This Close to Okay(24)
*
Emmett drank a glass of water in front of Tallie’s kitchen sink after she disappeared into her bedroom.
(The police officer had celery-brown eyes. A high and tight haircut, clean-shaven. Gun on his right hip. Last name stitched into his uniform in white: Bowman. His front tooth, slightly crooked. The tip of Tallie’s nose gets hot pink when she cries. Her fingernails are short and painted deep orange. She wears earrings, but no rings. A light confetti of orange and black cat hair on her jeans, below her knees. And she sparks electric…like a woman.)
TALLIE
The orange streetlamp drenched Tallie’s large living-room window with rainy, honeyed light. The gloaming spilled over her houseplants and bookshelves, poured across the floor. She loved that window, the holiness. She sat there in it, watching Emmett sleep. He breathed slow and deep with the ball of his foot pressing the armrest, as if he were kicking to a swim and would splosh the couch to water. She’d told him it was good for him to get extra rest. Tallie spoke with her clients often about their sleep schedules and how important they were to both their mental and physical health.
Like a fever dream, Emmett was on her couch with his backpack tucked next to him, and Joel was in Montana with his hair up in a ponytail, holding his new baby girl. She’d blocked Joel’s number from her phone, but it lived on in her mind alongside the other number minutiae she had memorized. Joel wore a thirty-two thirty-two in pants but could wear a thirty-two thirty also, depending. Joel wore a ten and a half in shoes. Joel had thirty thousand seventeen dollars in his savings account when he and Tallie got married. Joel’s parents’ address was seven zero four. Joel’s brother was two years older. Joel’s birthday was nine nine. Tallie and Joel were married on six six. Tallie and Joel suffered through five failed IVF cycles—numberless injections and hours on the phone with the insurance company, innumerable days in bed, crying, wishing, praying—before they fully believed the unexplained infertility diagnosis. Tallie and Joel were married for ten years and five months. Joel had finally admitted to his affair on ten one, but only after Tallie told him she’d suspected it; she’d caught him texting Odette at two in the morning. Tallie and Joel were separated for the Kentucky-required sixty days, plus four more. They went through uncontested divorce proceedings on twelve four.
Tallie and Joel had gotten married in June in the wildflower gardens by the river, promising I’ll love you forever in front of practically everyone they’d ever known. Joel and Odette had gotten married in December, mere weeks after the divorce. Joel had called Tallie, said they’d gone downtown to the courthouse, told her over the phone that Odette was pregnant.
“Tallie, it was an accident,” he’d said, as if he’d done nothing more than knock a glass of red across a white tablecloth.
“The pregnancy or the marriage?”
Joel was quiet on the phone.
“Marriage doesn’t mean anything to you, Joel.”
What he’d done was catastrophic and brutal. Tallie ended the call before he could hear her cry.
She hadn’t talked to Joel since their last Facebook communication over the summer. They weren’t friends on there anymore. She couldn’t imagine seeing Joel or Odette or their baby pop up on her timeline as she casually scrolled through the photos and anniversaries and recipes and political discussions. She had to be mentally prepared and ready for emotional battle when she looked through Joel’s posts. She’d tried to frame it as a cleansing ritual she eventually wouldn’t need anymore, but she needed it now.
She logged in to Joel’s account on her phone. He’d updated the night before about seeing the latest superhero movie. She and Aisha had gone to see it, too, and Tallie had even gone back to see it again alone. It was perfect candy-coated escapism. But of course Joel picked it apart like he always picked everything apart, even using the word doryphore. No surprise, since Joel was the kind of person who thought the Grand Canyon was overrated. (“I just thought it would be bigger, that’s all.”) Tallie read the whole post, rolling her eyes, wondering if she could pass out from annoyance. She read it again before going to Odette’s page.
Almost everything Tallie knew about Odette she learned from social media. She knew surprisingly little about the details of Joel’s affair, feeling like it was better for her mental health to not have all the answers. Besides, she’d already been haunted by imagining them together—the gruff, chesty sound Joel made when he came, the seashell suck of his ear pressed against Odette’s when he was on top of her. And she’d gotten all she could bear to know from Joel regarding when and where he and Odette had been together: never in their home, always at Odette’s. One compact September-to-October month of clandestine sex, from how Joel told it.
Tallie had been frustrated with herself, half wishing she were the kind of person who wanted him and Odette to die and disappear forever. Or at least the kind of person who could hope for the possible future schadenfreude of Joel eventually cheating on Odette, or their marriage falling apart. But none of that would change what had happened, and she knew the toxicity levels of hating Odette would poison her and her only.
Odette had grown up summering in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue with her grandparents. Odette liked romantic comedies and cheesy Christmas movies. Horses and coffee. Skinny casserole recipes, makeup tutorials. She had favorite Pilates instructors and Zumba classes. Sometimes she posted things Tallie fervently believed in and agreed with, too, like climate-action petitions and Taylor Swift videos. It was a dizzying swirl of intense emotions, knowing she and Odette had anything in common besides Joel.