Just Breathe
That would never fly with her editors, but a girl could dream. Mulling over the possibilities, she turned to the window. The rain-smeared glass framed the Chicago skyline. If Monet had painted skyscrapers, they would’ve looked like this.
“Regular or Diet Coke?” Donnie broke in on her thoughts.
“Oh, regular,” she said. Jack could use the calories; he was still gaining back the weight he’d lost during his illness. What a concept, she thought. Eating to gain weight. She hadn’t done that since her mother had weaned her as an infant. People who ate all they wanted and stayed thin were going to hell. She knew this because they were in heaven now.
“Pizza’ll be right out,” the boy said.
“Thanks.”
As he rang her up, Sarah studied him. He was maybe sixteen, with that loose-limbed, endearing awkwardness that teenage boys possess. The wall phone rang, and she could tell the call was personal, and from a girl. He ducked his head and blushed as he lowered his voice and said, “I’m busy now. I’ll call you in a bit. Yeah. Me, too.”
Back at the worktable, he folded cardboard boxes and sang unselfconsciously with the radio. Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she had experienced that kind of floating-through-the-day, grinning-at-nothing sort of happiness. Maybe it was a function of age, or marital status. Maybe full-grown, married adults weren’t supposed to float and grin at nothing. But hell, she missed that feeling.
Her hand stole to her midsection. One day, she might have a son like Donnie—earnest, hardworking, a kid who probably left his dirty socks on the floor but picked them up cheerfully enough when nagged.
She added a generous tip to the glass jar on the counter.
“Thank you very much,” said Donnie.
“You’re welcome.”
“Come again,” he added.
Clutching the pizza box across one arm, with the drink in its holder balanced on top, she plunged outside into the wild weather.
Within minutes, the Lexus smelled like pizza and the windows were steamed up. She flipped on the defroster and made her way westward through winsome townships and hamlets that surrounded the city like small satellite nations. She glanced longingly at the Coke she’d ordered for Jack, and another craving hit her, but she tamped it down.
Twenty minutes later, she turned off the state highway and wended her way to a suburb where Jack was developing a community of luxury homes. She slowed down as she drove through the figured concrete gates that would one day be operated by key card only. The tasteful sign at the entrance said it all: Shamrock Downs. A Private Equestrian Community.
This was where millionaires would come to live with their pampered horses. Jack’s company had planned the enclave down to the last blade of grass, sparing no expense. The subdivision covered forty acres of top-quality pasture-land, a pond and a covered training arena, lighted and lined with bleachers. The resident Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods would occupy an ultramodern, forty-stall barn. Bridle paths wound through the wooded neighborhood, the surfaces paved with sand to reduce impact on the horses’ hooves.
In the late-afternoon gloom, she saw that all the work crews had gone for the day, driven away by the rain. There was a Subaru Forester parked at the barn, but no one in sight. The foreman’s trailer looked abandoned, too. Maybe she had missed Jack and he was heading home. Perhaps he’d had an attack of conscience and left his meeting early to be with her at the clinic, but had gotten stuck in traffic. There were no messages on her mobile, but that didn’t mean anything. She hated cell phones. They never worked when you needed them and tended to ring when you wanted peace and quiet.
The unfinished houses looked eerie, their skeletal timbers black against the rain-drenched sky. Equipment was parked haphazardly, like giant, hastily abandoned toys in a sodden sandbox. Half-full Dumpsters littered the barren landscape. The people who moved to this neighborhood would never realize it had started out looking like a battle zone. But Jack was a magician. He could start with a sterile prairie or a reclaimed waste disposal site and transform it into Pleasantville. By spring, he would turn this place into a pristine, bucolic utopia, with children playing on the lawns, foals gamboling in the paddocks, women with ponytails and no makeup and thigh-hugging riding pants heading for the barn.
Darkness deepened by the minute. The pizza would be cold soon.
Then she spotted Jack’s car. The custom-restored GTO was the ultimate muscle machine, even though legally, it belonged to her. When he was ill, she’d bought it to cheer him up. Using her earnings from the comic strip, she’d managed to save up enough for a lavish gift. Spending her life savings on the car had been an act of desperation, yet she had been willing to give anything, sacrifice anything to make him feel better. She only wished she could spend her last cent to buy him back his health.
Now that he was well, the car remained his prize possession. He only drove it on special occasions. His meeting with the client must have been an important one.
The black-and-red car crouched like an exotic beast in the driveway of one of the model houses. In its nearly finished state, the home resembled a hunting lodge. On steroids. Everything Jack built was bigger than it had to be—wraparound deck, entryway, four-car garage, water feature. The yard was still a mud pit, with great holes carved out for the fully grown trees that would be installed. Installed was Jack’s word. Sarah would have said planted. The trees looked pathetic, like fallen victims, lying limp on their sides with their withered root-balls encased in burlap.
It was pouring harder than ever when she parked and killed the headlights and engine. A gaslight on a lamppost faintly illuminated a hand-lettered sign: “Street of Dreams.” There were at least two river rock gas fireplaces that she could see, and one appeared to be working, evidenced by a deep golden glow flickering in the upper-story windows.
Balancing the Coke on the pizza box, she opened her push-button umbrella and got out. A gust of wind tugged at the ribs of the umbrella, turning it inside out. Icy rain battered her face and slid down inside her collar.
“I hate this weather,” she said through gritted teeth. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”
Rivulets of water from the unplanted yard ran down the sloping driveway and swirled away in muddy streams. The nonfunctioning sprinkler system tubes lay in a tangled mess. There was no place to walk without getting her feet soaked.
That’s it, she thought. I’m making Jack take me home to California for a vacation. Her hometown of Glenmuir, in Marin County, had never been his favorite place. He favored the white sand beaches of Florida, but Sarah was starting to feel it was her turn to choose their destination.
The past year and a half had been all about Jack—his needs, his recovery, his wishes. Now that the ordeal was behind them, she let her own needs rise up to the surface. It felt a tad selfish but damned good all the same. She wanted a vacation away from soggy Chicago. She wanted to savor each worry-free day, something she hadn’t been able to do in a very long time.
A trip to Glenmuir wasn’t so much to ask. She knew Jack would balk; he always claimed there was nothing to do in the sleepy seaside village. Battling her way through the wild storm, she resolved to do something about that.
No locks had been installed yet on the prehung doors of the huge, unfinished home.
She smiled as she pushed open the front door and sighed with relief. What could be cozier than sitting in front of the fire on a rainy afternoon, eating pizza? Quite possibly, this house was the only warm, dry place in the neighborhood.
“It’s me,” she called, stepping out of her boots so as not to muddy the newly finished hardwood floors. There was no reply, just the tinny sound of a radio playing somewhere upstairs.
Sarah felt a twinge of discomfort in her belly. Cramping was a side effect of IUI, and Sarah didn’t mind. The fact that there was pain lent an appropriate sense of gravitas to her mission. It was a physical reminder of her determination to start a family.
Shaking off the raindrops, she padded in stocking feet to the stairs. She’d never been here before, but she was familiar with the layout of the house. Though it wasn’t obvious to most people, Jack worked with only a few floor plans. The massive size and luxurious materials aside, he built what he unapologetically called “cookie-cutter mansions.” She had once asked him if he ever got bored, building essentially the same house, over and over again. He had laughed aloud at the question.
“What’s boring about netting a cool million on a tract home?” he had countered.
He liked making money. He was good at it. And she was lucky, because so far, she was terrible at it. Each year when they filed their income tax return, he would look at the revenues from her comic strip, offer her a generous smile and joke, “I always wanted to be a patron of the arts.”
At the top of the stairs, she turned toward the sound of the radio, her raincoat brushing against the machine-turned banister. “Achy Breaky Heart” was playing, and she winced. Jack had terrible taste in music. So bad, in fact, it was actually endearing.
The door to the master suite was ajar, and the friendly glow of the fire glimmered across the freshly carpeted floors. She hesitated, sensing…something.
A warning, beating like an extra pulse in her ears.
She stepped into the room, her feet sinking into the deep pile of the carpet as her eyes adjusted to the soft, golden light. The diffuse, kindly glow of the lifetime-guaranteed Briarwood gas logs flickered over two naked bodies entwined on a bed of thick woolen blankets spread in front of the hearth.
Sarah experienced a moment of complete and utter confusion. Her vision clouded and she felt light-headed and nauseous. There was some mistake here. She had walked into the wrong house. Into the wrong life. She fought against the panicky random thoughts playing Ping-Pong in her head. For a second or two she simply stood immobile, assaulted by shock, forgetting to breathe.
After endless seconds, they noticed her and sat up, gathering blankets to cover themselves. The song on the radio switched to something equally appalling—“Butterfly Kisses.”
Mimi Lightfoot, Sarah realized, was exactly as Jack had described her: the horsy type—dry skin and no makeup, hair in a ponytail. But with bigger boobs.
Finally, Sarah found her voice and spoke the only coherent thought in her head: “I brought you a pizza. And a Coke. Extra ice, the way you like it.”
She didn’t throw the pizza or spill the drink. She set everything carefully on the built-in media console next to the radio. She was as discreet and efficient as a room service waiter.
Then she turned and left.
“Sarah, wait!”
She heard Jack calling her name as she skimmed down the stairs with the speed and grace of Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. Shoving her feet into her boots barely slowed her down. In seconds, she was outside with her broken umbrella, heading for the car.
She started the engine just as Jack burst outside. He wore his good pants—the ones with the creases she had admired this morning—and nothing else. She could see his mouth working, forming her name: Sarah. She put the headlamps on bright and turned the car, feeling a satisfying crunch as the rear bumper of the Lexus toppled the custom river rock mailbox. Her high beams washed across the front of the house, illuminating the porch timbers and fine wooden window casements, the Andersen glass and the grand front entranceway.
For a moment, Jack appeared pinned by the glare, a prize buck frozen in the headlights.
What would Shirl do? Sarah asked herself. She gripped the steering wheel, threw the car into gear and floored the accelerator.
Chapter Two
After creaming the newly constructed mailbox and mowing down the “Street of Dreams” lamppost, Sarah actually contemplated nailing Jack, too. Just for an insane moment, she allied herself with the crazed women you saw on TV being interviewed behind bars: “I didn’t think. My foot just pressed down and he hit the pavement…”
Somehow, she managed to aim the SUV away from him and toward the highway. She didn’t know what else to do and couldn’t think straight, so she headed home, exceeding the speed limit, like a horse sensing the barn after a long trek.
Predictably, her mobile phone rang right away. Jack was probably still half-naked. He probably still stank of Mimi Lightfoot’s scent of sex. Sarah killed the power on the phone and pressed the accelerator harder. She needed to get home, give herself some breathing space and figure out what to do next.
As she pulled into the landscaped, circular driveway, it struck her that this had never felt like her home; it just happened to be where she lived. This was the House that Jack Built, she thought, hearing the singsong rhythm of the old children’s story in her head. And this was the wife who lived in the house that Jack built. And there was the mistress that screwed the husband that ignored the wife who lived in the house that Jack built…
It was nestled amid similar houses in the exclusive lakeside subdivision. The trees that shaded the lane were spaced perfectly apart, the mailboxes all matched and every home’s entryway lay a uniform distance from the curb. The neighborhood had been planned by a designer who worked for Daly Construction.
She wheeled into the spacious garage, nearly grazing Jack’s work truck—a custom F-350 Ford pickup—and hurried inside. Then she stopped cold. Now what? She felt so strange, almost traumatized, as though she’d been the victim of a violent assault.
She looked at the wall phone in the kitchen. The message light was blinking. Maybe she ought to call…who? Her mother had died years ago. Her friends…she’d allowed herself to drift away from people back home, and her Chicago friends belonged more to Jack than to Sarah.
What would Shirl do? she wondered, plucking the thought from the panic swirling through her head. Shirl was smart. Tough-minded. Shirl would remind Sarah to focus on practical matters, like the fact that she had a separate bank account. This was something they had set up during Jack’s illness, so she’d have access to funds if the unthinkable happened.
Well, the unthinkable had happened. Not in the way she had feared, though.
Her stomach cramped, a sensation she would ordinarily welcome after the procedure, as it meant that biology was at work. Now the discomfort meant something altogether different.
The phone rang. Seeing Jack’s number on the caller ID, she let it kick over to voice mail.
She sat in the dark house for a while, her sodden coat and boots still on. It was such a strange puzzle. Husbands cheated on their wives all the time; daytime TV was filled with dewy-eyed betrayed women seeking solace on national talk shows. The problem was as familiar to anyone as ring around the collar. Yet the issue had always brushed past Sarah like a wind pattern on a weather map from another part of the country. She could recognize it, imagine what it was like. She thought she understood.
What the talk shows never explained—what no one ever explained—was what, precisely, you were supposed to do the exact moment you made the dread discovery. Probably you didn’t leave them a pizza.
She was familiar with the stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, bargaining…She had experienced them all when she’d lost her mother, and when her husband was diagnosed with cancer. This was different. At least in those instances, she had known how she was supposed to feel. It was horrible, but at least she knew. Now she saw a world turned upside down. She was supposed to be moving from the shock to the denial phase, but it wasn’t working. This was all too real.
Late into the night she sat mulling over her options—drinking, hysterics, revenge—but nothing felt quite right. Finally, exhaustion claimed her and she went to bed. She lay still, bracing herself for a storm of inconsolable tears. Instead, she stared dry-eyed at the shadows on the wall, and eventually fell asleep.
Sarah was awakened from a fitful sleep by the sound of running water. She turned over in bed, seeing that Jack’s half was a vast, deserted wasteland. He had come home, but not to her bed. The events of the day before crashed down on her and drove away all possibility of going back to sleep.
In the past year, she had gone to bed alone nearly every night while Jack worked late. How many marriages crashed and burned on the altar of “working late”?
I’m an idiot, she thought. She got up and brushed her teeth, pulled on her robe. On the bathroom counter was the bottle of prenatal vitamins she’d been taking. Normally, the morning after artificial insemination, she would cheerfully gulp down the pills, filled with hope and possibility. She wondered when she had begun to think of artificial insemination as normal.
Now she stared at the bottle in dull horror. “I’d better not be pregnant,” she whispered.
Just like that, the dream of having a baby evaporated like a snowflake hitting a skillet. Ssst.
The good news was, she thought, combing her fingers through her hair, they had failed to make a child no matter how many times she made the trek to Fertility Solutions, so she was in little danger of being pregnant now. A small blessing, but probably a blessing all the same.
She phoned the clinic and left a voice mail: she would not be coming in for the second part of the procedure today. With a determined air, she unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook the vitamin pills into the toilet. Then, as though of its own accord, her hand snatched the bottle upright. She clutched it hard, saw that there were a few pills left. Slowly, deliberately, she put the cap back on the bottle. She should probably keep a small supply. Just in case.
She stuck her feet into scuffs and followed the sound of running water to the guest suite. Jack had come home late. She’d felt him looking in on her, but she’d lain still, feigning sleep, aware that he knew she was faking. There was much to discuss with him, but she hadn’t wanted to engage at 2:00 a.m. Now, in the light of day, she felt…not stronger. But the shock and denial had worn off, giving way to a cold rage she’d never felt before, a sensation of such violence it frightened her.
She stepped inside to find Jack freshly showered, a towel slung around his slim hips. Under normal circumstances, she would find him sexy. She might even try some seductive moves on him, not that those moves had done her any good in a long time. Now that she was beginning to understand the real reason behind his lack of desire, she saw him through new eyes. And he didn’t look sexy at all.
“So,” she said. “Who wants to start?” When he said nothing, she asked, “How long has this been going on? How many times a week?” A dozen more questions pushed to the fore, but Sarah realized her main question was for herself. Why hadn’t she seen or known?
He hung his head. Ah, shame, she thought. That might be promising. But if she was honest with herself, she had to admit that she didn’t want him to grovel and beg her forgiveness. She wanted…she wasn’t sure what she wanted.
When he looked up, she didn’t see disgrace, but hostility in his eyes. All right, she thought, so he’s not ashamed.
“Just a sec,” he said, and ducked into the bathroom. He emerged a moment later wearing a white terry cloth robe, one they kept in the guest bath for company. His arms protruded from the too-short sleeves, and his legs were bare from the thighs down.
There was probably no dress code for the breakup of a marriage. Robes would have to do. At the very least, it would prevent them from running out of the house in a screaming rage. Or maybe not. At the moment, she would rather be anywhere but here.
“We’ve both been unhappy,” he told her abruptly. “You can’t deny it.”
Oh, she wanted to. She wanted to swear her life had been perfect. That would make him responsible for causing it to collapse in an instant. Instead, she realized she’d been battling a pervasive disappointment, little sinking steps downward, so incremental they were easy enough to ignore until failure, wearing a ponytail and nothing else, held up a mirror.
“I won’t deny it,” she said, “as long as you won’t deny you chose pretty much the worst possible way to express your unhappiness.”
He didn’t. He acted as though she hadn’t even spoken. “I didn’t ask to get sick. You didn’t ask for a husband with cancer. But it happened, Sarah, and it screwed up everything.”
“No, you screwed up everything.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, coldly handsome. “When I was sick, when things were at their worst, it changed us. We weren’t like man and wife anymore. We were like…parent and child. I couldn’t get past that. When I’m with you, I see myself as a guy with cancer.”
Her stomach tightened, and for a moment, she focused all her bitterness on the disease. It was true, the cancer and its treatment had taken away his dignity, rendering him helpless. He wasn’t helpless now, though, she reminded herself. “That’s over,” she stated. “We’re supposed to learn to be man and wife again. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been working on exactly that. Apparently, you’ve been working on being a man again, only without the wife.”
He flung her a look of unexpected venom. “You’ve spent the past year trying to get pregnant,” he retorted, “with or without my help.”
“You’ve been telling me since we got engaged how much you want kids,” she reminded him.
“I never let it turn into an obsession,” he said.
“And I did?”
He gave an angry laugh. “Let’s see. Let’s just see.” Striding past her, he left the room and went to the master suite, barging into her mirrored dressing room. Feeling queasy, she followed him. He ripped a calendar off the wall and dropped it to the floor. “Your ovulation calendar.” He moved on to another wall hanging. “Temperature chart.” He ripped it down and threw it on the floor, then moved to the dressing table. “Here we’ve got your thermometers—looks like you’ve got one for every orifice—and fertility drugs. I figure your next step was to install a Web camera in the bedroom so you can record the exact moment it’s time for me to do my part. Isn’t that what they do at stud farms?”
“Now you’re being absurd,” she told him. Her cheeks felt hot with humiliation. Defend yourself, she thought. Then she realized that wasn’t her job.
“What’s absurd,” he said, “is trying to be married to you when you’re so focused on having a baby that you forget you have a husband.”
“I changed my whole life for you,” she said. “How can you say I forgot I have a husband?”
“You’re right. You didn’t forget. When it’s time to fertilize the egg, you demand a performance, and failure is not an option. Can’t you see how that might lead to a little anxiety on my part, every time you came after me?” “Came after you? Is that how you see it?” “Christ, no wonder I couldn’t get it up for you. But I have to hand it to you, Sarah. You didn’t let that stop you. Why bother with a husband when you’ve got a lifetime supply of viable sperm samples available?”
“Going to the clinic was your idea. You sat there and held my hand, month after month.”
“Because I thought it would get you off my back.” Oh, God. She’d tried to be sexy for him. Desirable. Understanding. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference, and you know it. Listen, Sarah,” he said, anger flashing in his voice. “Maybe I was the one who strayed—”
“I would say definitely, not maybe.”
“These things don’t happen in a vacuum.”
“No, they happen in half-finished houses.” She felt as though she was being smacked around by both of them and there was no stopping it, no laws to protect her from the agony, the humiliation, the sense of complete violation. She emitted a bitter sound, not quite a laugh. “I guess now I know where all your erections went. I was wondering. And does it bother your clients? To know their house had been christened by you fucking the stable girl?”