“Ugh, Caleb. Stop it. I’m supposed to be thinking of ways to make my marriage work. Not building a new relationship with someone else.”
“Building a new relationship with someone else?” I am confounded. “We’re not building anything. We’ve been in a relationship since before we were actually in a relationship.” In actual fact, I tell people we were together for three years, even though it was only one and a half, because I was emotionally with her from the moment we met.
“Why are you saying this, now?” I say.
She opens a bottle of water that is sitting on her desk and takes a sip. I want to ask when she started drinking water, but I’m pretty damn sure my non-girlfriend is trying to end our non-relationship, so I stay still and quiet.
“Because it’s better for everyone if we’re not together.”
I can’t keep the sneer off of my face. “Better for whom?”
Olivia closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “Estella,” she says.
It feels like someone has reached a hand into my belly and grabbed hold of my organs.
Olivia is chugging her water, her free hand limp in her lap.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I haven’t heard her name in a long time. I’ve thought it plenty, but Olivia’s voice wrapping around the syllables is jarring.
Her nostrils are flaring as she breathes. She still won’t look at me.
“Olivia…”
“Estella is yours.” It’s a blurt. I blink at her, not sure where that came from, or why she’s saying it.
Being told I had twenty-four hours to live would have been less painful than that statement. I don’t say anything. I stare at her nostrils, which are working like fish gills.
She spins in her chair until her knees bump into mine, and she’s looking me straight in the face.
“Caleb.” Her voice is gentle, yet it makes me flinch. “Leah came to see me. She told me she’s yours. She’ll take the paternity test to prove it. But, only if we’re not together.”
My head and my heart are in a battle for who can host the most pain. I shake my head. Leah? Was here?
“She’s lying.”
Olivia shakes her head. “She’s not. And you can get a court-issued paternity test. She can’t keep Estella from you if you are her father. But Caleb, think about it. She’ll use her to hurt you. Forever. It’ll affect your little girl, and I know what it feels like to be a parent’s weapon.”
I stand up. Walk to the window. I’m not thinking about how Leah could use Estella to hurt me. I’m thinking about Estella being mine. How could something like this be true and I not know it?
“She was pregnant before Estella. We were separated, but we had sex once during that time. Anyway, she lost the baby after she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and had to have her stomach pumped. That’s why we went to Rome. She said that she wanted to reconcile, and I felt so guilty about her sister and the miscarriage.”
I look at Olivia when I say that. Her lips turn white as she presses them together.
“Caleb, she wasn’t pregnant in the hospital. She lied to you. She told me that too.”
I always wondered what Olivia felt when I told her I faked my amnesia. Painful truth is ineffable. It swings you around a couple times until you’re dizzy, and then punches you hard in the stomach. You don’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t hurt so badly if on some level you didn’t know it was true. I run with denial for a few more minutes.
“She bled. I saw her bleed.” Denial is such a friendly companion. It’s normally Olivia’s best friend. Suddenly, I want in on the party.
Olivia looks so distraught.
“Oh, Caleb. It wasn’t from a miscarriage. She probably just got her period and passed it off as that.”
Damn it. Fuck. Olivia is looking at me like the naive, gullible fool I am.
I remember how Leah chased me out of the room before I could speak to the doctor. How I stood in the doorway and told her I’d stay just so she’d keep my baby. She was clearly trying to get me out of there before the doctor revealed the truth.
I don’t need to say anything to Olivia. She can see I’m getting it.
I’m feeling smaller and smaller. During my back and forth time with Leah, Olivia was falling in love with someone else. I could have just walked away with Olivia in Rome and spared us years of this tangled, twisted mess.
“How did Estella come to be?”
“After Rome we made it another month. She was angry with me. She accused me of not being present, and she was right. So I moved out again.
I was at a conference in Denver and she was on a trip with her friends. We ran into each other at a restaurant. I was friendly, but kind of kept my distance. She showed up at my hotel that night. I was pretty drunk and landed up sleeping with her. A few weeks later she called and told me she was pregnant. I never even questioned it. I just went back to her. I wanted a baby. I was lonely. I was stupid.”
I don’t tell Olivia that I found out she was seeing someone during that time. That when Leah came to me, I fell into her because I was trying to fill that Olivia hole in my chest again.
“So, she told you Estella wasn’t yours? That night you told her you wanted a divorce?”
“Yes. She said she’d slept with someone else before the ski trip. She also told me she only went because she knew I’d be there and she wanted to make me think she got pregnant that night.”
“It was all a lie,” Olivia says. “Estella is yours.”
I see the tear in the corner of her eye. She doesn’t swipe it away and it rains down her face.
”She’s going to keep hurting you and Estella as long as I’m in your life. I have a husband,” she says softly. “I should work things out with him. We’ve been playing house, Caleb. But, this isn’t real. You have a responsibility to your daughter…”
All of it — Olivia, Leah, Estella — ignites a fury in me. I spin and walk to her chair, leaning down and placing both hands on her armrests and get right in her face. All I want to do is go find my daughter, but first things first. I’ll deal with them one at a time. We are breathing each other’s air when I speak.
“This is the last time I’m going to say this, so listen carefully.” I can smell her skin. “You and I are happening. No one is keeping us apart again. Not Noah or Cammie, and least of all, f**king Leah. You are mine. Do you understand me?”
She nods.
I kiss her. Deep. Then I walk out.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“What’s the matter with you?”
She rubbed her hand down my chest. I caught it before it reached the top of my pants.
“Jet lag,” I said, standing up.
Olivia.
She puckered her mouth sympathetically.
I’d been lying on the hotel bed for about ten minutes while Leah spoke to her mother on the phone. Now that her phone call was over, she was making her intentions known. I wandered over to the window so I could be out of her reach.
“I’m gonna take a shower,” I said. Before she could ask if I wanted company, I closed the bathroom door and locked it behind me. I needed to run to clear my head, but how could I explain a midnight run in a foreign country to my suicidal, overly emotional wife? God, if I started running, I might never come back. I stepped into the shower and stood under the scalding hot water, letting it fill my nose and my eyes and my mouth. I wanted to let it drown me. How was I supposed to do life after what just happened? Leah knocked on the door. I heard her say something, but her voice was muffled. I couldn’t look at her right now. I couldn’t look at myself. How did I just do that? Walked away from the only thing that made sense. I almost had her and I just gave up. I used ‘had her’ loosely, because you can never really have Olivia. She floated around like a vapor, causing friction and then running away. But, I’d always wanted to play the game. I wanted the friction.
You had to do it, I tell myself. It was a you-made-the-bed situation. And I was taking responsibility for my actions. Counseling, the endless marriage counseling. The guilt. The need to fix things. The confusion about whether or not I’m doing the right thing. The faking of my amnesia was my one rogue moment, when I stepped away from myself and did what I wanted to do without thought to consequences. I was a coward. I was raised to do what was socially acceptable.
I stood under the water until it turned cold, then I dried myself off and stepped out of the bathroom. My wife — thank God — had fallen asleep on top of the covers. I felt instant relief. I wouldn’t have to act tonight. Her red hair was spread out around her like a fiery halo. I tossed a blanket over her, grabbed my bottle of wine and retreated to the balcony to get drunk. It was still raining when I sat in one of the chairs and propped my feet up on the railing. I never had to “act” with Olivia. We just fit — our moods, our thoughts … even our hands.
Once, during her senior year, she bought a gardenia bush to put outside her apartment. She fawned over that thing like it was a dog, Googled ways to take care of it and then made notes in one of those spiral notebooks. She even named it. Patricia, I think. Every day she’d squat on her haunches outside her front door and examine Patricia to see if a flower had bloomed. I watched her face when she came back inside — she always wore this look of hopeful determination. Not yet, she’d say to me, as if all of her hope for life was tied into that gardenia plant blooming a flower. That’s what I loved about her, that grim determination to survive even though the odds seemed to always be against her. Despite all of Olivia’s plant nurturing, Patricia slowly started to fade away, her leaves curling at the tips and turning brown. Olivia would stare at that plant, a crease forming between her eyebrows and her little mouth puckered in a frown worth kissing. Florida had an especially cold winter that year. One morning when I got to her apartment, Patricia was clearly dead. I jumped into my car and sped off to Home Depot where I’d seen them selling the same bushes. Before my little love cracked her eyes open, I replaced her dead plant with a healthy one, repotting it over the grass in front of her building. I threw the old one in the dumpster and washed my hands in the pool before knocking on her door. She checked on it when she opened the door for me that morning, and her eyes lit up when she saw the healthy green leaves. I don’t know if she ever suspected what I’d done, she never said anything. I took care of it without her knowing, sticking plant food into the pot before I knocked on her door. My mother always put used tea bags in the soil around her rose bushes. I did that a couple times too. Right before we broke up, that damn plant bloomed a flower. I’d never seen her so excited. The look on her face was the same as when I’d missed the shot for her.
If she came back and stood in that same spot beneath my hotel room, I’d probably jump right off the balcony to get to her. It’s not too late, I told myself. You can find out where she’s staying. Go to her.
I loved Olivia. I loved her with every fiber of my being, but I was married to Leah. I’d made a commitment to Leah — no matter how stupid that was. I was in. For better or worse. I had a brief moment when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, but that was in the past. Before she’d gotten pregnant with my baby and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.
Right?
Right.
I shook the bottle of wine. I was halfway through.
When a woman carried your baby in her body, you started seeing everything a little differently. The impossible became slightly less fucked. The ugly picked up a pretty glow. The unforgivable woman looked a little less stained. Kind of like when you’d been drinking. I finished the bottle and set it on its side on the floor. It rolled away and hit the balcony railing with a ting. I was in a baby coma. And I needed to wake the f**k up.
I closed my eyes and I saw her face. I opened my eyes and saw her face. I stood up, tried to focus on the rain, the city lights, the f**king Spanish Steps — and I saw her face. I had to stop seeing her face so I could be a good husband to Leah. She deserved that.
Right?
Right.
We flew out four days later. We barely had time to recover from the jet lag before it was time to leave again. It’s not like I could focus on the trip with my ex floating somewhere around the city. I looked for Olivia at the airport, in restaurants, in cabs that splashed water on my ankles as they drove past. She was everywhere and nowhere. What were the chances that she’d be on our flight? If she was, I’d…
She wasn’t on our flight. But, I thought about her for the nine hours it took to fly across the Atlantic. My favorite memories — the tree, Jaxson’s, the orange grove, the cake fight. Then I thought about the bad ones — mostly things she made me feel, the constant thought that she was going to leave me, the blatant way she refused to admit that she loved me. It was all so childish and tragic. I glanced at my wife. She was reading magazines and drinking cheap airplane wine. She took a sip and grimaced when she swallowed.
“Why do you order it if you don’t like it?”
“It’s better than nothing, I suppose,” she said, looking out the window. Telling, I thought. I opened the book I brought with me and stared at the ink. For nine gracious hours, Leah left me alone. I’d never been so grateful for cheap wine. When we landed in Miami, she dashed to the bathroom to reapply her makeup while I waited in line for Starbucks. By the time we made it to baggage claim, I was in one of the worst moods of my life.
“What’s wrong with you now?” she said. “You’ve been distracted this whole trip. It’s really annoying.”
I glared at her from behind my sunglasses and grabbed one of her bags off the belt. I flung it down so hard; it wobbled on its fancy f**king rotating wheels. Who traveled with two large suitcases when they went away for five days?