Chapter Twenty-One
“I’m going to bed,” Henry announced from the living room as I stood shaking at the sink. He didn’t even bother coming into the kitchen. He didn’t thank me, nor apologize for the late notice. He didn’t reprimand me for the aluminum-flavored food and the regurgitated-looking dessert. He didn’t say he loved me. He didn’t ask if I was okay. Instead, he began to shuffle off to our bedroom.
“I’m sorry.” As soon as it came out of my mouth, I knew I shouldn’t have said that to Gary, especially not in front of Jack. Henry stopped, but he didn’t turn to look at me. He nodded, but then kept walking. “Henry!” I called, careful to not risk waking the kids.
This time he turned toward me. His eyes were rimmed with shadows, the bags beneath them heavy with exhaustion. He rubbed at his temples before asking, in a tone of equal parts annoyance and exhaustion, “What, Lulu?”
He didn’t acknowledge my apology. He didn’t look at me and see that I was as tired as he was. He didn’t seem to consider what it had taken for me to serve his guests that evening. The meal may not have been my best, but what did he expect on such short notice? And he didn’t know that his new friend had cornered me in my own kitchen.
I crossed my arms over my chest. I could’ve said a lot of things. I could’ve told him that I didn’t like the way Gary made me feel. I could’ve confessed that I did know where their cat was and that I had snooped in their house. I could’ve told him the truth I had found in that room. But explaining all that
seemed too complicated at that moment, so instead I said, “You’re welcome.”
Henry lifted his gaze to meet mine. He pursed his lips and shook his head as he squinted at me. In truth, he paused for a split second, but that time stretched longer, deeper, expanding the interval between the clock’s ticks to what felt like an eternity.
We had never been the type of couple who fought. We usually got along.
Sometimes we might have had disagreements, but we resolved them quickly, quietly. We weren’t like Nora and Dennis, who could sometimes be heard outside their home, especially on spring days if they had the windows open.
Henry and I didn’t raise our voices to each other. We might give a look or a remark. When I’d said I wanted a house in the country, he explained how a neighborhood better suited us. When he’d wanted to wear loafers to the office, I told him to stick with the derbys. When I’d said I might like a job at the local paper, he said I had too much to do around the house.
We disagreed, but we didn’t fight. But that night, it seemed like maybe we should’ve fought. Perhaps we should’ve raised our voices. Maybe I should’ve told him that I didn’t appreciate having to host on such short notice. And then maybe he would’ve told me why he had even invited Jack over like that.
Then I could’ve told him that I didn’t trust Gary and I thought it was a mistake to let him stay for dinner.
Maybe I’d go even further. Maybe I would tell him how I never wanted that dishwasher, the thing he thought I needed, and I couldn’t stand the sight of it. I wanted to scream at it every time I stubbed my toe or caught my apron on it. Maybe I would tell him how I was beginning to hate the walls of our house, how day after day it felt like they inched closer together. How my skin felt too tight, hot, inflamed, and not my own. How the sun made my eyes burn, so much so that I wondered if closing them forever would be such a bad thing. That I couldn’t even look at my oven without seeing her and how she’d lain her head to rest on the door and closed her eyes for the last time.
But we didn’t say any of that to each other. Instead, that epoch of a split second, along with any attempt at a conversation, ended with his words, “Don’t be so dramatic.”
With that, he went to bed and I waited. What else could I do? If I retorted, it would be proof of the pill’s failure. So, on wobbly legs, I stood in the kitchen and watched the spider in the window methodically swaddle the moth in its web before it dragged the wrapped meal out of sight and waited for its next victim.
When I knew Henry was asleep, I tiptoed into our room to get my nightgown.
I listened to Henry’s rhythmic breathing, knowing what his sleep sounded like, listening for the staccato of his inhales and exhales. I had listened to those sounds every night for the last five years. Even before that, if we were being honest, if we ever confessed to those nights we spent together before we were married. That was in the time when I still slept, when I found comfort in his arms, when I found solace in those breaths, as if in his presence, all was well.
I fumbled through the darkness, the streetlights offering the only amount of light in the room. The shadows shifted across the walls as a car drove by, casting a light across Henry’s face. He moved his head from one side to the other, repositioning so that his back was to the window. I paused, quieting my own breathing until I was certain he was asleep again.
Then I walked into the bathroom and carefully closed the door. As the light flicked on, the pill bottle caught my eye. Those damn pills. I wanted to toss them at the mirror, let it shatter as they spilled out.
I reached behind to unzip my dress. Some nights Henry would help me with that. Or he had. Before he would lock himself away in his office and I started taking baths shortly after dinner. When we used to go to bed together, he used to unzip my dress for me. Some nights that simple gesture was all it
took to light the spark between us. Some nights my dress would fall to the floor, followed by my slip and stockings. They would lay crumpled on the floor as we made our way to the bed. Some nights, I left them all in a pile so in the morning they acted as a monument to our lovemaking.
No such monument had existed for a while now, not since before Esther.
I stretched to reach behind me, having gotten accustomed to unzipping myself. As my dress fell to the floor, the tub caught my eye in the mirror. I wanted to draw a bath and sink beneath the suds, but Esther began to fuss. I knew Henry would tell me to let her be, to stop spoiling her, to stop giving in to her every need. But wasn’t that what a parent should do, even if ours hadn’t?
I put on my nightgown and tiptoed my way back out into our room. I needed to get to Esther, but in the darkness of the room, I caught my toe on the chair Marian had insisted we have. Her father had gifted it to her mother on their wedding day. It was beautiful, but its toile de Jouy print did not match the rest of the decor in our room.
“It’ll be fine,” she’d said with a dismissive wave before adding, “It’ll add a little class to the room.”
Henry always laid his suit jacket across the chair overnight before returning it to the hanger the next morning. A man of constant routine. He claimed it was so the jacket could air out before the next wearing, but part of me always wondered if he put his jacket there as justification for his mother’s insistence of the chair.
My toe throbbed, but I stifled my discomfort. I plopped into the chair, which emitted a screech. Of course the chair squeaked as if it held a built-in alarm, should anyone dare to use it for the purpose it had been created. Henry stirred in his sleep, his snoring stopping for a moment. I squeezed my toe, hoping the hurt would quickly fade. I took a deep breath and rested a hand on the breast pocket of Henry’s coat, feeling a rectangle tucked within it. I
assumed he had forgotten to remove his handkerchief, and I figured I’d do him a favor and remove it before it was forgotten. But when I reached into the pocket, I didn’t feel a cotton square. Instead, I discovered a folded-up piece of paper.
I needed to get to Esther, but first I wanted to see what this was. Perhaps it was something from work, a note about a project. Maybe it was a message from Alice or, worse, a love letter.
A small voice dreaded what I would find and questioned if I should look, but the louder voice told me to keep going. Open it. Read it. Coaxing me to know.
Struggling to read the writing in the dark, I held the paper upward, stretching into a faint glow of light just enough so my eyes, which had grown accustomed to the darkness, could make out the scrawled message. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, nor the phone number and certainly not the name: Dr. Ruthledge.
I folded up the paper and dropped it on Henry’s suit jacket before I made my way to Esther’s room. I took her from her crib and pulled my breast from my nightgown. I felt her latch before I could even sit in the rocking chair.
Dr. Ruthledge. My mind repeated the name. Perhaps he was one of the firm’s clients. Maybe those blueprints Henry had spent so much time working on each night were for him. Maybe he was one of those fussy types who kept requesting change orders, never satisfied with the renderings. I wondered if I should hate the doctor for being so demanding and delaying Henry’s promotion.
In the darkness of the room, as I rocked in silence, I thought about the dinner, the failure that it was, and I hoped that Jack could be forgiving. I didn’t care what Gary thought. He shouldn’t have been there anyway. And why was he there again? Oh, yes. Henry had said Gary wanted to give him something. It concerned what they had talked about the other night.
I thought back to that night when I had tiptoed into the hallway and overheard what Gary had said about his wife. I didn’t know what Nora saw in her. She was exactly the type of person Nora should be calling me about, to tell me about how that odd lady next door wouldn’t stop going on about her missing cat.
I tried not to think about how Gary had approached me in the kitchen.
What kind of a man does that to a woman? I could see the dirt beneath his nail as he slid his finger across the counter. I could see the liver spots that dotted his temple, smell his onion breath, feel the yoke he wielded.
If he made me feel that way, how did Bitsy feel?
What had Gary promised Henry the night he spoke of his wife’s unhappiness? I thought of how distant Henry had been. The looks he had been giving me. The paper in his breast pocket.
And I stopped rocking.
Night had settled over Greenwood hours ago. No one else looked to be awake on all of Twyckenham Court. Even Bitsy’s house remained fully dark.
I looked at that window and wondered what other secrets lay tucked away in those boxes, like the one that revealed her lobotomy. That was how Gary had calmed her.
I wanted so badly for Dr. Ruthledge to be the persnickety client, but in the wee hours of the night, the truth dawned on me: My husband thought I was the same as Bitsy. And the fox in the henhouse wanted to show him how to turn me into the happy housewife I should’ve been.
