Lost Along the Way(32)

A year ago she’d sat at the kitchen table and looked around her cozy Long Island home—specifically at the walls, which would never be decorated with family portraits or covered with scribbles drawn in crayon. She’d waited for Steve to get home from work. Whether or not he sensed it was coming, she’d never know.

“I think it’s time for us to admit this isn’t working,” Meg said. She refused to look at him, choosing instead to focus on a tree branch in the backyard that rocked in the wind. “You’ve done the best you could, and so have I, but we don’t work. Not like this.”

He dropped his briefcase on the floor at the back door and hung his car keys on the small hook on the wall. He opened the fridge and removed a can of beer, then decided against it and returned it to the shelf. He sat next to her and took her hand.

“We can try adoption again. The last one just wasn’t meant to be, but there are plenty of kids who need good parents. Don’t give up because you’re frustrated. I’m frustrated too, but we need to keep trying,” Steve pleaded.

“I wish I was strong enough to go through it again, but I’m not. I’ve accepted that this is my life, and that for whatever reason, it’s what God wants for me. I can’t take any more disappointments. It will break me. I need to start looking forward. You should, too.”

“I’m not giving up on us. I want to make us work. I don’t know why we can’t move on from this,” he said, looking so very tired.

“I can move on from this, but I won’t take you with me. You can have a different life. You can have a different future. The only thing holding you back is me, and I haven’t been a wife to you in a very long time.”

“That’s not true,” he whispered.

“Do you remember that night not long after we were married, when I got all dressed up and wore that beautiful necklace you bought me for my birthday? We went to dinner and then walked around talking about all of the things we were going to do and all of the things we wanted for our life together?”

“How could I forget it? Your heel got stuck in a subway grate and broke in half. You had to hobble the last five blocks home,” he said, rubbing his thumb across the veins in the back of her hand.

“That was right before I found out I was pregnant for the first time. And after that everything just went off in a different direction. We never did any of the things we said we were going to do. I never got to be the wife I wanted to be. I never took care of you the way you deserved. It’s like this little hole started to grow inside me, and over the years I’ve just crawled further and further inside it. The only thing I can do now is let you go.”

“I don’t want a divorce,” he said, sighing deeply and fighting to hold back a lone tear that was brimming in his left eye. She reached up and brushed it away with her thumb, tracing his jaw with her finger before returning her hand to her lap. “If you want to separate while we figure out how to go forward, just the two of us, how to make just the two of us enough, we can do that, but I won’t divorce you. I’m not giving up on us.”

“That defeats the purpose,” Meg said, having a hard time believing this conversation was happening. She looked over at the framed picture taken at Jane’s twenty-fourth birthday party, right after she and Steve had returned home from their honeymoon in Mexico. They were two people so very much in love. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. “I want you to give up. I need you to give up, for me. I’ll go to a hotel until I figure out what I’m going to do.”

“No. I won’t let you move to a hotel. I want you to stay here. Let me at least do that for you.”

Once Steve had packed a bag and left for a friend’s house, Meg sat alone with a glass of wine on the leather couch in his office that he’d kept from his bachelor days. She didn’t want to call her parents or her sisters or anyone else, because no one would understand what she was going through. She wasn’t as bothered by her isolation as she’d thought she’d be.

The way she saw it, she was going to have to get used to being alone.





twelve


I really don’t think that this is a good idea,” Cara said to Jane as they made their way through the halls of North Shore High School, looking for the classroom where they’d been told Steve taught his last-period English class.

“I can’t think of a better way to find her, can you? Besides, I always liked Steve and he always liked us. Why would he mind a little surprise visit?”

“No. I certainly don’t have a better idea, but that doesn’t mean I have to like this one.”

The women climbed the four flights of stairs to his classroom, which overlooked the athletic fields out front. Jane stopped for a minute and gazed out a window, vividly remembering her own days in high school and how eager she’d been to get out of there. It’d been twenty years since their graduation, but the after-school scene still looked exactly the same. She watched the jocks in their football pads trying to impress the popular girls as they made their way to their practice field, and caught sight of a group of outsiders who would no doubt spend the afternoon sitting in parked cars somewhere smoking cigarettes and joints, discussing their latest tattoos or piercings or whatever new and inventive way they’d come up with to piss off their parents. God she missed school.