Jack & Jill (9 page)

I looked again toward t
he bed, at the folds where the iPod lay, and realized those folds had formed around my daughter's body. She was in her bed, and squinting up at me through newly wakened eyes. Her hair was spread out around the pillow, and she frowned at me and raised a hand to block the glare of the light.

I slowly, carefully sat down next to her,
as if afraid she might prove intangible, another facet of my imaginings. "What did you...?" I began to ask again, then thought better of it. It was clear now that she had been in her bed all along. The covers were warm, the ear buds still nestled in her ears. She had fallen asleep while listening to her music. Nothing strange about that. Nothing strange here at all. And yet there was a lingering unease in my chest, an unsettling feeling in my brain that indeed something
was
wrong here, that I'd imagined nothing. Perhaps my exhaustion combined with the shadows in the room had merely composited an optical illusion from clothes, flattening perspectives of various objects to form an impression of my daughter's likeness sitting at her desk. It seemed unlikely given the clarity of what I'd seen, but fine, if I had to concede that it was possible, if not probable, then I could. But what of her words? Had I imagined them too? Or simply misinterpreted as sinister something she'd mumbled in her sleep? Maybe she'd been dreaming, and said: "Here to tuck me, Mommy?" and not "He touches me, Mommy." But she was too old for such infantile requests and I knew it.

I brushed a lock of my daughter's hair away from her forehead and she offered me a wan smile.

"You okay?" she asked.

"I am. You?"

"Uh-huh. What time is it?"

"Late. Go back to sleep. I'm sorry I woke you."

She nodded and closed her eyes.

I rose, and stood for a moment watching her. Then: "Jenny?"

"Mmm?"

"Thank you for watching Sam tonight."

"S'ok."

You saw nothing
, I told myself.
You heard nothing. And if you did, remember what happened with Sam. You're tired, and sick. You need help. Until you get it, keep it together. It'll be fine in the end.
Just hold on.

I bent down and kissed Jenny on the forehead, just as I had done with Sam, the difference being that if Jenny had been fully conscious, she wouldn't have stood for suc
h an overt display of affection. Likely, she'd have scowled and reminded me how old she was. But the kiss was less for her than for me. I needed the emotional contact to remind myself I was still here among people who loved me, and not on the far side of some dark plain screaming at hallucinations while the real world tried to shake me off. I was afraid, and no amount of self-counseling could lessen the feeling. If I was imagining all of these crazy, nightmarish things, how crazy did that make me? What if the therapist heard my story and decided the best thing for me was institutionalization or a pharmaceutical regimen that would turn me into a drooling zombie?
Would it be any worse an existence than this one?
I asked myself and decided that no, it wouldn't. I had agreed to try alternatives, and as it stood, any of them would be better than being unable to get through a day not populated by hallucinations and nightmares, or the expectation of same.

I turned off the light, and exited Jenny's room.

I did not look back.

Just in case she was there again, sitting at her chair, whispering.

SEVENTEEN

When I came downstairs, I found Chris sitting at the kitchen counter, a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

"Smoking?" I asked him, with half-hearted disapproval. Once upon a time, we'd both shared the habit, but I'd quit on my thirty-first birthday, and Chris had followed suit six months later. Still, we kept a pack in a drawer in the garage just in case events conspired to make having one seem a good idea.

He shrugged. "Just felt like it. Got tired of talking to myself."

"Sorry about that." I poured myself a glass of orange juice, and as I rounded the counter to look upon him directly, I saw to my dismay that he'd been crying.
Looks like the window of good cheer has closed and the skies have turned gray again
, I thought. "What's the matter?"

"Not sure." He looked with fierce intensity at the cigarette clamped between the index and middle finger of his right hand. "I had a good night tonight."

"Me too."

He sighed shakily and took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled smoke. "Is it going to stay like this?"

"Like what?"

He gestured at himself, then me. "This."

"If we want it to, it will, sure."

"Good." He drained his beer. "That's good."

I noticed he wouldn't meet my eyes. "What's eating you?" I asked, suspecting that it was something other than just our present situation.

"Nothing," he said, frowning. "It's nothing." Then he did look at me, if only briefly, and gave me a tired smile. "I'm just drunk. You know me when I've had one too many."

"Or nine," I said.

"Yeah. Maybe I'll go to work tomorrow, after all."

"What made you change your mind?"

He stubbed out the cigarette in his bottle cap. "The money, I guess. Like you said, the shrink isn't gonna be cheap."

"True," I agreed. "But we'll figure it out. And it'll help when I'm back to work too."

He nodded, stood. "You staying up for a while?"

"I wasn't planning on it, no."

"Okay. Think I'm gonna turn in."

"I'll be there in a minute," I told him. "Make sure you brush your teeth and spritz yourself with some deodorant when you go up."

He gave me a quizzical smile. "Why?"

"If you don't, the kids will smell the beer and cigarettes on you when you kiss them goodnight."
And don't you clearly recall Daddy reeking of those very things?
a voice inside me whispered unkindly.

"Yeah, you're right." Chris
looked disappointed. I knew why, but waited until he turned and started for the stairs before I alleviated that feeling for him. "And because I don't much like the taste of it myself."

He smiled, uncertainly at first, until I mirrored it.

"See you upstairs," he said.

* * *

"I'm sorry," Chris said later. He was sitting
naked on the edge of the bed, lit only by the sulfuric glow from the streetlight outside our bedroom window. His face was a mask of blurred and jaundiced shadows. "I don't know—"

"It's all right," I said, releasing his flaccid cock after a good half hour spent trying in vain to get him hard.
As I rose and tugged on my panties, he leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

"Fuck," he said with such ferocity that spittle speckled my bare belly.

I put my hands in his hair and hushed him. "It's not a big deal, Chris. You're drunk, and it's been a while."

He made a startling
sound then, an odd strangled noise I had never before heard from him in all our years of marriage. Alarmed, I tried to take a step back, but he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer, pressed his face hard against my stomach. In an instant, I felt dampness against my skin as he wept.

So many tears
lately
, I thought.
From everyone I know.

"What's wrong?" I asked and stroked his hair.
"Tell me."

"It hasn't been a while," he sobbed and I felt his body convulse as it pumped wave after wave of tears out of him.

"What do you mean?" It was a redundant question, because although I had spent the last few months with a tenuous grip on my faculties, the one condition that could never be attributed to me was stupidity. And like the old sage sayeth:
A woman knows
.

It took him a long time to answer, and the delay only reinforced the certainty in me that I had been betrayed. His eventual response confirmed it.

"I've done something I'm not proud of, baby. And...I'm so fucking...sorry..." More tears, more convulsions followed. I continued to stroke his hair, aware that it might be interpreted as forgiveness, especially given his alcohol and guilt-induced vulnerability, but this was not a typical time in our relationship, and it seemed best, at least until better options presented themselves, not to shut him out. Instead, I allowed him the closeness, let him kiss my belly with his snot-slick lips like an underling seeking clemency, and stared down at the top of his head, at my fingers in the chestnut forest of his hair, and I waited.

"It wasn't planned," he said, voice thick with sorrow. "I swear to
you it wasn't. It just happened."

Why?
I wanted to ask, but didn't. I knew why, just as instinct had informed me of his deeds before he had. It made a certain sick sense that, given my recent behavior, my condition, a lonely man would seek solace and satisfaction in the arms of another woman, no doubt a more stable and loving one. The hate, which had never really retreated, had merely stepped out for a while until it was needed again, returned, like ink dropped into the water of my consciousness.

"It had been so long, and...and I'm so sorry." He tightened his grip on me, making it hard to breathe. I gave him a moment, until the discomfort became too much to bear, then gently pried him loose. He raised his face, cheeks wet, tears made orange by the lamplight, and looked at me with imploring eyes. "Can you forgive me?"

I stared down at him, the taste of his cock still on my tongue, and I wanted to vomit. I wanted to hurt him, to make those orange tears red. Instead, I said, "Yes. I can. If you can give me time."

He nodded, tried to smile. It looked pained. "Don't you want to know—?"

"No," I said sharply. "I don't want to know anything more than you've already told me. It's enough."

He leaned forward
and put his face in his hands again. "You know I'd never hurt you on purpose. I love you, Gillian, and I promise you it'll never happen again."

I thought of us laughing earlier, of the warmth between us, and the feeling that everything was going to be all right, and then I imagined him fucking some stranger, and I felt cold spread through me.
"I'm going downstairs," I said, and scoured the floor in the gloom for something to cover my nakedness.

"Do you want me to come with you?"

"No. You get some sleep. If you're still planning on going to work in the morning, you'll need it."

"I could stay home,"
he said, in his words the desperate need to know we were okay. But that was the last thing I wanted.

"No. Go. I need the time to myself."

"Gillian, you have to believe I'm sorry."

"Get some sleep, Chris. We can talk tomorrow."

"I'd rather talk about it now."

"No," I said, unable to keep the iciness from my tone. "You wouldn't."

There was nothing he could say to that, so that's what he said.

I located one of his dirty T-shirts and considered putting it on until it occurred to me that this, or any of the other clothes scattered a
round the floor might be what he had worn the night he had cheated on me. It might smell like the other woman, might have one of her hairs clinging to it. I flung the shirt aside and went into the bathroom and retrieved my robe from the hook on the bathroom door instead, then headed downstairs, leaving Chris alone with his guilt.

* * *

It was almost five in the morning. I was so tired the room around me jolted rather than moved when I turned my head, but I knew that sleep was unlikely to come. So I sat up, tried to read a Tom Clancy novel Chris had started and given up on, but it wasn't long before I did the same. The words looked smudged, and only aggravated my headache. Next I tried to eat, but managed only to lay some cold cuts on a plate before they began to look exactly like what they were: circular pieces of cold flesh. I stuck the laden plate back into the fridge and thought about drinking. Chris had left plenty of beer in the fridge, and though it was inadvisable for so many reasons, the idea appealed, as did the thought of a cigarette to accompany it. So I fetched a beer, opened it, grabbed a cigarette from the pack Chris had left on the table, and settled down at the counter.

Sat. Put the cigarette in my mouth. Fingered the lighter, all to the faint sound of the beer's carbonated fizzing. Hesitated. I deserved the cigarette, didn't I, despite no real urge to have one? A
nd the beer? Why not slam a few? After all, if I couldn't understand or empathize with Chris's motives for doing what he'd done, maybe I could at least get hammered enough to meet him at his level. And hey, maybe it would be enough to knock me into a dreamless sleep after I got done telling my husband what a backstabbing shit-for-brains he was.