In the Stillness (23 page)

“Not yet,” I sigh, “the boys will be there for an entire week. I’m sure he’s smart enough not to call them, so I need to have a few days to sort some shit out. Let’s go.”

Tosha stays in my car and we make the 45 second journey to the ugliest building on Amity Street, in my opinion. Eric’s car isn’t there, so Tosha and I work quickly to load all of my clothes and toiletries into as few garbage bags as possible. Despite my desire to give Eric the full brunt of my emotions, I’m praying he stays away from here until I’m gone. I know myself well enough to know I need time to cool down or I’ll likely make things worse.
 

On our second trip from the car, Eric pulls in and follows us up the stairs. I’m doing my best to ignore him. Tosha goes into my bedroom ahead of me, stuffing sweaters into a bag.

“Natalie, wait! Listen. What the hell are you doing?” Eric is inches behind me. He slams into me when I stop abruptly.

“I’m leaving you,” I say as I turn around.

He throws his arms in the air. “Just like that? That’s it?”

“No,” I scoff, “not
just like that.
I
left
a long time ago, Eric. Now, I’m just bringing my body and my stuff.”
 

Tosha sneaks past me with a bag in her hands, not making eye contact with Eric, when he grabs the bag from her.

“Stop this, Natalie. Just take a breath—” He’s cut off when Tosha takes the bag back. “Jesus, Tosha, get the fuck out. This is none of your business.”

“I beg your
pardon?
” Fearlessly, she squares off to him. “It most certainly
is
my business when my best friend of more than ten years is put at risk by her man-whore of a husband. You’re such a piece of shit, you know that?” She takes the bag back from him and storms toward the door.

He calls after her. “Get the fuck out of my house, you nosy bitch!”

“Don’t speak to her that way.” I spin for the bedroom, but he grabs my arm. “Let go of me, or I’ll start screaming for help.” I speak just slowly enough that he knows I’m serious.

“Can’t we just talk about this, Natalie? You don’t even know—”

“What?” I cut him off. “The facts? Got ‘em. The details? Don’t want ‘em. You toted me and the boys along for the last five years so you could look like the darling dad, dashing husband, and perfect doctoral student. My gosh, how
does
he do it? All along you’re fucking some coworker over your desk.” My voice cracks over the last sentence.

Eric grabs my shoulders. “You wouldn’t touch me unless I begged, Nata—”

“No!” I scream. “Do
not
blame this on me. I’ve been horrifically depressed for the last year, and you think I’m just tired of being a mom. I have
issues
, Eric, and I’ve tried to ignore them to support some asshole who, as it turns out, didn’t give a
shit
about me.” I shake free from his hold. “If I wasn’t doing it for you then you man up and leave me before you start screwing someone else. It’s the least you can do. Instead you made me look like a fool and feel even worse. Excuse me. I’m leaving.” I grab the last of my things and clumsily carry them down the stairs

I watch the fight slowly leave his face as he sits on the front stair and watches us drive away. Tosh and I pull away and drive to the storage unit. After a few wrong turns, I find my unit and shakily open the door.
 

It’s rather lackluster, staring at the things that used to highlight who I was. A wing-backed chair I picked up at an antique store and put in here when I decided I didn’t want kids wiping things on it, and bookshelves and boxes of books that wouldn’t fit amongst the wall space Eric claimed as his. I never argued it. What would have been the point?
 

I walk to the back to stack a few garbage bags of my winter clothes on top of some other clothes when I see it. A box labeled “Ryker.” I can’t pretend I wasn’t keeping my eye out for it, but now I’m unsure if I even want to touch it.

“Whatcha looking at?” Tosha asks as she steps over a few boxes and meets me in the back.

“Oh . . . you know . . . a box of Ryker’s letters from war.” I roll my eyes as I sardonically pour the words from my mouth.

“Of course,” she deadpans. “Well, you can ignore those . . . or take them back to my place and we can get piss-drunk while reading about the last guy who deserved you.”

Her words shock me. “What? I thought you hated Ryker.”

She puts her arm around my waist. “No. I hate Eric. Always have. What I hated about Ryker was that he wasn’t getting help, and you were self-medicating with a razor blade. And that wasn’t even his fault, or yours. You two had something special—it’s the circumstances that were shitty.”

Her revelation—opposite of what I’ve spent the last ten years thinking—has me reaching for the box.

“We’re gonna need a huge bottle of vodka.” I brush past her and put the box in the back of her car.

“I’ve got you covered.”

“Did you ever think of getting rid of these?” Tosha asks as we neatly unpack the box forty-five minutes later.

Pouring our vodka tonics, I don’t look up. “Not ever.”
 

“Not even once?” She crooks her eyebrow.

“Not even once.” I add a little more vodka to my glass.

Despite everything that went down, I held on to those letters for dear life. They were the only things that reminded me that the good times were real and the bad times were the nightmare, not the norm. I smuggled them home with me when my dad brought me home from the hospital, and begged him to put them somewhere my mom would never find them; she would have trashed them for sure. So, my dad hid them where he hid his cigars in the garage. I took them with me when I returned to school.

“Does Eric know about them?”
 

“Yeah. He knows they exist, but I told him I left them at home, in P-A . . .”

Tosha and I drink loads of vodka while we sift through Ryker’s handwritten letters, sent to me from Afghanistan a thousand years ago. We pour over every single word; some funny, some sad, all full of the love he had for me. I think she switched to water, but an hour later I’m on my third drink when I pick up yet another letter.

February 1, 2002

Natalie,

Pretty lame that I bailed before our first Valentine’s Day, huh? I hope this gets to you before then. Sorry I haven’t had a chance to call in the last few days. Hopefully we’ll have talked before you get this.
 

Thank you for your letters. I know I say it every time, but they never get old. It feels like a lifetime ago that I was saying goodbye to you, even though it’s only been a little over two months. I’d ask how school is going, but I don’t really care. I just want to know how you are doing. Some of the guys have wives and girlfriends that seem to be falling apart. If you’re feeling like that, please talk to someone, Nat. Promise?
 

God, I miss you.
 

I love you so much, Natalie, and when I get home I’m going to keep loving you until you tell me to stop. But don’t, please. Don’t tell me to stop.

I love you.
 

With everything.

~ Ry

Vodka burns my throat as I recall that he hated anyone else calling him Ry, but me. He signed every letter “Ry” like it was his way of sealing it with a kiss.

“Well, this is fucking brutal.” My gums are numb. “Why did you suggest this, again?” I slur at Tosha.

“I figured we ought to cleanse your entire aura at once, instead of piece by piece. Are you ever going to pick up your phone? Eric’s called a thousand times.”

I ignore her question. “So. I loved Ryker. He loved me. PTSD came in and fucked us both royally over and, somehow, here I sit.” I look around her apartment. “Maybe I should have stuck it out with him—”

“Stop right there. The point of this exercise is to remind you that you did the right thing. You agreed to be in a relationship with the man who wrote those letters. Not the one who came home—”

“It wasn’t his fault, Tosha!” I snap.

She takes a deep breath. “I know it wasn’t, Natalie. But what was his fault was his choice not to seek out help, and lying to you that he had . . .”

“He was sick,” I whisper.

“Mmhmm,” she stands up and sits back down next to me, wrapping her arms around my neck, “and so were you. Given the last time you saw each other, we’re lucky either one of you are alive. You can’t keep beating yourself up over it, Natalie. You didn’t ruin his life. You probably saved it. You saw him, he looks great. It’s time to leave the guilt behind.” She tucks my hair behind my ear and kisses my cheek.

I lean my head on her shoulder as she continues. “I don’t mean that
Ryker
is the only person that can love you that way. I mean you’re worthy of the kind of love found in the pages of those letters, Nat. You hear me? But, it needs to come from you, first. You have to love you, again. Got it?”

Leaving my head on her shoulder, I sit in eerie silence until I fall asleep.

Chapter 27

I’m not ready to talk to Eric. Or to stop drinking. This morning Tosha and Liz had to take off to visit her parents for a few days, leaving me to my own devices. I think she took the vodka and dumped it out.
Oh, no, I drank it.
I’ve filled my morning with organizing Ryker’s letters by date. Maybe I’ll get them bound into a book.

Or throw them away.
 

I spend the afternoon analyzing what the healthy thing to do would be, when I’m interrupted by a knock on Tosha’s door.

“Who is it?” I ask, walking toward the door.

“Natalie, it’s me, let me in.” Eric sounds thoroughly exhausted.

Well, I’m out of liquor and, it appears, luck. I open the door.

“What.”
 

Good, he looks like shit.

He seems to be struggling to make eye contact. “Can I come in?”
 

I leave the door open as I walk away and sit on the couch. Eric moves to sit next to me.

“I didn’t ask you to sit.”
 

He stands without protest. “Will you at least look at me?”

“I don’t think I can.” I’m honest, and am tempted to remind him that he likes that about me.

“Nat . . .”

“Don’t. Call. Me. Nat.” I growl as I finally make eye contact with him.

I can tell by the puffiness around his eyes that he’s been crying, or that he’s massively hung over. If his night was anything like mine, it’s probably a little bit of both.
 

“I’m sorry,” he says in the same tone he met me with in the kitchen yesterday.

Then, it hits me.

“Is that what you were apologizing for in the kitchen yesterday? Cheating on me?”

“No, I was saying sorry for . . . just . . .”

“Do me the decency of telling me how long it’s been going on. And not just with her. With anyone else, too.” I hug my knees to my chest to prevent my guts from spilling out as I realize she likely wasn’t the first woman to wrap her legs around his waist while he’s been married to me.

“It was just her.”

“Who is she?” I didn’t give myself permission to ask that question, but out it came.

Eric folds his hands into his pockets. “A colleague. She works in the same department.”

“How long, Eric?” I start to regret asking again as I watch his face turn a slight shade of green.

Looking at the floor, he barely manages a whisper. “Just over a year.”

My hands fly to my mouth to prevent vomit from spewing all over him as I race to the kitchen sink. I’m only half-embarrassed that this is happening in front of him. The other half reminds me he deserves to see this. I walk toward him after rinsing my mouth out. He has tears in his eyes. Bastard.

“Just over a year? Just over a year! Eric?”
 

I feel like every woman I’ve known on TV or in real life that I’ve made fun of. Dumb. Clueless. I always stare at these women, the ones who couldn’t hang on to their husbands, and wonder how on God’s green earth they couldn’t know
something.
It’s been a solid three years since I’ve felt like Eric and I were in anything that could be considered a “happy” marriage. But, an affair? It’s never once crossed my mind that he might be having one, or to have one myself. He was working long hours on his Ph.D. while I was busy with our boys and trying to hold it together. Trying to get us through the experience in one piece. Apparently, we had different goals.

He opens his mouth, maybe to answer, but I continue. “Aside from the complete disregard you had for our marriage and our
family
, do you realize what physical risk you put me at by having sex with someone else?”

“We weren’t having sex the whole time, Natalie.” His honesty is like a machine gun. While I assumed that they
were
having sex, I both now know for sure that they were, and am faced with the reality that their
relationship
had time to develop to that of a sexual one.

I collapse onto the couch again. “When did the sex start?”

He kneels in front of me and I literally do not have the energy to push him away. “We only had sex once. Last week.”