One To Watch(93)

“You never talk about her,” Bea said quietly.

“Vanessa?”

Bea nodded, and Asher sighed.

“I keep expecting that one day I’ll wake up and it won’t hurt anymore. That I’ll finally understand what happened, and I’ll be past it. It’s been seven years, and still. No such luck.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Do you?” Asher looked at her. “The guy who hurt you last year?”

“Of course it’s not the same,” Bea said quickly. “I would never compare the two, she left her children. But waking up every morning, not wanting to think about it, but not being able to help it? That part I know really well.”

“I thought that meeting someone new would help,” Asher admitted. “And in some ways it has—to be with you, to feel so hopeful for the first time in years. But in other ways, I find I’m thinking about her even more. With every milestone you and I cross, I think back to what it was like with her. I don’t mean to compare you, and I hate that I’ve been thinking of her so frequently.”

Bea exhaled. “Asher, it’s only natural that we’re comparing this experience to past ones. How could we not? Especially if we’re looking for warning signs to make sure we won’t be hurt again.”

“I suppose we could will ourselves to forget them, focus on moving forward.”

“That doesn’t really sound realistic, does it?”

He took a sip of wine. “Perhaps not.”

“So, um. How did you meet her?” Bea asked, hoping this question was small enough to draw him out.

“In college,” Asher started. “She had this brilliant energy, and I was enamored. There was this shop near campus where we’d order tea rolls and Nepalese chai, and we would sit there for hours, arguing about moral determinism and the nature of humanity. I was so in love with her—and I was hardly the only one, men always fell all over themselves around her. But she told me she loved how reliable I was. How I never let her down.”

Bea tried to imagine him, this young, earnest person who hadn’t yet become untrusting. She grieved a little for what he’d lost—and what she had.

“Senior year, we started talking about whether to stay together after graduation. She wanted to travel, but I was accepted into a PhD program. We didn’t want to break up, but we thought we had to. Then we found out she was pregnant.”

“Oh wow.” Bea exhaled. “Did you consider an abortion?”

“Of course. But we were taken in by the romance of the situation. She said it would be a new adventure, and we would be homesteaders, raising our little family. It was a sign, she said. We were meant to be together. I couldn’t believe I was so lucky that she wanted to be connected to me for the rest of her life.”

“What happened after you moved?”

A dark expression came over Asher’s face. “We didn’t have any idea how hard it would be. We had no money and this tiny grad-student apartment, I was working all the time, it was freezing cold in Ithaca and she was cooped up all winter long with only an infant for company. I made friends through my program, but whenever I tried to include her, she would make some excuse, say she couldn’t leave Gwen. I didn’t understand how depressed she was.”

“That must have been so hard for both of you.”

“It did get better,” Asher asserted, “for a while anyway. When Gwen got old enough for daycare, Vanessa got a job in town, working at the local co-op. She started working on their farm, making all these friends. We finally moved into our own house, and she seemed happy again. She was always cooking some exotic new vegetable, bringing people over, hosting dinners, music circles in the yard.”

“Music circles?” Bea raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t really sound like you.”

“It wasn’t,” he conceded with a laugh, “but I was so happy that she was happy. When we found out she was pregnant with Linus, I thought, This time will be different. This time, we’ll be the family we were always supposed to be.”

“And was it? Different?”

Asher shook his head. “It was worse—much worse. After Linus was born, Vanessa was angry all the time. She would fly into rages over the smallest things, me bringing home the wrong brand of milk, whatever; storm out of the house and not come back for days. She refused to be around the kids, spent all her time at the farm. I started to feel like I was keeping the love of my life in a cage, and she despised me for it.”

“So what happened?”

“I guess I should have known,” he clipped. “All that time she spent away from home, you’d think it would have been obvious. But I was still devastated when I found out she was cheating.”

“What?” Bea gasped. It hadn’t been obvious to her. Asher nodded sadly.

“I went to the co-op one day to pick her up, and there she was, kissing another man in broad daylight. Not just a peck on the lips, either.” Asher shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of the memory. “She said she forgot I was coming, but I think the truth is she wanted me to see. Maybe she’d wanted me to see for a long time, but I refused to look. I couldn’t take it. I knew we were unhappy, but to see her, to actually see her with someone else—I just lost it. I felt my whole life collapsing on top of me. I kept hearing that word in my head, ‘reliable’—thinking, Is this who I am? Is my character defined by my capacity to be used and punished again and again by someone who thinks so little of other people’s feelings?”