2. Carrie
— ? —
Carrie
For a long moment, I just stand there, staring at the thong, willing it to disappear if I look hard enough. Willing myself to be hallucinating. Maybe the stress of the clinic appointment has finally cracked my brain loose, and none of this is real.
But when I blink, it’s still there. Red lace on our hardwood floor, right next to the coffee table I picked out when we first moved in. Right next to the couch where Ulises and I used to curl up and watch movies, back when we still did that.
My eyes track the room the way they’d catalog a crime scene. There, a cream silk blouse draped over the arm of the couch. There, black patent heels kicked off at the bottom of the stairs. And on the third step, a trail of clothes leading somewhere I don’t want to go.
Men’s briefs. Ulises’s. I’d recognize them anywhere.
Turn around. Leave. Pretend you never saw any of this.
The thought is loud and clear, a voice of reason screaming at me from far off. But my feet are already moving. One step. Two. My hand finds the banister, and I grip it so hard my knuckles go white.
The sounds start at the landing. Rhythmic. Unmistakable.
I know what I’m going to find before I find it.
Some part of me has known for a long time, all those late nights at the office, all those business trips, all those moments he looked at me the way you look at furniture you’ve grown tired of.
But knowing it in the back of your mind is different from seeing it with your own eyes.
Don’t open that door.
I open the door.
My husband’s bare ass is the first thing I see.
Pale and rhythmically thrusting, his hands gripping the headboard of our bed, the bed we share, the bed where we’ve tried and failed to make a baby so many times I’ve lost count, while a woman beneath him moans in a way I don’t think I’ve ever moaned in my life.
“Ulises?”
He jerks back so fast he nearly falls off the bed. His face cycles through it all fast, shock, then irritation, then a cold, calculating stillness that turns my stomach.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Carrie?”
His first words aren’t an apology. They aren’t even a denial. “What the fuck are you doing here,” he says, turning it around on me, the intruder, the one who’s somehow in the wrong here.
“What am I...” The words catch in my throat. “This is my house. This is my bedroom. This is my bed.”
The woman scrambles for the sheets, pulling them up to her chin. Her face is turned away from me, hidden by a curtain of dark hair, but the curve of her shoulder is familiar. Familiar in a way I don’t want to recognize.
“Carrie, listen to me.” Ulises holds up his hands, palms out, the way you gentle a spooked animal. “It’s not what you think.”
“Don’t.” My voice sounds strange. Foreign. “Don’t you dare tell me this isn’t what it looks like.”
He has the audacity to roll his eyes. To actually roll his eyes at me, making me the unreasonable one in the room.
“Fine. It’s exactly what it looks like. Happy now?”
“Happy?” I laugh, and the sound is ugly. “You’re asking me if I’m happy? I just found out I can’t have children, Ulises. I walked home from the fertility clinic, the place where I’ve been pumping my body full of hormones for two years trying to give you a baby, and I find you in our bed with-”
I stop. Because the woman has shifted, and her face is visible now.
Time stops.
My brain refuses to process what my eyes are seeing. It’s one of those optical illusions where you know what you’re looking at, but your mind keeps trying to rearrange it into anything that makes sense.
“Martha?”
My sister looks at me with eyes full of terror. She’s wearing Ulises’s shirt, the blue button-down I bought him for his last birthday, and her hands are shaking as she clutches the sheets to her chest.
“Carrie, please.” Her voice is high and thin. “It’s not, I didn’t mean, please, you have to understand.”
“Understand what?” The words come out in a whisper. “Understand that you’re fucking my husband?”
Martha slides off the bed. She lands on her knees on the carpet, our carpet, the white carpet I picked out because I thought it would look nice in a baby’s nursery someday, and she starts crying. Great, heaving sobs that shake her whole body.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It just happened, I didn’t plan it, I never meant to hurt you.”
“You’re my sister.”
“Carrie.”
“My own sister.”
Martha doesn’t answer. She just kneels there, crying, and Ulises doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. He’s pulled on his pants now, and he’s watching the whole scene with an expression I can only call bored. He might be half-watching a dull television program. None of this touches him.
The last thread in me snaps.
I grab the lamp from the nightstand, the crystal lamp that was a wedding gift from my parents, the one that costs more than most people make in a week, and I hurl it at his head.
He ducks. The lamp shatters against the headboard, spraying glass across the bed, across the pillows, across the sheets that still hold my sister’s scent.
“Are you insane?” Ulises brushes glass off his shoulder, unbothered. “That lamp cost three thousand dollars.”
“I don’t care about the lamp!” I’m screaming now, really screaming, a scream that tears at my own throat. “I don’t care about anything in this room! I want you out! Both of you, get out of my house!”
I grab the sheets and yank them off the bed, flinging them at Martha, who’s still on her knees, still sobbing. I grab the pillows and throw them at the wall. I sweep my arm across the dresser, sending perfume bottles and jewelry boxes crashing to the floor.
“Carrie, stop.” Ulises’s voice is sharp now. Commanding. The voice he uses when he wants to put me in my place. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I’m embarrassing myself?” I spin to face him, chest heaving. “You’re the one who was just balls-deep in my sister, and I’m the one who’s embarrassing myself?”
“Carrie, please.” Martha reaches for me. “Please, let me explain.”
“Don’t touch me.” I jerk away from her. “Don’t you ever touch me again.”
She flinches, hard, though I haven’t touched her. Good. I want to slap her. I want to grab her by her perfect hair and drag her down the stairs and throw her out into the street where everyone can see what she really is.
“This is over.” I turn back to Ulises, forcing my voice to steady. “I want a divorce. Tonight.”
For a moment, his face shifts. Surprise, maybe. Or calculation.
Then he laughs.
“A divorce?” He shakes his head, the way you’d humor a child. “No.”
“No?” The word doesn’t make sense. “What do you mean, no? I caught you. You can’t deny it. It’s over, Ulises.”
“I mean no.” He crosses his arms over his bare chest. “I’m not giving you a divorce.”
“That’s not how it works. I don’t need your permission to-”
“Really? Do you have any idea what a divorce would cost you?” He smiles, and it’s the coldest thing I’ve ever seen. “You signed a prenup, remember? If you leave me, you get nothing. No house. No money. No credit cards. Nothing.”
“I don’t care about the money.”
“Then what are you going to live on? Your little freelance writing career?” He laughs again. “You haven’t published anything in three years, Carrie. You don’t have a job. You don’t have savings. You don’t have anything except what I give you.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Will you?” He takes a step toward me, and the look in his eyes makes me want to step back.
But I don’t. I won’t give him the satisfaction.
“Let me tell you something, Carrie. Martha is better than you. She’s younger.
She’s warmer. She doesn’t cry after sex or track her ovulation on a spreadsheet like it’s a fucking science project. ”
“Ulises.” Martha’s voice is small. Scared.
“Shut up.” He doesn’t even look at her. His eyes are fixed on me, and there’s a cruelty in them I’ve never seen before. Or maybe one I’ve spent years refusing to see. “You’re not young anymore, Carrie. You can’t have children. What exactly makes you think there’s anything out there for you?”
Each word lands in the soft, wounded place inside me, the place that’s still raw from Dr. Hollis’s office, still bleeding from two years of failure and disappointment.
You’re not young anymore.
You can’t have children.
What makes you think there’s anything out there for you?
“I’m never giving you the divorce,” Ulises continues, his voice almost gentle now, the patient tone you’d use on a small child.
“You belong to me until I decide otherwise. Now clean up this mess.” He gestures at the broken lamp, the scattered pillows, the destruction I’ve caused. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
I stare at him. This man I married. This man I thought I loved. This man I let inject me with hormones and monitor my cycles and track my temperature because I thought we wanted the same thing. A family. A future. A life together.
And now he’s looking at me the way a man looks at a thing he owns. A thing to be managed. A thing with no worth beyond what he decides to grant it.
Run.
The word fires through every nerve in my body, loud and clear and undeniable.
I don’t think. I just move.
I shove past him, past Martha who’s still on her knees, through the bedroom door and into the hallway. My feet barely touch the carpet as I run, my heart pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears.
The stairs. Just get to the stairs. Just get out of this house and away from him and figure out the rest later.
I hear him behind me. His footsteps. His voice calling my name, but it doesn’t sound worried. It sounds annoyed.
I hit the top of the stairs at full speed.
My sock catches on the carpet runner.
My ankle twists.
I reach for the banister, but it’s not there, I’m too far to the left, I’ve misjudged the distance, and my hand closes on nothing but air.
The world tilts.
I see the ceiling. The chandelier. Martha’s horrified face appearing at the top of the stairs.
And then I’m falling.
The impact comes in stages: my shoulder hits first, then my hip, then.
The back of my head connects with the marble floor of the foyer, and everything goes white.
The last thing I hear before the darkness takes me is Ulises’s voice, cold and inconvenienced:
“For fuck’s sake, Martha, call an ambulance.”