I Will Never Leave You Read online

  “Sure, Trish. Nothing’s too good for you,” he’d answer, kissing my nose.

  The waiter returned and set a manhattan on the table for my father. Condensation beaded on the bowl of the stemmed cocktail glass. My father speared the cherry that bobbed in the drink with a swizzle stick, and then, after my father voiced approval of his cocktail, the waiter deposited drinks on the table for James and me—Scotch for James, a brandy alexander for me. While my father sat across from us sipping his manhattan, James reached over and held my hand. He squeezed it. “So what do you think, Trish? About surrogacy?”

  “I don’t want to discuss this.”

  “These days, surrogacy’s not outlandish anymore,” my father said. “No one looks down at the practice anymore. Or the people who are doing it. These days, everyone’s doing it.”

  “Dad. Please. I don’t want to discuss this.”

  “Be reasonable,” James said.

  Sensing a disturbance, people at the surrounding tables peeked discreetly at us. I felt under attack. My father explained what surrogacy involved—as if I couldn’t figure it out for myself. I got up from my seat, threw down the cloth napkin I’d been fingering, and walked away. James and my father called out to me, beckoning me back to the table, but after retrieving my sable coat from the coat check, I hailed a cab home, alone.

  Just as the cab let me off at my house, I spotted my closest friend in the whole world, Allie Carlson, crossing the cobblestone street with her triple stroller. We’d known each other since we were eight years old, having met while taking horseback-riding lessons in Rock Creek Park. We’d gone through elementary and high school together at Georgetown Day School, one of Washington’s exclusive private schools, all the while privately kibitzing about our aging instructors’ stunningly poor fashion sense.

  As soon as I saw Allie and her stroller full of children, I burst into tears. Unlike me, Allie was a baby machine. She’d only been married five years but already had so many children.

  Allie put her hand on mine. “What’s wrong, Trish? You can tell me.”

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to hold back the tears. I’d burdened her so often with stories about my fertility problems that I couldn’t possibly think of telling her how much it hurt deep inside, at this particular moment, to see her beautiful, healthy children. Allie often said she envied me, being married to a man as handsome as James. In her way, she loved her own husband, Clive, but he was balding and nearing sixty. He chaired Georgetown University’s Art History Department and was always away on business for long stretches, traveling to one museum or another to lend his expertise on their holdings. Whereas I had James to comfort me, she had her children; decorum prevented me from admitting that, at times, I wished our positions were reversed—who wouldn’t trade a husband for a baby?

  Gradually, I pulled myself together. Her three children—Ellie, Sebastian, and Stephen—sat inside the stroller bundled in cutesy panda sweatshirts she’d bought at a National Zoo fundraiser. Ellie, the youngest at barely two, looked up at me from the stroller’s front seat. In one hand was a lollipop and, in the other, a Raggedy Ann doll. How could one woman be blessed with three children and me, none?

  “We’re going to the playground. Got time to join us?” Allie said. Usually, I loved going with them to the playground three blocks away. Allie and I would take turns pushing her children on the kiddie swings and entertaining them with stories of fairy princesses and hoary goblins.

  I begged off, saying I had housework to deal with. Allie squinted at me. We’d known each other so long that she knew when I was lying. Her eyes lit up. “Is it trouble? Trouble with James? Is that why you’re so upset?”

  The speed with which she formed these questions took me aback. Instinctively, I gathered what she was getting at. Most women would be supportive when they suspected a friend’s marriage was collapsing, and yet with Allie, I sensed schadenfreude.

  I tried to laugh away her suspicions. The last thing I needed was my best friend spreading rumors about the state of my marriage. “That’s silly. What could possibly be wrong with James?”

  Allie looked cross, as if disbelieving me, but then her expression brightened so quickly that I wondered if I had misinterpreted her earlier questions.

  “That’s good,” Allie said, nodding. We made small talk for a moment longer, and then I watched as she pushed the triple stroller down the sidewalk toward the playground.

  In the weeks and months that followed, however, I began to suspect Allie was right—trouble had entered my marriage. I had lost James at surrogacy. Wheels turned in his head in the months after my father brought up the subject. A woman knows these things. No longer did he tie his prospects for a child to the viability of my reproductive organs. I’d find him reading websites about choosing the right woman to carry your child and ensuring her adequate compensation. Once, while in line for complimentary steamed shrimp at a reception in honor of a newly opened exhibit of Mary Cassatt paintings, he leaned over my shoulder and asked, “What about her?” He pointed to a shapely young blonde attired in a full-length black dress and said, “Her. We could pay her to have our baby. Look at those childbearing hips!” I was shocked. I elbowed him in the gut and, drawing him aside next to one of Cassatt’s mother-and-daughter portraits, explained to him in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t consent to surrogacy.

  James started working later into the nights and taking long business-related dinners. He wouldn’t come home until after midnight, complaining the clients he wined and dined spent too much time wining and not enough time dining. Despite his long hours, his spirits were high. The extra work, he said, energized him. Normally solicitous and free-flowing with the flattery, he became even more so, which I enjoyed. What woman does not relish hearing that her husband finds her to be the loveliest creature on earth? Yes, the over-the-top compliments reeked of insincerity, but I appreciated the effort he made to be nice to me. What was I supposed to do—ask that he quit being pleasant?

  One idyllic Saturday afternoon, Allie dropped by to see if I wanted to go to the playground with her and her children. James surprised me by asking to tag along. James, too, liked Allie’s children. He hoisted one child after another onto his shoulders and galloped around the playground giving them “horsey rides.” The children laughed. They couldn’t get enough of him. As soon as he let one child down to pick up another of Allie’s brood, the child would immediately tug on his chinos, begging for another ride.

  “Don’t give up,” Allie said when she caught me looking at her. Although we hadn’t talked about my conception woes in months, I knew immediately what she meant. “He’s going to be an excellent father someday.”

  James’s cheeks were pink with exhaustion from all his galloping. Ellie, Allie’s youngest, was on his shoulders, squealing at him to “go faster, horsey, faster!” One of James’s phones rang. He pulled it out of his pocket. It was a new red phone I hadn’t seen before, a cheap-looking flip phone unlike the two iPhones he carried with him at all times. Seeing some message flash across its screen, he seemed even happier. There was a delirious glaze to his eyes. He sucked in a breath, glided his tongue over his lips.

  A wife knows what her spouse is thinking. I had seen that same lustful sparkle in his eyes many times over the years directed, thrillingly, at me. Seeing it directed at his phone, I panicked.

  James stuffed his phone back into his pocket. “Something’s come up at the office.”

  “On a Saturday?” I asked.

  James planted a rueful kiss on my forehead. “Work happens, honey. Even on a weekend. It’s the price of being employed—distractions like this. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to run to my office and . . . and put out some fires.”

  Never before had I suspected James of having an affair. For weeks, this suspicion ate at me. I told myself I was imagining things. We never quarreled, James and I, and he seemed happy with our homelife. He complimented me endlessly and never failed to notice when I wore a new dress, did something differ
ent to my hair, or set fresh irises on our dining room table. And yet I sensed again and again that, even while he sat next to me on our living room couch, his mind was elsewhere.

  Should I have confronted him? In retrospect, I wish I had. He probably would have denied everything, and I probably would’ve believed him.

  Instead, I contacted a private investigator. A few days after I emailed him about my predicament, he sent me two pictures. In one picture, James and this other woman—Laurel—walked hand in hand over the sweeping white marble floor of the Mayflower Hotel’s lobby. I sucked in a breath and fumed. A half hour later, I summoned the courage to click open the second photo, which showed James and the same woman climbing the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in broad daylight. I studied this photo endlessly, trying to figure out what James saw in this woman. She was younger, yes, but plain looking and abundantly pregnant, dressed up in a pink novelty PSST! I’M NOT A VIRGIN ANYMORE! T-shirt that blatantly advertised her condition. She was what I’d always wanted to be: pregnant and happy.

  Today, an hour ago, James raced home, his cheeks flushed with excitement. Claiming he had “something of importance” to show me, he urged me to get into his Volvo. Instinctively, I guessed the reason for James’s excitement—my private investigator had told me his mistress was a week overdue. When confronted with evidence of my father’s affairs, my mother would lock herself in her room for weeks and sometimes months. I was determined to show the world I was made of sterner stuff. I grabbed my cashmere cape, slid on my ruched leather gloves. He drove us through the midday Georgetown traffic with an uncharacteristic abundance of caution, stopping at rather than running the red lights. Throughout our drive, he glanced at me with a nervous insistence. Poor, silly James hadn’t realized I’d guessed what was happening. While waiting at a stoplight on Foxhall Road, I tapped his hand and asked, “So. Let me guess: your mistress just had her baby.”

  The light changed. The car behind us honked at him to get moving. James shifted the Volvo back into gear. We clanked through the slushy streets slower than before. He stared at the bare trees lining the road, no longer glancing at me. Signs along the road indicated we were traveling toward Sibley Hospital. When one of the signs indicated we should veer right to get to the hospital, James veered right—but despite the road signs, I couldn’t believe he was actually taking me to see his mistress.

  “You know about her?”

  “Of course I do.” Despite our twelve years of marriage, James has yet to learn that nothing gets past me. It didn’t help that, in recent weeks, he’d been so careless with his secrets. I’d catch him reading baby manuals while watching televised golf tournaments. What grown man reads baby manuals? With or without a private investigator, the hackles on the most trusting wife would have been raised by that. And yet now that I was in his Volvo with him, I had no idea why he was taking me to her maternity suite.

  Chapter Three

  TRISH

  Laurel points at me from her hospital bed and, in a slow, medicated voice, asks, “What’s she doing here?”

  “Relax, honey,” James says. He takes the baby from me and, walking the five paces across the airy room, places the baby on Laurel’s lap.

  Because Laurel’s been asleep, she’s hardly held her baby yet, and I expect her to gaze upon Anne Elise with the same reverent joy as I’d done. Instead, she stares at me. No joy lights her rosy cheeks; no giddy happiness expresses itself in her eyes. There’s something hard about her, as if she’s had an uncomfortable upbringing. IV tubing snakes up from her tattooed arm; wires from an electronic heart monitor coil up from the folds of her gold terrycloth bathrobe. A plastic medallion like the one on Anne Elise’s ankle is strapped to her wrist. She, too, has been kissed by Mick Jagger. The two plastic discs graze against each other, causing a simultaneous electronic smooching sound to squeak out from them.

  “You let her hold the baby?” Laurel asks. Although she looks at me, the question is intended for James. I know so little about this woman James has been carrying on with. My private investigator has given me the basics on her, such as her name, age, and cell phone number, and clued me into her financial needs—her mountains of student loan debt, her penchant for Italian-crafted boots and fine leather goods. But he’s been less successful in assembling her personality profile, her psychological profile, anything that might be useful in helping me understand her. “That witch? That bitch? After all the things she’s done to you, you’ve let her hold our baby?”

  Seeing the needy jealousy that overtakes her, I know precisely the kind of woman she is: lowlife. That’s the vibe she gives off. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something criminal in her background. And as I’m realizing this, a plan hatches in my mind. A woman like her would have no shortage of nasty secrets. With my private investigator’s help, I’m certain I can ruin Laurel. Or, at the bare minimum, convince James to dump her. She’s carried on with my husband, seduced him, bedded him, and probably filled his head with fantasies of the bliss he can expect if he leaves me. None of this would have happened if I’d been able to conceive a child for James. Laurel’s only means of ensnaring him was to offer him the one thing I couldn’t: a baby. But now, I see her jealousy.

  Every woman reacts differently when confronted with her spouse’s infidelity. Initially, like my mother, I chose a predictable path: paralysis. Indecision plagued me for months, but at heart, I wasn’t my mother’s daughter so much as I was a child of my father. My father was a pragmatist who taught me that though the world was an ugly place, complaining served no purpose. After my private investigator informed me that James was having an affair, I had endeavored to figure out how to tilt things in my favor. Laurel’s pregnancy was a complicating factor. She had no money, no sophistication. If something were to happen to the baby, James would undoubtedly tire of her in due time. That is what I chose to believe. Yes, I hoped there’d be a miscarriage, an abortion, some permanent rift that would develop between James and his mistress. More than anything, I hoped James didn’t love her, and yet seeing the way he fawns over her and her baby, I see he loves them both. Which breaks my heart.

  “Laurel. Honey. You were asleep. What harm could be done by having Tricia hold Anne Elise while you rested?” James’s honeyed yet persuasive voice always strangely reminds me of roasted cashews. Any woman could fall for a confidence man with such a voice.

  Laurel rubs her eyes. “What do you mean, ‘Anne Elise’? We agreed on ‘Zerena’ if she was a girl. Zerena. With a Z like we talked about. Don’t you remember? We talked about this.”

  James lays a hand on Laurel’s shoulder, and with his other hand, he “coochy-coochy-coos” Anne Elise’s chin.

  “Don’t you remember? Zerena. With a Z. That’s what we agreed.”

  “Honey. Don’t get angry. A baby can pick up on a mother’s stress, so please act calmly. Zerena’s a wonderful name. An awesome name! But I was projecting forward, thinking long haul for our daughter, envisioning the awkwardness she’d face in job interviews, constantly having to explain her name. I work in a conservative financial services firm. You know this. I work with troglodytes. I work with people so pigheaded that should they happen upon a résumé from someone named Zerena—Zerena with a Z—they’d start laughing. Or utter disparaging wisecracks. No way would they call her in for an interview. Even if she was the most eminently qualified candidate in their whole stack of résumés. I want our daughter to succeed. If that means giving her a, um, less distinctive name, so be it.”

  Laurel looks at James with wide, glaring eyes. I wouldn’t have thought someone so ill-tempered and strongheaded would give in so easily, but she takes his hand, squeezes it, and thanks him for thinking “long haul” for their baby. James always knows the right tone to take, the right buttons to push. That is his power, his gift, his ability.

  “Names are important,” James says. “Hospital officials came by with the paperwork an hour ago. You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you, so I took it upon myself to fill out th
ose forms, making it official. I hope you don’t mind, honey.”

  Laurel nods. She’s still smitten in the blush of love, totally taken in by her confident, sweet-talking philanderer. No doubt she looks upon James as the answer to all her financial worries. Twenty-four years old and saddled with $200,000 of student loan debt: she was foolish enough to leave her small but prestigious New England college with only a degree in liberal arts and a puny certificate in gender studies, dismal credentials that had so far landed her nothing more than waitressing opportunities.

  Again, Laurel points at me. “So why is she here? I don’t want her to have anything to do with our baby.”

  “Honey, I thought it would behoove us to introduce Tricia to Anne Elise as soon as possible.”

  I shudder. James must be crazy. There’s no earthly reason he should’ve introduced me to his new baby unless he means to humiliate me. I’m hopping mad. Even now, I’m surprised I haven’t given in to my better senses and walked out of this room.

  “Why?” Laurel asks.

  James’s tone is measured, calm. He looks over to me, nods. “Earlier, while you were asleep, I saw how kindly Tricia responded to Anne Elise. She had goodness in her face, a gentleness that poured over her as she held Anne Elise.” As he’s saying this, I remember how dazzled I was to be holding the baby. I can’t believe a word James says about me, but I’d never be hostile toward the baby. “For years, we tried to conceive a child ourselves because I knew Trish would be a perfect, loving mother. Just now, watching her kiss Anne Elise—”