8. Wilson #2
I sat in that car staring at my phone, her words still ringing in my ears. I need my husband. I need you to actually be here.
And I told myself she said she was fine. That she handled it. That she didn’t ask me to come.
So I didn’t go.
I pour another scotch now and leave it sitting there untouched. It takes me a while to write the next line.
Year five. The appointment.
The waiting room had soft colors and gentle music, and I sat beside her answering emails.
“Wilson.” Her hand landed on my arm. “Can you put that away? Please?”
“One sec.” I kept typing. “Isaac needs me to…”
“Please.” Her voice caught. “Just for this. Just this one appointment.”
I pocketed the phone and took her hand. “Sorry. I’m here. I’m right here.”
They called her name. She changed into the paper gown and sat on the table with her legs dangling off the edge. I watched her grip the paper so hard it tore under her fingers.
My phone went off in my pocket. Then again. Then again. Isaac’s name buzzing through the fabric like it was the most important thing in the world.
“I’ll be right back.” I was already standing up. “Two minutes, I swear.”
“Wilson, please don’t…”
“Two minutes.”
I paced that hallway talking Isaac through some crisis I can’t even remember now. It took longer than two minutes. Of course it did. And when I came back in, the tech was already helping Izzy sit up.
“What did I miss?” I crossed to her and grabbed her hand. “Can we do it again? I want to see everything.”
The tech glanced at Izzy. Izzy stared at the wall.
“Of course.” The tech reached for the gel. “Let’s start over.”
Here’s what I remember about the next twenty minutes.
I remember the word scarring. I remember nodding like I understood what that meant. I remember asking questions that probably sounded smart.
Here’s what I don’t remember.
Anything else. I could repeat Isaac’s entire phone call word for word.
But whatever the doctor said about my wife’s body, about our chances, about what this meant for our future?
Gone. All of it.
I held her hand and made the right faces and half of my brain was still out in that hallway.
She stared out the window the whole drive home. I turned on the radio because I didn’t know what else to do.
My hand is shaking too hard to write now. The pen clatters onto the desk and I reach for the scotch instead.
The list keeps going even without the pen.
Helena’s birthday dinner, when I showed up at dessert and her mother looked at me across the table and didn’t say a word while Izzy smiled and cut the cake like everything was fine.
The Vermont weekend I canceled two hours before we were supposed to leave. Her bags were already in the car.
Her friend’s wedding in Boston, where she danced with the groom’s father because her own husband was in the parking lot on a call that could have waited.
She asked me twice to see a counselor with her. Twice. And both times I said we’d do it after the next big push. There was always a next big push.
My whole marriage, filed under later.
The pen has rolled off the desk somewhere. I don’t bother picking it up.
The list can tell me what I did. It can’t tell me who I was before I started doing it.
So somewhere in the smallest hours of the night, I get up and go looking for different proof. Proof that there was a version of me once who actually deserved the woman he married.
I dig through the hall closet. Old files from our first apartment. Photo albums Izzy made back when she still made them.
Cards I saved and never looked at again.
Happy first anniversary, my love. Thank you for a year of sandwiches on the floor and slow dances in the kitchen. Here’s to a thousand more. Your Izzy
My throat closes around nothing. I set the card down gently and keep digging.
At the bottom of a box marked WEDDING, under receipts and the seating chart, I find a DVD in a plain white sleeve. Her handwriting on the label.
Wilson & Izzy, October 4th, The Rooftop
Our wedding video. The reception our friends filmed, because a videographer cost money we didn’t have.
I try to remember the last time I watched it. The answer comes back empty.
She wanted us to watch it together on our first anniversary. I said yes, then a meeting happened, and she never asked again.
I carry it to the living room and hook up the old player with scotch-clumsy hands. The TV flickers. The disc spins.
Static, then music, then the rooftop.
String lights sagging between poles.
Chairs borrowed from four different apartments.
The folding table with the fake fern, where our friend Theo stands in a bathrobe over his suit, marrying us all over again for the crowd because City Hall got the paperwork and the rooftop got the party.
And there’s Izzy.
Twenty-four years old in white cotton with the straps she kept fixing, hair loose and curling in the October sun, laughing so hard at Theo’s fake sermon that she has to hold on to my arm.
I sink onto the couch. My glass sits empty and I leave it that way.
The camera swings to me.
There I am, skinny as hell in a suit I borrowed from my roommate, hair way too long because I couldn’t afford a haircut. Grinning at my bride like I’d won the lottery while Theo stumbled through the ceremony he’d practiced maybe twice.
Then the toasts.
Someone telling the story about our terrible apartment and the water stain shaped like Florida.
Everyone laughing.
Plastic cups of grocery store champagne catching the string lights we’d hung that morning.
And then me. Standing up with my cup raised, going suddenly serious while the rooftop got quiet around us.
“I don’t have anything to give her yet.” My voice on the tape is younger and rougher. “No money, no plan that makes sense. So I’m giving her this instead, in front of witnesses. Izzy, you will always come first. Before the work. Before whatever I end up building. Always.”
On the screen, Izzy presses her hand to her chest. Someone whistles.
“And I mean it enough to say the rest.” Young Wilson doesn’t smile.
“I’ve watched men start out meaning this and end up strangers to their own wives.
So if I ever make you feel like you come second to the company, leave me.
All of you, hold her to it. Because the man who would do that to her doesn’t deserve her, and I never want to become him. ”
“You’re being dramatic!” Izzy calls out to the room, bright and wet.
“I’m not.” The Wilson on the screen looks straight at her over the raised cup. “I’ll never give you a reason anyway.”
The rooftop cheers.
The video keeps playing and I can’t see it anymore.
My vision has gone completely. It takes me three tries to find pause.
The frame freezes on my own face. Twenty-six years old, cup raised, promising in front of witnesses.
That man would despise me. He’d look at what I became and tell her to run. He’d be right.
I grind the heel of my hand across my eyes until the dark goes red.
She kept the promise.
I made her feel second every day for years, and she stayed anyway, and hoped, and waited for the man on that screen to come home.
He never did.
So she kept it for both of us.
I pick up my phone. The screen is a wall of notifications, the board, the deal, the damage control. My thumb hovers over all of it.
What have I been building? For who?
I open my messages instead.
Me: Clear my calendar.
Isaac: Which day?
Me: All of them. Cancel everything for the next month.
Isaac: The deal closes soon. If you’re not in the room, it dies.
Me: Then it dies.
Isaac: Are you drunk? What the hell is going on?
I don’t answer him. I open my email and type it clean.
Effective immediately, I am taking a leave of absence. Isaac Faulkner has full authority in my absence. Everything pending is on hold.
I have personal matters that require my full attention.
My finger hangs over send.
This could cost me the deal, the board, the company. Everything I built.
I look at the frozen frame on the TV. The raised plastic cup. The wife laughing through tears at her dramatic new husband.
She’s already gone. What is any of it for, if she’s already gone?
I hit send.
Then one more, before the fallout starts.
Me: Take Izzy off your board. I don’t want to know where she is unless she tells me herself.
Cole: Sir, with the press camped outside the brownstone…
Me: If she’s in danger, you tell her. Not me. She’s not mine to track.
Cole: Understood.
The phone starts buzzing immediately. I turn it face-down on the cushion and let it rage.
The TV glows in the dark. My younger self holds his toast forever, mid-promise, looking at his bride with everything he owns.
I’m going to become that man again, or die trying.
Either way, I’m done being the man I warned her about.