Leave Me

“In any case, I’d gone, reluctantly, to the orchestra, and then after we’d been—or rather, she’d been—invited to a gathering where this oboist patient of hers would be, and I had no choice but to go along. I wound up sitting at the bar while Felicity made herself the life of the party, as always. We didn’t get on the road until midnight, which meant we wouldn’t be getting home until two.

“In the car, I was angry with her about how late it was, and she was chiding me for being in such a rush when I had nothing to do the next day, and then she got upset with how fast I was driving, and things got nasty and I was distracted, so when the traffic backed up in front of us, I didn’t see it. I slammed on my brakes but couldn’t stop in time.”

“Oh, god, I’m so sorry.”

“No,” Stephen said, holding out his hand. “That wasn’t it. We were fine. It was just a fender bender.”

The dread in Maribeth’s stomach solidified. “What happened?” she whispered.

“What happened was that instead of pulling onto the shoulder or putting on my hazards, I spent the last moments of Felicity’s life berating her for making me get into a crash. I was yelling at her when the car plowed into us from behind. I didn’t even have my brake lights illuminated because I’d thrown the car into park.”

“Oh, no, Stephen. No.”

“I wound up with a concussion and dislocated shoulder. But Felicity.” He paused to clear his throat. “Her side of the car . . . it wasn’t even a car anymore.”

He continued telling Maribeth this most terrible of tales: sitting opposite Felicity, caged in by the wreckage, begging her to hold on, seeing that she couldn’t. Maribeth started to cry.

He handed her a napkin and carried on, dry eyed. She had the sense that he wasn’t talking to her anymore, but toward her, using her as a cover, so that he might withstand telling the story to himself. Much the same way she wrote to the twins.

“After, I took a month off work, and when I came back I’d already lost some patients. And then I lost some more because I became, I suppose the term was gruff, though I’d always been gruff, but I guess I just became something untenable.

“Maybe that was why the rumors started. Felicity was beloved. I was not. She was dead. I was not. There were whispers of my being drunk. I wasn’t, though I certainly have been many nights since.” He gestured toward the sink where the empties had been. “But people seemed to smell my wrongdoing. Or perhaps they didn’t want any part of the whole sorry business. Who can blame them? The practice began to suffer. It was suggested I take a leave, though we all knew it was permanent.”

He pushed away his plate of eggs. “Perhaps it was for the best. Medicine requires a certain level of delusion, a belief in one’s invincibility. But watching Felicity die, being right there and not being able to do a goddamn thing to stop it, well, it robbed me of that, too.”

And so this was it. Not a malpractice suit. Not binge drinking. Not even a scandal, at least not the kind she’d thought. It was a damaged heart, eating away at itself. This was something she understood.

Stephen was quiet now but his hands were shaking. Maribeth cupped them in hers, held them firm until the shaking stopped. Then she kissed him.

47

Before her swimming lesson on Monday, she stopped at the library in Squirrel Hill to search her e-mail archives for her parents’ social security numbers. Since she had deleted the message from Jason without replying, she was not expecting to hear anything more. But there it was, another e-mail from him, the subject line an ominous P.S.

As in, P.S. I hate you? P.S. Don’t come back? P.S. You are the worst mother in the world?

p.s. You seem to think I’m punishing you. For the record, it was Thanksgiving and we were in the country and then Oscar got sick so I was home with him and those e-mails were sent to my work account so I only saw them on Monday night. You’ll forgive me if I took one goddamn day to absorb it all seeing as you haven’t uttered a word for a month.

For Christ’s sake, Maribeth, I’m leaving you be. I’m doing EVERYTHING you asked me to do. I don’t know what else you want me to say.

She checked the date. It had been sent the day after she’d received the first e-mail from him. Two days before she had kissed Stephen.

She had been thinking about that kiss with a strange mix of tenderness and confusion, but now those were joined by a retroactive guilt. Because would she have kissed Stephen had she received this second e-mail from Jason? Had she kissed him to spite Jason? It hadn’t felt that way. If she’d been thinking of either of the spouses in that kitchen, it was Felicity.

She read the message again. They were in the country? And what was wrong with Oscar?

Is Oscar okay? she typed immediately, and without thinking, hit send.

Jason must have been at his desk because his reply was immediate. He is fine.

Jason was never one for specifics. Not one for sweating the small stuff, though Maribeth could never get a bead on what qualified as the big stuff for him. For instance, did her running away count?

But Oscar being sick was a concern. Was it his ears? His tubes? Oscar had been a late talker—everyone had assumed it was because Liv had a tendency to answer questions for both of them—until Lauren noticed him saying “What?” a lot and asked if they’d had his hearing tested. It had turned out Oscar’s ears were so full of fluid he could barely hear, and that was why he wasn’t talking. Maribeth had been mortified, by her failing Oscar, by Lauren catching it before she did. (“Come on,” Jason had said, “she has four kids.”) Oscar got ear tubes and speech therapy and had caught up, but over the summer, the tubes had fallen out, and the ENT said they needed to make sure the fluid didn’t build up again.