the love that flooded his face was so undeniable that I knew the spell had been broken: Martin had been returned to me. To us.
He cooed to our child, bounced her gently, sniffed her head. We decided to call her Aubrey after a song that Martin used to sing to me because it was about a “not so very ordinary girl or name.” Aubrey’s eyes flickered beneath blue lids closed tight against a painfully overlit world as he stroked her head. I thought we were going to be all right.
But Aubrey had colic and screamed eighteen hours a day. Martin begged me to allow him to take her to “a practitioner” at the Hub. “We do astonishing work with gastro issues,” he said, but all I noticed was that he said “we” when he talked about Next, and I couldn’t recall the last time he’d used “we” when he talked about us.
Martin spent more and more time at the Hub. In addition to sleeping, I stopped eating and having rational thoughts.
When I sobbed through Aubrey’s twelve-month well-baby visit, the pediatrician sent me to a psychiatrist who put me on Lexapro. Clearly, I was too far gone for Lexa-amateur. Martin promised that if I swallowed the same fistfuls of Next-produced vitamins and supplements that he did, I would have no need for the “lobotomy in a bottle” dispensed by psychiatrists. I suggested that he was a deranged lunatic who should either stop actively torturing me or get the hell out of my life.
Martin begged me to try to understand. He bared his soul. He wept. We had desperate, amazing sex that I thought signaled a new beginning, but was actually a long good-bye. By Aubrey’s second birthday, Martin was in the process of turning over all his worldly possessions to Next. At the divorce hearing, I learned that it was an extraordinary concession on “the church’s” part to let Martin hold out enough money to put a big chunk down on the house and set up the college trust fund. Of course, Next made Martin promise in return that he would have no further contact with Aubrey or me. And if he ever did, that would lead automatically to the forfeiture of the trust. And, for the next sixteen years, there had been no contact.
It is obvious now, though, that he and Aubrey had been in contact. Just one more of the apparently limitless things my daughter did last year that I knew nothing about.
NOVEMBER 6, 2009
Friday is cold enough that Tyler wears his corduroy jacket and we don’t jump in the water. We take chunks of limestone and scrape powdery outlines of each other into the flat slabs of black granite at the top of the quarry. We do a crime scene story, each of us changing positions and taking turns outlining the other.
We start with our dead bodies. Corpse outlines. Then we draw our victims’ bloody fight. We keep adding scenes, backing the story up in time. The last scene we draw, which is really the first, where it all starts, is a kiss. I lie down on my side first and Tyler draws around me, being especially careful to trace my profile as I lean forward, head tilted up. Then he lies down. I trace around his back, his butt. I reposition his head and trace his profile. Limestone powder dusts his jacket, his jeans, his chin. My fingers touch his lips as I outline them. In the drawing our lips meet.
We step back and look at the whole story wobbling across the uneven surfaces. I try to figure out which one of us made it into a lovers’ quarrel but can’t. It is like the Ouija board, where the answer just magically comes out of two hands touching. Maybe he was imagining that he was outlining a guy. That’s fine. I had my own imaginings.
Tyler takes the back route home, a narrow, twisty road that used to be lined with farms and small ranches but is now deserted. We are deep in the country when he points to a road with weeds growing up through the cracks that has an old rusty mailbox beside it and says, “I used to live down a road like that one.”
“You did?” I try not to sound too interested. He never talks about growing up and I don’t want to scare him away from telling me stuff.
He glances in the rearview as if the only way he is ever going to