I Will Never Leave You Page 6

  And this is when I know I’ve got her right where I want her. She’s not prepared to give up on me, which gives me time to figure out what to do about Laurel.

  Chapter Seven

  TRISH

  James’s touch is like no other. Because he’s conflicted and confused, I must push harder on him to stay with me. If I were pregnant, none of this would’ve happened. We may have our differences, but the bond between us is unbreakable. Drunk as he was, he returned home last night rather than going to the hospital for the special celebration Laurel planned with him. If his desire was to straight-out abandon me, he would’ve done so already. Instead, he needs time and my encouragement to end his fling with Laurel.

  We first met on the scariest day in history. People were frantic, pouring out of their DC office buildings at ten o’clock in the morning. Hijacked airliners had slammed into New York’s World Trade Center towers, while here in DC, across the river, the Pentagon was in flames. Buildings throughout the city were evacuated, the federal government on emergency shutdown. With traffic at a standstill and the streets congested, hailing a cab to get home to Savory Mew was out of the question. Never had I felt so unsafe. I stared into the brilliant blue sky expecting it to be filled with hijacked aircraft. Sirens blared from every conceivable direction. My father was attending a shareholders’ meeting in New York, and as I crossed an intersection on K Street, panic seized me. My father, I realized, might be dead. My mother had been dead for five years, and my sister had died earlier in the year. People teemed around me, everyone fleeing their office buildings, but I feared I was all alone, an orphan with no one left in my life to care for. Cell phone networks were down. None of my calls went through. People crowded shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks. No one felt safe going down into the metro. Rumors that would later prove false peppered the conversations around me. Someone said a truck bomb had exploded outside the State Department. The breeze was heavy with the charred smell from the Pentagon fire a mile or two away. I started to cry, thinking about my father.

  A man next to me in the crowd reached into the breast pocket of his navy-blue suit jacket and handed me a soft white handkerchief to dry my tears. He had light-brown hair and dark, comforting eyes that brought out my immediate trust. Until that moment, lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t realized we’d been walking apace for several blocks. In tears, distraught, I told him I feared my father was dead. He drew a breath, put his hand on my shoulder, and, touching my chin, implored me to think positive thoughts. The man said I owed it to my father to visualize him happy and healthy, that if by chance my father was struggling to free himself from under tons of rubble, my “positive psychic projections” would energize him. I’ll never forget it. Under James’s persuasive gaze, I willed myself to believe my father was still alive.

  “In order to be lucky, you’ve got to think lucky. Subconsciously, we feed off the energy others give off to us. Karma,” James said, tapping his heart. “It’s what we live by.”

  I stared into James’s eyes, and he did not flinch from my gaze. We were in the nation’s capital, in the middle of a national emergency, people running every which way, sirens wailing, and yet I had his entire attention. As if by magic, my phone beeped. My father’s number lit up on the screen. Somehow, he had gotten through to me; somehow, he was alive. My father, never one to text before, sent the briefest of messages: Im OK U?

  Hurriedly, I texted back a simple Yes.

  So overjoyed was I that I wrapped my arms around James and kissed him, hungrily, digging my fingers into the lush fabric of his suit jacket and feeling the muscular flesh of his shoulders beneath the fabric. His mouth tasted of chewing gum, and his cheeks smelled of Acqua di Giò cologne, a combination of innocence and sophistication that drove me wild with desire. My need for him was animal-like and desperate. People in our midst were looking at us, pointing at us, and I had it in my mind we were reliving some kind of celebrated scene and that, like the famous Times Square photograph of an uninhibited sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day, our kiss would take on talismanic proportions in the popular imagination.

  James straightened his jacket, straightened his tie. He could’ve been forgiven for thinking me unhinged or, at the least, a bit too forward, and yet, as he turned to face me, I sensed again his unflappable calm, his supreme confidence. He held out his hand and introduced himself, prim and proper. He told me his name. Wainsborough. It sounded English. The name of a duke or a lord, someone of consequence I’d feel confident introducing to those in my social circle. He kissed my hand, an over-the-top gesture that, compared to my passionate embrace, seemed positively restrained. My heart raced. I stuttered.

  “The pleasure of meeting you is entirely mine,” James said, letting go of my hand. “It’s a pity it takes a national disaster for me to meet someone as charming as you.”

  Now, showered, dressed, and having spooned down a bowl of blueberries and instant oatmeal, James plants a kiss on my cheek. Back when we first dated, we talked without words, letting our eyes do the talking as we stared at each other across restaurant tables. Though he won’t call in sick to spend the day rekindling our love with a winter’s stroll through Rock Creek Park, I’m determined to hang on to him. He is my husband. I bat my eyelashes, and he raises an eyebrow.

  “Do you want to know what I dreamed last night? I dreamed I was pregnant,” I say, and as I tell James about the dream, he slips his hand over mine. Though he asked me to divorce him yesterday, I look into his eyes, yearning to see that divorce isn’t what he really wants. I tell him about the bloating I felt in the dream, how I thought I’d burst out of my skin. “It was simply the most exciting dream I ever had. Would you like it if I were pregnant?”

  James glances at the kitchen clock. The clock is plastic and black and shaped like an elegant cat, and with each passing second, the cat’s tail swishes from one side to the other.

  “Would you like it?” I ask again, but I already know from his reluctance to answer that he thinks it impossible I’ll ever get pregnant. He doesn’t want me to get my hopes up. Plus there’s Laurel, his fertile young mistress who apparently doesn’t share my difficulties with conception.

  “Hey, I forgot to compliment you on how well your shoes match your camisole. It looks lovely. What do you call the color?”

  Both items are new, bought the previous week while boutique hopping, but rattled with the feeling he’s slipping out of my life, I can’t remember the details. Reds, greens, and blues no longer exist in couture. Instead, we have shades like bruised plum, rosemary sorbet, and smudged banana, monikers deriving from produce aisles and fanciful imaginations. My friends are always amazed at how attentive James is of me, how he notices the little things—the accessories, the color coordination—that their own lackadaisical husbands overlook.

  “Hey, why so glum?” James asks.

  I shrug. In my heart, I know unless I do something, James will eventually leave me. None of this would have happened if I’d been able to become pregnant. Fundamentally, he’s a good man. I doubt he’s ever dallied with another woman before Laurel dug her claws into him. Now that he’s a father, he will endeavor to be a good father. For the sake of his baby, he will eventually commit himself to Laurel, tossing me aside. How is it supposed to feel when a marriage dissolves? I’m overwhelmed by the mawkish sentimentality for this shared life that’s rushing away from me. Back when we dated, I deduced that his love for my money helped cement his love for me, which was why I consented to his marriage proposal only on the condition he sign the prenup. As long as it was clear he’d never get a penny if he divorced me, I figured he’d be mine for life. Sooner or later, his love for Anne Elise will outweigh his love for my money. Eventually, he will leave me for Laurel. But I won’t make it easy for him.

  “Are you coming home tonight?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” James says, opening the front door. Over his shoulder, beyond the circular driveway and the snowed-over front lawn, I make out the cobblestone street in front of the house. “Why wouldn’t I want to come home to the most wonderful wife in the city? Please don’t think a little tiff or two will make me run away.”

  A little tiff? He’s trying to downplay his affair and all that’s come between us, but I’m not going to let him distract me. “So what time are you coming home?”

  James squints at me. It’s not like me to pester him about his comings and goings, for I’m not one of those henpecking wives who feels incomplete if she doesn’t know where her husband is every time the cat’s tail on her kitchen clock swishes another second or two. “I’ll be home. Just like I always am.”

  “At what time? I need to plan something. How about seven o’clock? Is that good enough? Do you think you can be home by seven?”

  James shrugs. “Sure.”

  A moment later, James snaps his fingers. “Crushed raspberry.”

  “Huh?”

  “Crushed raspberry. That’s what they should name the color of your shoes and top. It’s the perfect name for a color. Don’t you think, darling?”

  My father had multiple affairs during the course of his marriage. A woman internalizes these things. A father’s infidelity teaches a girl that, ultimately, as a woman, she’s disposable. A mother’s silence about her husband’s infidelities teaches acceptance. Yes, I was affected by it. My mother, who traced her ancestry to the Mayflower, was the most generous person I’d ever known. Each night, instead of reading bedtime stories to my sister, Julie, and me, she recited poems by the American fireside poets of the nineteenth century. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell. Her delicate voice lilted with the rhythms of each verse. She was a porcelain flower, fine and fragile and utterly unable to withstand the fissures my father’s affairs introduced into her marriage
. She took to bed for months on end. In the mornings, Julie and I dove through the heavy curtains that surrounded her four-poster canopy bed, trying to cheer her up. We’d brush her brittle hair, pretend she was our fairy queen and we her fair handmaidens. We’d lay out the elegant pleated skirts and silk blouses we’d hope she’d wear, but rarely could we coax her downstairs for breakfast or outside for a rambunctious hide-and-go-seek game like we once enjoyed.

  “What do you do all day?” my sister and I asked her one morning four months after she first retreated into her bedroom. We were trying to figure out why she no longer played with us or even asked after our school activities. During the months she’d become bedbound, winter had turned into an unseasonably warm spring, and now it was nearly summer, the twittering of songbirds in the air whenever we galloped outside. Julie and I had somehow discovered a passion for badminton. We wanted her to come outside and watch us volley birdies over a net we’d strung up between two maple trees.

  Our mother stared at us, her face gaunt and her eyes ravaged with worry.

  Until that moment, I assumed that, in bed, she slept throughout the day, but seeing the pallor in her sun-starved face and the purple shadows under her eyes, I suddenly realized that, quite to the contrary, she hardly slept at all. This knowledge frightened me. I wanted to flee the room, afraid that if I stayed another minute, I, too, would never be able to sleep again. Her skin was as white as the powder she used to dust onto herself.

  “I pray,” our mother whispered. “That’s all I do anymore.”

  Always much braver than I, Julie sat down beside her. “What do you pray for, Mommy?”

  “I pray that I can die soon.”

  Years later, I’d understand our mother had fallen into an irrevocable depression, but back then, still in my girlhood, I couldn’t fathom why she never left her sour-smelling room. I hated her for being so weak. I am not proud of this.

  My mother once had long, luxurious hair. She once had a pretty smile, a dainty figure, and calm, compassionate eyes. I pleaded with her to open the windows and let the sun flow into her room. I pleaded with her to be happy. I pleaded with her to fight for her life even though, at that young age, I wasn’t sure what that meant. As I grew into my teens, I gradually understood why young women sometimes called our house for my father at odd hours. Or dropped by in person, only to be ushered upstairs into one of the guest bedrooms by him. He was wrong for doing what he did, but I hated my mother for not being strong. Staying in bed, she was giving up on life. This, in my mind, meant she was giving up on being my mother.

  So, yes, my father’s affairs affected me, and yet I was never mad at him; I was mad at my mother. All my resentment and bitterness, even that which I was too angry to verbally express, was directed at her.

  Now, even after what James has done with Laurel, I’m determined not to suffer the same fate as my mother.

  Chapter Eight

  TRISH

  This morning, I gulped down two Valiums as I whipped up the breakfast tray of James’s hangover remedies. Yesterday, after returning from Laurel’s maternity suite, I met with my internist. I didn’t want to be like my mother and fall into depression in the face of James’s affair. Hopping onto the doctor’s examination table, I unveiled my troubles to him, letting him know depression ran in my family along my mother’s line. He put a stethoscope to my chest, the cool metal bell of that instrument causing me to shiver, and slipped a rubberized belt around my arm, pumping it up to gauge my blood pressure. Physically, nothing was wrong with me, and yet, as a precaution, he scribbled a Valium prescription for me. I was skeptical. What were the possible side effects? He told me about the sleepiness it induces, the difficulty in coordination some people experience. “Is that all?” I asked.

  He glanced at his tablet, scrolled through the drug’s complete profile. He told me about the suicidal ideation, aggression, agitation, confusion, unusual thoughts and behavior, memory loss, and depression that can occur.

  “Unusual thoughts?” I asked. My doctor put down his tablet. “Some people react strangely to Valium in rare cases. Since you’re without preexisting psychiatric concerns or mental health issues, I doubt you need to worry.” In the seventeen hours since I filled my prescription, I’ve taken several Valiums, but I’ve yet to experience the calm moods promised by my doctor. Now, watching James step into his Volvo, I take another tablet. And then another.

  Throughout his life, my father raved about a particular private investigation agency. They were the crème de la crème in his book, the ne plus ultra. So far, except for the gender studies snafu, they’ve provided me with excellent information on Laurel. In recent years, I remember my father saying that some unpleasantness had developed between him and the agency, sullying their relationship. They had charged him exorbitantly for their services or double billed him or some such nonsense. Because I don’t want whatever happened with that to impact the quality of services they offer me, I’ve only given them my married name—which was easy enough to do since all our previous communications were conducted through email. They don’t know I’m Jack Riggs’s daughter. Now, though, because I need them to dig up more information—uglier information—if I’m to convince James to stop seeing her, I jump into my car and drive to their offices.

  DC’s Chinatown, where Simpkins & Simpkins is based, is a section of town that, today, scarcely exists. Once or twice a year, before my father’s affairs ruined their marriage, my parents took my sister and me there for dinner at one of the small restaurants, where the dining rooms smelled of sizzling peanut oil, cardamom, and ginger. Authentic Chinese waiters appeared at our tables bearing pots of green tea and little ceramic teacups that looked unlike any of the fine porcelain cups I used at home. Roasted whole ducks, their heads still attached, their skin glistening with an orange glaze of Elmer’s-like viscosity, hung in the windows of these restaurants, ostensibly to attract customers, but I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be served one of those ducks. What do you do with the head? The neck? The beak? Often, we’d be the only Caucasians in these restaurants, everyone else being as authentically Chinese as our waiters, and I’d close my eyes, fling back my head on the metal-framed chairs, and listen to the yammering Mandarin of the conversations around me as my father pointed to items on the menu, calling them out by their numbers: “We’ll have numbers twenty-three, sixteen, and forty-nine. And bring us some egg rolls too.”

  But, today, for all intents, Chinatown is no longer Chinatown. Developers have rushed in, razing whole blocks of longstanding Chinese stores and replacing them with gaudy brewpubs, Fuddruckers, Hooters, and the brightly lit homogenized chain stores found in every shopping mall across the nation. Tenement buildings that had housed generations of Chinese immigrants were leveled to make room for luxury condominiums. Most of the authentic Chinese restaurants are gone. Nary is there a roasted duck in any of the storefront windows or a bowl of soy sauce–drenched bean curd noodles on any of the tables. Time and circumstance change neighborhoods and relationships. What is a Chinatown without any Chinese businesses or residents? What is a wife without a husband?

  When I arrive at the address listed on the firm’s website, something’s amiss. Consigned to the subbasement of a spanking-new office building, Simpkins & Simpkins’s quarters are barely bigger than my walk-in wardrobe closet. The office is windowless, airless, a claustrophobe’s nightmare. A man looks up at me from behind a dented metal desk, where he’s playing computer solitaire on his cell phone. He’s about twenty-five years old, maybe younger. With no sign of a wedding band on his ring finger, my guess is that he’s unattached, the kind of aimless young man who spends his nights on a secondhand couch watching college basketball games in a studio apartment. I’ve never been in a private investigator’s office before, but it is exactly as I imagined it—low-key and unkempt. Electronic gadgets—laptops, tablets, scanners, handheld radar guns, and parabolic eavesdropping microphones—surround his desk. A DC private investigator’s license hangs on the wall beside posters of athletes from Washington’s underperforming basketball and hockey teams.