Page 59 of Count My Lies

I’m just changing out of my clothes and into a pair of sweatpants when I hear the squeak of the front door opening and closing. I lean my head out into the hall to see if I hear anything downstairs, but the house is quiet. Did they leave together?

I cross the bedroom and slowly slide the window open. The ocean is loud, rushing, but their voices carry. They’re both on the porch. I strain to hear, but only catch a word here and there. I need to be closer.

Quietly, I ease the bedroom door open and tiptoe down the hallway. The downstairs is dark, the lights shut off. Holding my breath, I make my way down the stairs. From the last stair, I have a clear view of the window that looks out onto the porch. I creep toward it. It’s open; I can hear them perfectly. I’m hidden in the shadows of the darkened room, but even if I wasn’t, they’re distracted, their backs to me, each in an Adirondack chair.

“Over there,” Jay’s saying. “See, low, in the grasses?” He leans toward Sloane, his arm outstretched so she can see where he’s looking.

Then, after a pause, “Oh!” Sloane cries. “I think I saw one! And—another! There are a ton!”

Even though I can’t see, I know they’re talking about the fireflies that light up the dusky shoreline, blinking on and off like neon dots, glow-in-the-dark confetti. He’s showing her like I’d shown him when we last visited. When I was little, my grandmother and I would come down to the beach after dinner, running through the sand to chase them, shrieking if we caught one, their wispy wings tickling our palms.

Jay laughs. “Is this the first time you’ve seen them?”

“No,” Sloane says. “But it’s been ages. Not since I was a kid. My mom and I used to live in Florida; there were millions of them there.”

They sit quietly for a moment, but I can feel the charge from here. I remember that feeling, alone with someone, the air thick, heavy with anticipation. Her heart is pounding, I’m sure of it.

“I’m glad you came on the trip,” says Jay. He’s lowered his voice, and Sloane shifts to look at him.

“Me too,” she says.

Then, slowly, so slowly, his head begins to tilt toward hers. As if by magnetic force, she leans in, too, millimeter by millimeter. I hold my breath.

Then, as their lips are about to touch, Sloane pulls back, shakes her head. “I can’t…” she says, but I can hear in her voice how much she wants to. “I can’t do that to Violet.” I bite down on the inside of my cheek, internally screaming,Do it!, the voice in my brain sharp and shrill.

Jay pulls back. He studies her, then shakes his head. “You don’t know,” he says. “Do you?”

“Know what?” Sloane asks.

“We’re separating. Violet and me. I’m moving out when we get back to the city.” I breathe in sharply. We’ve discussed divorce, of course, but he agreed to work on things. It’s why he thinks he’s welcome in my bed on this trip. But it should be no surprise that he’s chosen to leave that part out.

Sloane’s quiet at first. Finally, she asks, “Why?”

That’s a great question, Sloane. Why, Jay? Are you going to tell her why we’ve discussed—well, shouted,screamed, about—divorce? Tell her, I dare you, I want to hiss through the open window, my breath hot in his ear.

Jay sighs. He leans his head back against his chair. “A million reasons. But mostly, she’s changed. We both have. And we’ve been fighting a lot. It feels like we don’t want the same things anymore. She hasn’t been happy here. In New York, I mean. I think she resents leaving San Francisco for me.”

I dig my fingernails into my palms to keep from screaming. It’s not that he’s wrong, but he’s not right, either. He’s so far from right. It’s true, we’d been arguing, like we had been for years, but that night—the night that we said everything, when divorce was said out loud—was different than our previous fights. The limit had been reached.

“You’re not the woman I married,” he’d said, shrugging, by way of explanation. Like I was an old rag, once new and bright white, now disappointingly faded, stained, tossed into a bucket of dirty water and used to mop the floor one last time before being thrown into the trash.

At that, I threw my glass of wine at him, overcome with fury, incensed by his nonchalance, how blasé he seemed about it all. Cabernet and glass shards exploded against the wall to the right of his head.

No, I wasn’t the woman he married. The woman he married was a meticulously curated version of myself, a boxed-in twenty-four-year-old with a round ass and a tight dress, in lacy bras and thongs, who gave him head in the bathrooms of bars, drunk and uninhibited. Now I was the mother of his child. But it shouldn’t have been a denigration, should it?

I wasn’t naïve; I knew that things would be different once I had Harper. I knewI’dbe different. I thought Jay knew that, too. I thought he’d understand that our lives would change, our relationship would change. I thought he wanted it to. I did.

But he wasn’t happy. “You never want to do anything anymore,” he’d say. “You never wantmeanymore. You’re always tired.”

Of course I was tired. I had a baby who woke up three times a night and every morning at five thirty, sometimes earlier. Who I carried everywhere, who wanted something from me every second of every day. I was swollen, puffy, both before I gave birth and after, my face sallow from the lack of sleep, nerves frayed from the crying—hers and mine. It’s not that I didn’t want to go out, that I didn’t want him, it was that I couldn’t. I was consumed by Harper, by her milk-sweetsmell, her velvet-soft skin, by the warmth and weight of her, by how much she needed me.

And, I wanted to know, if we did go out—who was going to get up with her in the middle of the night? Who was going to make her a bottle in the morning if we drank too much, were hungover, too sick to get out of bed? Not him. Never him. Where was his sacrifice? I was the one who’d given up my body, yes, willingly, of course, willingly, but what had he given up? Nothing. Not a thing.

But I tried. When Harper began sleeping for four-hour stretches instead of three, when I weaned her from my breasts, I put myself back in the box. In his box. I dressed up and smiled. I sucked his dick again. And I agreed to move, to uproot our lives. I left my job and my friends and my support system. For him. For us. Because he promised things would be different. That they’d be better. But instead, he removed my heart from my chest and crushed it with a sledgehammer.

So when he told me I wasn’t the woman he married anymore, like it was something he could no longer abide, I threw a glass and started screaming. The night dragged on for hours, slogged on, yelling and shouting, then a blur of red-and-blue lights. When it was over, the sun rising, I knew nothing would ever be the same. How could it be?

“I had no idea,” Sloane says to Jay. Her voice is hushed.

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