Mother May I(28)



Too late.





9




We sat in silence the whole way home, Gabrielle, then me, then Marshall in a row in the backseat of the dark sedan. I could feel the tension in their bodies, a thousand silent questions pushing in on me from both sides.

I was going to answer those questions, too. All of them. As soon as we were alone. I’d stopped acting out of panic and blind obedience. Now I was thinking, deciding, and a vast black calm settled over me. The mother had lied about the pills. Maybe about everything. I could not face the conclusions I was drawing by myself.

I checked my messages. Mom had texted to ask if I’d seen Peyton’s cell phone. The simple query made my heart twist. It was so precisely Peyton, a quiz-bowl MVP who never forgot a fact but could not remember where she’d put her phone, or her shoes, or even the Burt’s Bees lip balm she claimed she’d die without. Anna-Claire had texted, too, telling me to check her Insta if I wanted to see the cookies. I had an immediate, fierce longing to feel my girls tucked up against me, one on either side, smelling of sugar and vanilla and coconut shampoo. But for now I needed them safe at Mom’s.

Trey had texted, too. He’d talked to both girls. Stomach flu! No wonder I haven’t heard from you. Rest up and feel better. Call me in the morning. Love you.

In the front seat, our young driver whispered into a headset, the nothing-talk of the newly in love. Something about a movie, but I could tell by the tone that the subject didn’t matter. They only wanted to be talking to each other.

Trey and I had been like that, once upon a time. Every happy couple has that phase. For us it happened fast. He was so easy to talk to that the glass of wine led to a dinner date, then a play with drinks after. We made the world bigger for each other. He liked to feed me things I’d never tried before: marrow, quail, unpasteurized French cheeses. His theatre experience was limited to sleeping through Phantom until I introduced him to Pearl Cleage, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard. I was playing Babe in Crimes of the Heart at school, and he came to see me. Twice.

Once we started sleeping together, I was lost. I’d had a couple of serious boyfriends, but neither of them had ever seemed to know if sex was good for me or not. Trey? Trey tried things and asked things, until he knew. Sex felt like something he was inventing for me. I abandoned my dorm room, commuting from his bachelor apartment up in Buckhead, addicted.

In the wake of it, my body languorous and so sated I felt as stretchy and abandoned as a cat, we would whisper back and forth. I got a pretty clear picture of the life he wanted.

Kids topped the list. At least two, and soon. He was thirty-three, and he wanted to have them young enough to camp and ski and scuba-dive with them. He imagined a big Buckhead house with an outdoor kitchen. Family dinners, game nights, summers at a second home on Tybee. He worried that he wouldn’t get these things with me.

“You’re so young,” he said over and over. At the museum, with my updo and understated makeup, he’d thought I must be twenty-five at least. “So young and so damn talented.”

I was supposed to move to New York to pursue acting after graduation, but the more time I spent with him, the sillier it seemed. New York had been Betsy’s plan. In high school, and then at Georgia State, she’d spun tales of how we’d rent someone’s walk-in closet, sleep in bunk beds, eat Top Ramen. We’d waitress, covering each other’s shifts for auditions, until we got our breaks. I was holding on to a future she’d invented. One that she’d already lost interest in.

She and Marshall had been married two years by then. They’d finished the police academy and had full-time jobs and an apartment. They were grown-ups, talking about trying for a kid of their own. Watching them together, happy and bonded, taught me that the shape of love changed inside a marriage, but not necessarily for the worse. It could deepen. Get better and sweeter. They were building something real.

The things Trey wanted started sounding real to me as well. Real, but very specific. I wasn’t sure if he would shift his detailed dreams enough to make them ours. I started editing them, out loud. Yes to a big house with an outdoor kitchen, but not in Buckhead. I’d met his family by then and felt their chill. I wanted Decatur, which was artsier and, back then, more diverse. Yes, hell yes, to kids, and yes to Robert Evan Cabbat IV, if we had a boy. But no to Ireland for a girl. I liked classic names: Eleanor, Rose, Claire. Also, I thought a Tybee house would tie us down. I wanted to travel, show our kids the world and see it myself. He liked my ideas, and our dreamy whispers started to sound more like plans. When he asked me, I said yes.

It had been such a good call. Sixteen years in and we loved each other still, rock solid. The spark of attraction between us waned at times, but it always flared again, strong and bright and somehow grounding. He was a great dad, patient and good-humored.

But in the quiet darkness of the Lyft sedan, listening to the young driver whisper nonsense with his lover, I was thinking clearly. About Spence, and the mother and her daughter, and lies, and my husband’s job. Trey and Spence worked together on almost every case they did. Whatever Spence had done, Trey must have known about it. Maybe Trey had helped.

I’d push the thought away, only to have my husband’s beloved face rise up again in my mind. Questions rose with it, brand-new and ugly.

What did you do?

And worse. What will it cost us?

We pulled into my driveway. I hustled Marshall and Gabrielle inside, then sent them on through to the great room and did a lap around my house, making sure all the blinds were closed. I had no idea where the daughter was. She might still be at the party, or off to meet her mother, or living some unimaginable life of her own. She would not be coming back here to watch me, though. I was terribly afraid that there was no reason to watch me anymore. I closed the blinds anyway, praying I was wrong.

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