The Marriage Lie(95)

I think about that morning in bed, the way he surprised me with the ring, his expression as he slid it up my finger, and the tears well up all over again.

I gesture for him to keep going.

Will inhales long and deep, blows it all out. “Anyway, I’d missed my flight, so I was waiting at the gate for the next one when the Liberty plane went down. It was almost too easy. You’d be surprised how many holes there were in Liberty’s firewall, how easy it was to buy myself a ticket and get my name on the list of passengers. I didn’t realize until afterward that a plane headed to Seattle would open up a whole other can of worms.”

I think of Susanna, clutching Emma to her chest as that plane fell from the sky, of Evan’s haunted eyes at the memorial. “Those poor people! Their poor families. And for two whole weeks, I thought you were one of them, spread in a million pieces across a cornfield. Do you know what that did to me?”

“I do, and I’m sorry. I can’t begin to tell you how much.”

I look down, at my hands wringing on my lap, at the two rings my husband slid up my fingers. And then I press a palm to my chest, where his ring still hangs on a chain under my shirt. “What about your ring? What about your briefcase and computer?”

“Planted.” He winces. “People will do pretty much anything for money.”

People like you, I think, and pain lodges like a spiky boulder in my chest. I demanded the truth, but now I want to slap my hands over my ears and unhear his words. I want to press control-alt-delete and force a restart. The truth is too much. My husband is a monster.

“See?” he says. “You’re already doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking at me differently. Like you’re wondering how you ever could have loved me.”

I fall silent, because it’s true. That’s exactly what I was wondering.

Will looks away, his gaze landing on the framed Rolling Stones photograph I gave him last year for his birthday. “You preach about nature and nurture and those poor little rich kids you work for, and yet you can’t put yourself in my shoes. You can’t imagine what it’s like when your dad’s too busy whaling on you to hold down a job and your mom’s too drunk to care. Or what it feels like to scarf down a sandwich of rotten mayonnaise and moldy bread and feel relief there’s something lining your belly. Your life is so far removed from that kind of hell, you can’t even picture it.”

His words weigh heavy on my heart at the same time they harden it. Yes, experience has taught me to not blame the child for their parents’ questionable behavior. Children are the product of their parents, and crappy or nonexistent parenting skills load down a child with baggage that’s no fault of their own. I’ve said it often enough that Will knows I believe this to be true. He knows I won’t think less of him for his parents’ failures.

But he also knows I teach my students to move past their baggage by becoming accountable. I teach them responsibility for their own actions and behaviors, to follow the rules and live up to expectations. I told Will this part, too, but just like I had been able to pick and choose what I wanted to believe about him, he was able to pick and choose what he wanted to hear.

“I didn’t know about your life because you never told me. You didn’t even try. How can I imagine something I don’t know anything about?”

Now, for the first time today, Will grows defensive. He lurches to the edge of the couch, and his forehead creases in a frown.

“Come on, Iris. Get real. What would you have said if I’d told you? What if I’d taken you for coffee that very first day and told you Huck and I had a plan, a brilliant, foolproof plan to walk away with more money than we ever dreamed possible. Would you have given me your number? Would you have agreed to a second date?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”

“What you and Huck did was wrong, Will. To your parents, to those poor kids and their mother, to AppSec, to me. To our marriage. And what if that plane hadn’t gone down? You were just going to fly off to Florida and disappear? Did you stop for a second to think about what that would be like for me?”

“I only thought about you. You are all I thought about, even after I left. I wanted to make babies and grow old with you, Iris. I wanted us to last forever. But I couldn’t rewind things with Huck. He threatened to tell you the truth about me, and then Nick found out about the stocks, and he knew I was the one who moved them. I couldn’t stay.”

“Because you wanted the money.”

His hands fist into tight balls, his knuckles hard and white on top of his thighs. “No! Not because of the money. It had nothing to do with the goddamn money.”

“Then, why? Why couldn’t you stay?”

Will’s jaw clenches, and he looks away.

“Tell me why, dammit!”

“Because I’d rather you think I was dead, okay?”

He slings the words like weapons, looking just as surprised to have sent them flying as I am to be on the receiving end. He’d rather I think he was dead than what? I wait for him to explain, and his defiant expression collapses into anguish. It distorts his features like a hosiery mask pulled too tight.

“I fucked up so many things, but my legacy was the one thing I wanted to do right. I wanted you to think I died on that plane, so that you’d never know the truth. I wanted you to have honorable, happy memories of the man you fell in love with, the man you saw every time you looked at me. I wanted to be that man in your memories.”