The Divorce Party

She looks over at the cake in Eve’s hand and imagines throwing it at Thomas. But she can throw the cake or not throw it, and he is still going away. He is still never going to make it okay for her: these two million painful decisions he’s made, every lie he’s told, every indignity, every injury at her expense, every bit of strength that she has had to conjure up in order to handle this alone, every one of her own mistakes, every piece of her that wishes she’d never end up here. Thomas is never going to make right the hard, miserable fact that even if she knew it was all going to end here, Gwyn would have chosen him anyway. She would have chosen their life, and spent all of it trying to change his mind.

The only thing that is going to make any of that okay is Gwyn doing something else.

Which is when a final, bright belt of lightning illuminates the doorway of the barn, and the driveway outside. Absolutely brilliant, blinding light, momentarily breaking apart the sky.

It is so beautiful and sure of itself, the crack of thunder so immediate, that it takes a second to understand that it has hit the top of a tree—the tallest tree, wide and solid—about ten feet from the front door of the house. It hits the tree, and the tree starts shaking in place, shaking and stuttering—tilting left, first, then tilting right—and then it breaks, the top half of it, flying forward.

Breaking through the roof. Sharp and clean. Less like a crash and more like a cut. An incision. Through the roof and down into the second floor of the house.

The tree embedded there, like it belongs.

&nb

sp; Everyone looks at it, the broken tree, in its new resting place. And now it is truly silent. Gwyn can feel it in her chest. Her heart. She can feel it pushing its way out, against her corseting, against the tight material, absolutely unequal to the task. She starts counting windows, trying to figure out where it has landed. From here it looks like the upstairs hallway. But it could be her bedroom. Thomas’s and her bedroom. From here, it looks like, when she goes inside, she may very well find the heavy tree on top of their bed.

But, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, Gwyn runs the back of her fingers gently across her forehead.

She doesn’t look at Thomas. She is done looking at Thomas. In the periphery of her eye, she can make out Eve still holding the cake. It is hers now. Gwyn picks up her glass of wine and tilts it in her guests’ direction, in a final toast. “Thank you for coming,” she says.

Then she takes a sip, which is lovely and sweet, but which doesn’t at all remind her of the first time she drank it. It could be any wine, it could be any person she first shared it with, any person she was sharing it with now.

This feels like its own kind of hope.

So she takes them with her—the bottle, her glass. She takes them with her, and starts to walk out of the barn, into the rain, and toward her newly broken house.

part four

parting gifts

Never, never, never could one conceive what love is beforehand, never.

—D. H. Lawrence, after meeting his future wife

Maggie

There is a tree in the middle of the house.

No one is hurt, which feels like the biggest thing, until no one is hurt, and then the biggest thing is that there is a tree in the middle of the house. It has broken all the way through the roof, through the top floor of the house, down the center staircase, like the end of a hundred promises, like the end of whatever had been holding the place up before.

It has cut the house down the middle, or at least from Maggie’s angle, it seems to have cut the house down the middle. She stands looking up at it from the bottom of the staircase—its branches coming down the steps, its leaves at her feet.

Everything in here is still frozen. And outside—what just happened outside—feels far away. There was something remarkable about two hundred people stunned silent. Stunned silent, and still. Something grave and impressive about all those people watching in wide-eyed horror as things ceremoniously fell apart.

After the tree hit, no one knew what to do. Most people departed, moving quickly back to their cars—those who could get to their cars. Others hitched a ride with people whose cars weren’t blocked. But some stuck around in the barn, offering to call for help, offering to help themselves, as if there were anyone who could make things better now.

She saw one very short man who was particularly upset, talking about how he couldn’t believe that this was happening to his house. He was searching frantically for Gwyn.

“I’m still interested,” he said, when he found her. “But less so.”

“That’s shocking,” Gwyn said, walking away from him.

Now, Gwyn is gone. Gwyn and Thomas and Georgia.

It scared Georgia. Watching the tree hit her house, break it in two. It scared her enough that she felt something move around inside of her—felt something wrong and hard jump inside of herself—and despite Thomas’s assurances that she was fine, that she had nothing to be worried about, they are currently driving down into town, through town, to the hospital—to the emergency room, and a doctor who can hook her up to a machine and guarantee her that everything is fine.

The three of them heading to the hospital. In Eve’s van.

Georgia and Gwyn and Thomas in the van. Because it wasn’t blocked in. Because the Volvos were beyond blocked in. But Eve’s vine van was by itself over at the Buckleys’.