The Other Mrs.(38)

The days are getting colder. The coldness leaks into the clinic through the door and windows. The walls are porous, the doors to the clinic always opening and closing. Every time a patient walks in or out, the cold air comes with them.

I dig into a heaping pile of laundry, searching for a brown cardigan, one of those versatile things that go with nearly everything. The sweater isn’t mine. It belonged to Alice. It was in the home when we arrived. The sweater is well loved, worn, which is half the reason I like it. It’s slightly misshapen, covered in pills, with a wide, ribbed shawl collar and big apron pockets I can sink my hands into. Four faux shell buttons line the front of it. It’s close-fitting because Alice was smaller than me.

“Have you seen my sweater?” I ask.

“What sweater?” Will asks.

“The brown one,” I say. “The cardigan. The one that was Alice’s.”

Will says he hasn’t seen it. He doesn’t like the sweater. He always thought it was odd that I laid claim to the sweater in the first place. Where’d you get that? he asked the first time I appeared with it on.

The closet. Upstairs, I said. It must have been your sister’s.

Really? he asked. You don’t think that’s kind of—I don’t know—morbid? Wearing a dead person’s clothes?

But before I could respond, Tate was asking what morbid meant and I left the room to avoid that conversation, leaving it to Will to explain.

Now I find another sweater in the laundry to wear, and slip it over the blouse. Will sits, watching until I’m through getting dressed. Then he rises from the bed and comes to me. He wraps his arms around my waist and tells me not to worry about Jessica. He leans in, whispers into my ear, “She doesn’t stand a chance next to you,” making a poor attempt at humor, telling me that Jessica is a hag, that she bathes infrequently, that half of her teeth are missing, that spit comes flying out of her mouth when she talks.

I force a smile. “She sounds lovely,” I say. Though still I wonder why they have to drive together, why they can’t just meet at the library.

Will leans farther into me, breathes into my ear, “Maybe after the Legos event, after the kids are in bed, you and I can have some bonding time, too.” And then he kisses me.

Will and I haven’t been intimate since the affair. Because every time he touches me, all I can think of is her and I bristle as a result, nipping any suggestion of intimacy in the bud. I couldn’t stake my life on it, but I was sure she was a student, some eighteen-or nineteen-year-old girl. She wore lipstick, that I knew. Hot-pink lipstick and underwear that was flimsy and small, leaving it in my bedroom when she left, which meant that she had the audacity to not only sleep with a married man but to parade around sans underwear. Two things I would never do.

I often wondered if she called him Professor, or if to her, he was always Will. Or maybe Professor Foust, but I doubted that somehow. That seemed far too formal for a man you’re sleeping with, even if he is twenty years your senior, a father of two with traces of gray in his hair.

I thought a lot about audacious young women. About what one might look like. Pixie cuts came to mind, as did low-cut blouses, midriff bared; shorts so short the pockets hung out from below. Fishnet stockings, combat boots. Dyed hair.

But maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe she was a self-deprecating young woman, shy, lacking in self-respect. Maybe the marginal attention of a married man was all she had going for her, or maybe she and Will had a connection that went beyond sex and to a like-minded desire to save the world.

In which case, I think she did call him Professor Foust.

I never asked Will what she looked like. I did, and at the same time didn’t, want to know. In the end, I decided that ignorance is bliss and never asked. He would have just lied anyway and told me there wasn’t another woman. That it was only me.

If it wasn’t for the boys, our marriage may have ended in divorce after the affair. I’d suggested it once, that maybe Will and I would be better off if we got a divorce, that the boys would be better off.

“God, no,” Will told me when I’d suggested it. “No, Sadie, no. You said that would never happen to us. That we’d be together forever, that you would never let me go.”

If I said that, I didn’t remember. Either way, that’s the type of ridiculous nonsense people say when they’re falling in love; it doesn’t pass muster in a marriage.

There’s a small part of me that blamed myself for the affair. That believed I’d been the one to push Will into the arms of another woman, because of who I am. I blamed my career, which requires that I be detached. That detachment, the absence of an emotional involvement, works its way into our marriage at times. Intimacy and vulnerability aren’t my strong suit, nor have they ever been. Will thought he could change me. Turns out he was wrong.



SADIE


When I pull into the clinic parking lot, I’m grateful to find it empty. Joyce and Emma will be here soon, but for now it’s only me. My tires skid on the pavement as I make a sharp left turn into my spot, searching the adjacent street for signs of high beams.

I step from the car and make my way across the parking lot. This early in the day, the world is asphyxiated by fog. The air around me is murky, like soup. I can’t see what’s five feet in front of me. My lungs are heavy, and suddenly I don’t know for certain if I’m alone or if there’s someone out there in the fog, watching me. Standing just beyond those five feet where I can’t see. A chill creeps up my spine and I shiver.