Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
“Breathe in for me. Good. And let it out, slow.”
I breathe the way Dr. Meyers tells me to, the way I’ve been breathing for him since I was nine years old and a school nurse first heard something in my chest that didn’t belong there.
His office hasn’t changed in all those years, the same framed diagram of a heart gone soft and faded on the wall, the same jar of lollipops on the counter he’s never once stopped offering me even now that I’m a married woman, the same paper crinkling under me on the same vinyl table.
He moves the cold disc of the stethoscope a few inches across my back and listens again, his face doing the careful nothing it always does while he listens, the very same nothing he wore back when I was small enough to swing my legs off the edge of this exact table while he let me listen to my own heart through his earpieces and told me it sounded like a horse running somewhere far away.
It still sounds like that to me. A horse, somewhere, running. Even most of the time. Not always.
He has me lie back for the rest of it, the cool gel and the wand gliding slow over my ribs, the grey shapes pulsing and folding on his monitor that have never once meant a thing to me and mean everything to him.
He prints his long strips of paper. He frowns down at numbers I can’t read.
He has been the one constant of my whole life that no contract and no marriage and no death has ever managed to touch, this quiet careful man with his nothing-face, who has known the inside of my heart longer and far better than anyone I have ever loved, and who has spent twenty-odd years of his life trying to coax it into beating a little longer than it strictly wants to.
When he’s finished he helps me sit up, and he pulls his wheeled stool in close, and he takes his glasses off, which after a lifetime of these appointments is exactly how I know we’ve arrived at the part of the visit that isn’t a test.
“Right now,” he says, “you’re fine.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“But.” He goes on gently, because he has always been gentle with me and the gentleness is somehow worse than blunt would be.
“Mr. Barrymore was right to send you to me early. I don’t much like what I’m seeing in your rhythm this month.
Nothing dangerous yet, mind. But your heart was never built to carry a great deal of strain, Camilla, and the one truth nobody can hand you is exactly how much it can carry, because we don’t get to learn that number until it’s already been reached.
And by then, I’m afraid, it tends to be rather too late to be of any use. ”
“So what do I do?”
“You take it easy.” He says it like a prescription, because to him that’s exactly what it is.
“Whatever’s been weighing on you these last weeks, and something plainly has, I’ve watched you carry it in through that door, you find yourself a way to set it down.
Rest. Stay calm. And”—here he hesitates, because he’s a cardiologist and not a marriage counselor and he knows exactly where the line sits—”do whatever you can to make your peace with your husband.
I don’t need the details of it. I only need your life to have a good deal less storm in it than your face is telling me it’s had. ”
Make peace with my husband.
Easier said than done, I think, in the back of the car on the way home, watching the grey city slide past the window without taking in a single block of it.
He doesn’t want peace with me. He told me so himself, in the plainest words a man has available to him, across the width of my father’s old desk.
Peace isn’t on the table. The only things on the table are a child and an exit, plus a tidy itemized list of all the ways I can be cut out of my own baby’s life if I put a single foot wrong.
And you cannot make peace by yourself. Peace takes two people who both want the fighting to stop, and my husband doesn’t want it to stop.
He wants to win, and somewhere in the last two months he’s decided that I am the thing he’s winning against.
But I don’t want to die, either.
That’s the plain animal fact of it, sitting there underneath all the heartbreak when I dig down far enough.
I’m twenty-two years old. I’ve lost my father and I appear to have lost my marriage, and I am not, on top of all of that, prepared to go and lose my actual life to a heart that was never built to take the strain.
Dr. Meyers said take it easy. So I will take it easy.
And if taking it easy means making my own private kind of peace in a place where no real peace is on offer, then that is exactly what I’ll do.
I’ll make it on the inside, quietly, where Trey doesn’t get a say and can’t refuse to sign.
I’ll take it easy, I tell myself that same night, when I hear his key turn in the lock.
And taking it easy, right now, tonight, in this bed, means the only thing it can possibly mean.
It means pretending. It means lying still when he comes to me in the dark and letting myself believe, just for the length of it, that he still loves me the way I once was so sure he did.
It costs me nothing he hasn’t already taken from me, and it might cost me everything if I let the truth in while my heart is doing the uneven stumbling thing it’s started doing, so I shut the door on the truth and I let the pretending carry me off.
He kisses me awake the way he always does, and I let the old story write itself right over the top of the new one.
This is my husband, who chose me, I tell myself as his mouth finds mine in the dark.
This is the man who had four blankets delivered before I’d finished saying I was cold, who read me the worst of the sports pages in that terrible deadpan until I laughed, who held me through every ugly night after Dad.
I pour all of it into the dark behind my closed eyes and I let it gild him head to foot, and when he gathers me in against him I let myself pretend the gathering still means what it used to mean, that I am wanted and not merely used, cherished and not merely required to produce.
He takes me the way he always has, like a man with something to prove and no patience at all for proving it slowly, and I answer him the way I always have, because my body has never once learned how not to.
But tonight I fold the lie in on purpose, the way you’d stir sugar into something that’s gone bitter, and for a little while it actually works.
For a little while, with my eyes shut and his heartbeat going under my palm, I can almost taste the marriage I thought I had.
I can almost let myself believe that the man moving over me in the dark would, if only I asked him to, stay.
I don’t ask him. I’ve learned at least that much.
And when it’s over and he rises in the dark to dress, I keep my eyes shut and my breathing slow and even, and I tell myself a brand-new lie to replace the one that’s just worn out, and the new lie goes like this: he’s only leaving because he’s coming down with something.
I heard him cough this morning over his coffee.
He doesn’t want to pass it to me, not now, not when I need to keep well for the baby we’re trying so hard to make.
That’s all this is. A considerate husband sparing his delicate wife a fever in the night.
I build the whole small shelter of it in the time it takes him to find his shirt in the dark and button it, and I crawl all the way inside, and I almost, almost don’t hear the door close behind him.
That is how I learn to take it easy, and it turns out I have a real talent for it. It goes on like this for two months.
When he isn’t at the breakfast table in the mornings, I tell myself he’s only busy.
I make the coffee anyway, the good kind, from the machine with opinions.
I set out two cups on the pale stone counter, and I drink mine standing up looking at the full untouched one across from me, and I narrate his morning to myself in cheerful detail, the early meeting, the call with the coast that had to start before dawn, the quarter that won’t go and close itself.
I’ve gotten very, very good at reciting his schedule.
I have never in my life been less sure of where he actually is.
I butter a single slice of toast I don’t especially want and I tell the empty chair across the counter that he’ll be home for dinner, and some mornings I very nearly believe the chair believes me.
When there are nights he doesn’t come home at all, I tell myself he’s still just busy.
Men like Trey keep impossible hours; my father did, and my father loved us to his last breath.
A dark apartment and a cold half of a bed don’t have to mean anything at all.
I lie in the farthest guest room, the small one at the end I never did move back out of, and I listen for a key in a lock that doesn’t turn, and I tell myself that an empty side of a bed is only an empty side of a bed and not a verdict handed down.
I’ve gotten so practiced at the telling that I can almost manage it now without crying. Almost.
And when I’m standing in the kitchen one grey afternoon with the television murmuring to itself for company, and I glance up to find my husband’s face filling the screen, and beside his face a woman’s, some elegant dark-haired stranger caught coming out of the same restaurant he’d just come out of with the same car idling at the curb for them both, and underneath the two of them a caption with a question mark in it doing a truly enormous amount of ugly work, I tell myself it’s only gossip.
The city invents these things for sport.
The city once spun a whole fairy tale out of me and Troy from nothing but proximity and a good jawline, didn’t it, so surely it can conjure a woman for Trey out of one coincidence and a slow news day.
Only an idiot believes gossip. I switch the television off and I tell myself, firmly, that I am not an idiot, and I make myself a cup of tea I then don’t drink, and I do not, I do not let myself stand there and wonder whether the considerate husband with the cough has been busy being considerate somewhere else these two months.
That is what it costs me to take it easy.
I simply keep on lying to myself, one fresh lie laid down carefully over the last one before it has time to cool and set, an endless gentle mortar of untruth, because if the lies are the only wall left standing between my heart and the strain that could stop it for good, then I will build that wall just exactly as high as it needs to go, and I will live the rest of my life behind it if I have to.
She’ll keep lying to herself, the girl in the bathroom mirror, if lying to herself is the only way left to protect her heart.
And she does keep it up, right up until the morning the lying finally runs clean out of road, when Trey and I end up standing side by side in the cold quiet of that same bathroom, waiting in a tense ringing silence for a small plastic stick laid on the marble between us to decide something about the rest of my life.
He’s the one who picked it up when the little timer on his phone went off.
He’s the one holding it now, turned away from me toward the window so I can’t see his face.
I can’t take my eyes off the small white window in the plastic where the answer is slowly surfacing, and I’m doing the breathing Dr. Meyers taught me a lifetime ago, in for four, out for six, easy, easy, take it easy, while my whole future arranges itself one developing line at a time, and oh, oh, oh, the line?—
“You’re not pregnant,” he says. He calls it out first, before I can read it for myself, and his voice gives away absolutely nothing.
I can’t look away from the test in his hand. “I guess I’m not.”
“If this keeps on,” he says, “perhaps I’ll have to find another woman to give me an heir after all.”
And then he’s gone, the way he’s always gone these two months, except this time he doesn’t even bother to leave quietly.
He walks out, and the bathroom door slams shut behind him hard enough that I feel it come up through the marble into the soles of my feet, and the sound of it is the truest thing that’s passed between the two of us in two months.
I want to take it easy. I want to, I want to, I have been trying so hard, I have built such a high and beautiful wall.
But I just can’t.
And as I start to cry, standing there alone in the cold quiet bathroom with a piece of plastic in my hand that says I’ve failed at the one single thing keeping me here, I try to pretend that I don’t feel my heart begin to ache, slow and wrong and worsening by the second, in a way that frightens me more than anything Trey has ever said to me.