steak on a cutting board. And that’s when the panic attacks began. She started to have about two a day. One right when she wakes up when she feels she can’t breathe, and the second at lunchtime because it means there’s a whole second part of the day to live. She started to pick at her face. She would have a nervous moment and walk into the bathroom and press her torso up against the Corian lip of the vanity so she could get her skin up close to the mirror and she would excavate tiny moon craters on her soft, pretty face.
She loses her keys. She forgets to turn off the oven. She forgets coffee cups on the tops of cars. She forgets to take her gloves off in restaurants. She forgets if she’s ordered. She forgets her pills. She forgets to not eat gluten.
It gets to feeling like a perfect storm, the hormones and the eleven years and the multiple washings of the kitchen floor and Ed turning over in bed every night and putting his back to her and all the panic attacks and the lonely feelings in this big house, of feeling newly pretty in this big lonely house. It becomes a montage of routine desperation, and when she closes her eyes she sees him turning his back to her body at night. Turning his back and turning his back and she gets to hate the whole posterior side of him. The back of his body becomes a cold animal, like an alien, with its divots of missing flesh and its freckles and its occasional pimples and she thinks, You have big, nasty pimples on your back and I still want to make love to you and you still reject me and how can I live this way. How can anybody with a soul live this awful way for eleven years. And her whole thinner body becomes a long ticking pendulum inside a clock. So that one day she says, If it gets to three months, that’s it, I’m leaving.
• • •
Three months came and went. At first the time went slowly and then it went fast. Lina had been a good Catholic her whole life. Adultery, she’d always thought, was for only the very selfish. Her two kids were the most important things. Having both parents in the home was something she’d expected for her children, though she knew it did not guarantee happiness. She thought, for example, of her own childhood. Her mother and her father had never divorced, but for the whole time her father was like a fish in a tank. Something she saw every day but could not touch, could not understand. Her mother had been perpetually angry. Wandering around the house, Windexing things.
Still, it was an unbroken home. It was whole. She’d expected her children would have the same.
But if Ed had not touched her after three months, she’d promised herself she would leave. She could not break that promise.
Before Lina has found the right day, she accepts an invitation to a friend’s bachelorette party in Indianapolis. It’s not hard for her to be excited for her friend. Everyone, she knows, walks into marriage glowing. She doesn’t begrudge her friend her green hope. She wonders if that’s because she’s been talking to him on Facebook.
Aidan.
It hasn’t been too much, just some light flirting here and there. You couldn’t even call it flirting. They are just exchanging the facts of their lives. How many children each has, and their ages. Where they live. Aidan still lives close by where they grew up, not far from the river, toward Indy.
On the night of her friend’s bachelorette party, Lina takes more care getting ready than she has taken for anything in a long while. She tells Ed that she plans on drinking and is likely to be staying over.
She types a text out to Aidan letting him know she’s going to be in his neck of the woods. That she has a hotel room. She doesn’t mean to send it. She just wants to see how it will look on her phone. These wild words.
But then something flips in her. The idea of Ed at home, with his fingers on the television remote while her parents watch their children.
So she hits Send. She feels light-headed. She gets into the car.
When, a few minutes later, his name comes through on her screen, her heart nearly stops. But even the stoppage is wonderful. It’s something