too. We just threw a week-long party for all of our friends that culminated in a wedding for two hundred people.”
I inhaled his explanations as he exhaled them, a form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, an intimate rescue. What Jack said made sense: I was going through a postwedding letdown following so much frenetic expending of energy.
But in my journal, I grappled with how to describe the dimming of my emotions, the way food tasted bland, colors looked dull, and my thoughts were unclear. I wrote that it was like having a small cloud hovering above, impeding the sun’s light and warmth. I tried to understand this strange sense of gloom, a steady but seemingly benign presence, more annoying than menacing. Yet whenever I tried to examine it, I found I couldn’t quite face it directly. Like the side of my nose, my growing sadness was both constant and peripheral.
On the last night of our honeymoon, I had a nightmare. In it, my brother Christopher had grown into a young man and was waiting for me by the stream behind my father’s cottage in Newtown. He beckoned me from the very spot where I knew my parents had sprinkled his ashes. My brother had something urgent to impart to me, but in my excitement to meet him, I embraced him, unaware that doing so was forbidden. All at once, Christopher’s body turned liquid and poured back into the creek, now dark and roiling. In the distance, my mother leaned against a tree, hands covering her eyes. She wouldn’t look at me. I awoke heavy with guilt, aware only that I had failed her.
As Jack and I packed to go home, I kept returning to the morning after my wedding. My mother had pulled me aside, brimming with excitement about her dance with Ben, eager to fill me in on what he’d whispered to her.
“Mom, please. You have to stop telling me this stuff,” I said.
My mother looked crushed. “Why? I thought you’d be happy for me.”
“I can’t be your confidante anymore, Mom,” I said. “I’m married to Ben’s son. Don’t you get that?” I told her she needed to turn to Brenda or someone else with less at stake personally. “Really, Mom. I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore.”
At my mother’s look of shock and abandonment, I softened my tone and explained I was exhausted from guilt and needed to start my life with Jack on fresh footing. It was one thing to have lied to him in the past; it would be more unforgivable going forward. I was no longer a child. “Mom, I’m married to Jack. Lily is my mother-in-law,” I said, enunciating each syllable.
“I’m not an idiot, Rennie. I know exactly who you’re married to,” my mother said, going on the offensive. “It’s not as if I’m asking you to murder someone. I was trying to tell you something sweet. Never mind.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said again, pleading. I didn’t want to leave for my honeymoon on bad terms with her. “Please, just promise me that you won’t tell me if you two start up again. I don’t want to know. I really, truly don’t. I can’t.”
Initially, I felt freed from a burden I’d been carrying since I was fourteen. At long last, my part in the emotional high-wire act of my mother’s affair with Ben had ended. I’d been spinning plates for so long that now that all the china finally lay shattered on the floor, I mostly felt relief. Still, I had to be vigilant. I couldn’t fall back into my old patterns. Malabar was my Siren and could bewitch me again and again. Deep down, of course, I was dying to know what Ben had whispered to my mother during their forbidden dance on my wedding night. Had he suggested they meet? Had he begged her to wait for him? Already, I missed Malabar and our confidences terribly. I’d been following in her footsteps for so long, I didn’t know if I could find my way forward without them.
After our honeymoon, I ferried the cloud back to San Diego, where it expanded inside me over the course of several months, settling in like a moody weather system. I didn’t feel sad so much as deprived of my normal range of emotions. Every sensation felt tamped down—victories at work, pleasure from food, distress for friends who were in pain. I couldn’t muster outrage when our country initiated the First Gulf War or feel adequate compassion for