In Her Bed

I rolled over and grabbed my glasses off the end table. I wanted to see her in all her clarity, her steely resolve, silent and sitting with the knowledge of what we had done. Sharon was married too, her husband, away for the weekend. She had invited me over for a mid-afternoon drink, a shared moment between coworkers, between friends. Her living room was quaint: a sofa, a chair in the corner, a television displaying pictures of famous paintings. She drank a seltzer; I stole one of her husband’s IPAs. This too felt like a violation, but nothing compared to what we were about to do—the breaking of our mutual, sanctimonious vows.

“How are you feeling?” I asked her. She turned to the window. Sun came down in fat beams and a square of yellow light draped over us, extended to the floor.

“We may have made a mistake,” she responded. Then, laughing, “I feel good.”

Sharon worked on the floor above me. We met in the elevator. After a few weeks I knew when she’d come in, and I took care to arrive at the office five minutes early and wait by the door. We’d walk into the elevator chatting about our weekends, our spouses, the isolated lives we led, and I would step out first, looking back as the doors closed.

I got up from the bed and stood at the edge. Hanging there naked I stretched my arms above my head and leaned back. There was a book on her nightstand—Beach Read by Emily Henry.

“When was the last time you went to the beach?” I asked her.

“We went a couple weeks ago,” Sharon replied, “With the Thompsons and the Meagers. Do you know them?”

“Vaguely,” I replied.

“The water was warm. I went swimming.” She was rolling her head back and forth on the pillow, eyes closed.

“Did the Meagers bring the children?” I asked. My wife was pregnant with our first child. She was due in a couple weeks.

“Yeah,” she replied, “and a watermelon.”

I pictured her chomping into the flesh, juice running down her chin. A few weeks ago, Sharon started coming down to eat lunch in the breakroom on my floor. We would sit and I would watch her eat a sandwich, eat a salad. In the elevator she felt impenetrable, foreign. But sitting with her for longer stretches, watching her sustain herself, she was so pitifully human.

“Are you thinking of having kids?” I asked her and bent down to pick up my underwear.

“I don’t want to get pregnant,” she said. She didn’t say why, but I understood the implication. Sharon worked out every day after work, often on the weekends, she had told me, Pilates. She took pride in her body. “We’ve considered adoption.”

“I should probably get going,” I said, collecting my clothes.

She rolled onto her side. “I wish you would lay with me,” she replied.

I was standing in my socks. We hadn’t taken them off. Another part of her I would never see.

“I really have to go,” I said, slipping into my shirt, pulling on my pants. “Will you walk me to the door?”

“Where are your shoes?”

“They must be in the living room,” I replied, and collected my phone from the end table. I had a missed call from my wife. “Shit,” I said. “Amanda called.”

Sharon flipped the blanket off, stood up, sun at her back, and stretched herself out. I felt my face fall into a goofy, juvenile look. Something next to lust, but more innocent, young. She walked around the end of the bed and led me out the doorway, gripping the frame and looking back with a smile as she turned the corner.

In the living room, I slipped on my shoes, I leaned back on the couch, I tipped my head back. “I wish we had time to go again,” I said.

“We could,” Sharon replied. She walked toward me. She placed her hands on my knees and looked me dead in the eyes.

Keys jangled at the door. Hinges started to squeak. The door swung slowly open. Sharon froze. Her husband stood in the doorway. For a long time, he was quiet, all of us looking at each other, Sharon and I steeping in our guilt. She straightened up and turned to her husband.

“You’re early,” she said to him. “I’m so sorry.”

There was no feeling. No weight. He put his hand over his eyes before turning around and closing the door behind him. We heard the car pulling out of the driveway. Sharon’s mouth hung open. She was shivering. She looked back at me like I’d have something to say. She was so scared. It’s a terrible thing, the way I felt, amused at the absurdity of it all, the colossal undoing. In her moment of need, I turned away. I had to keep myself from laughing.

The Thompsons

Were sitting on the couch, Cabernet poured, movie on, when Gloria got the call from Sharon. She picked up the phone, and as Sharon began to speak, her posture curled. She crutched her elbow against her thigh, leaned her ear against the phone. Terry shifted on the couch to face her. He asked who was on the phone and Gloria waved her hand.

“I don’t know where he is,” Sharon said, muffled through the speaker.

Gloria got up off the couch and walked to the bedroom, sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned back, her head hit the mattress, and she breathed hard while Sharon recounted the day’s events. She brushed over the grisly details, the haste of their movements, the explosive pleasure, the quick-setting realization of the act committed, and focused on that final moment, her hands on Michael’s knees, leaning downward, keys jangling at the door, lock unhitching, the terror she felt when she turned around to see her husband in the doorway.

“He came home early,” she said. “He wasn’t supposed to come home early.”

Gloria talked her down. Terry came into the room and sat down next to her on the bed, laying a hand gently on her thigh. “Is everything okay?” he mouthed, and Gloria looked at him, head tilted, and shook her head no.

By the end of the call Sharon’s voice had settled into a whisper.

“Okay,” Gloria said. “I love you. Call anytime,” and then she hung up.

Terry stared intently at his wife, waiting for an explanation.

“Sharon cheated on Andy,” Gloria muttered.

They were thinking the same thing. Terry was making tiny circles on her knee with his thumb. Gloria was biting her lip. This could happen to them.

“What is she going to do?” he asked.

“She doesn’t know where he is. He left. The car pulled out of the driveway, and she hasn’t seen him since.”

Terry pulled his hand back and Gloria tipped her head back and she ran her fingers through her hair.

“Where would you go,” Terry asked, “if the shoe was on the other foot?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her head turned to the side. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Would you ever disappear?” he asked her.

She thought of the fights they’d had, over money—which was never a real issue—over sex, the possibility of children (children Terry didn’t want, and Gloria always had), over leaving the toothpaste open on the bathroom counter. She thought of the day they had gone to a party for Terry’s work, the same company Sharon worked for on the same floor, and she saw him talking to her, leaning forward and laughing while spilling wine on the carpet. Terry was tipsy. The whole party was drunk and well-lit, and she remembered the white light coming down and bleaching her eyes. They were in a ballroom. The women wore long gowns, the men wore suits, and in that moment, she was alone, standing against the wall, psychically begging her husband to come rescue her from her isolation. She thought Sharon was beautiful, fun, exciting to be around, and she was equally threatened as she was intrigued. Even at the dinner table, when they’d had her and Andy over, part of her wanted to take Sharon for herself and see what it could be like if they built a life together.

“I would,” she finally said, replaying the memory in her head. “I think I would go to the ocean.”

“I don’t like to think about you leaving me,” Terry said, and she thought of freedom, about escaping their big house on Long Island, taking her car and driving along the water until she ran out of coastline.

“Too much of the same thing isn’t always a good thing,” she said. “It’s hard not to wonder.”

“Do you think about other men?” he asked, and he stood up from the bed, walked to the other side of the room and leaned against the dresser. He was tall and thin, and for a moment, she was disgusted by him, his body, by the conversation, by Sharon and Michael for making them have it.

“It’s not about that,” she said. “Maybe I need to go somewhere.”

“To the ocean?” he asked.

“Across the sea,” she replied, and they exchanged a smile.

“Maybe some travel would be good for us,” he said.

“I meant alone,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to spend time in Spain.”

“Spain?” Terry asked. “Paella and bull-rider dick?” he prodded.

“That was uncalled for,” Gloria replied. “I wasn’t trying to make you upset.”

“I just don’t understand this itch you have,” he said. “I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to spend time away from you. I like you,” he said. “Do you like me?”

“That’s a stupid question,” Gloria replied.

“Do you like our marriage? Because I enjoy sitting on the couch watching movies with you. I like leaning against the counter when you cook, and going to the city and buying you dinner, and drinking too much wine, and walking to the car underneath the lights. I like when we go ice skating at Rockefeller Center and even though it’s overcrowded, I don’t mind, because I’m with you. I like watching you move around a room. I like when we go to the grocery store and other men look at you, and I look at them, and they look away. I like the fact that you're mine.”

“I’m not yours,” she said.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

“I’m not yours, you’re not mine, we’re just two people sharing a space. You belong to you and I belong to me.”

“Well, fine,” he said. “Whatever, it’s not important. I like sharing a space with you. I like breathing your air and tasting your spit and getting your lipstick on my face.”

“You’re worked up,” Gloria said. “You can’t let fear dictate this conversation.”

“Then say it,” he said.

“Say what?”

“Tell me you aren’t going to leave me.”

Gloria let out a long breath. She got up off the bed and walked over to where Terry was leaning against the dresser. She grabbed his shoulders and met his eyes. She stared at him, then she kissed him between the eyes.

“I am not going to leave you,” she said.

When he hugged her, stroking his hand across her back, pressing his lips into the space below her ear, doubt festered in her like gangrenous tissue, an infection that had spread to the bone. She thought of the ocean, of Spain and of freedom, of sitting alone in an empty house, wondering where it all went wrong.

Andy Didn't Go to the Ocean

Because he didn’t want to feel so vulnerable, so open. Instead, he drove to his office and entered the garage beneath the building before stopping at a liquor store alight with red neon signs. There he bought a bottle of gin and a pack of spirits, lime juice in a little lime-shaped container with a yellow cap. The lemon juice, hanging next to it on the plastic vine, had a green cap, and reaching for them, he got confused. He had to pause to decide which was which.

In his office he hung his jacket on the back of his chair and sat down and kicked up his feet on his desk. He tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling. He was supposed to be out of town until Monday, drumming up clients at a conference in Philadelphia, but by the end of the day Saturday, he was sitting in the empty convention center, watching the cleaning staff go through and pull streamers off the walls, swipe away the tablecloths, his tie draped around his neck, legs spread wide, slouched in a hard-backed chair with five business cards in his hand. Five warm leads. I can leave, he thought. I can go home.

There existed a world before he walked through that door, and a world after.

In his office—sunlight drained from the city—he drank his gin. He kicked himself back and forth in his chair. As he drank the ceiling started moving, scanning, back and forth, fading and reappearing. He realized he was blinking. He toyed with the pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, put it between his teeth, and lit it. The drunken rush was familiar, and it gave him a surge, a spot of energy, which turned to a brewing anger.

He stood up and looked at his desk. There were stacks of papers, manilla folders stuffed full on either side, a box of tissues, a picture of his wife on their wedding day. He poured another shot of gin and snuffed the cigarette out, left it smoldering on the desk. Then he set the bottle on the floor next to the chair and picked up the photo of Sharon, white-knuckled the frame. Big eyes and a wide smile, hair done, makeup perfect, the photo was taken before she walked down the aisle. There were tears brimming at the corners of her eyes. There was a mole tucked above her left nostril she had since had removed. She was younger then. He didn’t remember the last time he saw her cry.

He lifted the photo over his head and brought it down hard on the edge of the desk. The glass cracked, the frame snapped, he cut his hand and tossed what remained to the corner, then looked at the divot in his palm, blood dripping on the carpet. He unbuttoned his shirt and took off his undershirt and tied it around his hand before swiping his arms across his desk, knocking the papers, the box of tissues, the monitor and keyboard to the floor. He stepped to where the monitor lay and stomped down again and again until the screen cracked, bent, snapped in half. He pulled the filing cabinet off the wall. Papers scattered across the floor. He grabbed them in piles and tore them to pieces.

In the bullpen desks sat jammed into cubicles. He pulled down pictures pinned to bulletin boards, wives and children, friends and family, he unplugged monitors and frisbeed them at the walls. He smashed keyboards in half on the edge of desks, letters flying, he tipped chairs over. He wished he had a hammer. He wished he had a gun. In the break room he pulled mugs down from the shelves, launched them down against the linoleum tile, hardened clay skittering across the floor. He found a dish towel and shoved it in the drain of the sink. Then he turned on the faucet, and on his way out of the office, pulled all the photos off the walls, threw them to the floor. He punched the glass door with his wrapped hand. The vibration rattled through his knuckles, up his arm, settled in his shoulder. Bending down, he untied a shoe, pulled it off and took the toe in his hand, brought the wooden heel down hard against the glass. A crack formed. He hit it again and it shattered with a crash, shards at his feet. He slipped his shoe back on and walked through the gap in the door with a crunch.

There was an eerie, dewy silence permeating the walls of the parking garage. Fluorescents burned, a dull hum, the clicks of his shoes echoed against the concrete. He got into the passenger side of his car, sat down, leaned the seat all the way back. He put his arms up above the headrest. Thoughts of Sharon swarmed, of her body plain and vulnerable in the living room, the way her face disintegrated. Was this the first time? Or had she been cheating all along? Every late night at the office, weekend business trip, passive absence, ‘I’m just going to take a drive,’ she would say—had they been rendezvous too?

His head was light and his body was faint. He pulled the shirt, soaked red, from around his hand and inspected the wound, a clotted gorge, the blood no longer streaming. He threw the shirt in the back seat, rested his hands in his lap, closed his eyes, and woke up starving.

Cars dotted spaces, early-risers in suits, pencil skirts and cardigans, walked towards the exit—no one he recognized, thank God. He reached back and shimmied into his blood-stained undershirt. He curled his toes in his shoes. His button up, he realized, was still in the office. He felt dirty, hair greasy, the cut on his hand was pink and pulsing. His mouth was dry, smacked with mucus. He pursed his lips, opened the door, and spit.

Coming up the elevator his palms stung with sweat. For the first time since he walked through the door, he wasn’t thinking about Sharon. There was a thin layer of water covering the floor. He stepped through the hole in the broken door with a splash. Papers were strewn, glass everywhere, and when he walked in—blood stained shirt, messy hair, five o’clock shadow and unbrushed teeth—everyone standing in the room tending to the photos, to the waterlogged papers, turned knife-driving glares. They knew it was him.

“Why?” said a second-year associate. Baby faced and innocent, he had garnered the reputation as a dogged worker. He had a future. His arms bent, palms turned up, facing the ceiling.

I should’ve shattered the lights, he thought. His office door was open, the bottle of gin sitting on the desk. It was all absurd—nothing meant a God damned thing—and he started to laugh.

“I don’t know,” he said.

In the Days That Followed

I didn’t see Sharon in the elevator. On Tuesday I went up to her floor and walked through the cubicles, walked through the breakroom. I went up to a young woman—must have been an intern—and asked if Sharon had been in.

“She’s sick,” she replied, and, sick, I thought. Sure. I thanked her and went back to my desk on the floor below, stared at Sharon’s number in my phone and debated calling. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The way her waist caved in above her hips, her hands pressed into my chest, her eyes open, wide, peering. I liked the way she looked at me. I wanted to see her again. I imagined her picking up the pieces of her marital bed. I wondered if Andy would stay. I wouldn’t have.

The next two weeks passed like this: I went to work, Amanda at home, Sharon creeping through my head like a specter, crawling in the corners like a spider, leaving webs between the folds of my brain. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. At home, Amanda asleep on her back, fingers laced at the bottom of her belly, I would sneak to the bathroom and replay the scene in my head as best I could remember and masturbate in front of the mirror. I had dreams of Sharon so life-like I felt our bodies pressed together. In the mornings, I made breakfast for my wife, scrambled eggs seasoned with oregano and chives, butter toast and orange juice, and fantasized about someone else’s kitchen.

Amanda didn’t notice my mental absence, or if she did, she never said anything. She was so focused on herself, as she had every right to be. I should have been focused on her too.

Her water broke on a Thursday. I skipped the elevator, burst into the stairwell, scampered to the lobby, the woman at the desk made a comment about my hustle. I didn’t respond. In the parking garage I cut the corners close. My tires skipped as I turned onto the street. When I got home, Amanda was sucking deep gulps of air through her mouth.

“This hurts,” she said. She was in the middle of a contraction. There was a stain on the couch.

“Just try to breathe,” I said, and helped her up, out the door, down the steps, and into the car.

“Do you have my bag?” she asked. She had labored for months over that bag. A small black suitcase full of everything she deemed essential: a bathrobe, a clean pair of underwear, socks, lip balm, a travel sized lotion, lavender-scented deodorant, an old Nirvana t-shirt, a box of chewy bars and a tangerine, Gatorade and a Red Bull, diapers, an empty baby bottle, a breast pump, a swaddling towel, a one-piece, padsicles, a speaker for the birthing playlist that consisted largely of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, music she had grown up with, music her father played for her. In the backseat of our car—a Caravan we traded in for when we found out she was pregnant—was the car seat.

I gripped the steering wheel while Amanda hung her hand from the handle above the door, breathing hard and cussing when the contractions came, silent when they didn’t, no music played. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I shut my mouth and kept driving. Every time we hit a red light, or came to a fit of traffic, I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I strained out of my seat to look at the road ahead.

When we got to the hospital, I left the car out front with the hazards on. I helped Amanda to the door and got her to the desk. “What brings you in today?” the nurse asked.

“She’s in labor,” I blurted before Amanda could speak, and she looked at me.

They rushed her to the back. I went outside to move the car, crowded parking lot, sun beating down on the pavement, I found a spot and stepped into the thick muggy air. When I got back inside the AC struck me, stung my sweat, and I walked quickly through the hallway, past the stretchers, past the nurses in their scrubs holding their clipboards until I found my wife in a wide open room. She was holding the Doctor’s hand.

He turned to me and said, “We have a long way to go.”

Labor lasted twelve hours. I spent the time shuttling back and forth between the vending machine and the delivery room grabbing ice chips in little Styrofoam cups. We had planned for a natural birth. Amanda wanted that. I didn’t care either way. By hour six, she was asking for an epidural, but it was too late. She gripped my hand with every surge, squeezed hard, I could feel bones moving beneath my skin.

At hour eleven I got a phone call. It was Sharon.

“This is work,” I said, straining the muscles in my neck. “I have to take this.”

“Don’t leave me,” Amanda said.

I wanted to talk to Sharon. I needed to know how she was doing, if Andy had come back. If she missed me. Amanda’s eyes were boring, her pain pedestrian. I felt like I had been here before, and that I’d be here again. My whole life splayed out in front of me, the future wide and stretching, set in stone. Nothing would change from this point on. Everything was determined.

I let the phone ring.

Our baby girl came at two am, greased up and sliding, and my wife sat panting, holding her, watching her breathe, cradling her head in her arms.

“We did it,” I said. “We did it.”

Sharon and Gloria

Arrived at the restaurant in separate cars and met in front of the double-paned glass doors. Gloria wrapped her arms around Sharon, pulled her close against her body and held her there until Sharon broke away.

At the table, they sat with their hands in their laps, backs straight, a candle between them. Sharon’s hair was wily and flying. Her face was bare. Gloria had taken extra care with her makeup, applied eyeliner three times, blush twice, she blended her foundation into her neck. Whenever she saw Sharon, she wanted to impress her. She wanted to look beautiful.

“I haven’t eaten in days,” Sharon said.

She looked it. Her face was gaunt, eyes hollow. There were glimmers of effort. She wore a black skirt with a white button up, top three undone, gold necklace with a circular pendant hanging down around her neck. Gloria pictured her getting ready, standing in front of the mirror, motionless and staring, waiting for the moments to pass until it was time to leave.

Sharon requested Gloria not bring her husband, and she had happily obliged. The last two weeks had been icy, seamless, cold and detached. It would get better, Gloria thought. She wasn’t seriously considering leaving, but the thought lingered, a quiet desperation for a change. Maybe, she had said to Terry, they should have a child. Something to pin her to the floorboards.

Studying the menu, Sharon began to speak. “I was naked when he came home,” she said. “That almost felt like more of a violation than the cheating. I felt so vulnerable. To be that exposed with another man in our home… we should have gone to a hotel.”

“What would you have told him? If he came home, and you weren’t there?”

“I don’t know.” She looked back down at the menu. “I would have thought of something. My hair would have been matted. I would have stunk of it.”

The waitress came and took their orders, they ordered drinks, sours, pasta pomodoro and mushroom risotto. The waitress complimented Sharon on her order, and she forced a smile.

“Terry and I got in a fight after you told me,” Gloria said. “He asked me if I would ever disappear.”

“I didn’t expect Andy to. I thought he would come back. I thought he would call.”

“He will,” Gloria said.

“He’ll come back with papers,” she sneered.

“Do you love him?” Part of Gloria hoped she would say no, though she didn’t know which part, and the reflexivity of the thought terrified her.

“I married him.” She responded. “I like my life.” The drinks came, Gloria thanked the waitress, Sharon took a healthy sip. “When he asked if you would ever disappear?” she said, dotting her top lip with the white cloth napkin, “what did you say?”

“I told him I’d go to the ocean.”

“You didn’t say no?”

“Well, then I told him I was thinking of going to Spain.”

Sharon cocked her head to the side. “Have you been thinking about that long?”

“I don’t know,” Gloria said, and she smiled a coy, thin-lipped smile, hunched her shoulders. “I need an adventure.”

“You’re restless.”

“Something like that.”

“I know the feeling,” Sharon said. The restaurant had low ceilings and lots of tables. There were couples surrounding them, intimate dinners, close-quartered conversations. Gloria half expected to see a diamond ring glinting in the bottom of a champagne flute. But there was no drama, no showmanship, just spoons cutting into tiramisu, breaking the crusts of creme brulee.

“So,” Gloria started, “If the shoe had been on the other foot…”

“I would have killed him,” Sharon picked up where she left off.

“No, but really.”

“No,” Sharon said, “Really. I would have gone to the kitchen and grabbed a knife and stabbed him in the eye.”

“Do you think about killing him often?” Gloria smiled.

“Every day,” Sharon replied, and the two laughed. She settled into her chair. She slouched her shoulders. Things were normal, things were broken. All in all, things were the same.

The food came, the conversation moved on. They spoke about work, about retirement, about front porches and single drinks, bridge games and old age. Sharon was ready, she said, to have her ‘best years’ behind her, the tumult and anxiety of this time in the past. They weren’t young, but they weren’t old either, she said, and something about the middle terrified her.

At the end of the meal, plates clean, forks laid in the center of their wide-rimmed bowls, leaning over the table, Gloria posed a question as a statement.

“Come to Spain with me.”

Sharon put her hands on the edge of the table and leaned back.

“He’ll come back,” she said. “I know he will. This is the first time I’ve left the house. I almost didn’t come. I’ve been sitting in the living room, too anxious to read, or watch TV, just sitting, waiting. He has to come back, and I have to be there when he does.”

“What if he doesn’t?” Gloria asked, and Sharon, head tipped back, a turkey in the rain, sat in her fear. She was drowning.

It Was Easy

For Andy to find the number, through mutual connections and online sleuthing, to alert Michael’s wife. He had seen them at work parties, at restaurants, and made cordial conversation, feigned laughter in an innocent way. Sitting in the car outside of his house—Sharon’s house now, he thought—his thumb hovered over the call button. If it was him, he would want to know.

He’d spent the last two weeks holed up in a hotel room in New Jersey. He bought all new clothes, a new toothbrush and went to the bar every night, watching the dog days of the baseball season spin out in a drunken stupor.

On Saturday he woke up with a splitting headache and decided it was time to go see Sharon. When he got there, the curtains were closed. He was in the car, looking at the shielded home, the overgrown lawn, the mangled shrubs, imagining Sharon sitting in the living room with a book, or watching TV, or maybe just sitting. Maybe Michael was there again.

The phone rang, rang again, and Amanda picked up with a crunch. He put it on speaker, lay the phone on his thigh.

“Hello?” she said. “Who is this?”

“This is Andy, Sharon’s wife. We’ve met,” he said.

“Andy?”

“My wife works with your husband.” He pictured the two of them in their bed.

“Oh, Andy!” She said it like she was happy to hear from him.

“I’m not sure how to say this, so I’ll just come out with it.” His hands were clammy, his voice shaky. “You’re husband, Michael, with Sharon, I walked in on them.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was naked, in the living room, leaning over him. They were about to, or just had, I’m not sure.” Static and fuzz hummed across the line. Andy dug his nails into his thigh and closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just thought you should know.”

On the other end, he pictured Amanda shell-shocked and stupid, working through his words one by one, replaying them in her mind. When he caught Michael with his wife, he lingered in the doorway, trying to make sense of the image, like pixels loading on a screen. He saw each frame one by one. He felt like, even now, a part of him was still standing there, a witness to some crime committed, a body bleeding on the floor.

“Is this true?” she asked.

“Why lie?” he replied.

“When did this happen?”

“Two weeks ago,” he said. “But does it really matter?” He put his hand down on the median. He pressed his skull into the headrest and exhaled through his nose. Amanda thanked him through tears, then hung up. He cradled his phone in the palm of his hand, propped it up against the steering wheel, and set his forehead against its edge.

He didn’t want to go inside. He knew, as soon as he did, it was over. But something compelled him and all at once he was standing on the doorstep, willing his arm to raise, a fist to form, white and shaking knuckles blessing the wooden door.

At the Airport

Gloria stood with her suitcase watching Terry pull away from the terminal, wondering if she had made a mistake. After her dinner with Sharon, despite her refusal to come, she had gone home and told Terry she was booking a flight to Spain. He stood sputtering and stupefied in the doorway of their bedroom, asking questions she couldn’t answer. She just knew she had to get outside of her own life.

Around her people stepped out of cars, stepped onto the curb, they hugged and kissed, said tearful goodbyes. There had been no tearful goodbye with Terry. He helped her pull her suitcase from the trunk and they stood a foot apart exchanging goodbyes. As she watched him pull away, tracking his hands on the steering wheel through the back window, she regretted not kissing him, if only for his peace of mind.

Once he’d gone around the corner, she pulled out her phone. There was a part of her quivering, worrying she had made a mistake. Maybe she would call him, tell him she wanted to have a kid. She imagined them sitting on their porch with drinks in hand, sipping slowly and watching a child play in the yard, cars pass on the street, birds fly, clouds drift. But the vision was obfuscated by her uncertainty, her unwillingness to step two-footed into the future.

Sharon’s refusal had broken her heart. The two weeks in Spain could have taken their minds off their respective troubles, her own boredom, Sharon’s infidelity. They would talk to Spanish men. They would watch each other get dressed in the mornings, do their makeup in the mirror.

Her hand trembled as she scrolled to Sharon’s contact. Air came rushing under the concrete awning in a big gust. A shuttle pulled up and stopped with a creak and opened its doors. People tumbled out. The phone rang once, then twice, then once more before the line picked up, and she heard Sharon’s breathing through the phone.

“Gloria,” she said. “He came back.” Her words felt detached, her recounting distant, like it had happened a long time ago.

“Oh?”

“We sat in the living room for a little while. I didn’t know what to say to him.”

Gloria stepped through the double doors, the air was cool and the sound of chatter, of suitcases rolling, felt elevated, more distant, and she was relieved.

“We just sat for a long time,” Sharon said. “And then he said he was leaving me.”

“God, Sharon. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. It’s what I expected. What I deserve.”

A woman walked by talking loudly to her sons, trying to corral them as they ran circles around her with child-sized suitcases in toe. She looked lost, like she didn’t know what she was doing, and Gloria was reminded, in an instant, why she and Terry hadn’t had children.

“Come to Spain with me,” she said. The words traveled past her teeth before she had the time to stop them. “It will take your mind off things,” she justified.

“Gloria…”

“We can drink wine on the coast and eat paella, and you can make love to Spanish men, and it will cure this for a little while.”

Sharon started to say something and then stopped.

“What?”

“It sounds beautiful,” she finally said. “But I need to sit with this for a while.”

“Okay,” Gloria said.

“Okay,” Sharon replied. “Thank you for the call. Have fun in Spain.” Her voice ticked up at the end, a hollow attempt at exuberance.

In the rushing of the terminal, a crushing loneliness took hold of Gloria’s stomach. She stood in front of the bag drop. She watched the people move, clustered and coupled, and wished she was moving too.

In the Car

Amanda fussed with the radio. A conversation was had the day before, after she received Andy’s phone call. Michael tried to lie. He tripped over his words. He made excuses for where he’d been that day. But it didn’t matter. In the cool of the evening, they stepped onto the porch, and Amanda wished for a cigarette, for a drink, something to ease her mind, but there was nothing but the humming of the bugs, the chitter of the grasshoppers, and something about this soothed her, the deep and eternal nothing. The baby was asleep inside. Their mutual creation, dormant.

It was on the porch he had started talking about his infidelity in truth, why he had done it, what was going through his mind. He said the word frustration, and the word boredom, and then he got angry, but Amanda wasn’t really listening. She was looking at the house across the street, where the Fillman’s lived, their curtains drawn open. A bright yellow light shone in the living room, and you could see everything from the rug on the floor to the black leather couch to the pictures on the walls. They sat, shoulder to shoulder, watching something on the television, parents on either side, kids propped up in the middle. She had wanted that life, and it was gone now, and she was angry, crestfallen, but beneath it all was some crushing empty she’d always known was there. There was nothing at the bottom.

When Michael finished pontificating, he muttered, “Fuck,” and turned away, paced around, until he was facing her. Then, for the first time, he apologized.

“I’m not sure you mean that,” she said, and, even now, sitting in the car, she wasn’t sure he had. The way he talked about it was like it was something he had to do, would have always done, couldn’t help.

The baby was in the back, strapped into the car seat. The sun came down through the windshield in piercing rays, the AC was blasting. She felt she should be sweating. She was going to her mother’s house, she’d decided, further North and further East, but she wanted to get further. She pictured herself in San Diego, drinking margaritas on the shore, or in Canada, where the weather was cooler and the air cleaner, filtered through the trees. But she didn’t know what else she could do but return home to the place she started and start again.

Pulling out of the driveway she looked at the house in the rearview mirror. They had bought it after they got married once they decided they wanted to leave the city life behind. There was a porch swing hanging from the wooden awning, a tree they had planted in the lawn, still just a sapling. She had watched it grow from the living room window, drinking her coffee, drinking her tea. In the mornings after she found out she was pregnant, she would stand in that window with the blinds drawn and hold her belly, even though there was nothing there, and think about time. The way it passes, and the way we move through it, walking backwards. She had pictured a life in that home. She would never look back at it.

Turning onto the road, eyes fixed forward, she had a sinking sense she would never see that tree again.