The Wife Between Us(59)

If I showed this picture to strangers and asked them to guess which woman was my mother, they would likely choose Aunt Charlotte, even though physically I resemble my mother more strongly.

I’ve always told myself that I only received superficial traits from my mother, such as her long neck and green eyes. That on the inside, I was my father’s daughter; that I was more like my aunt.

But now Richard’s words boomerang back.

During our marriage, whenever he told me I wasn’t acting rationally, that I was being illogical, or, in more heated moments, when he yelled, “You’re crazy!” I denied it.

“He’s wrong,” I would whisper to myself as I paced the sidewalks in our neighborhood, my body rigid, my footsteps pounding the cement.

I’d slam down my left foot: He’s—then my right foot—wrong.

He’s wrong. He’s wrong. He’s wrong. I’d repeat those words dozens, even hundreds, of times. Maybe I’d thought if I said them enough, they would bury the persistent worry worming through my brain: What if he was right?

I flip to another photo of my mother standing up to give a toast. On a table directly behind her was our three-tiered wedding cake adorned with Richard’s heirloom topper. The porcelain bride’s painted-on smile is serene, but I remember feeling anxious in that moment. Luckily, my mother’s speech at my wedding dinner had been coherent, even if it rambled on too long. Her meds were doing their job that day.

Perhaps I had inherited more from my mother than I’d allowed myself to believe.

I grew up with a woman who inhabited a different world from the station-wagon-driving, grilled-cheese-making mothers of my friends. My mom’s feelings were like intense colors—fiery reds and sparkling, soft pinks and the deepest slate grays. Her shell was fierce, yet on the inside, she was fragile. Once, when a manager at the drugstore was berating an elderly cashier for moving too slowly, my mother yelled at the manager, calling him a bully, and earning applause from the other customers in line. Another time, she knelt down suddenly on the sidewalk, soundlessly weeping over a monarch butterfly that could no longer fly because its wing had been torn.

Had I absorbed some of her skewed vision, her impulsively dramatic reactions? Were the genes that dictated my destiny influenced more by her, or by my steady, patient father’s composition? I desperately wanted to know which invisible attributes I’d inherited from each of them.

During the life span of my marriage, I became gripped by a growing urgency to capture the truth. I chased it in my dreams. I worried my memories would fade like an old color photograph that’s been bleached by light, so I tried to keep them alive. I began to write everything down in a kind of diary—a black Moleskine notebook that I hid from Richard under the mattress of the bed in our guest room.

It’s ironic now, because I’ve surrounded myself with lies. Sometimes I am tempted to succumb to them. It might be simpler that way, to quietly sink into the new reality I’ve created as though it were quicksand. To disappear beneath its surface.

It would be so much easier to just let go, I think.

But I cannot. Because of her.

I set aside the album and walk to the small desk in the corner of my room. I retrieve my legal pad and pen and start again.

Dear Emma,

I would never have listened to anyone who told me not to marry Richard. So I understand why you’re resisting me. I haven’t been clear because it’s hard to know where to begin.



I write until I fill the page. I consider adding one final line—Richard visited me last night—but leave it out when I realize she may think I’m trying to make her jealous, to create the wrong kinds of doubts in her.

So I simply sign the letter and fold it into thirds and tuck it into the top drawer to read one more time before I give it to her.


A little later that morning, I have showered and dressed. I am tracing lipstick over my mouth, covering up the imprint of Richard’s touch, when I hear Aunt Charlotte yell. I run into the kitchen.

Black smoke curls toward the ceiling. Aunt Charlotte is batting a dish towel at orange flames dancing on the surface of the stove.

“Baking soda!” she cries.

I grab a box from the cabinet and toss it on the flames, dousing them. Aunt Charlotte drops the dish towel and turns on the kitchen tap to cold. I see the angry red mark on her forearm as water courses over it.

I remove the pan of burning bacon from the stove and grab an ice pack from the freezer. “Here.” When she moves her arm away from the water, I turn off the tap. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“I was pouring the bacon drippings into the old coffee can.” I pull out a stool for her and she sits down heavily. “I missed. Just a little grease fire.”

“Do you want to go to a doctor?”

She pulls away the ice pack and peers at her arm. The burn is the width of a finger and about two inches long. Luckily it isn’t blistering. “It’s not that bad,” she says.

I look at the overturned box of Domino sugar on the counter, grains spilling out onto the stove.

“I threw sugar on it by accident. Maybe that made it worse.”

“Let me get you some aloe.” I hurry to her bathroom and find a tube in the medicine cabinet, behind her old tortoiseshell glasses and a bottle of ibuprofen. I bring the painkillers back to the kitchen, too, and shake three tablets into my hand, then pass them to her.