Chapter 33 #2
When I get back to Dallas, we deliver the hard news in the softest way possible: by telling Sadie that I’m going to stay at our house to help work on it, so I won’t be sleeping at Gramma Deb and Grandpa B’s house anymore.
Stay at our house and won’t be sleeping at theirs aren’t lies, but it feels like this is how adults confuse children, leaving them to piece together the harsher realities.
Our hope is that by the time Sadie realizes this is permanent, she will already be used to it.
I don’t know if this is a cruelty or a kindness.
She asks to go finish her puzzle with Uncle Cameron. And although this is exactly what we intended, it stings that she isn’t sad.
I exhale and tell her, “Of course, go ahead.”
She scampers off, leaving April and me on the couch.
I want to fall onto her. I want to rest my head in her lap.
I want her fingers in my hair, her lips on my forehead, her words in my ear.
I guess eleventh-hour doubt is no surprise after a decision like this.
For a minute, I let it play out. It’s the hundredth time I’ve imagined it, but the image is the same: if I were to stay with April, every hour apart would make me wonder where she is, who she’s with, what she’s doing, what she’s wearing. Things I’ve never worried about before.
I stand up, because no. We could not make that work.
I look at April. “You should tell your family before Sadie does.”
“About the trailer? Or about us?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Both. At this point, they deserve to know.”
I don’t say, And I deserve to not be press-ganged into dancing with you in their kitchen.
“You don’t want to tell them together?”
I sigh. “They’re your family.”
And so I go to the backyard, because there isn’t one place in this house where I can get away. Most people don’t end their marriages while living with their in-laws.
I’ve been sitting outside a long while when Cameron finally seeks me out. He sits down beside me and I try to read his expression, his posture. What narrative of our undoing has April told him? Is he pissed?
Finally he says, “Surely y’all can work it out.”
She didn’t tell him she cheated, of course she didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Try,” he says. “Maybe it just needs more time?”
But the issue isn’t time, it’s trust. So I say nothing.
He adds, “You’re my brother regardless.”
He has always been the sweetest Russo. But despite his sentiment, I’m afraid of losing him. Will I still be in his wedding? Will I meet his future kids?
We sit a while longer with the waning moon and choir of crickets.
Eventually Deb and Billy come out the back door, and I take a deep breath. They sit down with their drinks and their tact, and Deb starts where she always starts: “You know we love you.”
Their unspoken questions hang like smoke in the night air, and I think of Andre, the lone traveler in my book. Are we who began life alone destined to end it that way?
Josie isn’t home right now, so at least there’s that. She can sob or yell at me tomorrow.
The crickets chirp for a few more minutes before Deb says, “You know there’s an apple pie in the kitchen?”
Of all the ways this woman could break my heart. I’d prefer misdirected anger to her relentless love. “No.” I exhale. “I didn’t know.”
She nods. “Be sure to eat it with ice cream.”
This tells me so much. That I don’t have to sit here with them and explain myself. That they understand it’s complicated and private. And that their love transcends my marriage to their daughter.
I stand up, giving them each a squeeze on their shoulders before I walk through the exit door my mother-in-law has so graciously given me.
The pie is delicious. I eat a slice alone, with two scoops of vanilla.
Within a week, a single-wide is set up on our property, covered by insurance for now.
This is how our marriage begins to be severed.
By design, the significance is lost on the kids.
I have one small bag of belongings packed.
At the Russos’ front door, I lift the strap onto my shoulder, and see-you-soons are spoken quietly.
When I step into the trailer alone, I get whiplash, as though my life is a palindrome. I can almost see Mami peeking through the vinyl blinds, and the intervening years shrivel.
I wander the trailer, opening the microwave and closing it again.
Opening cabinets and drawers. I unpack my toothbrush and set it beside the sink, looking out the little rectangular window at my half-burned house, the creek behind.
Our storage unit sits ominously with all that remains, and a murder of crows is gathered for some sort of open-mouthed tribunal.
I walk to the lone bed in the back and fluff a pillow as though for my mother, or wife, or children. They feel close enough to reach out and touch, and also like they don’t exist at all.
In this bizarre new aloneness, I test my insularity.
As night falls and coyotes yowl in the distance, I pace the single-wide and sing Ryan Adams at the top of my lungs.
I hit each consonant of each explicit word, and a memory spears me: a time when Sadie asked if hate is a bad word. She whispered it.
But Sadie isn’t here. No one is.
I banish thoughts of Lexington Avenue. Of Billy and Deb coming in from the back deck. My children with their bath-wet hair as Sadie retrieves Bear Bear from a twist of blankets.
I grab my phone and respond to Kim. NOT YET.
She sends back a GIF of U2 singing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
I press the “haha” reaction, laughless. SEE YOU AT IN-SERVICE.
YEAH, SEE YOU.
A minute later, she adds, SOMEONE WISE ONCE SAID, “TO SEARCH IS TO LIVE.”
It’s a line from Seventh City, when Andre comes to the end of himself in the middle of his quest. He gets an infection, thinks it’s all over for him, but even then he does not regret his trek.
To search is to live, my own words come back to bite me.
Andre and I are thrown into stark relief: he wanted to discover, but I do not.
He doesn’t regret his journey, but I would undo mine if I could.
Because I embrace every history except my own. So I heart the text, loveless.
A bullfrog bellows outside, and a drop of rain plunks the roof overhead. Then another and another. There’s a nauseating familiarity as I think of my first home with its leaks and mildew.
I open Google as thunder cracks. My hero’s journey will not take me through the wilds of Cambodia, but through the wilds of the internet. Ready as I’ll ever be, I thumb in the words of my exploring: my parents’ names.