CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
The next morning, I awaken feeling more refreshed than I have in years. I’ve slept straight through for nine hours without the aid of alcohol or a pill. Another small victory.
I can hear Aunt Charlotte puttering in the kitchen as I approach. I walk up behind her and envelop her in a hug. Linseed and lavender; her scent is as comforting to me as Richard’s aroma is unsettling.
“I love you.”
Her hands cover mine. “I love you, too, honey.” Surprise threads through her voice; it’s as if she can sense the shift within me.
We have hugged dozens of times since I moved in. Aunt Charlotte embraced me as I sobbed after a cab left me on her building’s doorstep. When I was unable to sleep as the memories of the worst times in my marriage tormented me, I felt her slip onto the bed and wrap me up in her arms. It was as if she wanted to absorb my pain. For every page in my notebook that I filled with descriptions of Richard’s deceit, I could write an equal number recounting times throughout my life when Aunt Charlotte has buoyed me with her steady, undemanding love.
But today I’m the one reaching out to her. Sharing my strength.
When I let go, Aunt Charlotte picks up the pot of coffee she has just brewed, and I pull the cream out of the refrigerator and hand it to her. I crave calories—nourishing food to fuel my newfound fortitude. I crack eggs into a pan, scramble in cherry tomatoes and shredded cheddar cheese, and slide two pieces of whole-grain bread into the toaster.
“I’ve been doing some research.” She looks up at me and I can tell she knows exactly what I’m talking about. “You are never going to be alone in this. I’m here for you. And I’m not going anywhere.”
She stirs the cream into her coffee. “Absolutely not. You’re young. And you are not spending your life taking care of an old woman.”
“Too bad,” I say lightly. “Like it or not, you’re stuck with me. I found the best macular degeneration specialist in New York. He’s one of the top guys in the country. We’re seeing him in two weeks.” The office manager has already emailed me the forms that I’ll help Aunt Charlotte fill out.
Her wrist moves in more rapid circles, and the coffee is in danger of sloshing over the edge of her mug. I can tell she’s uncomfortable. I’m sure that as a self-employed artist, she doesn’t have a great health-care plan.
“When Richard came by, he gave me a check. I have plenty of money.” And I deserve every cent of it. Before she can protest, I reach for a mug of my own. “I can’t argue about this before I have coffee.” She laughs, and I change the subject. “So, what are you doing today?”
“I thought I’d go to the cemetery. I want to visit Beau.”
Usually my aunt makes this trip only on their wedding anniversary, which is in the fall. But I understand she is seeing everything anew now, fixing familiar images into her memory bank to revisit them when her eyesight is gone.
“If you’re up for company, I would love to join you.” I give the eggs a final stir and add salt and pepper.
“You don’t have to work?”
“Not today.” I butter the toast and slide the eggs out of the pan, dividing them between two plates. I serve Aunt Charlotte, then take a sip of coffee to buy some time. I don’t want to worry her, so I come up with a story about storewide layoffs. “I’ll explain it to you over breakfast.”
At the cemetery, we plant geraniums by his headstone—yellow, red, and white—as we trade some of our favorite Beau stories. Aunt Charlotte recounts how the first time they met, he pretended to be the blind date she was meeting at a coffee shop. He didn’t reveal the truth until a week later, on their third date. I’ve heard this story many times, but it always makes me laugh when she tells the part about how relieved he was to no longer have to answer to the name David. I share how I loved the little journalist’s notebook he kept in his back pocket with a pencil threaded through the spirals. Whenever I came to New York with my mother to visit, Uncle Beau gave me a duplicate one. We’d pretend to report on a story together. He’d take me to the local pizza parlor, and while we waited for our pie, he’d tell me to record everything I saw—the sights, the smells, what I overheard—just like a real reporter. He didn’t treat me like a little kid. He respected my observations and told me I had a sharp eye for detail.
The midday sun is high in the sky, but the trees shade us from the heat. Neither of us is in any rush; it feels so good to be sitting in the soft grass, chatting comfortably with Aunt Charlotte. In the distance I see a family approach—a mother, father, and two kids. One of the little girls is riding on her father’s shoulders, and the other is holding a bouquet of flowers.
“You were both wonderful with children. Did you ever want to have any?” I’d posed the same question to my aunt once before, when I was younger. But now I’m asking as a woman—as an equal.
“To be honest, no. My life was quite full, with my art and Beau traveling on assignment all the time and me joining him. . . . Plus, I was lucky enough to get to share you.”
“I’m the lucky one.” I lean over to briefly rest my head on her shoulder.
“I know how much you wanted children. I’m sorry it didn’t happen for you.”
“We tried for a long time.” I think of those slashing blue lines, the Clomid and resulting nausea and exhaustion, the blood tests, the doctor’s visits. . . . Every single month, I felt like a failure. “But after a while, I wasn’t sure if we were meant to have kids together.”
“Really? It was that simple?”
I think, No, of course not, it wasn’t simple at all.
It was Dr. Hoffman who finally suggested to me that Richard should have a second semen analysis. “Didn’t anyone tell him that?” she’d asked as I sat in her immaculate office during one of my annual physicals. “There can be errors in any medical test. It’s standard to repeat the sperm analysis after six months or a year. And it’s just so unusual for a healthy young woman like yourself to be having this much trouble.”
This was after my mother had died; after Richard had promised things would never get bad again. He’d made an effort to come home by seven o’clock several nights a week; we’d taken a long weekend trip to Bermuda and another to Palm Beach, where we golfed and sunbathed by a pool. I’d recommitted to our marriage, and after about six months, we’d agreed to start trying anew for a baby. The job Paul had suggested never came through, but I continued my volunteer work with the Head Start program. I’d told myself I’d been partly to blame for Richard’s violence. What husband would be happy to learn his wife was sneaking into the city and lying about it? Richard had told me that he’d thought I had a lover; I reasoned he would never have hurt me otherwise. As time passed and my sweet, attentive husband brought me flowers just because and left love notes on my pillow, it became easy to rationalize that all marriages had low points. That he would never do it again.
Just as my bruises faded, so, too, did the small, insistent voice inside me that cried out for me to leave him.
“My marriage was kind of . . . uneven,” I tell my aunt now. “I began to worry about bringing a child into such an unstable environment.”
“You seemed happy with him at first,” Aunt Charlotte says carefully. “And he clearly adored you.”
Both statements are true, so I nod. “Sometimes those things aren’t enough.”
When I told Richard what Dr. Hoffman had said, he immediately agreed to get retested. “I’ll make the appointment for Thursday at lunch. Think you can keep your hands off me for that long?” We’d learned the first time that he had to wait two days to build up a good number of mobile sperm.
At the last minute, I decided to join Richard for this test. I thought back to how he was always beside me at my fertility appointments. Besides, I didn’t have much else to do that day and figured it might be nice to spend the afternoon in the city, then meet him after work for dinner. At least those were the reasons I told myself.
When I couldn’t immediately reach my husband on his cell phone, I called the clinic. I remembered the name from the first time Richard had gone years earlier—the Waxler Clinic—because Richard had joked that it should really be called the Whack-Off Clinic.
“He just phoned to cancel a little while ago,” the receptionist said.
“Oh, something must have come up at work.” I was grateful I hadn’t begun the journey into the city.
I’d assumed he’d go the following day, and I planned to suggest at dinner that I accompany him.
That night, when I greeted him at the door, he folded me into a hug. “My Michael Phelps boys are still going strong.”
I remember time seemed to shudder to a stop. I was so stunned I couldn’t speak.
I pulled back, but he just hugged me tighter. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’re not going to give up. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll figure it out together.”
It took everything I had to look him in the eye when he released me. “Thank you.”
He smiled down at me, his expression gentle.
You’re right, Richard. I will get to the bottom of this. I will figure this out.
The next day, I bought my black Moleskine notebook.
My aunt has been my confidante for much of my life, but I will not burden her with this. I reach into my purse for the bottles of water I brought along and give one to her, then I take a long sip from mine. After a little while, we stand up. Before we leave, Aunt Charlotte slowly runs her fingertips across the engraved letters of her husband’s name.
“Does it ever get easier?”
“Yes and no. I wish we’d had more time. But I’m so grateful I had eighteen wonderful years with him.”
I link my arm through hers as we walk home, taking a long route.
I think of what else I can do for her with Richard’s money. My aunt’s favorite city in the world is Venice. I decide that when this is all over—when I’ve saved Emma—I will take my aunt to Italy.
After we arrive home and Aunt Charlotte goes into her studio to work, I am ready to execute my plan to get the AmEx statement to Emma. I know how I’m going to do it, because Emma never changed the cell phone number she used as Richard’s assistant. I will photograph the document and text it to her. But I need to transmit it when Richard won’t be near, so she can absorb the full implications of what she is seeing.
It was too early when Aunt Charlotte and I left this morning; they might have still been together. But by now he should be at work.
I take the statement out of my purse and smooth it open. The AmEx is Richard’s business card, the one he keeps for his sole use. Most of the charges on this statement are for lunches, taxis, and costs associated with a trip to Chicago. I also see the fee for the caterers for our party; I signed the contract and specified the details, but since it was primarily a business function at our home, Richard had said to use the AmEx card they had for us on file. The four-hundred-dollar charge from Petals in Westchester covered the cost of our flower arrangements.
The Sotheby’s wine refund is at the top of the statement, a few lines above the charge for the caterers.
I use my phone to take a photograph of the entire page, making sure the date, the name of the wine store, and the amount stand out clearly. Then I text it to Emma with a one-line message:
You placed the order, but who canceled it?
When I see that it has been delivered, I put down my cell. I didn’t use my burner phone; there’s no longer any need to conceal what I’m doing. I wonder what Emma’s memory will reveal when she looks back at that night. She thinks I was drunk. She believes Richard covered for me. She is under the impression that I polished off a case of wine in a week.
If she realizes one of those things is not true, will she question the others?
I stare at my phone, hoping this will be the thread she begins to worry between her fingertips.