I Will Never Leave You Read online

  “Wait. Are you telling me you let that witch kiss our daughter?”

  James holds out his hand to calm her, but anger blooms in Laurel’s face. I have no idea of the hormones rampaging through her, wreaking havoc with her emotions. I would have thought blissful happiness was the hormonal fate of every new mother, but as she grips the stainless steel bars at the sides of her hospital bed, Laurel’s as unhappy as anyone I’ve ever met.

  “Honey, hear me out,” James says. “I’m on your side. Trust me. I want what’s best for our little daughter. And I know you do too. When I saw Trish kissing Anne Elise, I realized we’re in a win-win-win situation.”

  “Huh?”

  James walks up to me, takes both of my hands. We stand inches apart, and he stares into my eyes, and my knees go squishy like the first time he introduced himself to me. His hands are warm, his smile tender.

  “Trish, be honest with me. You want the best for my daughter, don’t you? You wouldn’t hurt Anne Elise, would you?”

  I shake my head, for how could anyone wish to harm a baby?

  “Then divorce me,” James says.

  Things crumble inside me. I can’t believe what James just asked. I feel dizzy, nauseous. James stares at me compassionately as if about to butter me up with another damn dose of his flattery. He reaches over, touches my arm, and it takes every ounce of my self-control not to burst out in tears or push him away, and yet when I start to say something, he raises his hand to hush me.

  “Hear me out,” James says. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way. Honest. I wish there was some other way. Divorce me so I can do the right thing and marry Laurel. Divorce me so I can make sure Anne Elise grows up in a strong, loving nuclear family. Divorce me so she will grow up with the confidence that she’s loved by both her parents. You know the studies. You know the odds. A child growing up in a two-parent home is far more likely to succeed in life. This is especially true for girls. Trish, you’re not an ogre. Divorce me so I can be a daddy.”

  Pleading to be a daddy, he trembles, bringing tears to my eyes. The pain of living with me, being married to me, is etched all over his face. I’m horrified. He doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want my love, my continued support. This much I already guessed by his willingness to leap into his affair with Laurel. But it’s more than that: after twelve years of fruitless marriage, he’s cutting his losses, casting me aside because of my barrenness. A woman in his eyes is only as valuable as the baby she’s capable of gestating, and it pisses me off, this biological reductionism. Laurel, too, looks at me with glistening eyes, and now that I’m helpless with shame and tears, I remember that, by the terms of our prenuptials, James needs me to divorce him if he is to have any claim on my fortune. It is the most ironclad of prenuptial agreements: if he even threatens to bring divorce proceedings against me, he forsakes all of my money and four-fifths of whatever assets we’ve jointly acquired. Because he is reckless with his spending and reckless with his investments, I’ve always insisted that we keep our finances separate.

  I let go of James’s hands. I’m not going to divorce him. In fact, I’ve already planned how to force him to toss Laurel aside. I turn toward the window. My eyes settle upon the snow-covered gazebo across the hospital’s grounds. Beyond the gazebo is a small pond. Though now skinned with ice, it is the type of pond where ducks flourish in idyllic summers, the type of place where Allie would take her toddlers to feed stale bread and broken crackers to the mallards.

  “So what do you say, Trish? Will you let me do the right thing? Will you let me be a daddy?”

  I turn around. The baby is asleep again on Laurel’s lap. James and Laurel are holding hands. Both have hopeful expressions. If I were to say yes, they’d thank me and promise to invite me into their house whenever I wished, but my father—a contractually minded banker with no compunctions against foreclosing on businesses, farms, homes, and families—was always proudest when declaring he hadn’t raised any suckers in the family.

  “No, James. Why would I divorce you? I love you,” I say, holding my hands to the chest of my ruby-colored Armani sweater, and as I’m saying this and seeing my grinning face in the mirror atop Laurel’s bed table, I’m thrilled by the horror that comes over them. Laurel in particular seems appalled to hear that I still love James—and I do. He’s mine. I could never hold my head high if I were to let him discard me. He only wants to be with her because of the baby. Why else would he throw away the life we’ve built together? Why else would he throw away the comforts my fortune provides? Our posh Georgetown residency? If I am to keep James, I’ve got to neutralize the enchanting hold that baby has on him—and yet the baby is so beautiful. Closing my eyes for a moment, I can’t get the baby out of my mind. She’s all I ever wanted in life.

  Chapter Four

  LAUREL

  I’m no special snowflake, no precious girl who demands to play by her own rules. Every dawn must have its day and every monkey its—what?—comeuppance. A woman in my position, having given birth to the daughter of another woman’s husband, can expect no favors from that other woman, but I can’t stand the dismissive, belittling way Tricia glares at me. She struts through my—my!—maternity suite with a sense of ownership as if it’s one more room in her own private little snow globe. Possession is her game, so Jimmy has let on, but she can never have me or Zerena, and although Jimmy promised he was going to ask for a divorce as soon as our baby was born, I hadn’t expected he’d call his wife to the hospital and do it right in front of me. I’m proud of Jimmy for allowing her the opportunity to do the decent thing and divorce him, but now that she’s declined to board that train, it’s time for us to move on.

  Ten, maybe even five years ago, Mrs. Patricia Wainsborough (née Riggs) would’ve been beautiful. Jimmy showed me a picture of them at a ridiculously extravagant museum benefit, she in a strapless black Dior with a high-low hemline that showed off her long slender legs and impossibly thin waist, and you could see, both in the picture itself and how he fawned over the photo as he handed it to me, that he must have considered himself the luckiest duck in the pond to have had her as his arm candy. The dress must have been a size 4, something that even after I lose all the baby fat, I’d struggle shimmying into. She’s in her forties, about as old as Jimmy. No longer does her skin naturally glow. Nor is the skin as supple. If you look closely, you see wrinkles have begun to pinch her eyes. Furrows crevice her pale forehead. A wiser woman of her means would avail herself of Botox or other procedures, but her eyes, the color so breathtakingly blue you’d swear they were costume jewelry baubles, still compel attention.

  “Mrs. Wainsborough, please be reasonable,” I say.

  At the sound of my voice, Tricia curls her lip. “I am being reasonable. I’m simply not going to divorce James.” She takes out a gold compact from her handbag, and her anger is evident in how she powders her cheeks, caking the cosmetics so thick she must be poisoning herself. To limit the risk of birth defects and miscarriages, at Jimmy’s suggestion I refrained from cosmetics throughout my pregnancy, and now the smell of whatever she’s dusting onto herself makes my skin crawl. “I’ve simply made up my mind, and I’m not going to discuss it any further.”

  “Mrs. Wainsborough. I’m asking you to leave. Get it? This is my private—private!—room. So why don’t you vacate the premises, ’kay?”

  She flinches, the first rise I’ve gotten from her since waking. Despite the color pasted onto her cheeks, her face is pale. She turns to Jimmy and is about to say something, but one of his cell phones goes off, emitting the pompous opening four notes to that famous Beethoven symphony—bah bah bah bum. Like a drug dealer, he carries three separate phones, and when he answers the call, a smile flashes across his lips, and he slips into portfolio-management mode, telling whoever’s calling about the benefits of transitioning from front-loaded to rear-loaded mutual funds. It’s how this vainglorious peacock displays his plumage, showing off to his wife and me his mastery of arcane investment wisdom and going off abo
ut yields, risk rates, and debt/equity ratios. Three minutes into the call, just as I think it’s winding down, Jimmy raises a hand to signal he needs to continue his call away from our prying ears. There’s a bounce to his step, a happiness that comes to him only when talking about money. He walks out of the maternity suite and into the hallway, and when I can no longer hear his voice, I turn again to his wife.

  “Mrs. Wainsborough, I don’t want to be difficult. I—”

  “Tricia,” she says, interrupting me. “Call me Tricia. Even people who don’t like me call me Tricia.”

  “Okay. Whatever. Tricia. Please leave. I don’t know how much clearer I can be without morphing all rude on you.”

  “It’s going to have to wait.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “James drove me here. I have to wait until he finishes his call so he can drive me back.”

  “He drove you here?” It doesn’t make sense. I assumed Tricia came here by herself. After Zerena’s birth and as doctors stitched me up from the episiotomy, drowsiness from the anesthesia and the pain meds got the better of me. Although I longed to stay awake and hold Zerena and hear the sound of her breath, I drifted off to sleep. Jimmy squeezed my hand and said he’d stay with the baby until I awoke again. I trusted him. Instead, he abandoned Zerena and me so he could go back to his wife and bring her here.

  “He’s not a bad driver. Or at least no worse than every other idiot on the road.”

  Zerena wakes up again, crying. She looks at me with angry eyes and shakes her fists, and suddenly I feel so sorry, so selfish, so inadequate for having done whatever I’ve unknowingly done to make her so angry. How could I have let my baby down already?

  I’m heartbroken Jimmy hadn’t stayed true to his word and remained with us while I slept. He’s the only man I could imagine spending my life with, but I’ve always questioned if I can really trust him. The baby’s my lifeline to a better life, a means to escape my troubled past. Being the other woman is no easy task. Jimmy loves me. I know he does. And I love him. He has to love me. He just has to love me. Otherwise, how can I raise Zerena on my own?

  What Jimmy said about a child—especially a daughter—needing the active love of a father in her life is true. Growing up, especially when I was really young, I always thought I was missing out not having the kind of father who’d read bedtime stories or take me to the park, help me onto one of the playground swings, and stand behind me, pushing me. My friends spoke glowingly of their own fathers. Me? I hardly knew where he was most of the time. What was so wrong with me that he couldn’t stick around much or even every so often ask, “Hey, girl! How was your day at school? I’m real proud of you, sugar, for all those As on your report card.”

  Zerena needs Jimmy. I need Jimmy.

  I first met Jimmy when he brought some clients to the restaurant where I waitressed. Looking at him from across the floor, I broke out in a cold sweat. I saw his gold wedding ring. Alarm bells zinged in my head, warning me to stay clear of him, but I couldn’t resist. How often can the man of your dreams float into your life? Handsome, with dark-brown hair and eyes that set me on fire, he asked me what was good on the menu. I stuttered out a description of the risotto del giorno and told him the chef’s signature braised lamb dish had recently been featured in the Washington Post Magazine. As I spoke, he slid his eyes up from the menu, taking me in, and smiled. I wrote down his table’s orders. His manners were impeccable. Other men at his table looked up to him. He possessed a level of self-assurance that I’d never encountered before.

  Until then, I’d defined myself solely by what I didn’t possess—money, good clothes, and a respectable upbringing. I was the goose who could pass unnoticed in even the smallest of gaggles. I was no rich girl, no beauty queen, but he complimented me on the way I poured a glass of Barolo for him and thanked me for grinding just the right amount of pepper on his lamb. I basked in these compliments. I was a chasm, an abyss needing to be filled. I was a quantum, and he was the leap I needed to take.

  I wanted Jimmy more than I’d ever wanted any man. He returned to my restaurant every night for a week. Sometimes, he’d stay just for a drink, but mostly he ate alone at a corner table. When the restaurant was slow, I hovered around him, inviting conversation. I didn’t care that he was married. One night after closing, I let him walk me back to my apartment. He broke down and cried about the difficulties he and his wife had been having trying to conceive a child. They’d tried the whole hornet’s nest of therapies and fertility treatments, nutritional supplements and fertility drugs, everything. He was at wit’s end. Any man so distraught at the idea of never being a father deserved a child. I led him to my sofa bed, slid off the cushions, and opened the mattress before taking off my simple cream-colored cotton peasant blouse and drying his tears with it. He stood still and startled, and I snapped off my bra and watched as he instinctively pulled away as if having second thoughts about being in my apartment, alone, with me. So much can be said without saying a word. I wanted him so bad. I wanted to be the woman who’d bring purpose to his life. I caressed his shoulders, and after some moments he gave in to the temptation and caressed me back.

  We’d been seeing each other for two months, him calling me whenever I had a night off from waitressing gigs. He’d book us into expensive hotel suites and take me to dive bars where he couldn’t possibly run into anyone he knew. One night he took me to a brightly lit Nuevo Latino restaurant in Adams Morgan where pulsating Caribbean club music thundered over the sound system, making conversation impossible. The walls were loud and yellow and soft and pink, the murals a fauvist’s Day-Glo reckoning of mauve palm trees, turquoise beaches, and lime-green oceans. A waiter approached our table. Because of the loud music, Jimmy raised his voice to be heard, something a classy guy like him doesn’t do much. “Bring me a glass of your best sipping rum,” Jimmy said, not bothering to open the leather-bound cocktail menu. Turning to me, he asked what I wanted to drink.

  “Ginger ale,” I responded.

  Jimmy wriggled his eyebrows. It wasn’t the answer he expected. In our previous outings, I’d made a point of ordering elaborate cocktails, gin fizzes I’d compel bartenders to whip up using fresh egg whites and Hendrick’s gin or chocolate concoctions of my own fancy—jiggers of amaretto Disaronno liqueur mixed with Courvoisier, pale white rum, and maraschino cherries. Half the fun of dating me, I often joked in a flirty giggle, came from being able taste the outrageous cocktails I ordered, but no man acted so oddly in my presence as when I requested that simple ginger ale. Jimmy sidled his chair over to mine. Bougainvillea blossoms sprayed out of the bud vase atop the batik tablecloth. Already, this early in my pregnancy, my sense of smell was greater than it had ever been. The flowers were fragrant. Jimmy leaned into me, whispered into my ear, asked if I was all right.

  “I’ve got a zygote problem,” I said, aiming to be humorous, but the terminology tripped him up. The concern in his face deepened. He asked if my condition was contagious. I cast my glance into my lap and confessed to peeing onto the absorbent tip of a home pregnancy test that morning and watching its indicator change from a minus sign into a plus sign, simple arithmetic that informed me the sum total of my life was about to change. He scanned my face with deadly seriousness to judge whether I was kidding. Never had I felt so vulnerable or so much at the mercy of another human being’s compassion. I thought he’d be happy, overjoyed. He’d never explicitly said he wanted me to get pregnant, but I assumed that was his intention. Now, though, in his hesitation to embrace this news, I realized I’d let myself forget he was a married man and that, being married, he might not cotton to the news that his mistress was pregnant.

  After some moments he squeezed my hand, his hand warm and pliable, like the modeling clay public school art teachers had doled out whenever my creative urge slouched toward sculpture. Jimmy said he’d take care of everything, that I’d have nothing to worry about, and in the weeks to come I thought he’d hand me a check or offer me transit to a clinic and sit w
ith me in a sterile examination room as clinicians vacuumed out my womb. Driving me back to my apartment that night, he stopped off at an all-night drug store. I waited inside his Volvo—what kind of man willingly drives a Volvo station wagon?—while he ducked into the store, and when he emerged carrying a small paper bag and a bottle of water, I thought he was going to ply me with some caustic poison—something to rid my life of more than just the zygote. He opened the plastic water bottle, handed it to me, and tossed the bag onto my lap. Prenatal vitamins were inside the bag. I didn’t normally cry, but jacked up as I was on mommy hormones, stupendous gratitude overtook me. Tears rushed from my eyes, and I knew at that moment he’d be one of the few decent people I’d ever meet. But I also understood I could never take the solidity of our relationship for granted.

  Now, I’m holding our baby, who’s crying. Jimmy is nowhere to be found. What am I supposed to do? Jimmy read the baby books. He was supposed to be here, coaching me, calming me and my child.

  “Your baby,” Tricia says, approaching my bed. “She’s crying. Do something about it. Feed her, why don’t you?”

  I feel suddenly stupid. “How do I do that?”

  Tricia throws up her arms, a sanctimonious fireball of rage. With not an iota of her husband’s grace, she storms out of the room, leaving me to listen to the clack of her heels in the hospital corridor.

  Wrapped in her pink receiving blanket, Zerena squirms in my lap like an angry burrito. I wonder how motherhood will change me. Will I be a good mother? Will I be able to love her, nurture her, or at least calm her? Nothing makes you feel as all alone and hopeless as being unable to calm your screaming baby. Zerena reaches toward my chest and puckers her lips. I loosen the sash of my terrycloth robe and raise her to my breast. She latches on instantly, making sweet glurpy sounds. I expect breastfeeding to hurt, but the sensation of her mouth and tongue and the cute way she swallows between mouthfuls of nourishment make it all tickle.