Here She Lies

square into my sweater’s pocket. Well, Julie’s sweater — she had forgotten it on her last visit, in March, and I was wearing it to return to her tonight. (It was a wonderful sweater, an expensive Oilily with pink and orange flowers shifting dominance depending on the angle of the light, creating a hallucinogenic effect. It reminded me of the old Cheerios boxes Julie and I would stare at during childhood breakfasts, shifting our gazes to catch another invisible, floating O.) I noticed that one of the sweater’s six large, distinctive flower-shaped buttons had fallen off — and for a moment I panicked. But I had no time to search for a button now.
    Lexy was asleep on her stomach even though I’d left her on her back; she had only recently started turning over. I ran my hand lightly down her back to let her body know Mommy was there, then carefully picked her up and positioned her over my shoulder so she could keep sleeping. Her eyes fluttered open, then fell shut again. I detoured to my bedroom for one more glance to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and discovered that I had: the novel I was in the middle of reading. The Talented Mr. Ripley had been keeping me up nights, distracting me from my troubles, and I needed to finish it. Steadying Lexy, I dipped at the knee and took the slender paperback in my free hand.
    Downstairs, I transferred Lexy to Bobby’s shoulder so he could hold her while I put the suitcases into thetrunk of the car. I figured I owed him that. At first he wouldn’t follow me outside into the bright morning, instead staying in the front hall with our baby sleeping floppily over his shoulder. It was the week our cherry tree was in full bloom, with a few pink petals on the dappled shadows of our front lawn, and I got the feeling that the perfect beauty of the tree and the clear sunlight would pain him more than he could handle at the moment. I did feel sorry for him. But I had to go.
    “Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll take her now.”
    He didn’t move. I could see him drinking her in, smelling her, feeling her. I gave him another moment before slipping my hands under her arms and shifting her back to my shoulder. This time she woke up. She took a deep yawn and settled her weight into me.
    “I’ll park in Long Term and leave the ticket under the mat so you can get the car,” I said.
    “How will I get to the airport to get the car and then drive it back? I’m just one person.” His eyes teared up and for the first time I saw a fleck of gray in his left eyebrow, just one lone hair. In the past months he had sprouted silver at his temples and his face had become a fretful map. He had twelve years on me — he would grow old first. I’d always known that and it had never bothered me. I wondered now if his affair was some kind of midlife crisis. Was that what this was?
    “Oh, Bobby. You’ll figure it out. Ask someone to go with you.”
    He knew who I meant. Her. The mystery woman. Lovyluv.
    “You’re making a real mistake,” he said. “This is a marriage. We have a child.”
    But I still believed that if he really wasn’t having an affair, if the love letters and credit card charges were really part of some hoax, he would have found a way to prove it. I kept hoping he would. Even up to the last minute, after I’d strapped Lexy into her car seat, my heart was primed... but all he could do as I got into the car was turn around and walk back into the house. He kept his eyes down, on the flagstone path, refusing to even glance at the cherry tree. I drove away. In the rearview mirror I could see his chest rising and falling.
    He was weeping. I was weeping.
    He shut the door.
    I turned the corner off our street and began the long day’s journey from our home in Lexington, Kentucky, to my sister’s house in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.
    It was five o’clock when I carried my restless baby off the plane at Albany International Airport. I changed her diaper in the ladies’ room, brushed my hair and refreshed my pale pink lipstick (usually the only makeup I wore, an irrational yet effective source of confidence; the putting-on-of-lipstick in a mirror was something we had often watched our mother do: the stretched lips, the steady eye, the smooth stroke of color). Then I gathered our bags and sat for twenty minutes to nurse her. My cell phone service had no network this far east, so I had to find a working pay phone to let Julie know we’d landed on time.
    “Expect