Not This Time
27
Sad Truth
WE DELAYED OUR CELEBRATION. Lily and I managed to get Bruce into bed, but he stumbled out to throw up in the toilet and was retching for half an hour with the two of us trying to make sure he didn’t start bleeding or aspirate something. He was in bed for almost two hours before he returned and started heaving again. This time mostly dry heaves that seemed to be more painful than actually throwing up. Lily couldn’t stand to be in the bathroom with him and by five in the morning, she was in the other bathroom with her daily morning sickness.
Bruce went back to sleep while Lily and I drank tea in the living room. We both looked at the bottle of scotch. It was over half gone.
“Did he drink all that yesterday?” Lily asked.
“Must have. I don’t think we had any scotch. He must have bought the bottle when the liquor stores opened yesterday.”
“What are we going to do?” she asked. “His self-esteem is shattered.”
“I don’t get it. Granted, I’d feel like crap if I lost my job, but it isn’t the end of the world. We’ve got plenty. If we wanted to, we could probably all retire, as long as we didn’t expect to fly first class around the world every year,” I said. “It just feels out of proportion.”
“Not exactly stellar daddy-material today, is he?” Lily giggled.
“And to think I was considering getting pregnant,” I sighed. Lily snapped her attention to me.
“Really?”
“Well, I was going to ask what you’d think if I sort of got preggers, too. You know, so your baby has a playmate, sort of. I wouldn’t do it if you objected—or if Bruce objected, of course. But I was just thinking about having a baby around and I started getting all squishy.”
“Are you still squishy?” Lily asked after she’d kissed me.
“Oh, Lily, I wish you could plant a baby inside me.”
“Maybe we should go into the guest room so we don’t disturb hubby and let me investigate to make sure all the channels are open and receptive,” she said as she cupped my breast. Oh, God!
“I love you. But I think I’d better pick up Emily and go to a museum for a few hours. I’ll see if I can get a ticket for Pinocchio at the Children’s Theater and take her there, too. We need to keep it quiet here or he’ll be right back in the bathroom. And so will you.”
“He’s going to suffer for this all day, isn’t he?” Lily said. “That must have brought him close to alcohol poisoning. We should have called an ambulance.”
“With any luck, he’ll suffer for it for a long time,” I said. Yes, that was evil, but I wasn’t going to let him forget he’d been so drunk we couldn’t tell him he was going to be a daddy.
“He lives!” I said as I came through the door with Emily.
“You’ve been gone a long time. Lily’s cooking,” he said. Obviously, his head still wasn’t on straight. Emily ran to him and he hugged her tenderly. I saw tears slip from his eyes.
“Baby, I think Daddy isn’t feeling well. Why don’t you see if you can help Mommy in the kitchen?”
“Okay!” she said happily. We’d had a good day at the museum and at the children’s performance. It was nearly dinnertime and I was exhausted. Bruce looked up at me with the tears running and the most mournful look on his face. I started to go to him, but he held out his hand to stop me.
“I know you are going to throw me out. I just want you to know I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Bruce, you silly guy! We’re not going to throw you out because you lost your job or because you felt bad enough to get drunk. We love you more than that.”
“They found out I had an affair with a student.”
“They… A…” A crash sounded from the direction of the dining room and I looked up to see Lily standing in the doorway. A platter of fried chicken lay broken on the floor. Her mouth was open in horror.
“Uh-oh,” Emily said. “We need to go out for dinner.”
“Nooo!” Lily wailed.
“You what?” I screamed. “You what!” I was happy five minutes ago. Lily was going to tell him she was pregnant. I was going to ask him to make me pregnant. Had she told him yet? He was going to tear our family apart to get a piece of ass from a college slut?
Right. Lily and I were family, living together with one man. Loving in any combination and I was ready to dismiss any college girl Bruce got his hooks into as a slut. How long had he played her? How long had it been going on? What did we do wrong?
“It didn’t…”
“Don’t you dare say it didn’t mean anything!” I screamed. “Don’t you dare! Are you going to tell us she was just a piece of meat with a hole in it and you needed to masturbate? Don’t make it worse.”
“Let me finish,” he yelled back. “It didn’t start out to be an affair. No more than you and Lily started out like that. I was just trying to help a student who was having a hard time adjusting. We got to be friends and worked together on sets. It just sort of happened.”
“What show? Once Upon a Mattress?” I fumed. “What did she need help with? Getting dressed or getting undressed?”
Lily hadn’t said anything. She stood there gasping. Bruce was crying and I was raging. I don’t know why Emily chose to go him, except that I’d told her he wasn’t feeling well. She went to hug him and he wrapped his arms around her. NO!
“Get your filthy hands off my daughter! Emily! Get away from him.” Emily looked up at me and burst into tears. She ran to her bedroom and slammed the door. I looked at Lily. She’d taken one step into the room and stopped. She looked at Bruce and then at me.
“Stop it! Stop it!” she yelled. “You’re both making it worse. Stop it before I die. I can’t! I can’t bring a baby into the world without a father. Stop it!”
“A what?” Bruce gasped. “Lily?”
“I’m pregnant. We were going to tell you last night. Please, please don’t destroy everything!” It wasn’t Bruce, but me, she was looking at. I choked. I was going to lose both of them. I turned to follow Emily.
“I need to take care of Emily,” I whispered. I went to my baby.
Back in the old life, the one I thought I was here to correct, I’d had a husband who cheated on me. Repeatedly. For twenty-five years. I’d endured it. Ignored it. Blocked him out of my life until my daughter was old enough to fend for herself. Then I closed the door on him and died.
What the fuck? I hadn’t loved Jesse to start with. In this life, he was easy to get over—even with a daughter to raise by myself. Even he was better off. But Bruce… I had to admit that I loved him. What was worse was that Emily and Lily both loved him. I realized that I could have walked away from Jesse any time and neither Willa nor I would have cared. Instead, I stayed with him for twenty-five years. Now I was seriously considering walking away from the two people I loved, tearing our child away from them, ruining our lives.
Because my heart was broken.
I slept with Emily that night. At first, she didn’t want me to touch her. She was mad at all her parents. But she also wanted—needed—the desperate reassurance of physical contact. She hugged me all night long as I hugged her. I wondered if, in the master bedroom, Bruce was hugging Lily and she was hugging him. Of course, they would be. Of course.
I woke up to the smell of coffee brewing and bacon frying. It was a Sunday morning ritual. Bruce made breakfast. It started back in the days when I was still holding open houses every Sunday. Emily, of course, was already up and I knew she’d be sitting in the kitchen with him. I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t just walk in and demand that he not pay attention to my daughter. He had no biological or legal right to her. I could remove his name from the list of people approved to take my daughter from school. I could buy a new condo and move out.
I might as well just kill us all.
I took a deep breath and steeled myself as I walked out of the bathroom and headed toward the kitchen. I could see through the door that the bacon was done and he was sitting at the table across from Emily. His coffee cup was held in both hands in front of him. He wasn’t speaking loudly, but the only other sound was the scraping of Emily’s spoon against her plate as she ate.
“Because I hurt Mommies,” he said. “It’s not an owie I can put a Band-Aid on and make it all better. I hurt them really, really bad. I didn’t mean to.”
“You had an accident?” Emily asked.
“No, honey. I had a stupid,” he answered softly. “Sometimes you see something you could do and you know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway. And you never stop to think that the reason you shouldn’t isn’t because there’s a rule against it or it’s against the law, but that you shouldn’t do it because it will hurt someone you love. That’s a stupid. My stupid was so stupid that I might have to go away.”
“When will you come back?”
“I don’t know, Precious. I don’t know if I can ever come back.”
“You can’t go away,” Emily declared. “It’s a stupid. It would hurt me.”
Lily took my hand. I had been so intense on the conversation that I hadn’t heard her come out of the bedroom to stand next to me. I looked at her with tears in both our eyes. She nodded and we walked into the kitchen.
“That’s right, Emily. It is a stupid and we’ve had quite enough of those,” I said. “Don’t leave, Bruce.”
“You… Can you forgive me?” he asked. Lily shrugged and gripped my hand more tightly.
“I don’t know. Right now, it’s hard to see past the hurt. But I know… We know that Emily is right. Unless you plan to take stupid to a whole new level, you can’t leave. There’s something in this room that’s more important than stupid and hurt put together.” I went over to kiss my little girl on the forehead. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” She looked at me and reached a sticky finger up to wipe a tear off my cheek. Lily bent down and kissed her, too. Finally, Emily nodded.
“There’s Mommies and Daddy and Emily,” she said with finality.
I guess she understood even better than I did.
I saw Les Monday morning and asked him for a referral to a couple good counselors who he thought could understand a complex relationship. We’d all agreed to work on it together, but I also wanted, finally, to talk to someone personally—alone. I couldn’t live with my former life hanging over my head any longer. All my stored knowledge and wisdom from that life had not helped in the long run. I was nearly twenty-six years old, and I could see myself living a life estranged from my husband and wife, even though we lived in the same house. There was another bedroom I could move into. I was sure, just based on the hormonal activity I knew was going on inside Lily, that she would forgive Bruce and they would become the Mom and Dad of the household. I would be the rich maiden aunt who lived in the other room.
I didn’t want to live my life like that, but I couldn’t imagine another way that it would work out.
As soon as I told him what I needed, Les nodded his head.
“I’m sorry you’re having difficulty,” he said. “But you should know that just agreeing to get help together and then taking the step of getting help for yourself as well is a step in the right direction. It’s a positive move. You know I can’t help you because we are friends and business associates. But I’m sure I can find someone who will.”
“Thank you, Les,” I said. “Now how soon can we get the needle disposal units installed? And I’ve been thinking about that empty house on the corner.”
Things were uneasy. We started sleeping in separate rooms—all three of us. We talked. We went to our counseling sessions. I’d already started with the other counselor Les recommended, but the relationship counselor wanted separate sessions with each of us as well as our combined session once a week until she knew where we were individually, as well as together. In a way, I was glad of that. It let me separate what I wanted to talk about with my therapist for myself and what I wanted to talk about for our relationship. We even got Emily a few sessions with a children’s therapist who understood the basics of our family dynamic and why we were all in counseling.
Over the course of months, it seemed, we gradually rebuilt. Part of the process, of course, was Lily’s pregnancy. Even though Lily and I had been through the process before, we went to all the birth classes together. Even Emily went to some of them and was as excited about having a baby brother or sister as the rest of us were. Ultrasound said it was to be a brother.
Great. One more dick to worry about.
Bruce got a huge surprise when TRP called him for an interview. Their tech director had a heart attack during the opening of Barefoot in the Park and they heard he was available. The director, Tessa, had worked with him at Park Square Theater while he was in grad school. I guess theater contacts never go stale. He was happy to be employed again, even though the salary was considerably less than what he’d made at Grace College.
When Lily was seven months along, she begged us both to come back to her bed so junior could get to know his parents. Bruce and I slept with Lily between us. It wasn’t sexual, but there was a feeling of such intensity to be so close to my family that I could hardly bear it. Sometime during the night, Emily crawled into the big bed with us and we all woke up together in the morning with the first glimmer of real happiness that we’d experienced in five months.
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