Chapter 26
LEO
OTTO IS ONLY FIVE MONTHS old when I introduce April to Cody Blanchard.
He’s a new hire for the district literacy program, and he needs tutors. Individual educational coaches, they’re called now.
April misses helping kids read. Sadie has no signs of dyslexia at all, and April seems almost disappointed about it, like it means her daughter doesn’t need her.
Never mind that she does so much for Sadie: takes her to preschool and gymnastics and the doctor, slathers her with sunscreen and bug spray, holds her after nightmares, lifts her over mud puddles, sings to her while trimming her hair, applies Neosporin to cuts with Q-tips, and presses on her toes through her shoes to see if they fit, kneeling and saying, “Wiggle your toes.”
But recently Sadie corrected a word when April was reading Dr. Seuss, and April mumbled, “Well, she might as well just read to me instead.” I thought, Nothing wrong with that, but I knew better than to say it.
I was scared when April got pregnant with Sadie, but I was really scared when she got pregnant with Otto, because my fears were no longer abstract.
I was scared of being a fourth wheel, of April seeking purpose in a baby that no baby can satisfy.
I was scared of her vacant eyes and a house made of eggshells.
I was scared to have a son. To fail a son.
Every marriage needs strength to survive, but especially a marriage with young children, because new buds weigh down the branch.
In the first days of Otto’s life, I could tell I was a nuisance on top of everything else April was dealing with. But I told myself those were just early days.
Does it still count as early days four months later?
Five months? Six? April doesn’t like me to see her postpartum body, much less touch it.
She has always been self-deprecating, but never more than when she has given birth, despite the fact that she practically shines in glory.
What her body has done and continues to do is divine, mystifying, intolerably sexy, a paradise of new lines and life.
I want to pilgrimage. To worship. But she wants to lose weight.
To sleep alone with the baby, avoid mirrors, and keep the lights dim.
Restraint becomes second nature. It doesn’t go well when I try to be close, and it doesn’t go well when I try to take care of the kids.
One minute April asks me to get Sadie’s cup and a snack and a clean towel for her bath, but the next minute both Sadie and April are exasperated because I got the cup that leaks, or didn’t cut the grapes small enough, or mixed up which laundry basket was clean and which was dirty.
April is particular and she’s independent; I’m an inconvenience and a burden.
The only meaningful contribution I make is grocery shopping.
But half the time, April gets the food delivered.
So I take solace in work because people want me to be there.
When April comes to the school for her interview, Otto is strapped to her like a kangaroo. She will be a shoo-in, and it feels good to have snagged this interview, to prove my worth in her life. And it’s better to see her at the school than in the pressure cooker of our house.
After she meets with Cody, she waits in the hall for my class to let out, Otto gnawing on her finger.
She looks wonderfully awake as she tells me about the position.
It can be as part-time as she wants; she can bring Otto; Cody already offered her the job.
She starts Monday. And I’m optimistic that this could change everything.
Over the next few months, we work with Cody as he floats around the district schools. April floats schools too, and I love the days when she’s at Argyle High, like when we met all those years ago.
When Cody comes up in conversation, it’s like we’re talking about two different people.
I see him as his crisp polo shirts, his Monday morning talk of bogeys and birdies, his oil-tycoon father, and his habit of dismissively saying “No habla espanol” to Spanish-speaking students.
April, however, sees a skilled boss, a man decorated with advanced degrees, and a strong leader who is clever with puns.
Throughout the semester, they become close.
And it’s embarrassing to admit how it feels to see her admiration of a man like him.
A man with blond hair and disposable income.
A man with two shiny, married parents who stop by for the occasional lunch.
Since our house is near the school, it’s common for co-workers to come by.
They drop off books, pick up folders, compare notes about students, or bemoan budget cuts.
They like our shutters, our bathroom tile.
They ask where we got our coffee table, our woven light fixture.
They drink glasses of sweet tea and reach their fingers into ramekins of mixed nuts. Usually, we love it.
I don’t know why Cody comes over on this particular day, whether it’s his first or second or twentieth time in our home. Our home, with the fixtures I installed. The sink I repaired. The walls I painted. The wife I laid back onto our marriage bed.
All I know is that during my off period, I realize I packed a lunch but forgot it at home. I picture it on the top shelf of our black Frigidaire: turkey and provolone on thin sandwich rounds, dabbed with mustard. And so I go home.
Sadie is at school. Otto is napping. And April is in the living room in unbuttoned jeans and a bra—the pale pink one with daisies along the underwire.
Cody Blanchard’s lips are on her skin, and she’s gripping his polo, her body arching toward him, her face full of pleasure. His hand is inside her jeans.
They jump apart. The clock stops. The world.
My memory fractures: red faces, flat words, and Cody with the audacity to lift April’s shirt from the floor and hand it to her as though she should cover up for her husband.
The clearest thought I have is that my son is in the house; I cannot yell because my son is in the house. I probably wouldn’t yell anyway, because what would I say? I’ve been so respectful of her body, her need for space, and now—
Now.
I want to transport to any time other than now.
I want to think about anything else: the chipping paint, my staff meeting, some war of old, or the sandhill cranes I saw on my morning run.
But I blink the wars and cranes away as I get lashed by the daylight in my own living room, here with April and Cody. I want to set the house on fire.
But I don’t. I go back to school, my veins bulging with betrayal.
I teach my classes; I do not remember them. My sandwich is still in the fridge at home. Co-workers talk about the news, the rain, the flaky croissants in the faculty lounge. This is a private apocalypse.
I drive around for a long time and come home very late, after the kids are asleep. April is at the kitchen table, her face puffy, which evokes something like rage in me. Something I’ve never felt toward her until today.
Everything in our house feels different. The lighting. The air.
She looks at me. “We should talk.”
When someone says that, it means they want to say something. And I don’t want to hear the sound of her voice for even one second. “The last thing I want to do is talk to you.”
Her lip quivers, and my rage grows.
She sits there and watches me get a glass of water.
A box of crackers. Some blankets. I take them into Otto’s room, shut the door, and stretch out on the floor.
He’s been sleeping in our bed anyway. April doesn’t try to follow me.
My stomach growls, but the cracker box sits unopened beside me through one of the longest nights of my life.
All at once, I’m a boy alone in a single-wide; I’m a teenager pretending not to hear my aunt’s elongated sighs; I’m a man watching my wife yank her shirt on after taking it off for another man.
My stomach twists, pressure flooding my skull, memories bludgeoning me from the inside.
And all of a sudden, it is not sudden. Infidelity is like death: it proves the sickness.
I stay in our house because I am a father. Meals are eaten and laundry is washed. Trash bins fill and oranges fur with mold. Phones ring and mail is retrieved. Days pass and the baby cries, the only one of us who does. He wails like a banshee.
Every day, I stand in front of the rising generation of students, telling them about figures of the past. But something about the familiar stories feels incomplete now.
I shut my classroom door after school and ask Google how many of those historical figures had affairs.
I’m insatiable for the details that didn’t shape headlines but shaped people.
How many wives did Sam Houston have? And, How did James Bowie survive the death of his wife?
And, Did Stephen F. Austin regret not marrying?
And, What about the women behind the men of the Revolution?
I find some personal information out there, but most of it is about muskets and land disputes.
Love and lust and shame were kept closer to the heart.
They were taken to the battlefield or the grave, where the faithful and unfaithful alike fill plots of land that were hard-won and, therefore, hard-lost.
Then, every night, I lie on the floor of Otto’s bedroom wondering if April will run off with Cody.
I see them together whether my eyes are open or closed.
I want to yank out the part of my brain with the memory of that cataclysmic day, with the memory of April altogether.
At least I finally understand why she’s been pushing me away: Cody makes more sense for her than I ever have.
But he seems to vanish, and I don’t ask about it. In fact, not asking becomes my mission. I could obsessively demand every detail, but it’s too painful to imagine even one.
The cruelty of this is that I have to be the one to call it.
After a couple of weeks of us drifting through our house like shadows, school lets out for the summer and I can’t bear to stay any longer.
April is making dinner, and the kids are in the other room in front of cartoons when I tell her that I want to end this.
Then she’s back and forth across the kitchen, saying, “Now you’re ready to talk?
It’s not the right time for a big conversation. I have kids to take care of.”
I have kids to take care of too. But they’re fine with their noodles and television. April is just the sort of overwrought mom who thinks they need every little thing done for them.
I peek around the corner at the backs of their heads.
Otto is in his high chair, curls at the nape of his neck.
Sadie is giggling. I would die for them without hesitation, but I also wish I never had them.
They are light enough to lift in one arm, yet their dependence is as heavy and immovable as failure itself.
They didn’t ask to be born to parents who would lose each other.
They only asked to be held in the dark, to have one more book read to them, to eat buttered noodles instead of broccoli.
Looking at them now, I clutch my chest. Children make it grueling to stay married and grueling to get divorced. I knew the world into which I brought them, and yet I brought them still. This is my fault. Mine and April’s. Two idiots who believed ourselves immune.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
But six hours later, I wake to smoke.