Chapter 7
CADE
“You look terrible.” Lauren does not sound sorry.
She holds the door half open with her body in the gap. There is a dish towel over her shoulder and something frying behind her, and she has not said my name.
“Can I come in?”
She steps aside, then turns and walks down the hall. I follow her in and close the door.
Her kitchen is too warm. She goes back to stirring the onions with a wooden spoon. She does not offer me anything. I stand at the end of the counter, waiting for her to look at me.
“I need to ask you something,” I say.
“Halloran’s wife called me.” She does not turn around.
“Two days ago. She wanted to know, delicately, whether there was anything she could do. Ashley sat beside you at that dinner and played your wife in front of people who know Sienna. Sent your wine back. Corrected a closing date before you could answer.”
She turns from the stove, her mouth tight. “And you sat there and let it happen.”
“That’s not…”
“You carried Ashley out of a gala where your wife was standing at the podium honoring her own grandfather. You left Sienna alone in front of a room full of people who watched you choose. And then, a few days later, you let Ashley sit in her chair and act like your wife in front of the same crowd.” She stops stirring.
“How did Sienna get home that night, Cade? After the gala. After you left with Ashley. How did your wife get home?”
I don’t say anything.
“You don’t know.”
“I know she got home.”
“You know she got somewhere. You don’t know how, and you didn’t ask. You’ve been hurting that woman in ways you refuse to acknowledge, and I am done watching you do it.”
“I’ve never laid a hand on Sienna.” My voice is louder than I intend. “I would never do that. I’ve never even raised my voice to her. Do you understand what you’re accusing me of?”
“I know you haven’t.”
“Then say what you actually mean.”
“I mean not hitting your wife is a pretty low bar, Cade. You can clear it every day of your life and still hurt her every damn day.”
I’ve been telling myself the same things since Sienna left. Maybe my sister can explain why none of them seem to count.
“I kept every promise I made her. Never lied to her, even that night. She asked me a question. Was I supposed to lie?” My sister says nothing.
“She’s had everything she needed. Never had to worry about money.
And I haven’t slept with another woman since we married.
You know what the men we grew up around were like.
I thought I was doing better than that.”
I wait for her to answer, but she lets me keep going.
“Sienna never complained. Two years, and she never said she was unhappy. So you tell me what I did.”
Lauren sets the spoon down on the rest.
“You chose Ashley over your wife,” she says, “in the moment that mattered most to her, in front of everyone.”
The silence stretches and fills with house sounds. A clock somewhere. The oil in the pan.
“Ashley needed me,” I say.
“Your wife needed you.”
“Sienna was in the middle of her speech. She looked fine. Ashley was collapsing against me. What was I supposed to do?”
“Catch her. Help her sit down. Get someone to stay with her.” She puts the towel on the counter. “You carried her out in front of your wife, Cade. Why did it have to be you who took her home?”
“I couldn’t leave her like that.”
“But you could leave Sienna?”
“She wasn’t alone. There was a room full of people.”
“Then you had plenty of people to ask for help.”
“I texted Sienna,” I say. “Told her where I was, not to wait up.”
“Did you ask if she needed the car?”
I don’t answer.
“You took care of getting Ashley home. Who took care of your wife?”
I don’t say anything.
“Right,” Lauren says.
“Tell me where she is and I’ll send flowers.”
She laughs. A single, humorless syllable that cuts straight to the bone. For the first time in my adult life, my sister looks across her own counter and sees something small.
“Flowers,” she says. “God. Of course. Flowers.”
“Then what fixes it?” I am not proud of the sound of my own voice. “Tell me what fixes it, Lauren, and I will do it. Today. Name it.”
“That’s the whole problem with you. You want the invoice.” She picks the towel back up. “Maybe you figure it out. Or maybe it can’t be fixed.”
“No.”
“Cade.”
“No.” I have both hands flat on her counter and I am leaning on them. “That is not an answer I am taking. Not from you. Not from anyone. She is my wife.”
Lauren looks at me for a long moment. Whatever she is deciding, she decides it.
“Do you love your wife,” she says, “or do you want her around for what she does?”
I stand in my sister’s kitchen and the seconds go by and I do not fill them, and both of us listen to me not fill them.
“Please tell me where she is.”
“Where is her favorite place in the world?”
“Lauren.”
“It’s not a trick. It’s a question. You’ve been married to her for two years.” She comes around the end of the counter and stops with three feet between us. “Where is her favorite place in the world?”
I start to answer, and I hear myself guessing before the words are out, and I stop.
“All right,” she says. “What does she love doing? Not what she does for you. Not the schedule, not the dinners, not the thank-you notes she wrote for you. What does she love?”
There is something. There is the shape of something, books maybe, there are books in the house, a box of them, and I could not name one title and I do not know when she read them because I have never seen her sitting down with one.
“Who are her friends,” Lauren says. “Besides me.”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes. Not a name, not a face, not a woman at a party I could point to. A whole marriage, and besides my own sister, I cannot produce one name.
“Two years,” Lauren says.
“Give me the address.”
“No.”
“Lauren.”
“No, Cade. Not tonight, not next week, not when you’re worse than this, and you are going to get worse than this.” She walks past me to the front door and opens it, and the cold comes in around her. “If you want to find her, maybe start by learning who she is.”
I make it to the car before I understand that she is never going to give it to me.
The house is dark except for the timer lamp in the foyer, which now comes on at seven whether anyone is here or not so I don’t come home to a dark house.
I stand in the study doorway with my coat still on and my keys in my hand.
The decanter set is on the sideboard where it has been for years. Four crystal decanters, a tray, six glasses. It is there to be seen. Every photograph anyone has ever taken of me in this room has that set behind my shoulder, saying something on my behalf about who lives here.
I lift the tray off the mahogany and hurl it straight into the fireplace.
The crash is deafening, heavy crystal blowing apart against the brick, liquor spraying the hearth, and shards skittering across the hardwood long after the echo dies. Then the room goes dead silent.
The shame hits before the liquor has even finished soaking into the wool rug. Thirty-seven years old, standing in my own ruined study, looking at a tantrum that bought me nothing. Childish. Useless. Loud.
The movers are coming for her things.
Her list is with them and nothing of mine is on it, and when they have been and gone this house will hold nothing of hers except what she forgot she owned. And whatever she left behind that neither of us knew was worth keeping.
I walk through the house, looking at the things I still think of as hers before I have to start remembering where they used to be.
Her books, spines cracked in the way that means read. Her seascapes, seven of them, the only things hanging in here that came from her own eye and not from anybody else’s. And on the bottom shelf of the study cabinet, behind the box files, three photograph albums.
Actual photographs. Printed, in corners, in books.
I have never opened one of them.
The first is ours. Dinners, a boat somebody chartered, a Christmas at Lauren’s, her arm through mine at a hundred functions in a hundred rooms. She is turned toward me in every single frame.
Not posed toward me, turned, her shoulder under my arm and her chin coming up and her whole face lifted like there is a light source in it.
And in every single frame I am facing the room.
I go through photograph after photograph of my own marriage, and in every one of them my eyes are on the camera or on the man I am talking to or on the middle distance where the next thing is coming from, and my body is a half step out from hers the whole way through.
Then there is one that is not like the others.
It is a candid. I do not know who took it and I do not remember the evening. She is mid-laugh at something outside the frame, head back, the whole thing, and I am not looking at the camera and I am not looking at the room.
I am looking at her.
My hand is at her back. There is something on my face that is not in any of the other photographs. Something real.
I have never seen this picture. It was in my house the entire time. It was right here, and it is the only evidence that exists of what I actually feel for my wife, and I never let myself admit it. Not once. Not out loud. Not even to myself.
My legs go out and I sit down on the floor with the album open across my knees.
The wedding album is the second one, white, and it stops a dozen pages in. After that the pages are empty, sleeves and corners and nothing. She never finished it.
She is on those dozen pages and she is the most beautiful thing I have ever looked at.
I remember standing at the front of that room and watching her come toward me and feeling something open in my chest that I did not want to name.
I remember thinking that whatever this was, I was not going to ruin it by looking at it too closely.
I remember checking the time on the way to the car. I remember thinking the day was going well.
On eight of the twelve pages I am not smiling. In the others, I am posing for the camera.
I could not give my wife a smile on her wedding day.
I have to put the album down on the carpet and hold the bridge of my nose, and the pressure behind my eyes is unfamiliar enough that for a moment I do not know what it is.
I cannot recall one occasion, not one, when I told her she was beautiful.
Not on that day. Not in the car after. Not the night she came down the stairs in something new and stood in the foyer waiting for me to look up from my phone.
My God. What have I done?
The last album is older than the others, with faded seashells printed on the cover and edges worn soft from years of handling.
She is in it in the time of her life before me.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, sunburned, no makeup, hair wrecked by wind, and lit from the inside in a way I have never seen in our house.
She is never alone in a photograph. There are women around her in every one, older women, an arm around her neck, four of them crowded into a frame at a kitchen table laughing at whoever is holding the camera.
One of them has her hand flat on Sienna’s head like Sienna belongs to her.
I do not know a single one of these women.
Not one of them has ever visited. Not at a dinner, not at the wedding as far as I can remember, and I turn the pages faster looking for a face I can place and there isn’t one, and the thing that gets me is not that she hid them. She did not hide them. Nobody ever asked.
And behind them, in photograph after photograph, is a place.
Small. Wood, weathered gray, a rail, a deck with the sea coming up behind it. A doorway with a screen door. A porch with steps.
I pull one out of its corners. She is on that deck in a sweatshirt with her feet up on the rail, laughing at whoever is holding the camera, and there is water all the way to the edge of the frame.
Somewhere small, by the sea, from before me.
She would have sold it after we got married. She had a home with me by then. I have never heard a word about it. Not a bill, not a key, not a weekend.
I turn the photograph over. There is nothing on the back.
I get up off the floor with it in my hand.
Lauren asked me where her favorite place in the world was, and I stood there with nothing. The answer was here the entire time.
A cottage by the sea, and a life full of women who loved her, and I do not know the road or the town.
But I am going to find it.