“I know it’s not. You told me last night, and I guess I knew already, but Tony? I think maybe it should be true. I think … I look in the mirror sometimes, and I can’t even see myself. I sat down at the table last week to make a list of errands I had to run in town, and I flipped over the page and tried to make myself write down ten things I wanted, and I couldn’t think of ten. I couldn’t think of three. I wrote down ‘A shower’ and then ‘Time to run in the morning’ and then I sat there and stared at it for half an hour, and I couldn’t come up with anything.
“And you know how on take-out night we all get a turn to choose what we want to order, and you always get meatball subs from Contino’s in Mount Pleasant, and Ant always gets pizza with green olives? I dread my turn. I dread it. Because I don’t even know. I don’t know what I want to eat. I don’t know what I want to wear or look like, and that’s why I cut my hair and had that evil woman at the spa wax me and paint my fingernails—because I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m afraid I’m not anybody. That I’m only your wife and the kids’ mom and that’s it.”
He kept his arms tight around her. Rubbed his cheek over the top of her head, pressed his fingers against her ribs. He didn’t say anything, and that was good, because his silence gave her space to catch her breath.
She hadn’t intended to say so much. She’d opened her mouth, and the words had been piled up behind her tongue, waiting to come out. Impatient.
When she closed her eyes, there were more.
“You remember when we met?” she asked.
She felt him nod.
“You remember that I told you I was afraid I was going to live my whole life and then be on my deathbed and realize I hadn’t done anything? That I hadn’t really lived? And you made fun of me because I was too young, you thought. Well, I’m thirty-five now. I’m thirty-five, and I haven’t been anywhere. I haven’t done anything. I quit my job and had three babies. I think if the person I was when I met you saw who I am now, she wouldn’t even recognize me. And I know what I have done is important, too. I know that. It’s not like I want to go become the first woman to climb K2 backwards or whatever. It’s just … the house is so big. It’s so empty when there’s nobody home but me, and I don’t have anything. I want to have something so that when you don’t come home until nine or ten, and the kids are sleeping, I’m not just waiting for you.” The last word came out too dramatic, too accusatory, because her voice was breaking.
You.
Tony stroked her neck and her back and her butt, and water rushed over her feet and into the sea, and she felt calmer. Not calm. But calmer. Less poisonous.
They stayed there for a long time, and gradually she started to notice the tension that had crept into Tony’s body. The weird way he was holding her, no longer natural. As though he didn’t want her to get away, but he didn’t want to keep her, either.
She sighed and stepped back, giving him the space he seemed to need now that she’d attacked him. “It’s not … there isn’t anything you can do, so I don’t want you to think I’ve been waiting for you to …”
Fix it. Solve me.
But she had. She had, and that made it even worse—to realize how passive she’d been, and what a drag that added on both of them.
“It’s only in my head, I guess. I need to take a pottery class or join a book club, whatever it is that moms do. Visit the self-help section at the college bookstore.”
She tried to smile, but it didn’t quite make it, and Tony—something was really wrong with Tony. He crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. He made a face that was possibly supposed to be a smile, in return, but it was horrible to look at. Completely horrible.
“See, this is why I didn’t tell you,” she said. “I knew it would make you feel bad, and I hate that. Pretend I didn’t say anything, okay? We’ll just …”
She trailed off, alarmed by the bleakness in his eyes.
“Tony, what?”
“You should have time to run,” he said. “It’s not a big deal.”
“No, it is.” His hands curled into fists. “It is a big deal. You love to run. You always loved it, and you like to do it first thing, when the sun’s coming up. I know that. You should be able to do it. I don’t know why—” He broke off staring at the water, and when his eyes met hers they were fierce. Almost scary.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “How to help. But I know that if you can only think of three things you want to do, you should at least fucking be able to do them, Amber, and you can’t. I made you cancel your gym membership and personal training because I didn’t think we could pay for it. I didn’t make it a priority. And I know you like to run in the morning, but I don’t make that a priority, either, so I’m pretty pissed off at myself. I’m glad you told me, though. I’m just—”
He met her eyes, and she saw the same anguish she’d seen in the lobby the other day, when he was getting ready to tell her that she was staying and he was leaving.
“What good am I to you?” he asked. “If I can’t even figure this stuff out? And if you don’t tell me. If you don’t tell me, and I don’t ask. What good are we to each other?”
“I don’t know.”
But she thought of the way he’d looked, braced over her last night. How he’d felt inside her. How she’d felt, giving him pleasure, telling her secret, opening herself up to love and possibility.
It was better than good, to be with him.
When they did it right, it was better than anything.
And her certainty in that—in this one thing—was enough to propel her forward. Because she hoped. In her bones, in her heart, in her body—she hoped they could do this, and she had never stopped hoping even as she felt doomed. She’d told him what she was afraid of, and the act of telling him had knocked down a wall. Now there was mess and confusion—all those little chunks of sharp masonry on the ground, threatening their bare feet—but there was light in her heart, too. Fresh air, blowing through all her confusion.
They could figure this out. She hoped they could.