The Consequences, page 22
“Exactly.” With the phone propped between her head and shoulder, Kathy started to clear off the kitchen table, loading the cups and plates into the dishwasher. She needed to start prepping the vegetables for Christmas dinner, and it would be nice to get the kids up to bed at a reasonable hour for once. She wanted them up early in the morning; Christmas Day was the one day of the year when the entire family attended church, and it was always preferable to get to one of the early masses. They were shorter. Floorboards creaked overhead, and she suddenly glanced up. Would Robert be attending church with them tomorrow?
In the few days that had passed since she had discovered Stephanie Burroughs’s name in Robert’s phone and begun to suspect the affair, she had found herself asking so many questions. Suddenly everything that she had taken for granted was open to doubt. All the certainties of eighteen years of marriage lay shattered about her. “Why?” she said, and didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until Sheila answered her.
“Why what?”
“Why did he have the affair?”
“Because he could,” Sheila said immediately.
“I keep asking myself if I could have stopped it, prevented it by being more . . . I don’t know, more present,” Kathy said eventually. “And, by the way, what in the world possessed you to tell Julia about Alan?”
Sheila’s laugh was completely without humor. “He was here at the time. He said he was going to tell his wife that he was leaving her for me. . . .”
“Sheila!”
“Hey, I begged him not to. Alan is fun and charming and sophisticated, but he can also be just a little bit pompous and more than a little boring. He’s great in bed and fun to talk to, but he’s definitely not someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. Over the past couple of weeks, he’s been promising me an extra special Christmas present. Guess what it was? That he was going to tell his wife about us.”
“Very romantic,” Kathy said bitterly.
“Tell me about it. That’s the last thing I wanted. I kept telling him not to make an announcement at Christmas, where every emotion is heightened. Then he accused me of being ashamed to be seen with him. I’d never even introduced him to my family, he was saying, and right at that moment Julia called. I have no idea what got into me, but I heard myself saying that I would come over for dinner if I could bring my boyfriend. I’m not sure who was more surprised, Julia or Alan.”
“But she recognized his name,” Kathy said.
“I know. Brookline is so small. How many Dr. Alan Gallaghers are there? She recognized the name, obviously thought about it, and then called me back, asked me point-blank if he was married, and then started asking me if his wife knew we were having an affair, saying she wasn’t going to be able to let this pass. I mean, seriously, what does it have to do with her?”
“Robert asked her the same thing.”
“Anyway, she’s been calling me on and off all night, obviously wanting to discuss the situation.”
“Is Alan still there?”
“No, I convinced him to go home and say nothing.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea. Try and stall him ’til after Christmas. And then dump him. Nicely if I can, but I’m prepared to be brutal.”
“And will you bring him to Julia’s for dinner?”
“Can you imagine how much fun that would be? I doubt she’d even let him in the door. Hey, Alan’s calling my cell . . . d’you mind?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Kathy had a lot to do before she went to bed, and she wanted to bury herself in the simple Christmas Eve routine. Talking to Sheila, knowing that she was involved in her own affair with a married man, was a constant reminder of her own situation. And right now Kathy wanted to forget about it, just for a few minutes. She wanted things to be the way they were last Christmas.
And then she suddenly realized that Robert had been having his affair last Christmas too. Pressing both hands to her mouth, she raced out to the downstairs toilet, where she knelt on the floor and retched in great heaving gulps.
CHAPTER 39
Wednesday, 25th December
Christmas Day
Kathy Walker opened her eyes, suddenly awake and alert. What had awakened her?
She’d gone to bed alone just after midnight when she’d finished in the kitchen, leaving it rich with the smell of Christmas—odors of spice and cinnamon, cooking and candle wax, scents that she would forever afterward equate with betrayal. Rolling over, she glanced at the clock: just before one.
The house was absolutely still and silent, and she knew, even before she rolled out of bed and pulled back the curtains, it had snowed. The world outside the window was solid white, crisp, magical, and clean. Later cars would churn the road to filthy black sludge and children would turn the paths into glistening ice sheets, but right at this moment the world had lost all its sharp edges, and everything looked gorgeous and new.
Kathy slid back into the warm bed, lay on her back, and stared at the ceiling. The room should have been in total darkness, but the snow reflected gray alabaster light onto the ceiling.
A white Christmas.
She’d been a child the last time it had snowed on Christmas Day. It should be something to celebrate—but not this Christmas, not today.
Yesterday—was it only yesterday?—she had confronted her husband’s mistress.
Yesterday, she had walked up to a woman she did not know and had slapped her across the face.
Yesterday, she had drunk tea with the woman who was sleeping with her husband.
Yesterday, that woman had given up Kathy’s husband.
Less than twelve hours, and yet it seemed a lifetime ago.
Kathy pressed both hands to her churning stomach. From the moment she had set out to drive to Stephanie Burroughs’s apartment, her stomach started to burn with acid indigestion. When she’d climbed out of her car before the woman’s house and rested her finger on the bell, she’d thought she was going to throw up.
On the drive home, she’d had to pull off the road twice and roll down the window to breathe in great, heaving breaths. The cramping pain had come back at her again throughout the remainder of the day. It had grown worse in the late evening and into the night. With the sights and sounds of the encounter with her husband’s mistress running and rerunning through her head, she’d felt her stomach protest, and she’d thrown up until there was nothing left but bitter bile. In desperation, she’d drunk Pepto Bismol—which she hated—straight from the bottle, the chalky liquid coating her tongue and mouth with its milky pink residue.
Kathy glanced across the bed.
Robert’s side was empty. He’d made no attempt to come to bed with her, and she guessed he’d spent the night sleeping in the chair in his study. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if he’d attempted to climb into bed next to her. Got out and slept downstairs, she supposed. But she should have known he wouldn’t want to put himself in a position where they would have to talk.
She knew he didn’t want to do that just yet. They’d had arguments and disagreements in the past, just like every other couple. His usual tactic was to state his position and then simply refuse to discuss it further. After a few vain attempts to raise the topic of conversation, she would normally let it drop, allowing him to win by default. That was not going to happen this time; they needed to discuss the future.
If there was going to be a future.
Then she heard it: the quiet closing of a door followed by the irregular creaking of the stairs. Every sense tingling, she heard him move around downstairs, shuffling from the living room to the kitchen. There was a long silence, and then she heard the kitchen door close. Footsteps hurried upstairs, and she heard his office door open, then close again moments later. This time when the footsteps descended the stairs they sounded more solid . . . as if he had put on his shoes.
Kathy sat up, heart thumping. Surely he wasn’t going out?
The chain on the front door rattled, then the door was gently eased open and pulled closed with a click.
Leaping out of bed, she watched him back the car out of the drive. He hadn’t put on his headlights because they would light up the bedroom, she realized, but his reversing lights painted the snow blood red.
He was going to her.
She’d thought . . . She’d thought . . . When he’d come back with her, he had seemed genuinely contrite, and she had been hopeful that once they got through these few days, they would be able to move on. She’d asked him to promise not to see Stephanie again, and he had, but without a huge amount of conviction, she’d thought. Talking about Stephanie, he’d said, “In any case, I think you can tell from today that she’ll want little enough to do with me.”
He’d lied to her.
There were no tears now, just a cold anger . . . coupled with a feeling of absolute helplessness. What was she going to do? What could she do? Throw him out? Gather all his clothes, stuff them into the suitcases, and fling them out into the front garden? Call Stephanie and tell her that he was on the way and not to send him back?
Was he even coming back?
Pulling on her robe, she wandered out of the bedroom and into his study. It felt hot and stuffy, the air slightly stale with a hint of his old aftershave overlaying sour perspiration. Everything seemed in order—perhaps in a little too much order. The pile of mail on the desk was certainly a lot neater, and she guessed that if she went to it she would find that the parking ticket and the Visa bill would conveniently be missing.
She wandered down into the kitchen where she found the note beside the phone. “Office alarm has gone off; gone in to see if there’s a problem.”
Her first instinct was to pick up the phone and call the alarm company to confirm. She’d actually lifted the receiver when she changed her mind and put the phone down again. If she and Robert were to begin again, then she had to start trusting him. She’d been wrong about him before, when she had suspected that he’d been having an affair six years ago. Her accusations then had desperately damaged their marriage, and she didn’t want to make that mistake again. Maybe the office alarm had genuinely gone off . . . but she hadn’t heard the phone ring, and when she checked the caller ID, there had been no calls since one of Theresa’s friends had called the house much earlier that evening. If the alarm company were calling, would they have contacted Robert’s cell first, and then the house second, or the other way around? Feeling a little relieved, she returned the note to where she’d found it, then went back upstairs and climbed into the cold bed.
Lying in the silence, she heard the snow hiss and spit against the window and suddenly found herself praying for his safe return.
But at the back of her mind, faint but insistent, was the thought that he had gone to Stephanie. And if he had, she knew, then they were finished.
Finished.
She was still awake at two thirty when he returned.
The minutes had crawled by, second by agonizing second, each one accompanied by visions of an equally terrifying scenario: Robert dead by the side of the road . . . the car on its roof in a pileup on Storrow Drive . . . Robert in the arms of his mistress.
Several times she had reached for the phone to dial his number or the office number or even Stephanie’s number. But each time she had pulled back. If he had gone out for a genuine reason, she didn’t want him to know that she was checking up on him.
When she saw the splash of headlights on the road and heard the car slowly crunch its way down the ice-locked street, she knew it was him and experienced a wave of relief that left her shaking with emotion.
Climbing out of bed, she stood and watched the Audi approach and then the lights click off so that they would not illuminate the front of the house before he turned into the drive. Leaning forward, straightening the curtains, she watched him climb out of the car, and the look of leaden exhaustion on his face convinced her that he had not gone to see Stephanie. If he’d gone to his mistress, surely he would have spent the night, and even if he had decided to return home before Brendan and Theresa got up to open their presents, then he would be looking a whole lot happier.
She heard the hall door open and, for a moment, thought about going down and asking about the office alarm, but then she decided that she didn’t want him to be aware that she knew he’d been out. Stairs creaked, his office door opened and closed, then she heard the pneumatic hiss as he sat back in his chair.
Then silence.
Kathy sat on the edge of the bed for almost an hour, then she padded out of the room, down the landing, and stopped outside his door. She opened the door and peered inside.
Still wearing his leather coat and gloves, Robert was slumped in his office chair, fast asleep. His face was ashen and, even in sleep, lined with exhaustion. He must have gone into the office, she decided. And she felt vaguely guilty then for even having her suspicions.
She was going to have to learn how to trust him again. She would, she promised. Standing in the doorway, watching him sleep in his clothes, Kathy Walker made an early New Year’s resolution: She was going to work to save this marriage because, despite the pain and anguish he had put her through, despite how small he had made her feel, she still loved him.
God help her, but she still loved him.
CHAPTER 40
She dozed rather than slept for the next couple of hours.
Whenever she closed her eyes, events and incidents from the previous days came rushing back. Suddenly she would find herself remembering the look in Stephanie’s eyes when she’d opened the door and found Kathy standing there. Somehow Stephanie hadn’t seemed to be in the least surprised; maybe she too had been relieved that events were coming to a head.
In an affair time stopped. An affair existed in a bubble. It was only when it was discovered or ended that people could go on with their lives. In her own situation, Kathy had been trapped in a world of white lies, half-truths, and evasions, while Stephanie had been equally trapped by the same lies for the past eighteen months. And in the middle was Robert, spinning the lies, trying to balance both worlds, telling both women what he thought they wanted to hear.
She heard movement. The bathroom door opened, then slow and heavy footsteps went downstairs. Maybe Robert also couldn’t sleep.
Kathy got out of bed and went to stand by the window. The front yard and road looked like a traditional Christmas card. No tracks broke the pristine snowy surface; even the tracks left by Robert’s car several hours earlier had been covered over. Some of the houses had lights on, and, across the street, she could see the seven-year-old Brady triplets in their matching Spider-Man pajamas, clustered around the Christmas tree ripping paper off their presents.
She found herself remembering her own childhood, and in particular that morning when she had awoken to find that it had snowed overnight. She shared a bedroom with Sheila, and she’d shaken her little sister awake. She would have been about nine or ten, she thought, old enough to begin to suspect the existence—or nonexistence—of Santa Claus, but not prepared to question it too deeply. Just in case. Together, the two girls had huddled in the window, with the quilt pulled around their shoulders, and simply looked at the snow and the world that they knew so well, now changed beyond all recognition. They’d scanned the roofs of the houses across the street looking for reindeer tracks in the snow before finally deciding that magical reindeer probably didn’t leave tracks.
She remembered, with absolute clarity, what she had gotten for her Christmas presents that year. An Easy Bake oven with miniature trays to make chocolate cakes, a Scoobie Doo Mystery Mobile that she used to cart around her Barbie dolls, a paint-by-numbers art set of Wonder Woman that she’d never finished, three Nancy Drew books, and two pairs of overalls—one of which still had a Sears tag on it . . . which she remembered thinking was a strange place for Santa to get his clothes from.
She couldn’t remember the following Christmas, nor the previous one. It was the snow that had made that particular Christmas special and memorable.
Other Christmases stuck in her memory; the first Christmas after her father died, the first year she was married, the year Brendan was born, the year Theresa arrived, their first year in this house. The rest melted into one vaguely similar event, with the same rich food, the same movie marathons on TV, the same “Is that all?” feeling at the end of the day.
And now this Christmas. She would certainly be adding this to her list of memorable Christmases. This was one she would never forget and, she was afraid, would forever taint all future Christmases.
A creak on the stairs disturbed her daydreaming, and she turned away from the window and quickly slipped back into bed.
The bedroom door cracked open, yellow light from the hall spilling into the room. She heard Robert move around to her side of the bed and then the rattle of a cup and saucer as it was put down. She didn’t remember the last time he had brought her up a cup of coffee. “Kathy.” His voice was a hoarse, exhausted whisper. “Kathy?”
She opened her eyes. He looked wretched. There were deep bags beneath his eyes, and the skin on his face seemed to have sagged. She fought to quell her rising concern.
“I brought you some coffee,” he said, then added, “Merry Christmas.”
“You went out last night.” It wasn’t what she had intended to say, nor was it what she wanted to ask, but she had to know; she had to ask the question, and she had to hear his response. She had worked hard to keep her voice carefully neutral.
“The office alarm went off—I got a call from the alarm company. I had to go in.”
She searched his face, looking for the truth. But would she even know if he were lying? He’d spent the past eighteen months lying to her, and she hadn’t picked that up; he must be an expert at it by now. “You were gone for a long time,” she said, pushing up in bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.
In the few days that had passed since she had discovered Stephanie Burroughs’s name in Robert’s phone and begun to suspect the affair, she had found herself asking so many questions. Suddenly everything that she had taken for granted was open to doubt. All the certainties of eighteen years of marriage lay shattered about her. “Why?” she said, and didn’t realize she had spoken aloud until Sheila answered her.
“Why what?”
“Why did he have the affair?”
“Because he could,” Sheila said immediately.
“I keep asking myself if I could have stopped it, prevented it by being more . . . I don’t know, more present,” Kathy said eventually. “And, by the way, what in the world possessed you to tell Julia about Alan?”
Sheila’s laugh was completely without humor. “He was here at the time. He said he was going to tell his wife that he was leaving her for me. . . .”
“Sheila!”
“Hey, I begged him not to. Alan is fun and charming and sophisticated, but he can also be just a little bit pompous and more than a little boring. He’s great in bed and fun to talk to, but he’s definitely not someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. Over the past couple of weeks, he’s been promising me an extra special Christmas present. Guess what it was? That he was going to tell his wife about us.”
“Very romantic,” Kathy said bitterly.
“Tell me about it. That’s the last thing I wanted. I kept telling him not to make an announcement at Christmas, where every emotion is heightened. Then he accused me of being ashamed to be seen with him. I’d never even introduced him to my family, he was saying, and right at that moment Julia called. I have no idea what got into me, but I heard myself saying that I would come over for dinner if I could bring my boyfriend. I’m not sure who was more surprised, Julia or Alan.”
“But she recognized his name,” Kathy said.
“I know. Brookline is so small. How many Dr. Alan Gallaghers are there? She recognized the name, obviously thought about it, and then called me back, asked me point-blank if he was married, and then started asking me if his wife knew we were having an affair, saying she wasn’t going to be able to let this pass. I mean, seriously, what does it have to do with her?”
“Robert asked her the same thing.”
“Anyway, she’s been calling me on and off all night, obviously wanting to discuss the situation.”
“Is Alan still there?”
“No, I convinced him to go home and say nothing.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea. Try and stall him ’til after Christmas. And then dump him. Nicely if I can, but I’m prepared to be brutal.”
“And will you bring him to Julia’s for dinner?”
“Can you imagine how much fun that would be? I doubt she’d even let him in the door. Hey, Alan’s calling my cell . . . d’you mind?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Kathy had a lot to do before she went to bed, and she wanted to bury herself in the simple Christmas Eve routine. Talking to Sheila, knowing that she was involved in her own affair with a married man, was a constant reminder of her own situation. And right now Kathy wanted to forget about it, just for a few minutes. She wanted things to be the way they were last Christmas.
And then she suddenly realized that Robert had been having his affair last Christmas too. Pressing both hands to her mouth, she raced out to the downstairs toilet, where she knelt on the floor and retched in great heaving gulps.
CHAPTER 39
Wednesday, 25th December
Christmas Day
Kathy Walker opened her eyes, suddenly awake and alert. What had awakened her?
She’d gone to bed alone just after midnight when she’d finished in the kitchen, leaving it rich with the smell of Christmas—odors of spice and cinnamon, cooking and candle wax, scents that she would forever afterward equate with betrayal. Rolling over, she glanced at the clock: just before one.
The house was absolutely still and silent, and she knew, even before she rolled out of bed and pulled back the curtains, it had snowed. The world outside the window was solid white, crisp, magical, and clean. Later cars would churn the road to filthy black sludge and children would turn the paths into glistening ice sheets, but right at this moment the world had lost all its sharp edges, and everything looked gorgeous and new.
Kathy slid back into the warm bed, lay on her back, and stared at the ceiling. The room should have been in total darkness, but the snow reflected gray alabaster light onto the ceiling.
A white Christmas.
She’d been a child the last time it had snowed on Christmas Day. It should be something to celebrate—but not this Christmas, not today.
Yesterday—was it only yesterday?—she had confronted her husband’s mistress.
Yesterday, she had walked up to a woman she did not know and had slapped her across the face.
Yesterday, she had drunk tea with the woman who was sleeping with her husband.
Yesterday, that woman had given up Kathy’s husband.
Less than twelve hours, and yet it seemed a lifetime ago.
Kathy pressed both hands to her churning stomach. From the moment she had set out to drive to Stephanie Burroughs’s apartment, her stomach started to burn with acid indigestion. When she’d climbed out of her car before the woman’s house and rested her finger on the bell, she’d thought she was going to throw up.
On the drive home, she’d had to pull off the road twice and roll down the window to breathe in great, heaving breaths. The cramping pain had come back at her again throughout the remainder of the day. It had grown worse in the late evening and into the night. With the sights and sounds of the encounter with her husband’s mistress running and rerunning through her head, she’d felt her stomach protest, and she’d thrown up until there was nothing left but bitter bile. In desperation, she’d drunk Pepto Bismol—which she hated—straight from the bottle, the chalky liquid coating her tongue and mouth with its milky pink residue.
Kathy glanced across the bed.
Robert’s side was empty. He’d made no attempt to come to bed with her, and she guessed he’d spent the night sleeping in the chair in his study. She wasn’t sure what she would have done if he’d attempted to climb into bed next to her. Got out and slept downstairs, she supposed. But she should have known he wouldn’t want to put himself in a position where they would have to talk.
She knew he didn’t want to do that just yet. They’d had arguments and disagreements in the past, just like every other couple. His usual tactic was to state his position and then simply refuse to discuss it further. After a few vain attempts to raise the topic of conversation, she would normally let it drop, allowing him to win by default. That was not going to happen this time; they needed to discuss the future.
If there was going to be a future.
Then she heard it: the quiet closing of a door followed by the irregular creaking of the stairs. Every sense tingling, she heard him move around downstairs, shuffling from the living room to the kitchen. There was a long silence, and then she heard the kitchen door close. Footsteps hurried upstairs, and she heard his office door open, then close again moments later. This time when the footsteps descended the stairs they sounded more solid . . . as if he had put on his shoes.
Kathy sat up, heart thumping. Surely he wasn’t going out?
The chain on the front door rattled, then the door was gently eased open and pulled closed with a click.
Leaping out of bed, she watched him back the car out of the drive. He hadn’t put on his headlights because they would light up the bedroom, she realized, but his reversing lights painted the snow blood red.
He was going to her.
She’d thought . . . She’d thought . . . When he’d come back with her, he had seemed genuinely contrite, and she had been hopeful that once they got through these few days, they would be able to move on. She’d asked him to promise not to see Stephanie again, and he had, but without a huge amount of conviction, she’d thought. Talking about Stephanie, he’d said, “In any case, I think you can tell from today that she’ll want little enough to do with me.”
He’d lied to her.
There were no tears now, just a cold anger . . . coupled with a feeling of absolute helplessness. What was she going to do? What could she do? Throw him out? Gather all his clothes, stuff them into the suitcases, and fling them out into the front garden? Call Stephanie and tell her that he was on the way and not to send him back?
Was he even coming back?
Pulling on her robe, she wandered out of the bedroom and into his study. It felt hot and stuffy, the air slightly stale with a hint of his old aftershave overlaying sour perspiration. Everything seemed in order—perhaps in a little too much order. The pile of mail on the desk was certainly a lot neater, and she guessed that if she went to it she would find that the parking ticket and the Visa bill would conveniently be missing.
She wandered down into the kitchen where she found the note beside the phone. “Office alarm has gone off; gone in to see if there’s a problem.”
Her first instinct was to pick up the phone and call the alarm company to confirm. She’d actually lifted the receiver when she changed her mind and put the phone down again. If she and Robert were to begin again, then she had to start trusting him. She’d been wrong about him before, when she had suspected that he’d been having an affair six years ago. Her accusations then had desperately damaged their marriage, and she didn’t want to make that mistake again. Maybe the office alarm had genuinely gone off . . . but she hadn’t heard the phone ring, and when she checked the caller ID, there had been no calls since one of Theresa’s friends had called the house much earlier that evening. If the alarm company were calling, would they have contacted Robert’s cell first, and then the house second, or the other way around? Feeling a little relieved, she returned the note to where she’d found it, then went back upstairs and climbed into the cold bed.
Lying in the silence, she heard the snow hiss and spit against the window and suddenly found herself praying for his safe return.
But at the back of her mind, faint but insistent, was the thought that he had gone to Stephanie. And if he had, she knew, then they were finished.
Finished.
She was still awake at two thirty when he returned.
The minutes had crawled by, second by agonizing second, each one accompanied by visions of an equally terrifying scenario: Robert dead by the side of the road . . . the car on its roof in a pileup on Storrow Drive . . . Robert in the arms of his mistress.
Several times she had reached for the phone to dial his number or the office number or even Stephanie’s number. But each time she had pulled back. If he had gone out for a genuine reason, she didn’t want him to know that she was checking up on him.
When she saw the splash of headlights on the road and heard the car slowly crunch its way down the ice-locked street, she knew it was him and experienced a wave of relief that left her shaking with emotion.
Climbing out of bed, she stood and watched the Audi approach and then the lights click off so that they would not illuminate the front of the house before he turned into the drive. Leaning forward, straightening the curtains, she watched him climb out of the car, and the look of leaden exhaustion on his face convinced her that he had not gone to see Stephanie. If he’d gone to his mistress, surely he would have spent the night, and even if he had decided to return home before Brendan and Theresa got up to open their presents, then he would be looking a whole lot happier.
She heard the hall door open and, for a moment, thought about going down and asking about the office alarm, but then she decided that she didn’t want him to be aware that she knew he’d been out. Stairs creaked, his office door opened and closed, then she heard the pneumatic hiss as he sat back in his chair.
Then silence.
Kathy sat on the edge of the bed for almost an hour, then she padded out of the room, down the landing, and stopped outside his door. She opened the door and peered inside.
Still wearing his leather coat and gloves, Robert was slumped in his office chair, fast asleep. His face was ashen and, even in sleep, lined with exhaustion. He must have gone into the office, she decided. And she felt vaguely guilty then for even having her suspicions.
She was going to have to learn how to trust him again. She would, she promised. Standing in the doorway, watching him sleep in his clothes, Kathy Walker made an early New Year’s resolution: She was going to work to save this marriage because, despite the pain and anguish he had put her through, despite how small he had made her feel, she still loved him.
God help her, but she still loved him.
CHAPTER 40
She dozed rather than slept for the next couple of hours.
Whenever she closed her eyes, events and incidents from the previous days came rushing back. Suddenly she would find herself remembering the look in Stephanie’s eyes when she’d opened the door and found Kathy standing there. Somehow Stephanie hadn’t seemed to be in the least surprised; maybe she too had been relieved that events were coming to a head.
In an affair time stopped. An affair existed in a bubble. It was only when it was discovered or ended that people could go on with their lives. In her own situation, Kathy had been trapped in a world of white lies, half-truths, and evasions, while Stephanie had been equally trapped by the same lies for the past eighteen months. And in the middle was Robert, spinning the lies, trying to balance both worlds, telling both women what he thought they wanted to hear.
She heard movement. The bathroom door opened, then slow and heavy footsteps went downstairs. Maybe Robert also couldn’t sleep.
Kathy got out of bed and went to stand by the window. The front yard and road looked like a traditional Christmas card. No tracks broke the pristine snowy surface; even the tracks left by Robert’s car several hours earlier had been covered over. Some of the houses had lights on, and, across the street, she could see the seven-year-old Brady triplets in their matching Spider-Man pajamas, clustered around the Christmas tree ripping paper off their presents.
She found herself remembering her own childhood, and in particular that morning when she had awoken to find that it had snowed overnight. She shared a bedroom with Sheila, and she’d shaken her little sister awake. She would have been about nine or ten, she thought, old enough to begin to suspect the existence—or nonexistence—of Santa Claus, but not prepared to question it too deeply. Just in case. Together, the two girls had huddled in the window, with the quilt pulled around their shoulders, and simply looked at the snow and the world that they knew so well, now changed beyond all recognition. They’d scanned the roofs of the houses across the street looking for reindeer tracks in the snow before finally deciding that magical reindeer probably didn’t leave tracks.
She remembered, with absolute clarity, what she had gotten for her Christmas presents that year. An Easy Bake oven with miniature trays to make chocolate cakes, a Scoobie Doo Mystery Mobile that she used to cart around her Barbie dolls, a paint-by-numbers art set of Wonder Woman that she’d never finished, three Nancy Drew books, and two pairs of overalls—one of which still had a Sears tag on it . . . which she remembered thinking was a strange place for Santa to get his clothes from.
She couldn’t remember the following Christmas, nor the previous one. It was the snow that had made that particular Christmas special and memorable.
Other Christmases stuck in her memory; the first Christmas after her father died, the first year she was married, the year Brendan was born, the year Theresa arrived, their first year in this house. The rest melted into one vaguely similar event, with the same rich food, the same movie marathons on TV, the same “Is that all?” feeling at the end of the day.
And now this Christmas. She would certainly be adding this to her list of memorable Christmases. This was one she would never forget and, she was afraid, would forever taint all future Christmases.
A creak on the stairs disturbed her daydreaming, and she turned away from the window and quickly slipped back into bed.
The bedroom door cracked open, yellow light from the hall spilling into the room. She heard Robert move around to her side of the bed and then the rattle of a cup and saucer as it was put down. She didn’t remember the last time he had brought her up a cup of coffee. “Kathy.” His voice was a hoarse, exhausted whisper. “Kathy?”
She opened her eyes. He looked wretched. There were deep bags beneath his eyes, and the skin on his face seemed to have sagged. She fought to quell her rising concern.
“I brought you some coffee,” he said, then added, “Merry Christmas.”
“You went out last night.” It wasn’t what she had intended to say, nor was it what she wanted to ask, but she had to know; she had to ask the question, and she had to hear his response. She had worked hard to keep her voice carefully neutral.
“The office alarm went off—I got a call from the alarm company. I had to go in.”
She searched his face, looking for the truth. But would she even know if he were lying? He’d spent the past eighteen months lying to her, and she hadn’t picked that up; he must be an expert at it by now. “You were gone for a long time,” she said, pushing up in bed, pulling the covers up to her chin.
