18. Flora
— ? —
Flora
I wake to pale morning light and the realization that I slept, really slept, for the first time since this nightmare started.
Aster is already awake, watching me with an expression I can’t quite read.
“Morning,” he says quietly.
“Morning.” I stretch, pleasantly sore in ways that remind me exactly what we did last night. Twice.
The cabin looks different in daylight. Smaller, mostly.
There’s a stack of lumber offcuts by the door and a coffee mug on the windowsill with a ring in the bottom of it and three shirts hanging off the back of the chair, and it’s the first time in a year I’ve seen the actual evidence of how my husband lives when nobody is managing him.
He makes his bed. I didn’t know that. Somebody has been making that bed every morning in a cabin nobody visits. “What time is it?”
“Early still.” He hesitates, and I watch him decide to say it. “Your phone was going off last night. I looked at it. I didn’t want to wake you.”
I sit up, suddenly alert. “What did it say?”
He hands me the phone. I scroll through the messages, and each one is worse than the last.
“The interview airs tonight,” I say.
“I know.”
“And you didn’t wake me.”
“You needed to sleep.” His voice is careful. “You’ve barely closed your eyes since you got here.”
I want to be angry about it. I want to snap at him for making a decision without me, for deciding what I could handle and when, because that is the exact shape of everything that went wrong between us and he did it again while I was lying on his chest.
But he told me the second I opened my eyes. He didn’t sit on it for four days and hope the moment would improve. He looked at my phone and made a bad call and then he handed it to me before I’d even asked, and I don’t know what to do with a man who is failing in a smaller way than he used to.
“Don’t do it again,” I say.
“I won’t.”
“I mean it, Aster. Even if it’s four in the morning. Even if it’s terrible. I’d rather be awake and know.”
“I won’t do it again.”
I look at him for a second longer, and then I let it go, which surprises me as much as it seems to surprise him.
“Tonight, then,” I say. “The whole thing, start to finish, no pausing.” I look at him. “You’re going to want to talk over it. Don’t. I need to see what a stranger sees when they watch it.”
“Understood.”
The day is unbearable. That’s the only word for it.
There’s nothing to do but wait for eight o’clock, so we do chores.
I weed a bed that doesn’t need weeding. Aster puts three more hours into the shed and gets the door frame up, and every so often I look out the window and see him standing there with his hands on his hips staring at it, not working, just standing, which means he’s doing the same thing I’m doing.
Mom makes a roast at four in the afternoon for no reason at all, which is her version of a fire drill. She sets the table properly. She puts out the good napkins. Nobody says out loud that we’re carbo-loading before a war and all three of us know it.
We watch it that night on my phone, propped against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table, the picture freezing every few minutes while the one bar of service decides whether it wants to cooperate, with cups of tea that go cold while Cecilia Winsley lies her way through thirty minutes of primetime television.
She looks perfect. Soft lighting, tasteful makeup, wearing white like some sort of ironic sacrifice, dabbing at tears that never quite fall with a tissue clutched in her perfectly manicured hand.
“I never wanted this,” she says, her voice trembling beautifully. “I never wanted to be in the middle of somebody’s marriage.”
The interviewer leans forward with practiced sympathy. “Tell me what happened.”
“Aster told me he was separated.” Cecilia’s lip quivers. “He said his marriage was over, that they were just waiting for the right time to announce it publicly. I believed him.”
Beside me, Aster’s hands close into fists on the table.
“I should have known better.” Cecilia continues her performance, her hand drifting up to her earring. “I should have walked away the first time he kissed me.”
“She touches her ear when she lies,” Mom observes from the corner where she’s knitting. “Watch her. Every time she says something false, that hand goes to the earring.”
She’s right, and once you’ve seen it you can’t stop seeing it.
Ear, ear, ear. She does it four times in the first ten minutes and every single one lands on a sentence about my husband.
I watch more carefully after that, and the tell is unmistakable, and it makes the whole thing worse rather than better, because now I can see exactly how much of it she knows isn’t true.
Here’s what nobody tells you about watching somebody lie about your own life on television.
It isn’t the lies. The lies are almost restful, because they’re so far from what happened that they slide off.
It’s the true parts. She says his marriage was in trouble and that’s true.
She says he was away constantly and that’s true.
She says everybody could see it and that’s the one that gets in, because everybody could, and I told him, and he called me dramatic twice.
She’s built the whole thing on a foundation of things I already believed at three in the morning with a coffee I didn’t drink. That’s what makes her good at this. She didn’t invent a story. She took the story that was already true and put herself in the middle of it.
“But I believed we had something real.” Cecilia dabs at her eyes. “And when the photo leaked, he called me in a panic. He said we had to deny everything. That his wife was threatening to take him for everything he had.”
“That’s a lie,” Aster says flatly. “She called me exactly once, and I fired her.”
“Shh.”
“I know I’m a terrible person for being involved with somebody like this,” Cecilia says near the end, her voice cracking artfully. “But I would never intentionally break apart a marriage. Had I known he was lying, I would have told his wife myself.”
The camera zooms in on her perfect tearstained face.
“What would you say to Aster if he were watching right now?”
Cecilia looks directly into the lens. “I’d say that I forgive him. For leading me on. For making me believe in something that wasn’t real.” She pauses for exactly as long as she needs to. “And I’d tell Flora that I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve any of this. I hope you can find some peace.”
The interview ends and the autoplay tries to serve up a segment about a cooking competition, and I turn the phone face down before I throw the whole thing across the room.
For about ten seconds nobody in the kitchen says anything at all. The phone buzzes once against the wood. Out in the yard one of the chickens is going on about something.
“That manipulative, lying.” I can’t finish the sentence.
“Flora.”
“She just went on national television and told ten million people that you begged her to lie for you. That I was threatening you. That you told her our marriage was over.” I’m on my feet and I don’t remember standing. “And I have to sit in my mother’s kitchen and watch it on a phone.”
“I know.”
“I want to go back.” I turn to face him. “I want to go to LA and walk into whatever room she’s standing in and I want her to look at me while I’m in it. I’m done being the wife who’s somewhere else.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say okay like you’re managing me.”
“I’m not managing you.” He stands too. “I’m agreeing with you. But before we go anywhere, I need to say something, and I need to say it here, in this kitchen, and not on a plane or in a car or in front of anybody.”
Mom’s needles have stopped. She doesn’t leave the room, and I notice that, and so does he, and he goes on anyway.
“I’m not going to say I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve said it so many times it doesn’t mean anything, and you’ve told me that, and you were right.” He’s not looking at the floor. He’s looking at me. “So I’m going to say what I did instead, and you can tell me if I’ve got it wrong.”
“Aster.”
“I left you alone at a restaurant for two hours on our anniversary, and when you told me what that felt like, I called you dramatic. I ordered your dinner without asking what you wanted. I told you about the tour in the same breath, like it was good news.” His voice is steady and it costs him.
“I left your birthday for a session that could have waited until Friday. I knew that in the car. And she was in the booth that night, and she told me to wish you happy birthday from her, and I never passed it on because I didn’t want to say her name in our kitchen. ”
I have my hand over my mouth.
“There was a dog in our house for three weeks and I couldn’t have told you his name.
You handed him off and cried in your car and I never asked how it went, and you never told me, because you’d stopped expecting me to ask.
” He takes a breath. “You wore red to our anniversary. I know what I said about you in red, once, years ago, and I didn’t notice you were wearing it.
You picked every single thing in that house and I never once said thank you for a room.
There are seven rooms in it you’ve never used, and I know that now, because I walked through them the day you left, and I understood for the first time that you’d been living in a hotel. ”
“Stop.”
“I’m nearly done.” He doesn’t stop. “You warned me about her, from three thousand miles away, and I laughed at you. I said I liked having a jealous wife. And then she kissed me in a hallway and I called you that night and you asked me if something was wrong and I said I was tired. I let you sit in that house for four days thinking the worst thing that had happened was a red carpet. And I added a week to the tour without asking you, over a vacation you’d already booked, because I told myself I’d move it and you’d understand, because you always understand.
” He stops. “That’s what I did. Not the kiss.
The kiss was somebody else. All of that was me. ”
The kitchen is completely silent, and I’m crying, properly, the way I cried on the marble floor with the trash bags, and I don’t try to hide it from either of them.
“I’m not asking for anything,” he says quietly. “I don’t think I get to. I wanted you to hear the list, so you’d know I know what’s on it.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. When I can, I wipe my face with both hands and look at him.
“You got it right,” I say. “All of it.”
He nods.
“That doesn’t fix it.”
“I know.”
“I’m still going to LA.”
“I know that too. I’m coming with you.”
Mom picks the needles back up. “She’s frightened,” she says.
Both of us turn to look at her.
“Cecilia. On that screen.” She nods at the phone. “People who are winning don’t book half an hour of primetime to explain themselves. She did that because something isn’t going the way she planned it.” She glances up. “Whatever else she is, she isn’t enjoying this.”
I find that I don’t care whether Cecilia is enjoying herself, and I’m not sorry about not caring.
My phone buzzes against the wood. Mara.
She’s confirmed for the LA premiere party Friday. Every camera in town will be pointed at that door to see if you show up.
I turn the phone so Aster can read it.
“Friday,” I say.
“You’re sure about this?” he asks. “Once you walk into that room, you don’t get to be a private person again. Not about this. People you’ve never met will have opinions about your marriage at dinner parties in twenty years.”
“I know.”
“You’ve spent three years staying out of it on purpose.”
“I know that too.” I look at him. “And it didn’t protect me, did it. I stayed out of it and I still ended up in an article being described as a former waitress with no career of her own. I did it their way for three years and it got me that. So now I’ll do it mine.”
He nods slowly. Then the corner of his mouth goes up. “Okay then.”
Mom sets the knitting down. “When do you leave?”
I grab my bag off the counter. “Pack your bags, rockstar. We’re going home.”