying the end of my marriage in an envelope lighter than a paperback.
She looks at me like I’m either very brave or very stupid.
I’m probably both.
***
By Saturday, he’s on the island.
The silver Mercedes appears at the end of my lane at six in the morning, completely wrong for the island’s dirt roads. This time, he gets out.
He looks terrible. Not in a dramatic, movie-star way - Zachary Dean could never look actually bad, his bone structure won’t allow it - but in a human way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen. Unshaven. Rumpled. Wearing jeans and a sweater instead of his usual armor.
He walks up the lane slowly, like he’s giving me time to stop him.
I don’t stop him.
I step onto the porch with my coffee and wait.
He stops at the bottom of the steps. Ten feet away. Close enough to talk, far enough that I don’t have to touch him.
“Juliette.”
“You got the papers.”
“Did you read them?”
“Every page.”
“And?”
“Your attorney spells my name right and describes our marriage as irretrievably broken.” He says the words carefully, like they’re in a foreign language he’s still learning. “It’s the most honest paperwork my family has ever received.”
“I got the papers.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “I’m not here to fight them.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I don’t know.” He looks up at me, and his eyes are red-rimmed. “I needed to be where you are.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
“That’s also not an answer.”
A ghost of a smile crosses his face. “I’ve forgotten how to talk to you. I used to be good at it. Remember? In the library. I was charming.”
“You were adequate.”
“I was devastating and you know it.”
“You were a stranger who followed me into the stacks and wouldn’t stop talking about Hemingway.”
“And you kissed me anyway.”
“I was young and easily impressed.”
“You were the most incredible person I’d ever met.” His voice drops. “You still are.”
I take a sip of my coffee, buying time. The banter is easy - too easy - and I need to remember why I’m standing on this porch instead of in our bedroom in Boston.
“You can’t charm your way out of this.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“You’re absolutely trying to. You’ve got your sad eyes and your rumpled sweater and your hands in your pockets, and you think if you just stand there looking devastated long enough, I’ll feel sorry for you.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not working.”
“It’s not.”
He nods, accepting it. “Okay. I’ll go.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?” He takes a step back, away from the porch, away from me. “You want a divorce. I got the message. I’m not here to argue about it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I spent six years not being where you needed me to be, and I don’t know how to stop now that it’s too late.”
The words land harder than they should.
“That’s not romantic,” I say. “That’s pathetic.”
“I know.”
“Showing up at my mother’s cottage to mope on my lawn doesn’t undo anything.”
“I know that too.”
“So go home. Sign the papers. Let me move on with my life.”
“I will.” He’s at the edge of the garden now, almost to the lane. “I’ll sign them. I’ll give you whatever you want. But I’m going to come back tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Not to convince you. Not to change your mind. Just to be here.”
“Why?”
“Because you spent six years leaving me notes every morning and I never once told you I was keeping them.” His voice cracks. “So now I’m leaving you something. Even if all it is is me, standing at the bottom of your steps, letting you tell me to leave.”
There’s no good answer to that, so I don’t give him one.
He turns and walks down the lane, and I watch him go, and I tell myself this is what I wanted.
***
He comes back the next morning.
Same time. Same terrible appearance. Same slow walk up the lane.
This time I’m ready before he reaches the steps.
I come down them, which surprises him - he actually stops walking - and I hand him a travel cup of coffee from my mother’s percolator.
He looks at it like I’ve handed him a live grenade.
“What’s this?”
“Coffee.”
“You made me-”
“Look at it, Zachary.”
He looks. Plain lid. Plain cup. No foam, because the percolator doesn’t do foam. No star, because there is no star. He turns it slightly in his hand, the way I’ve watched him turn a cup ten thousand mornings without ever once looking at it, and I watch six years land on his face in real time.
“There’s nothing on it,” he says quietly.
“No.”
“And nothing under it.”
“No.”
He holds the cup like it weighs what it actually weighs.
“This is what it tasted like,” I say. “Every morning. For you. Now we’ve both had one.”
I go back up the steps and inside, and I don’t watch him drink it, and through the kitchen window I see him stand at the bottom of my steps for a long time with a blank cup of coffee in his hand, and then he raises it slightly - toward the house, toward me, a toast to the fairest sentence anyone has passed on him yet - and drinks it to the bottom.
“Go home, Zachary.”
“Okay.”
He goes.
***
The next morning, the lane is empty.
Six o’clock. Six-thirty. No headlights, no Mercedes, no man at the bottom of my steps composing himself for another day of being told to leave.
Seven. Nothing.
I drink my coffee on the porch anyway, because it’s my porch and my routine and it has nothing to do with him, and I check the bend in the lane about as often as the tide checks the shore.
He appears at half past seven. On foot. Soaked to the knees, walking like a man who has recently lost an argument with geography.
“Your car-”
“Ferry’s down. Engine trouble.” He takes up his post at the bottom of the steps, dripping. “I got a ride to the island road and walked the rest.”
“That’s four miles.”
“That’s four miles,” he agrees, and says nothing else about it, and stands there with his ruined shoes and his terrible schedule of hope, and I go inside before my face can commit to anything.
I do not bring him a towel.
I stand behind the door holding the towel I did not bring him for a long time.
That night I wake at two and his headlights are still there.
Not headlights - the parking lights, dim amber at the end of the lane, the shape of the Mercedes behind them like something washed ashore. He is sleeping in the car. The man owns four properties on two coasts and he is sleeping in a sedan at the end of a dirt lane in October.
I am down the porch steps before I decide to be. Robe. Boots. No plan.
I bang on the window with the flat of my hand. He comes awake the way rich men do, apologizing to no one, hand flying to a phone that isn’t ringing. The window hums down.
“Are you insane?” It comes out at a volume I haven’t used since the gala. “It’s forty degrees. You’re sleeping in a car at the end of my lane like a repossession. What is wrong with you?”
“Several things-”
“You don’t get to be funny.” My breath is fogging.
His isn’t, which is how I notice the heater isn’t on.
“You had a house. You had a wife in it. You had six years of me warm and stupid and folding your ridiculous pocket squares, and you filed me under manageable, and now you want to freeze on my property so I can feel something about it? Is that the plan? Am I supposed to come out here and feel things?”
“No.” He says it quietly. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”
“Well, I’m not. I don’t sleep. You want to know why I don’t sleep-”
And that’s when I see his hands.
They’re on the wheel, ten and two, gripping. Shaking. Not cold-shaking. The other kind. He sees me see, and takes them off the wheel, and puts them in his lap like a man putting away evidence.
The yelling goes out of me all at once, like a tide.
“Zachary.”
“Don’t.” His voice is even. His hands aren’t. “You were doing so well. Finish the sentence. I earned the whole sentence.”
I lean down instead. I don’t decide that either. His face is right there, close and wrecked and familiar, and the cold has made honest people of us both, and for one long breath the only thing in the world is the two inches between our mouths.
His eyes drop to my lips. Mine drop to his.
I straighten up.
“Go to the bed and breakfast,” I say. “If you freeze on my lane, the island will put me in black at your funeral, and I have done enough funerals this year.”
I walk back up the lane. I don’t look back. I get into my mother’s bed with my boots still on and lie there until dawn hating the two inches I didn’t cross - which is not the same as being glad about them, no matter what I tell the ceiling.
***
The next morning, I’m ready for him.