Mother May I(96)

“I’m done,” he said. He swiped a furious hand at the tattered pictures sprinkled across our area rug. “Clean this up. Burn those goddamn pieces. I don’t want our nosy, innocent daughters playing jigsaw puzzle with them.”

His fury was a wall. On the other side of that wall I stood, a truth he would not face. I could feel it between us, implacable and unbreachable. He would not look. His whole life had made it easy not to look. No one had ever asked him to before.

Lexie had changed him. He’d distanced himself from Spencer, married Maura. He’d been done with “shitty girls” forever. He was still done, staring me down like I was one of them.

“That’s the last time you threaten to leave me, Bree. If you love me so little, trust me so little, then pack a bag. See how that goes for you.” He said it cool and furious, with all the weight of his family money and his name, and then he stood looking down at me, waiting to see what I would say.

I couldn’t speak. Tears welled in my eyes. My whole body was shaking, love and fear and sorrow all at war. He seemed to see all that. It seemed to soften him. He walked away toward the bathroom door, rubbing at his forehead.

“I need a shower. I need to wash this conversation off me. Then I’m going down to watch movies with the girls and hold my son. I’m sleeping in Robert’s room tonight, on the daybed, so you can get some rest. Take one of my Ambien. You’ve been sitting up all night every night since Sunday. You’re a wreck. That must be where this is coming from.” He paused, as if waiting for an answer. I didn’t have one for him. Not one he would hear right now. He swallowed and nodded, as if my silence were confirmation. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Because if I let you keep on tonight, you’ll break us. I don’t want that. We have three kids. We love each other. I’m not going to let you break us. We will not put our girls through the ugliest divorce this city has ever seen. Think about it, Bree. You don’t want to publicly accuse their father of being a rapist. You know what that will do to them. You’ll tear us apart and make them hate you, and for what? An imaginary story you made up from a photo. You know me. And I know you. I honestly think you only need to get some sleep. Real sleep. It will all look different. We’ve had the most hellish week any parents could ever live through. Let’s not make things worse.”

He went into the bathroom, closing the door deliberately and gently behind him. I heard the lock turn, and then I heard the water running. I knelt down, weeping, and started picking up the pieces of the pictures. He was wrong to worry about the girls finding them. The photographs were shreds and specks. Some things were too broken and too torn to ever again be mended.





26




I didn’t take the Ambien. I’d never tried it before, and I was afraid. Not because of the black label warnings about sleepwalking and memory loss. I was afraid that if the flesh-and-blood Lexie Pine came for us, her will as implacable as her mother’s, her anger more direct and righteous, I would not wake up.

Trey would not make peace with her. Trey refused to be sorry, and I was irrationally fearful that she had somehow heard him say all those awful things, same as I had. In my mind her fury honed itself against his words and his willful denial, sharpening.

I lay all night in our king-size bed, alone. I’d never realized how wide it was, the white expanse of sheets going on seemingly forever. I stared out the window, the drapes pulled open and the backyard floodlights on, listening through the baby monitor to Trey and Robert breathing. I slept in snatches, my mind too busy and worried and unhappy to let me rest.

I did not think that Trey had lied to me. I believed he had told me the story the way he remembered it. He believed every word he’d said. That was the problem. Belief and memory couldn’t make Lexie Pine any less a victim of rape, couldn’t justify his refusals to give that damning picture more than a glance. His belief and his memories also didn’t make me into the girl he’d first seen and fallen for at the High. I’d known him seventeen years, and all that time didn’t make my early history any less like Lexie’s.

A little after four, Robert woke up for his bottle. I listened to my husband feeding his son. He talked so soft and sweet to him, saying, “Is that good, Bumper? Yeah, buddy, there ya go,” and then hummed in a soft rumble. After, the familiar thump of his hand on Robert’s back. “Let’s get that extra burp out.”

Once Robert was back down, Trey crept into our room to get fresh clothes. He took them into the master bath. I feigned sleep as he got ready for work, unready to argue again. I wanted to give him time and space to think, to remember, before I tried to get through to him again. He loved me. I believed that my words would stay with him today. He left early, before six, without trying to wake me.

I went to the nursery as soon as Trey was gone. I didn’t want Robert left alone. Not even in his own room with the baby monitor on. I found him deeply asleep, arms thrown over his head. I felt grainy-eyed and hollow, so tired that my peripheral vision had gone fuzzy and dark spots swam before my eyes.

I sat down in the rocker to wait for him to wake. Down the hall I could hear whichever night-shift bodyguard had not gone with Trey walking heavy-footed to the kitchen. Getting coffee, I assumed. I closed my eyes and rested my head back, limp and faintly nauseous, until Robert stirred, making his stretchy, waking-up sounds.

I opened my eyes, and there, at the foot of his crib, glowing in the pale light of new morning, stood Lexie Pine. She was young and lovely and wrecked and angry in her white dress. I realized it was the white dress. The one her mother believed that every girl was issued at birth, that would show every stain and that she would be wearing on her wedding day. Her wedding day had never come, though. She’d never had a marriage or children, a connected family life, so she had come to show the dress to me. It was torn, streaked with blood and grime. I knew that my husband had helped ruin it. Her mouth twisted down, and her eyes shone with avid hunger as she stared at my son.