talk more later.”
Or we won’t talk more later, which is what I’d currently prefer. Not until I figure out how I’m going to deal with this. Alone. All by myself.
But I can do this, I think. I can act like I don’t know anything. Like I didn’t see anything. Like it didn’t even happen. I have to.
“Let’s go pretend we’re mermaids,” Afton’s saying as she pulls Abby toward the dolphin tanks. “Under the sea.”
16
I spend the next several hours alone, thinking until I think I’ll drive myself insane.
It’s at this point that I ask myself the question: Who? Who was it? It was dark in that room, and I never saw the man’s face. I only got a glimpse of the back of his head. I struggle to call up the image. Dark hair, cut short. Wide bare shoulders narrowing to a trim waist.
I shudder with revulsion.
One thing is for certain: it wasn’t Pop, changing his mind about not coming on the trip, Popping in to surprise us all.
Pop is black. And this guy wasn’t black.
So who was it?
I make a mental list of possibilities, starting with the men in Mom’s circle:
Jerry. He has dark hair but, ugh, no. Jerry is way older, and not in the best shape. The man I saw was definitely not Jerry with his shirt off.
Max Ahmed. Max also has dark hair. But Max is so quiet, so reserved and so proper all the time. I can’t grasp the idea of a universe in which Max would cheat on his wife.
Billy Wong. But he’s so attentive to his family, which I’ve always appreciated, in contrast to Mom. Last year at the awards dinner I caught Billy mouthing the words “I love you” to his wife across the crowded room. I can’t imagine Billy doing . . . that.
Which only leaves the hundreds of other doctors at this conference, men who only my mother has met. Men I don’t know.
Tearful and frustrated, I stretch out in one of those white rope hammocks that are scattered around the resort and try to talk myself into taking a nap, so I’ll have a few hours of relief from the torturous rat maze that my mind is turning into, but I can’t make myself sleep. After I give up on that, I stand on the hillside and watch a couple get married in the outdoor chapel.
Because I am apparently a glutton for punishment.
I’m not close enough to hear what the bride and groom are saying, but I know they’re making promises to each other. Like promises to be faithful. As in, to refrain from having sex with anyone else. It must be so easy to believe those promises, I think mournfully as I watch them, when you’re young and you’re in love.
Of course I wouldn’t know anything about that. The whole thing with Leo is now so clearly unimportant and childish and silly. I didn’t love Leo. I liked him, sure, and I loved the idea of him, and that’s not the same. But I believed that true love existed, out there in the world, that it was a real thing. That it was possible. I believed that because of Mom and Pop.
They got married at a vineyard in wine country when I was eight years old and Afton was ten and Abby didn’t exist yet. It was sunny that day, and the air smelled of lavender. Mom wore a simple white cotton dress, a circle of wildflowers pinned to the crown of her head, and cowboy boots because she thought they would be funny and more comfortable than heels. She smiled all day long, from morning until night, even when she knew she was having her picture taken. Mom hates to smile for pictures because she thinks smiling makes her eyes get small and squinty. Her doctor profile picture on the hospital website, for example, is of her staring almost solemnly at the camera, her eyes as wide as they’ll go, her lips turning up in the tiniest possible version of a smile. But that day, on her wedding day, she smiled with her teeth.
I wonder if Mom smiles at this other man like that. I don’t want to imagine it, even though I’ve seen her doing so much worse. There’s a part of my brain that refuses to accept that what happened this morning was real. It was dark in there, this part of me whispers urgently in the back of my mind. Maybe I didn’t see