wife in the pit of postpartum depression. There’s a deadness to her voice that I couldn’t have imagined until I heard it. And all the light has been sucked from her eyes.
“Let me try to make this easier for you,” I say gently. “I think I know what you’re about to tell me.”
“How could you?”
“I spoke to Tallulah this morning.”
“Tallulah?” Jet looks blank. “What about?”
“She’s an observant woman.”
Jet shrugs and shakes her head in puzzlement. “What did she ‘observe’?”
“Well . . . nothing terrible, or even untoward. She just described to me a feeling that she had.”
A sudden alertness in Jet’s posture tells me she’s made the connection. “Oh,” she says softly. “Oh.”
“Did you come here to tell me that Max never raped you?”
Her chin begins to quiver, and her eyes close. Even her hands are shivering.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” I say, meaning it as a kindness. “I have no idea what you were going through then. It had to be a terrible time.”
“I’d prefer to tell you,” she replies, her voice braced with iron. “If you can listen. It’s not what you think. Nothing like what you must think.”
What can she mean? “Did he rape you?”
She looks stricken. “No.”
“Then . . . what should I think?”
“Will you please listen to me? Five minutes. That’s all I ask.”
I nod slowly. “I’m listening.”
Jet takes two deep breaths, then licks her lips like someone about to read aloud from a book. “The situation was pretty much as I described last night. Though Paul was, if anything, in worse shape than I let on. He had constant pain from his head wounds. He was addicted to Oxycontin. Warren Lacey wrote prescriptions for whatever he wanted, but Paul also bought street drugs from a worker at the sawmill. I think the multiple IED concussions had profoundly affected his brain. He would fly into rages, he was impotent nearly all the time, and he refused to seek help for any of it.”
“And you?”
“I did what women always do. I blamed myself.”
“Why?”
“For marrying him.”
I feel like we’re retracing old steps. “You said that last night. That you married a man you didn’t love. But I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. Or me. You feel that way now, but not when you walked down the aisle.”
Frustration etches itself into her face. “You’re so wrong, Marshall. Did I not come to you in D.C. only weeks before Paul proposed to me? Did I not ask if there was a chance for us?”
“Yes . . . sort of. But you waited until you were right at the edge of the cliff.”
Anger flashes in her eyes. “I still did it. That’s more than you did. But you shut me down. You slept with me, of course. But you let me know you weren’t ready to deal with it in a real way. With us.”
“I wasn’t ready. What was the hurry?”
“We were twenty-eight! Not eighteen.”
I turn up my hands on the table. “To tell you the truth, I was still hurt by you going back to Paul after college. I assumed you wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t love him.”
Jet’s gaze flits over the surface of the table, as though she’s looking for crumbs that need sweeping up. “I’ve come to realize something,” she says. “Marrying someone you don’t love is a sin. Because it sends both of you to hell. It destroys the other person first, but in the end it gets you, too. The magnitude of what you’ve done, the damage you’ve caused by forcing you both to live a lie.”
Her words take me back to my own marriage. “I see the truth in that. I’ve lived that. But that sounds like a lot of marriages, Jet. Wilde said the one charm of marriage was that it made a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
“Glib and depressing.”
“Why don’t we focus on you and Max?”
“There is no me and Max! There never was.” Though Jet’s outward affect is melancholy, I sense fearsome anger beneath. “What happened was simple, pragmatic, utilitarian. By 2005, Paul and I had been trying to have a baby for four years—since before he went to Afghanistan after 9/11. All through his rotations home, even when he had that stupid contracting company in Iraq. After one year of failure, I got myself thoroughly checked out. My plumbing was fine. But Paul refused to get even the most basic fertility tests on himself.”
“That I believe.”
“He’d tried to kill himself