Also-Ran

When I opened the door, I found that Jeanne was two steps ahead. Of course, she had been our whole marriage, so why should this be any different? She smiled wanly, standing from our couch. "Scott, please come and sit with me. I can prove that I've been faithful to you the entire time we've been together." I glared at her, and she looked down at her hands. "Physically. I know--" My wife looked back up at me, forlorn. "I know that's not enough. I know it, Scott. You deserved more. But I can prove this much, at least."

I sat, but not close to her. Jeanne frowned at the gap between us, but that was of her making. She could fucking deal. My wife had brought two boxes into the living room, one small and the other much larger.

She handed me the smaller one first. "These are all the letters I received from James. They're... sporadic. Sometimes he'd write every few weeks, others I'd go months before hearing from him." I opened my mouth, an angry noise starting to form. "I know. I know, Scott. I should have..." Jeanne shook her head. "I should have done a lot of things differently."

She continued, trying to avert further interruptions. "You can see that they're... They're love letters. Of a sort. They talk about a lot of things. About how he'll come back for me, about his plans for us, about... Anyways. But you can see that he never talks about having seen me after that time you found us talking in the house, nor between our wedding and that time."

I scoffed, "So? You could have selectively removed the ones that talk about the times you fucked him."

Her face reddened. "I didn't. There are some that..." Jeanne closed her eyes. "They talk about when we were younger. What it was like then. I sent him a few letters, but not many, and not as... affectionate as the ones he sent me. I told him that I couldn't be his. That I wouldn't leave the kids or you."

"Interesting ordering there, 'sweetheart.'"

A deep frown etched her features. "That wasn't- I didn't mean..." She snarled, "Goddammit, Scott, I've been loyal to you! I've tried as hard as I could!" With a shove of her foot, the other, larger box tumbled over, spilling its contents: a number of notebooks. "These are my journals. I wrote in them almost every day. You can see..."

Jeanne stood, reached behind the couch, and pulled out one more journal, then tossed it on the pile. "...I don't know. I don't know what you'll see; I know what I wrote, but I don't know what you'll see in it. I'm sorry, Scott. I am. I'm sorrier about what I've done to you than I ever have been of anything in my life.

"But I'm glad, too! I'm glad because I DO love you. I'm so glad you're my husband and the father of my kids. You're everything I said you were before, everything that I should want. I know I've fucked up. I know that I AM fucked up. I tried to hide it from you, because you didn't deserve anything less than the best. And that's what I'll give you, if you'll let me: the very best that I can."

Her shoulders sagged. "Just... just read them, Scott. The letters have gaps because..." She laughed mirthlessly. "Because James was an irresponsible asshole. But I'm... I'm not irresponsible. Not entirely, at least. I wrote in my journals almost every day, and they're all there. You can see I told the truth, Scott. I'm done lying. I wish I had stopped years ago, so we could face this together. I hoped you'd never have to deal with the fallout of my stupidity. But here we are.

"I love you, Scott. Please, I'm begging you: read them. Everything is there. Everything I've hidden, everything I've felt, everything I've wished. I don't deserve you; I know that. Or- or maybe you don't deserve me, to have to deal with me and what I've done. However you want to look at it. But please, Scott. I'll do anything to keep our family together. You were right when you said it was my dream. But it was yours, too. It still can be. I'll do everything I can to keep it alive, if you'll let me."

My wife walked to the door and picked up her keys from the entryway table. "I'm going out. Not far; just down to the little cafe on Claremont. Take the time and the space you need; you can call me whenever you want to talk, or when... if you want me to come home. I pray to God you do." Then she left me to sit with the evidence of her sins.

I vaguely remembered the boxes from the sprawling mess in our closet; yet another thing right under my nose that I'd missed, apparently. I knew she'd kept a journal for years, but I had always respected her privacy. I didn't know about the letters. Those made my anger flare.

Fifteen years of documents--hundreds of pages of text--lay before me. Even with the entire day, I'd be unable to read all of them. But I picked through the journals and letters, looking for some specific periods to begin with: the ones around the conception of Rachel and Nate.

There was some mention around Rachel's conception about the visit from James, about our confrontation and her fears, but that was all. They had only conversed for fifteen minutes before I got home. He left. We fought. The journal documented all of that, but also her feelings for me. Jeanne did love me. She was afraid I'd find out about her feelings. She had tried everything she could to hide it from me, even if her efforts had turned out to be less than successful.

Everything was as she said; she'd even tracked her cycle around the times we'd been trying for Rachel and Nate. I expanded out from those two periods and added a few more: our wedding, a handful of anniversaries, our birthdays, a few other special occasions. There were loving descriptions of our nights together, minutiae of her days taking care of the house and kids, excited entries when she'd received letters from James.

My wife loved me. That was clear. She was even, as she said, in love with me. I found numerous entries dedicated to her guilt on a variety of topics; she had, as I suspected, fantasized about James most of the times we were together. She daydreamed about what he'd be like as a lover with presumably dozens of notches on his bedpost, as opposed to her fumbling young love. Jeanne's words contained a certain amount of distaste at the idea that he'd been with others, but also a level of excitement. She wrote of her wishes that he could have stayed with her. She wondered what he would have been like as a father and husband.

But other entries showed that she herself knew how foolish all those notions were. I was a much better lover than him from both a technical standpoint and a romantic one. She enthused about me as a husband, bragged about my patience and love for our children. Other passages were spent excoriating herself for her foolishness, for daydreaming about a man that had abandoned her rather than the one who had married her.

I still had many pages to read by mid-afternoon, but I had gained a new insight into my wife's obsession and her shame. The journals went to one side as I attacked James' letters. If my wife's diaries had shown a woman torn, the adventurer's missives revealed a self-aggrandizing, manipulative asshole.

He interwove astonishing tales of adventure, danger, and excitement with honeyed bullshit about how much he missed her and how close he was to the end of his wandering days. That pattern repeated itself from the earliest messages from him and on into the most recent. Like a street preacher, the end was always nigh, and the true believer just needed to be ready for his return.

The journal entries around the receipt of each letter followed their own pattern: excitement at receiving them, wistful reminiscence, flights of fancy, guilt over her misplaced adoration, and acceptance of her own weakness. The five stages of James repeated themselves over and over throughout our married lives.

But now that cycle had been broken.

I sat on the couch as the sun sunk low in the sky. There would still be DNA tests, but I had little doubt that they would show the kids to be mine. I found no sign in her journals that he had ever returned, nor that she would have left me for him if he had. She was too enamored of her family--if not necessarily of me--to do something so foolish.

Everything I read backed up everything she had said. I briefly considered the possibility that she had forged the journals, but they seemed appropriately aged the further back they went, with the oldest beginning to yellow. Unless she'd kept a second, different set, these were the real deal, and I had all the information I could ask for. None of it made my path forward much easier.

The text went out to my wife. Come home. I saw no point in delaying this confrontation. My anger had dimmed from white-hot to a dull, angry red, and it wouldn't fade further than that anytime soon, if at all.

Jeanne came through the door only a few minutes later, a fearful expression on her face. The capillaries of her bloodshot eyes clashed with the deep green I'd lost myself in so many times before. I stared at her, solemn-faced, before gesturing at the couch. She moved to take a place near me, but a slight shake of my head dissuaded her; we sat on opposite ends of the couch as I gave my verdict.

"I'll stay--" She gasped, eyes going wide. "For now." The forming smile halted, froze, fell. "I'm not going to deprive our kids of a father, just because you wish they had a different one." She started to talk, but I silenced her with an angry snarl. "Don't. Fucking don't. I read your journals and his letters, and I know that I'm the silver medallist here. If you could have had him, but he was more like me, he would have been your pick every time.

"You did this to us. You should have burned every one of those fucking letters before you opened them. You knew--you KNEW--how bad he was for you, how bad your fantasies were for us. You say that you tried to love me? Fuck, Jeanne. You never even tried to stop loving him. Not really."

I took a deep breath and angrily let it out through my nose. "Well, he's dead now, and I'm fucking glad of it." She screwed up her face in disbelief; who was this man, and what had he done with her loving, sensitive husband?

"I'll stay until Nate's in college, unless you decide to keep mourning your fucking fantasy; you've got a week til the kids get home. Figure your shit out. If you're still acting like the heroine of a gothic fucking tragedy by then, I'm gone. I'll fight you for custody of the kids; maybe I'll win, maybe I'll lose, but I'm not going to compete for one more minute with the ghost of that arrogant, obnoxious asshole."

Jeanne nodded, swallowing a couple of times before she spoke. "Only until Nate goes to college?"

"You're lucky to get that much. You can't even begin to conceive how much you've hurt me; if it wasn't for the kids, I'd walk out the door this instant and take my chances on dying alone. I'm not doing this for you; hell, I'm only partially doing it for them. It's for me. I don't want to be a weekend dad--"

"I would never do that to you!"

I sneered, "Just like you'd never lie to me for our whole marriage? Just like you'd--" With a shake of my head, I stopped myself from ranting. "I might have been second in your heart; hell, I might not have even been that high up when you consider the kids and your fantasies about a perfect domestic life. Fourth place? Fifth?

"Whatever. You were first in mine. Now you're not." The shocked look on her face hurt me; I pushed that pain aside. It was a remnant of the intense love I'd felt for this woman that had deceived me for so long. "I have to look out for myself, because I can't trust you anymore. I never could, but now I know it."

"Scott, please!" She reached out for me as I stood.

"Hank offered me a place to stay for a few nights, but I want to be alone. I'm going to get a hotel room, but I'll be back on Wednesday. We can try to build some kind of semblance of a normal home before the kids get back. Do you think you can be done weeping over the asshole before I get back?"

Jeanne looked down at her hands. "I haven't cried for him since you left yesterday. I cried for you and- and for us. For me, too."

"If you say so." I hefted my suitcase and headed for the door as she wailed behind me. I wished it affected me less than it did.

A few days in a hotel gave me a small taste of what I imagined post-divorce life would be like; I was not a fan. I called the kids each night and talked with them for a while. My parents didn't seem to know about my time apart from Jeanne, and I saw no need to inform them; the fewer people that knew our secret, the better. From what I read in her journals, my wife felt the same.

By Tuesday morning, I was sick of living out of a suitcase five miles from my home. Part of me wanted Jeanne to stew and suffer a little while longer, but I honestly wondered whether that had happened at all. She was getting her way, right? I'd promised to keep her perfect illusion together for a while longer, and I was sure she thought--with an unfortunate level of accuracy, if I'm telling the truth--that she'd eventually get me back to "normal." I decided I might as well go home and start trying to play my part in her little charade.

That didn't happen.

When I opened the door to our house Tuesday evening after work, the first thing I noticed was a stench of rot. It wasn't awful yet, not completely overpowering, but it was omnipresent. I found the source in the kitchen: a sink completely full of dishes, trash heaped to the top of the can, a plate half-filled on the kitchen table with flies buzzing around.

I called out for Jeanne, but no response came. This wasn't like her at all; fearing the worst, I dropped my suitcase and ran to our bedroom. The door banged open as I pushed through, and there she was: laying on top of the covers, still dressed in the clothes she'd worn Sunday. Sleeping; thank God, she was only sleeping.

Jeanne roused slowly from her slumber as I shook her. "Scott? Wh- What?" A smile, a frown, a deluge of tears, all in the space of a few moments. "You're home! I didn't clean, I- I- I- Scott, I'm so sorry, let me get up and--" She stumbled off the end of the bed and fell to the ground, then started to sob. "Please, I haven't- I should- I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry, so sorry!"

"Jeanne--"

"Make it up to you, honey, make it all up to you, I--" She crawled toward me as I stood, shocked, rooted in place. Her shaking hands feebly tried to undo my belt as she continued her slurred, single-minded tirade. "Sorry, I'll be so good to you. Anything you want, let me make you feel good, I love you Scott, I do, I do, I know I'm an idiot, but I--!" I grabbed her hands and pulled her to her feet, finally roused from my stupor.

"Jeanne, stop!"

"WHY?!" She howled in my face, a manic light in her eyes. That single syllable broke the dam, and a slurry of self-hatred fell after, half-intelligible in her exhaustion. "Why?! Why, Scott, why should I? I'm a stupid fucking cunt, a dumb bitch that can't love the best thing in my life like he deserves! I love you, I love you but it'll never be enough! And you know it now, you know it, you know it, you know I've never been good enough for you, for anyone! I was never good enough for James! He left, and now you know I'm not good enough for you either!"

Her eyes weren't just manic; they shone with full madness. Or... no. Their pinprick pupils swam in a sea of arsenic green. Drugged, not mad. "Jeanne." Her head lolled. "Jeanne! Jeanne, what did you do? What did you take?"

She giggled. "Pain pills. All sorts. Yours, mine, new, old. Doesn't matter. I'm your pain. Take it away." My wife tried to focus on me, becoming almost coherent. "Is it Wednesday? Naughty husband! You're not supposed to be home until Wednesday, mister! Not supposed to find me 'til then. Set you free on Tuesday, find me on Wednesday. Give you a better life." Another giggle, then drowsy, singsong speech. "Scott gets a better life / can find himself a better wife."

I scooped her up. Christ, she smelled worse than the kitchen sink; vapors of vomit and booze and sweat and urine assaulted my nostrils as I ran for the front door, yanking it open with a hand burdened by the weight of my love. Jeanne's speech had deteriorated to the point of incomprehensibility by the time I had us both seated in the car; only the seatbelt kept her upright as I burned rubber out of our driveway.

I drove down city streets at twice the speed limit, trying to keep one eye on the road and one on my fading wife. She slumped forward, and I grabbed her arm, hauling her back upright and shaking her. "Jeanne! Jeanne! Don't fall asleep, baby! Stay with me, please!" My attempt to keep her conscious almost cost both of us our lives as I skimmed within inches of a slowly turning truck. With that near-accident, my singular focus became getting us to the hospital as quickly and safely as possible, not sparing more than a glance as she vomited into her lap.

We skidded to a stop in the emergency room driveway, blocking both lanes. A security guard ran up to the car, but when he saw Jeanne in the passenger seat, his priorities shifted to summoning assistance; a crash team with a gurney met me just inside the sliding glass doors. I tried to follow along, but a grim shake of the head from one of the nurses turned the guard into a sentinel, one which would not allow me to pass. "Sir, why don't you go move your car? She's in good hands. I promise."

Once parked, I sat there, shaking and crying for a time. Part of it was the adrenaline wearing off, part the fear of losing Jean. But the biggest was my own words echoing back in my head: "Jeanne! Stay with me, please!" How like the words she'd spoken to me as she begged me to stay, as my wife begged to make right what I was so certain she never could.

A little prayer escaped my lips, one for her and me and our kids, that she'd come back to us. That we would find a way forward. I couldn't see the shape of it, but I had to hope that we could pull some kind of future out of the days of our tattered past.

I dried my eyes and went in search of news. None was immediately forthcoming, the staff stonewalling all inquiries. After sitting in the waiting room for what seemed like an eternity, a nurse brought me back. Her doctor, a pale, gaunt man with the last name of Essex, gave me grim tiding after grim tiding.

"Your wife is stable now, but it was a narrow thing. Her heart stopped for a few minutes; if you hadn't gotten her here when you did..." He let that sentiment trail off as I shuddered at the implication. "We've pumped her stomach, but she's likely to be asleep for quite some time still. I expect she'll recover physically, but..." Dr. Essex tried on a comforting affect; it didn't fit. "That wasn't an accidental overdose, was it?" A slight shake of my head confirmed his suspicion.

"Then, at the very least, she needs a psychiatric evaluation. I'll make a note in her chart to keep her safe from... well, from any harm she might do to herself."

"Can I see her?"

"Not tonight. She needs to rest--" He looked me up and down. "--And I expect you do, too. Come back tomorrow morning; bring anything that might give her comfort. Distract her. I know that you have things you need to talk about, but my goal, for now, is to keep her stable both mentally and physically."

I nodded and shook his hand. He let me watch Jeanne through the window of her room as she slept for a few minutes. Her beautiful red hair was plastered to her forehead, and her normally pale skin had turned a sickly mix of grey and jaundiced. Shallow breaths and the occasional twitching of her closed eyes gave the only outward signs that my wife still lived.

I hadn't wanted this, no matter how angry and hurt I'd been.

Once home, I busied myself cleaning... everything. The level of filth that had accumulated over only a few days amazed me. But then, I hadn't paid much attention to anything that happened in the house after Friday evening; had she already begun to give up then?