Page 37 of Saltwater

They were packed for Italy.Their clothes neatly folded by Louisa, the nanny, earlier that afternoon. It hadn’t always been Louisa’s job, but Richard had started to let the household staff go after Helen was born. First the cook. Then the housekeeper.

They’re too close,he said.We need more privacy, more of a family feel.

Sarah hadn’t noticed the paranoia at first. The way it was growing, seeping into all aspects of their life. She told herself she didn’t mind. She hadn’t grown up with it all—the staff, the money, the ease. But she had grown used to it. It was a fact that felt sour, a little rotten.

She joined her husband in the living room. She perched on the couch, not fully seated, each muscle engaged, ready to stand. To bolt.

“Have you read the play?” she asked Richard.

It was nighttime in Bel Air and their flight was early. Helen had been put down two hours ago.Helen.The reason she had stayed. The reason she was still trying. Sarah had never known her parents, both dead in a car accident when she was only six months old. She had been raised by her grandmother in Andover, New Hampshire, but the woman didn’t survive to see her graduate college.

Helen deserved more.

In any case, the Lingates abhorred divorce. They thought it was tacky. But mostly, they thought it was expensive.Divorce,Richard always said,split the pie.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Will you promise to read before we go?”

“Why?”

“Because I need to let my agent know you have.”

Sarah stood and picked up his wineglass. Pinched it together with hers. She left him in the living room, tapping out time to the overture that played low in the background. In the kitchen, she refilled both their glasses. For months she had written at the kitchen table while Richard was at golf games or drinks or meetings, only to slide her pages into Helen’s diaper bag as soon as she heard him push through the front door.

She hadn’t meant to hide her work; it had been an impulse. An animal instinct she followed without examination. Maybe it was because he had been a writer once, too. In the early years of their relationship, it had knit them together. They feverishly passed pages back and forth, walked arm in arm discussing their process, their fears. But then, as her career began to soar, his faded. Slowly, her work seemed to rattle him. Or maybe it was her ambition.

When the work became hard for her—after they moved to L.A., after Helen—Richard seemed relieved. It was easier on the marriage, after all, if they had both failed. Together.

But when Helen turned three, the fog lifted. As quickly as it had rolled in, it burned off. Sarah wrote. At first only a sentence or two here, a letter to a friend there. The feeling so new, Sarah worried at the end of every session it might not be there the next day. But it was. And every day, a little bit of her came back, too. Back from the hard early days of motherhood, back from the strangeness of Los Angeles, back from the pressure of Richard’s family. Her work had been there, waiting.

The relief nearly suffocated her.

A new play had poured out of her. As if the words had been gathering behind a dam, mixing and curing until they were ready for the page. When she was done, she let them sit. Just to be sure they really were something. Two weeks later, she pulled them out while she and Helen were at the playground, and she read them in the sunlight next to the sandbox.

They were good.

The dialogue was sharp and biting. The story, heart-wrenching. She packed the play into a manila envelope and sent it to her agent. The days following were excruciating.

“What’s eating you?” Richard had asked a few weeks ago.

“Nothing,” she said.

She still hadn’t told him. She hadn’t told him because Richard had grown used to the Sarah who didn’t write, who arranged flowers, who had idle hobbies and the occasional large credit card bill. It was a life heknew.A wife he knew. One he had always told her he didn’t want. But then, nothing had been the same since they moved to Los Angeles.

Her agent’s call came a week later.

“Sarah,” he said before she could even get anything else out besidesHello,“this is it. This is going to be huge. But just one thing…”

“What?”

“Have you run this by your husband yet?”

—

“He’s a writer.”

That’s what one of her friends first told her about Richard.He’s a writer.

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