Accidental Happiness (11 page)

“Jesus, Gina. I’m sorry,” she said. I tried to recall exactly what she’d done. “I wasn’t thinking. That was such a fucking stupid thing to say. I honestly didn’t mean it like that.”

She thought I was offended by the wife remark. The
widow card
was often a get-out-of-jail-free ticket. I almost wanted to laugh, she looked so horrified.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I don’t care. I’m tired of people editing everything they say around me. And you’re right about Derek and Charlie. They’re adorable. And they’re among the few people who don’t treat me like I died too.”

“That’s because they’re babies. Mortality’s still a nasty rumor at their age.”

It was okay, sometimes, to have Reese around. As bizarre as it seemed, there were odd moments when she felt like family.

“You mind picking up where we left off? You know, talking about Angel and . . . and Benjamin.” I said it fast, as soon as it occurred to me, to keep from losing the nerve. Like diving into cold water.

“I don’t have much more to tell you,” she said. “I’ll try to answer whatever I can.”

She put down her brush, then stopped for a second to steady herself on the edge of the counter, as if she’d lost her balance. But the night was calm, no motion from the waves.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Being on a boat takes a little getting used to.”

“Do you sail?” I asked, careful to keep my tone light. “Did Ben ever teach you?”

“Wouldn’t try it by myself on a bet,” she answered. Settling down opposite me, she began to take the wrapper off her ice-cream sandwich. “He dragged me out a lot when I first knew him, in a smaller boat he had when we were in college. I just barely put up with it by the time we were married, even after he bought this thing.” She stopped.
Married.
Neither of us was married anymore, and I couldn’t think of anything to fill the awkward void, so I stared down at my drink.

“Anyway,” she said finally. “You had some questions. Ask away.”

I did ask, point-blank again. About Benjamin. About Angel. By the time she got a couple of sentences into her story, I decided that second cognac sounded like a good idea after all. Her breakup with Benjamin, the length of time it took for it to “take,” became the central factor in the saga. He had told me she left him, as if that was the end of it. She told me so much more.

“The first time I left, he found me in Myrtle Beach,” she said. “He tracked down my credit cards. It took him two weeks. He deserved a better explanation than I gave him at the time. I felt bad about that part. But I didn’t plan on how much it would hurt him. He always seemed . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Beyond vulnerability.” I finished her thought.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I knew he loved me. Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t cold. Just the opposite. But he was so fucking confident—about everything. You know?”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” I told her, surprised at how good it felt to hear someone else’s insecurities when it came to my husband.

“If this is wrong for me to be saying . . .” She kept her eyes level with mine. She never looked away, never apologized for her story. “Just tell me to stop. You asked, so . . .”

“I want to know.” I left it at that.

Seems Benjamin had convinced her to come home that time. The time after that, he found her in Charlotte, and the time after that outside of D.C.—living with someone else.

“You just kept using your credit cards?” Either she was stupid, which I doubted, or she wanted to be found.

“In Charlotte, yeah. By D.C., I’d pulled together some cash, but then I ran into friends. Somebody told him. But it didn’t matter; I knew he’d show up again. I was beginning to realize I needed to push some new buttons if I was going to make him understand.”

“Understand what?”

She let the question sit stagnant between us.

“Why didn’t you just refuse to go home with him?” I tried again.

She raised one eyebrow. “You lived with him, Gina. You loved him. How many times
didn’t
he get his way when his mind was made up?”

“Once,” I told her, leaving it at that. “But I still don’t understand. If you loved him, why . . . ?”

“That’s the part you don’t ask me about.” Her voice changed, hardened. She wasn’t kidding. “That’s my story. It’s not one I want to tell. Not now.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling reprimanded somehow.

“Anyway, D.C. is where it gets confusing, I mean about who Angel’s father is. Benjamin found me again—staying with James, a guy I knew from State,” she said. “I thought he’d just leave when he saw everything. But he didn’t. James left instead. Benjamin acted calm, as if I’d, I don’t know . . . misbehaved. He talked me into going back home with him. It was a kind of panic that set in, when I realized he wouldn’t give up. It was kind of scary, Gina. How determined he was.”

I thought of him, of our brewing conflict over children that had never been resolved.

“But you did go back?” I pushed everything else out of my mind. “Part of you must have wanted to.”

“I loved him. No matter what all this sounds like. But I had my reasons for going. He had to . . .
control
everything. I . . . I really don’t want to talk about it.”

I almost understood. Not
how
she chose to leave, but why. Ben could be overwhelming. He didn’t mean to be so dominant, but sometimes his energy seemed to consume everything in proximity to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m trying hard to understand all this, Reese. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I’ll lay off. How did you finally get him to accept it—that it was over?”

She finished her ice cream, threw the wrapper in the trash.

“I went too far.” She stopped, left it at that.

Georgie nudged in the trash after the wrapper and I pulled her away.

“Come on, Reese,” I said finally, irritated with the dramatic pauses. “Just tell me what the hell happened. It can’t be any worse than . . .”

She looked over at me, her eyes straight on mine. I saw that she wasn’t pulling an act. The pain in her expression made me stop.

“I went out when he was working late one night,” she said. “I went to a local bar.”

“And?” I could barely get air in my lungs.

“I left with someone, some tourist in town with a bunch of buddies. Young guys, like Derek and Charlie.” She looked so tired, the words held no momentum. “I almost invited a couple of the buddies, just for good measure, but then I figured not even I was that hateful.”

“So this guy?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Benjamin found out?”

She nodded; her eyes looked beyond me.

“I brought the guy home with me. I told him my husband was out of town, that he could stay the night. Benjamin found us in bed, in our bed, when he came home from work.”

“Didn’t you know . . .” My mind still tried to make it a mistake, a miscalculation on her part. But it was no accident that Benjamin found them. The truth was, it made perfect sense.

“Benjamin looked . . . he looked like I’d never seen him look before. Destroyed. I destroyed him that night.” Her voice was breaking. I didn’t look at her, didn’t want to start crying over her fucking mistakes. He was my husband too.

“I felt so terrible.” Her words ran close together, almost slurred, as if they were too hard, too much effort to say. “It’s what I’d intended to do. He knew it was on purpose. He wasn’t loud, or angry. His face was so flat, had no expression at all.”

I couldn’t imagine Ben like that. Stunned and defeated. He had more life in his eyebrows than most people have in their entire body. When she described how he’d reacted, only one image came to my mind. Benjamin laid out in his casket. It was the first time I’d ever seen him still. Maybe that was the second time in his life that he’d died.

“He said he should have taken me at my word when I left the first time, or the second, the third . . .” She went on with her story. “He hadn’t believed it was how I really felt.”

“How did you feel?” I asked.

She bowed her head slightly, then raised her eyes to meet mine, but didn’t answer. I knew better than to push for more. I wanted to hold Benjamin, comfort him. The impotence of the moment overwhelmed me.

“What happened after that?” I forced myself to stay with the facts, to keep moving forward.

“He helped me pack my stuff, gave me some money, and told me to call if I was in trouble, if I needed anything. Than he kissed me good-bye.”

I saw them. In the driveway of their house, the same house I’d sold two months before. I saw him kiss her, then stand in the empty yard after she was gone.

“And you were pregnant?” I asked.

“I found out a couple of weeks later,” she said. She leaned her head back against the cushion, tucked her legs up underneath her on the seat. The confession had drained her.

“How could you have done that?” I barely managed a whisper.

“Don’t judge me.” She didn’t look at me. Her tone stayed solid, not defensive. She didn’t need my approval. “You don’t know me or my reasons.”

I rubbed Georgie’s head, gave her the comfort that I wanted to offer Ben, but never would. Benjamin had never hinted at the story she told me, had never said a single negative thing about her. He simply called her a “wild child” and left it at that.

“Ben would have wanted to know,” I said. “About the baby.” I needed to speak for him, but against all reason, I felt sorry for her. “There were tests you could have done. And even if there was just a chance she was his, he would have—”

“That’s why I didn’t tell him.” She spoke, but her eyes were closed. She said the words as if they explained everything.

“That’s not good enough. You can’t think that’s right.”

“I’m not trying to make a case with you.” She looked up. “I’m just trying to answer your goddamn questions. You asked for the truth. This is the closest thing I have to the truth.” She was unapologetic, her composure unnerving. “By the time I had Angel, no one was in the picture, not even Benjamin.”

“You talked to Benjamin half a dozen times, at least, after I knew him. You’d call, out of the blue, to just ‘talk.’ How could you do that? How could you talk with him and not tell him?”

She pulled her legs around to the floor and sat up, put her heels down with a percussive emphasis, then stretched her arms, as if the tension had become too great in her muscles, her limbs.

“I had a life with Angel,” she said finally. For the first time, she began to sound irritated, as if explaining something simple to a stubborn child. “It wasn’t a conventional life, but we were happy. You know what Benjamin would have done. If you don’t see it, you’re blind, because I sure as hell knew.”

Benjamin would have taken action. He would have taken Angel.

“A custody fight,” I said.

She nodded, never took her eyes away from me. “And he would have succeeded. I’m not stupid. I know how people see my life. My choices. And there were other things too. There’s no way they would have let me keep her.”

The rest of it, we didn’t say. That, like it or not, if Reese had acted differently, Angel would have been in my home; would have been my stepdaughter. Even as I thought it, I knew the real truth that lay behind everything.
I wouldn’t have married him if he’d had a young daughter.
The thought was too hard to keep in my head, made me feel weak, queasy.

“I couldn’t lose her,” Reese went on. “I couldn’t allow her to lose me. So I kept it simple. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell any of them. For all practical reasons, it didn’t matter who her father really was. Angel was my child, and no one else’s.”

I couldn’t argue anymore. It wasn’t my argument to make anyway, and it ran up on hypocritical ground regardless of where I stood with it. I let it go. I had to let it go.

“And you came back now because you changed your mind?” It wasn’t really a question. More of an accusation. Any camaraderie we’d ever shared had faded and I wanted to lay blame. More than anything, I wanted to finish the conversation, to go to sleep.

“It doesn’t matter now why I came back.” She stopped at that, made no attempt to go into it again.

The air conditioner sounded its steady hum. I was grateful for the comfort, but felt disconnected somehow from life outside, isolated in a bubble of time with my dead husband’s ex-wife. Like extreme, couple’s therapy, people locked in a room until they resolve their issues.

“Reese, I’m part of this, if only by circumstance.” I made one last effort. “You’ve eventually got to tell me what you wanted from Ben . . .”

“He’s gone.” The harsh tone said more than her words. “Those are the only circumstances that matter. What I need is some sleep.” She stood up, but there was nowhere to go really. I could have pushed deeper into it, but I felt as tired as she sounded, and my heart wasn’t in it anyway.

“We have to talk about this sometime. About why you’re here. What you want.” I felt only relief at bringing the conversation to a close. “But you’re right, we’re both tired tonight.”

“I’m here with you tonight because you offered me a bed. Beyond that, it’s not your problem.
We’re
not your problem.”

But I sensed she was wrong. Whether I liked it or not, my days would be tangled with Reese and Angel.

“I made up the quarter berth for you,” I said. “There’s a light under there if you want to read.”

She sat, unmoving. “I won’t keep my eyes open that long,” she said. A weak smile was all she could offer.

I put all the glasses in the sink, decided to let them sit until morning. As I headed toward the V-berth for the night, one question still lingered. A curiosity more than anything. “Does Angel look like any of them?” I asked. “I can’t really see Benjamin in her, but—”

“No,” she interrupted me, shook her head. “Only me.” She stood up, gathered her purse to head back to her quarters. Before she went in, she turned slightly toward me. “But, for my own peace of mind, I always thought of her as Benjamin’s. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”

My emotions were too jumbled to sort out how I felt; so I just shrugged, didn’t respond.

Later, much later, as I was trying, and failing, to sleep, I found myself angry with her. I hadn’t felt the full complement of anger while she was saying all of it, telling me how she treated Benjamin; but afterward, I found it there, and I was surprised the feelings took so long to surface. How could she have done all those things? Nothing could have justified it, none of her mysterious reasons. But something kept me from full-blown hate, some quality in her that I couldn’t define. Some quality in her evoked patience, sympathy. Ben had felt it. He had never come to hate her, I was sure of that, even after all she did.