Page 121 of The Husband Hour
“But you told her that Stephanie was still here, right? That the answer isn’t to run away? The things we discussed?”
He poured himself the last of the coffee. Beth retrieved the bag of coffee beans from the freezer to make a fresh pot.
“There was a man with her,” Howard said. “Matt somebody. Do you know about this guy? Is she finally dating after all this time?”
The filmmaker. Howard still didn’t know anything about the documentary. “It’s a long story,” Beth said.
“You’ve been holding out on me?”
She turned sharply but then realized he was teasing her.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I couldn’t deal with this alone.”
“Of course I’m here.”
“Mom!” Lauren yelled from the second floor. Beth, with a quick, alarmed look at Howard, bolted up the stairs. She found Lauren standing in the doorway of Stephanie’s bedroom. “What is all of her stuff still doing here? When is she moving out?”
Across the hall, Ethan’s door clicked open. When he spotted Lauren, he dashed over, threw his arms around her legs, and gazed up at her with adoration.
Lauren looked down at him and burst into tears.
It’s just a house, Lauren told herself, throwing her clothes into a suitcase and then emptying her drawers; she’d pack the rest in garbage bags or whatever she could find. It’s just a house and it was never truly yours and it’s time to move on. That’s all.
Lauren would have to find her own apartment. Maybe it was something she should have done a long time ago. Every summer, year after year, she’d felt encroached upon, but instead of staking out her own private space and doing the hard work of moving on, she’d just told herself it was temporary. Now the day was here, and she would not cry about it. She was just thankful that she’d been working hard, had saved her money, and was in a position to take care of herself and rent an apartment. As for tonight, for the next few weeks, a hotel would have to do.
But the boxes. She could not lug all the boxes with her, and yet she could not leave the artifacts of her life with Rory behind in enemy territory.
Or were the boxes themselves enemy territory?
She would not, could not, think about Rory. But when she let down her guard, the thoughts slipped through, like water seeping through cracks in plaster walls. All she could do to battle them back was tell herself this: It was not possible that he had known about Ethan. Yes, it was possible that he had betrayed her during that summer apart. But it was unthinkable that he would have fathered a child with her sister, known about it, and still asked her to marry him.
And yet, she was stuck in this hell of wondering and never being able to confront him about it, because she would never hear from Rory again.
It had been one of the hardest things to wrap her mind around in the beginning, the permanence of it. The notion of never hearing his voice, never being able to seek his counsel, never making another plan or sharing another hope with him, was as vast and incomprehensible as thinking about Earth as just one planet orbiting one star out of millions of stars in the galaxy. Once, Rory had played her a video that showed Earth’s size in relation to the other planets’ in the solar system, then the solar system in relation to the Milky Way galaxy, and then the galaxy in relation to all the other known galaxies in the universe. It mapped out the travel distances between the stars in light-years, and the vastness of it all felt like something her mind was not built to contemplate. But this was exactly what Rory loved about astronomy. Maybe, if she had been the one to die first, to die young, he would have known how to reckon with infinity. With permanence. More than four years out, she couldn’t. That was why she had left the letter unopened. It was her safeguard against good-bye forever.
She stared at the boxes taking up most of the space inside her closet.
The boxes were all still open from the night she’d looked through them, poking around for things to share with Matt, hoping to make Rory more balanced, more human in the film. How arrogant, how naive she’d been to think she was the custodian of the truth.
How could you do this?
She couldn’t remember what box she’d stuffed the letter in, and by the time she found it, the floor around her was littered with yearbooks, photos, and clothes. Sitting among the relics of her former life, she pressed her back against the closet door, staring at her name rendered in Rory’s tightly looped handwriting.
If she wanted answers, if there was hope for any kind of response to the question that would haunt her for the rest of her life, she had to open it. It was time to face forever.
She peeled open the envelope carefully, thinking that it had been his hands that had sealed it. He had planned for this moment, just her and his words.
The letter was handwritten on yellow legal paper. He’d taken a page from one of the pads she left on the kitchen counter for her grocery and to-do lists. The routine had not carried over to her life in Longport, and the memory of such a mundane, day-to-day habit took her breath away.
January 15, 2012
Dear Lauren:
If you are reading this, it’s because I’m gone. I’m so sorry, because I promised you it would be okay and I was wrong. Please forgive me for this mistake.
I wish I could say it was my only one.
I tried and failed with so much, but my biggest failures were in this relationship—the one thing I cared about the most. I know it didn’t seem like it at times, but I wrote this because I want you to know that it’s true. I love you and loved you even in my worst moments.
