Here She Lies

low and steady because I knew this information would convince him I was serious: “Bobby, I already quit. I called Kent this morning at home. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I have another job lined up in New York.”
    His face, already pale from last winter, went ashen. Bobby was nineteen years into his career as a physical therapist in the U.S. Public Health Service. In one year, he could retire with bounteous lifelong benefits. Me, I was just two years in and I didn’t care anymore. After Lexy was born I’d had only six weeks off before jumping back on track, and our workday at the prison began at seven a.m. I didn’t want to drop my baby off at day care in the pitch-dark morning ever again.
    “Annie, don’t leave me.” The strain in his voice, the regret, the yearning, were painful to hear. “I’ll find a way to show you you’re wrong.”
    Then show me! But I didn’t say it, because that plea had been my mantra and yet — nothing. I was finished waiting. This latest e-mail was the last straw. Lately I’d wondered if he had met her while I was still pregnant with Lexy, toward the end when we weren’t having sex anymore. Julie, my twin sister, had told me that was just what happened to a friend of hers: a loving marriage, a wanted baby, and then the husband couldn’ttolerate a couple months of abstinence and he “roamed.” Like he was a cow who’d wandered through a broken fence. I’d never thought Bobby could do such a thing. Never. Julie’s friend hadn’t either — but then you never do.
    “I’m going to wake her,” I said, “or we’ll miss our flight.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “To Julie’s.”
    His face seemed to clamp at the mention of her name. No surprise to me. I’d always figured that, deep down, he was jealous of the closeness I shared with my twin.
    As I walked toward the stairs, he followed me. “Annie, please — please don’t take Lexy away from me.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. Sorry. Sad. Out of rationalizations. Finished with begging for what he couldn’t seem to give me: the simple truth and an end to the affair.
    I went upstairs to get Lexy. Quiet footsteps on the pale carpet Bobby and I had chosen together, an impractical but beautiful shade of champagne. He would be lonely by himself in this house. (Would he bring her here?) I could feel its emptiness and I wasn’t even gone yet; I was still here, Lexy was still asleep in her very own crib, I could still change my mind, we could stay, we could stay...
    Lexy’s bedroom doorknob was cool in my hand. It clicked when I turned it.
    Morning light edged the pulled-down window shades, creating a silvery half darkness. Lexy’s breathswere long and deep and her room smelled baby-sweet. It was a good-sized room, with butter yellow walls trimmed in white. Two built-in corner bookcases held whatever things she had collected in the five months of her life. Dolls, books, colorful objects that made all kinds of sounds when you moved them.
    On a high shelf of one bookcase was the collection of tiny handblown glass cats and kittens from the summer my parents took us to Italy, when Julie and I were seven. It was the July before they got divorced, a final and typically dramatic try at making their marriage work. It was a fun summer, though; Julie and I played happily beneath marital thunderclouds inside the ancient stone walls surrounding the Florentine rental castle where we stayed for four whole weeks. We were the kind of kids who didn’t worry about things unless we had to, believing that our twin bond protected us from hazard (we may have actually still believed this, now, at the age of thirty-three). Being together always felt like safety in a storm.
    The way our parents finally broke the news was this: Dad left the house and Mom sat us down in the living room (we were still in our matching pink nightgowns; the new school year hadn’t yet started) and said in her cheerful way, “Daddy and I have decided that enough is enough. There won’t be any more fighting.”
    Their divorce was final before Christmas. Under the tree that year my mother wrapped my glass cats in purple tissue paper with a green ribbon. Julie’s cats were wrapped in green paper with purple ribbon. We had watched the glassblower make the tiny cats and even tinier kittens but never knew, until we receivedthe gifts, that our parents had gone back to buy them for us.
    Now I wrapped my glass cats in tissues and eased the soft