After the End(88)

It is amazingly, absurdly, astoundingly therapeutic.

I hold up our wedding plate. A present from one of Pip’s old colleagues, it was brought to our wedding reception with a pack of colored pens, and taken away afterward—replete with goodwill messages from our guests—to be glazed and fired. May your marriage bring nothing but blue skies, reads one of the messages.

“No.” Our fingers brush against each other as Pip takes it from me. “Not that.”

“Just this, then,” I say softly. I pick up the framed picture. “We can’t divide this in two.” It’s the picture Dylan made at school. My family. It isn’t the only one—it was made on a computer and a copy emailed to us to keep—but this one was printed at school. In the bottom right-hand corner is Dylan’s thumbprint, carefully helped into place by his art therapist.

“You keep it,” Pip says.

I want it so badly. I hold it in two hands and think of my boy putting colors on the page until three shapes emerged, one smaller than the others. Maybe it was fanciful to imagine he knew what he was doing, but I want to believe he did. “You’re his mom. You take it.”

Her eyes shine as she looks at the picture, then she hands it back to me. “Take it home, Max. Take him to Chicago.” I want to tell her I love her, that she’s the only one I’ve ever loved, ever could love.

“Thank you,” I say instead.

We have dinner at a restaurant around the corner from the storage lot. The place is deserted, a bored waitress perched on a stool by the bar.

“Is there any chance you could squeeze us in,” Pip asks, deadpan. “We haven’t booked, I’m afraid.”

I stifle a laugh, but the waitress is looking around the empty room. “Um . . . yeah, I think that would be fine.”

She seats us at a corner table, where we sit at right angles to each other. We work our way through the terrible menu, drink white wine that makes us grimace, and remember the awful restaurant we went to on honeymoon, when the waiter couldn’t tear his eyes away from Pip’s cleavage, and the steak came garnished with a hair.

“And they still asked us to leave a TripAdvisor review!”

Pip laughs, then she looks at me, suddenly serious. Something sinks inside me. We’ve been playacting, tonight. Remembering how things used to be. This isn’t real.

“I’ve met someone,” she says.

I swill my vinegary wine around my glass, examining it earnestly before taking a sip.

“It’s early days—nothing serious—but I wanted you to know.”

“Congratulations.” Do I mean it? A piece of me does, I think. A small piece. A very small piece. I love her. I want her to be happy.

“His name is Lars. He’s a pilot at work. I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere, but . . .” She trails off. We eat in silence for a while.

“If I hadn’t . . .” I can hardly bear to say it, but like some kind of masochist, I have to know. “If we hadn’t gone to court, do you think we’d still be together?”

I don’t realize my hand is halfway across the table until I feel her fingers through mine. Our eyes lock, and our fingers intertwine, and my heart hurts so much I would give anything to turn back the clock, because she’s nodding slowly, reluctantly. Yes.

“But it wasn’t just the verdict that broke us, Max, it was everything. Dylan’s treatment, the court case, the very fact we had to choose whether our son lived or died. It broke us.”

“Afterward . . . we should have tried harder. We should have made it work.”

“Afterwards, everything changed.” Pip’s crying, now, and I squeeze her hands in mine and wish I could take all her pain away from her. “We were carers, not parents; coworkers, not husband and wife.”

I’m shaking my head, but she’s right—everything she’s saying is right. I wish it weren’t, but it is.

“It hurts to be apart,” Pip says, “but it hurts more to be together.”

I’m glad we chose this godforsaken restaurant, and that no one else wanted to eat here, because now I’m crying too. “I’m so sorry, Pip. I never thought our marriage would fail.”

“Fail?” She shakes her head fiercely. “No, Max. Our marriage ended, but it didn’t fail.”

She leans toward me and presses her cheek against mine, and we stay like that for the longest time.





forty





Pip


   2015


Aeroplanes are countries of their own, their time zones elastic. Passengers eat breakfast at supper time, crack open the G & T when the sun’s still high. On aeroplanes you are oblivious to the real world, and today I wish the journey would go on forever.

I ate breakfast in my room, too worried about bumping into Lars to risk leaving. What was I thinking? What went through his head when I kissed him? One of those, he must have thought. Another trolley dolly with her sights set on a pilot. But I’m not. I wouldn’t. I . . . and yet I did. At least, I tried.

What would I have done, if he hadn’t stopped me? Slept with him? To get back at Max? I screw up my face, wracked with embarrassment.

“You all right, love?” A woman with severe sunburn looks at me with concern, perfect white circles where her sunglasses have been. I’m helping out in economy, and glad of the distraction.