Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,77

always my mother’s fault? Did I not have agency in this mess I’d made? I didn’t idolize my mother, I told Dr. B.; I understood her. I was aware that it was inappropriate for Malabar to have involved me in her affair, but she’d had a hard life—an alcoholic mother, a dead son, a failed first marriage, a second husband incapacitated by strokes before their life together really began, now dead as well. All I’d ever wanted was for my mother to be happy and loved. I felt pretty sure this was what she wanted for me too.

Dr. B. rephrased. “Do you think your mother puts you first?”

My silence answered the question.

Over the course of our weekly sessions, Dr. B. pointed out all of the ways I placed my mother’s needs before my own. She would alert me each time I made excuses for Malabar’s behavior.

“Do you think it is possible that you might have fallen in love with Jack to please your mother?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. I listed Jack’s abundant love-worthy qualities. “Malabar had nothing to do with that.”

Dr. B. smiled. I wanted to slap her.

When, after a few months of weekly conversations, my depression gave no signs of easing and I was still exhausted and unable to see a brighter time ahead, Dr. B. prescribed an antidepressant. A few weeks into taking the drug, I felt a swell start to form beneath me and found that I could catch the wave and be lifted and propelled forward. These rides were nothing short of miraculous—my appetite back, ideas flowing, the future visible. But the waves soon flattened, leaving me adrift again. Dr. B. tinkered with different combinations of medications—a higher dose of this, a dash of that. With each new cocktail, I marveled at her ability to summon the wind and tide. My mood would lift, and, for a few euphoric days or weeks, I could see my life more clearly. But nothing worked over the long haul. A little lift meant a little fall; a bigger lift, a bigger fall.

* * *

In Massachusetts, Malabar and Ben joined their lives together at a speed that shocked even our family and closest friends. None of us were surprised they’d found their way back to each other, but given the scandal surrounding the discovery of their affair coupled with Lily’s death being so recent, the assumption—the hope—was that propriety would dictate timing. We felt sure they’d wait at least a year before making their relationship public.

They did not.

Ben moved into Malabar’s house on Cape Cod within two months of Lily’s death. Soon after, they announced their intention to marry.

Jack and Hannah objected for the sake of their mother’s dignity.

“What’s the rush, exactly?” Jack asked his father.

I begged my mother to wait. “You already won,” I said, attempting to flatter her. “You’ve got the guy. For the sake of Jack’s and Hannah’s and everyone’s feelings, why not hold off, even just a few more months?”

Our collective pleas fell on deaf ears. If anything, our objections seemed to strengthen Malabar’s resolve. She refused to budge. Having been deprived of a legitimate relationship for more than a dozen years, she felt she’d waited long enough. And Ben, who had endured Lily’s heartbreak for two years, was committed to making Malabar happy. My mother and Ben—sixty-one and seventy-five years old, respectively—decided to marry in early September, nine and a half months after Lily’s death.

Ben and Malabar’s wedding took place on my mother’s property not fifty feet from where Jack and I had married three years earlier. Their guests, numbering around twenty-five, had also attended our wedding. They included Ben’s siblings and their spouses, my mother’s half brother and his family, and a few close friends. I surmised that most of the guests had known about the affair but also that they assumed they were the only ones in on the secret. The minister, from Plymouth, was a close friend of both families. He’d given the eulogy at Charles’s funeral. I wondered if he knew too. I scanned the crowd, fixated on trying to identify allegiances—who was happy for Malabar and who was distraught for Lily.

Ben stood on one side of the reverend, Jack and I—best man and matron of honor—on the other, our backs to the bay. As we awaited the bride, I studied the expressions on the faces of the guests, some smiling, others grim. Then Malabar emerged through the sliding glass doors, radiant in an ivory Chanel suit, clutching a bouquet of pale