All Fall Down(33)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“Keep your voice down,” Dave hissed as he opened the door. In his white T-shirt and boxer shorts, with his hair combed away from his forehead, exposing the growing wings of skin on his temples, he had a narrow, aquiline appeal, and I knew that if we were to split, it would take him approximately ten minutes to replace me. “You just don’t seem very interested in hearing from me.”

“I’m just . . . I’m overwhelmed. It’s all too much. I need you to help me.” I meant to sound sincere, but I thought I’d only managed sullen. Reaching out, I let my fingertips brush his forearm, feeling the soft hair, the warm skin, remembering that I used to spend hours dreaming of when he would touch me again, happy weekends when we barely got out of bed, delighting in each other’s bodies.

“I’m busy, too.” He went to the bed, pulled off a blanket and two pillows, and stood, facing me, with the bedding bundled in his arms. “I’m basically doing the work of three people now. And blogging and answering e-mail, and doing those goddamn live chats.” He rubbed at his cheek again. “I’ll help you as much as I can, but full-time is full-time.”

“I can’t keep doing all of this,” I said. There were tears on my cheeks. I scrubbed them away. “I can’t. There’s my work, my dad, my mom, and everything with Ellie, and the house, and it’s all just too much, Dave.”

He tilted his head, skewering me with his gaze. “Just a thought here, but do you think maybe the pills are part of the problem?”

My breath froze in my throat. My hands turned to ice. I couldn’t move. Had he guessed the extent of it, how many pills I was taking, how many different doctors were prescribing how many different things, and how I’d come to depend on medication to get through my days? “What are you talking about?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. I felt myself cringing, wondering what he’d say . . . but instead of confronting me with what he knew or what he’d guessed, he said, “I need to get some sleep.”

“David . . .” He turned toward the door. I followed him into the guest room, reaching for him and not quite touching his shirt. “I’m sor—,” I started to say, then stopped when I realized that I didn’t know what I was apologizing for. Was I sorry that I wasn’t the one he wanted to talk to, to share his life with? Was I sorry I was taking so many pills, or just sorry that I’d gotten caught?

“Do you think we should go to counseling?” I asked, hating how timid I sounded. “Maybe we just need to sit down with someone and figure it all out.”

He shrugged, pulling back the covers on the guest-room bed. There was a phone charger plugged into the wall and a stack of Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine on the floor beside the bed, where I’d meant to put a table. He had more or less moved in here, and somehow I’d let it happen.

“Look, I’m sorry if I seem a little spacey, but things have been so stressful,” I said. “Did you see what people were saying about me in the comments on that story?” I tried to sound like I was joking, like it didn’t really bother me. “Jesus, who’s reading the paper these days? A bunch of sixteen-year-old virgins stockpiling guns in their parents’ basements?” I wanted to tell him how much the comments hurt me, and how much I wanted him to need me, to want me in his life, the way my own parents had not. I wanted to tell him why I needed the pills, and maybe even ask him for help . . . because, honestly, it was starting to scare me, how many of them I took, and how I couldn’t imagine getting through a day without them.

“What an encouraging thought,” he said. “Given that newspaper readers are my employers.”

I pressed my lips together. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to take pills until I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wanted to hate him, wanted to be angry enough to throw something heavy and sharp at his face, but I wasn’t. Maybe because I loved him . . . or maybe it wasn’t love so much as knowledge, or time, something weedy and unlovely and impossible to kill; the cockroach of emotions, a feeling that could survive even nuclear war. We had spent the past ten years of our lives together, and now every place I went, every song I heard, all of my familiar phrases and jokes, Ellie’s bedtime ritual (three kisses on her forehead and a quick spritz of monster spray), all of it I’d seen or heard or experienced or created with my husband. At our favorite restaurants I knew what he’d order, and then what I’d convince him to order by saying I just want a few bites, after which I would end up devouring it. I knew which pump he’d pull up to at the gas station, which glaze he liked on the chicken at Federal Donuts, and how he’d always forget his mother’s birthday and have to spend a hundred dollars on flowers at the last minute unless I reminded him to get her a gift. I was myself, but, I realized as I looked at his silhouette, I was also half of a marriage. How could I live a life where the person who’d built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who’d seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?