The Perfect Marriage(20)

There was a general rule among the teachers that you didn’t take phone calls in the lounge. But an exception was made if the call was short, in consideration of the fact that even teachers weren’t allowed to be seen in the hallways with a phone, and it could take ten minutes to walk outside, which meant that a two-minute call would take up nearly half your lunch break.

“Everything okay?” he whispered, conserving his words so as to not disrupt the other teachers.

“No. Everything is definitely not okay.”

Jessica began telling him that Owen’s cancer had returned and something about a possible experimental treatment. As soon as she did, the air left his lungs. He felt as if he might pass out.

Jessica did nearly all the talking, and for most of it, she sobbed. Their call ended in less than five minutes, which was still long enough that Wayne got the stink eye from Ed Weston, who had been old when Wayne joined the faculty twenty-two years ago.

Wayne knew that Owen had never been cured—that you never were cured of leukemia—but it had been easy to accept Jessica’s assurances to the contrary. The few times he had made a comment that hopefully Owen would be well enough to go to college, Jessica had glared daggers at him, suggesting that it was Wayne’s pessimism, rather than the cancer, that was making their son sick.

In the end, like so many other things, he’d been right, and she’d been wrong. It reminded him of all the times he’d said that something was not right in their marriage, and that maybe counseling would help, and she had gaslighted him into believing their problems were all in his mind. Right up until the day she left, in fact.

He tried to focus on the one positive thing Jessica had said: the experimental treatment. But just as quickly he remembered that health insurance wouldn’t cover it and that it would cost several hundred thousand dollars.

Wayne calculated the maximum amount of money he could beg, borrow, and steal. He had no assets to sell. In fact, he was in debt up to his eyeballs. He had used every last nickel he could get his hands on—which included getting cash advances on his credit cards and taking a second mortgage—to fund the $50,000 he needed to buy Jessica out of her half of the equity they had in their house during the divorce. The housing market dropped even before the ink on the divorce decree was dry. If he sold the house now, he doubted he’d net much more than thirty grand after transaction fees and paying off both mortgages, and he’d still have to find a new place to live.

His 401(k) had less than $20,000, his savings account less than $2,000.

Wayne still had thirty minutes left for lunch but no appetite to go with it. He decided that his time would best be spent out of view of the other teachers.

He didn’t stop back at his locker to get his coat and felt a shiver the moment he left the building. Still, he found the fresh air helpful to break him out of the daze he’d been in since answering Jessica’s call.

An empty bench was a few feet away, overlooking the football field. Wayne sat down, covered his face with his hands, and began to cry.



Reid had not even tried to hide his annoyance at James’s rejection of his proposal, suggesting that James take the train back into the city under the rather transparent ruse that he needed to conduct some business out of East Hampton for the next few days.

The train back to Manhattan was delayed outside Bay Shore. Some type of track problem, the conductor said. The end result was what should have been a four-hour trip took nearly twice that long. James called Jessica and told her to have dinner without him, his own evening meal a slice of pizza he grabbed in Penn Station.

By the time James finally got home, he expected Jessica to already be in the bedroom. Instead, he found her in the living room, sitting almost completely in the dark but for a small reading lamp beside her. The television was off, and he didn’t see a book or anything else that could have been occupying her time.

“Sit down, James,” she said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

He knew at once that whatever it was, it was serious. He did as she asked.

“I got some terrible news at Owen’s doctor’s visit,” she said. “It wasn’t a redo of the blood test, after all. The last test showed the cancer was back. They wanted him to retest, but they’re sure it’ll be the same result.”

Jessica was trying to keep an even keel about this news, but James knew it must be devastating her. By the time he’d met Jessica, Owen’s cancer was something spoken about in the past tense. Like a movie he had walked into in the middle, after that particular plot point had already been resolved. Still, he knew that this very possibility had always hung over Jessica like a black cloud.

“Oh God, I’m so sorry, Jessica. What . . . what’s the prognosis?”

“It depends on if you’re a glass-half-full type or not, I suppose,” she said, trying to eke out a smile that didn’t quite appear. “The doctor wants to put Owen on this experimental treatment. He said that if Owen qualifies for it, there’s a good chance—actually the doctor said a very good chance—that the cancer would go back into remission.”

“That’s good news, then, right?” James said.

He was trying to sound upbeat, even though he knew that anything short of a guarantee of survival still sounded like a death sentence when it pertained to your child.

“Not great, though. It’s going to cost a lot.”