The Wife Between Us(55)

I felt my heart skip a beat.

“Did you get the license plate number?” the older officer, the one who did most of the talking, asked.

“I didn’t, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.” Richard drew me in closer. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re trembling. I promise I will never let anything happen to you, Nellie.”

“You’re sure you didn’t see anyone, though, right?” the officer asked me again.

Through the windows I watched the flashing blue and red lights revolve atop the cruisers. I closed my eyes but I could still visualize those frantic colors spinning through the darkness, pulling me back into that long-ago night when I was in senior in college.

“No. I didn’t see anyone.”

But that wasn’t completely true.

I had seen a face, but not in one of our windows. It was visible only in my memory. It belongs to someone I last encountered in Florida, someone who blames me—who wants me punished—for the cataclysmic events of that fall evening.

I had a new name. A new address. I’d even changed my phone number.

I’d always feared it wouldn’t be enough.


The tragedy began to unfold during a beautiful day, also in October. I was so young then. I’d just started my senior year in college. The blistering heat of the Florida summer had yielded to a mellow warmth; the girls in my sorority wore light sundresses or tank tops and shorts with CHI OMEGA stamped across the butt. Our house was filled with a happy energy; the new pledges would be initiated after sunset. As social director, I’d planned the Jell-O shots, the blindfolding, the candles, and the surprise plunge into the ocean.

But I woke up exhausted and feeling queasy. I nibbled on a granola bar as I dragged myself to my early-child-development seminar. When I pulled out my spiral-bound planner to write down the next week’s assignment, a realization stilled my pencil on the page: My period was late. I wasn’t ill. I was pregnant.

When I looked up again, all the other students had packed up and were leaving the classroom. Shock had stolen minutes from me.

I cut my next class and walked to a pharmacy on the edge of campus, buying a pack of gum, a People magazine, some pens, and an e.p.t test as if it were just another casual item on my shopping list. A McDonald’s was next door and I huddled in a stall, listening as two preteen girls brushed their hair in the mirror and talked about the Britney Spears concert they were dying to attend. The plus sign confirmed what I already suspected.

I was only twenty-one, I thought wildly. I hadn’t even finished school. My boyfriend, Daniel, and I had been together for just a few months.

I stepped out of the stall and went to the row of sinks, running cold water over my wrists. I glanced up and the two girls fell silent when they caught sight of my face.

Daniel was in a sociology class that let out at twelve-thirty; I’d memorized his schedule. I hurried to his building and paced the stretch of sidewalk in front of it. Some students sat on the steps, smoking, while others sprawled on the green—a few eating lunch, others forming a triangle and throwing a Frisbee. A girl rested with her head on a guy’s lap, her long hair draped over his thigh like a blanket. The Grateful Dead blared from a boom box.

Two hours earlier, I would’ve been one of them.

Students began to trickle out the door and I scanned their faces, frantically searching for Daniel. He wouldn’t be the guy wearing flip-flops and a Grant University T-shirt, or the one burdened by a cumbersome saxophone case, or even the one with a backpack shrugged onto a shoulder.

He didn’t look like any of them.

After the crowd had thinned, he appeared at the top of the stairs, folding his glasses into the pocket of his oxford shirt, a messenger bag slung crosswise over his chest. I lifted my hand and waved. When he saw me, he faltered, then continued down the steps to where I stood.

“Professor Barton!” A girl intercepted him, probably with a question about his class. Or maybe she was flirting.

Daniel Barton was in his mid-thirties, and he made the Frisbee-throwing jocks, with their leaps and hoots when they caught the disk, look like puppies. He kept glancing at me while he talked to the other girl. His anxiety was palpable. I’d violated our rule: Don’t acknowledge each other on campus.

He could be fired, after all. He’d given me an A during my junior year, a few weeks before our affair began. I’d earned it—we’d never shared a personal conversation, let alone a kiss, until I bumped into him after being separated from my friends at a Dave Matthews beach concert—but who would believe us?

When at long last he drew close to me, he whispered, “Not now. I’ll call you later.”

“Pick me up at the usual spot in fifteen.”

He shook his head. “Today won’t work. Tomorrow.” His brusque tone stung me.

“It’s really important.”

But he was already moving past me, hands in his jeans pockets, toward the old Alfa Romeo that had taken us to the beach on so many moonlit nights. I watched him go, feeling stunned and deeply betrayed. I’d stuck to our agreement; he should have realized this was urgent. He tossed his bag onto the passenger’s seat—my seat—and sped off.

I clutched my arms around my stomach and watched as his car turned a corner and disappeared. Then I slowly made my way back to the sorority house, where everybody was busy preparing.

I just had to get through the rest of the day, I told myself, blinking hard at the tears that filled my eyes. Then I could talk to Daniel. We’d come up with a plan together.