The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

after drop-off. I wanted you to be gone, but the house still smelled too strongly like you. You were somewhere. I didn’t call for you. I shut the bathroom door and got into the shower and I scrubbed myself hard. Every piece of me. I stood under the showerhead until the water ran cold.

I could hear you on the other side of the door, the sounds I had heard nearly every morning of our life together. Your drawers opening and closing. Your fresh underwear. Your undershirt. And then the closet. Your dress shirt – you must have been trying to impress someone that day. The metal clips on the hangers clanged. Your suit slipped off the heavy wooden shoulders and onto your arms.

And then the bathroom door opened. I was naked. You stared at my body differently that morning; the hanging skin that had held your children; the breasts those children had sucked dry; the patch of scraggly pubic hair that hadn’t been cared for in years – all there, for the eyes of a man who had something better, younger, firmer to look at. I imagined her skin was smooth and free of purple veins and enduring hairs. I watched you watch me. And I wondered what this body meant to you now. Was it just a vessel? The ship that got you here, father of one beautiful daughter and a son you’d barely known?

You saw me watching you and then you looked away. You knew you’d lingered too long on my naked body. You knew that I knew. You reached out for the towel on the hook and you handed it to me.

We didn’t say a word to each other that morning. You were gone until ten at night. And then you came home and fucked me so hard that I bled. I had begged you to. I imagined you’d fucked her that night, too. But I wanted to feel used, in a mechanical type of way that made my body feel separate from who I was. I wanted to feel like a barge in the sea. Rusted, trusted, dented.

There are days, like that one, that mark the moments in our life that change who we are. Was I the woman being cheated on? Were you the man who betrayed me? We were already the parents of a dead boy. Of a daughter I couldn’t love. We would become the couple that split. The husband who left. The wife who never got over any of it.

1972

There came a time when it was clear to everyone that Etta was slipping away. She’d stopped cooking and stopped eating. She’d stopped doing much of anything by then. The house had a rank smell to it, like damp towels that had been left too long in the washer. She wandered the second floor some days, but others she didn’t leave her bedroom.

It was a tough time for Cecilia as well. She was wasting away, swimming in the clothes that had fit her earlier that year. She’d lost her appetite and stopped caring for herself in the way other fifteen-year-old girls knew how to do. She didn’t want to ask Henry for money to buy sanitary pads, so she started stuffing her underwear with socks during her period. There was never laundry soap in the house, so she let them pile up under her bed. When Henry found them, Cecilia was humiliated. He asked his sister to move in for the time being. She lived overseas and as far as Cecilia could remember, Henry hadn’t spoken about her before, so she figured things were desperate. They kept their distance from one another as best they could – Henry’s sister understood that the situation was delicate. She cleaned the house and bought groceries for the fridge.

One day, Cecilia overheard Henry’s sister suggest that Cecilia should move away to a boarding school. She didn’t think it was safe for her to be living with her mother anymore. Henry’s fist rattled the silverware.

‘She’s her daughter, for God’s sake. Etta needs to be with Cecilia.’

‘Henry. She doesn’t want to be. She doesn’t love that girl.’

Cecilia peered around the corner and watched him. He covered his face with his hand for a minute. And then he shook his head. ‘You’re wrong. Love doesn’t have anything to do with it.’

A few days later, Etta hanged herself from an oak tree in the front yard using one of Henry’s belts. It was a Monday morning and the sun was just coming up. They lived on the same street as Cecilia’s school. Etta was thirty-two years old.

59

I wondered if the pain of spending my days imagining you fucking another woman would mean I’d start to miss Sam less. Surely there is a limit to how much sadness one person can hold. And so I thought if I just focused more attention on what you did to me, maybe the pain of Sam would start to feel less suffocating, less consuming.

But that never happened. I couldn’t find enough heartbreak in your betrayal. What happened with Sam had blunted me, knocked me so hard that I still couldn’t feel anything more deeply than his loss. You wanted another woman? Fine. You didn’t love me anymore? I understood.

The doctor at the hospital who spoke with us after Sam died said this before you left: ‘Be strong together. Many relationships don’t survive the death of a child. You have to be aware of this and work hard on your marriage.’

‘What kind of thing is that to say to us?’ you’d said to me later about her comment. ‘We have enough to worry about.’

I didn’t confront you for eight days about what I suspected. We went about life quietly so that Violet wouldn’t sense any tension. You were extra kind. Extra thoughtful. I didn’t want any of it.