“Of course I know that.” I was acting out of hurt. It feels like a betrayal, like Ted was more loyal to Rick than to me. “So why, then?”
“Why didn’t I tell you about Rick’s marriage?”
“Yeah.”
“Honestly, I don’t want to hear about it, let alone discuss it with my beautiful, fun, fascinating wife.”
He kisses me on the cheek and I lean into it.
“I came up to tell you that Rini made sandwiches. Gourmet ones. Fancy stuff,” Ted says.
“I’m not hungry right now, but thanks.”
Ted starts to close the door behind him, and I call out to tell him I love him.
“Love you too,” he says before the lock clicks shut.
I notice the flowers and daily horoscope cards on the dresser across the room. When could Rini have had time to place those? She was making sandwiches while Adam and I were taping up the window. I pick up my card.
Good morning, Pisces! Open your eyes today to what you’ve been blind to, but do so with a kind and gentle heart. You were deliberately ignoring what you could not handle before. You are ready now.
I lie down again and close my eyes. I feel woozy and disoriented. Moments from the weekend bombard me.
With Rini: There’s something big coming to you around their death. Some new information, or a new perspective. It’s going to be a life-altering realization. Maybe a story you realize is different from the one you’ve been telling yourself.
I reach in my memory to the long-ago past, trying to call up the proof Adam wanted. Examples of our parents in love. But all that appears in my mind, over and over, is my father’s desk.
When I graduated law school, I decided I wanted my father’s old oak desk. Seventeen years later it was in the same condition as it had been in the house, sitting in storage. We were too young to make decisions about their belongings, and my Nana was too burdened.
Cleaning out the desk, I found a variety of key documents: their birth certificates, passports, Social Security cards. I also discovered my father was going to divorce my mother. He had filled out dissolution-of-marriage documents for the State of New York.
At the time, New York required proof of fault to grant a divorce, and the options were cruel and inhumane treatment, abandonment for one year, imprisonment for three years, or adultery. New York held on to this archaic system of fault, rather than allowing couples to claim irreconcilable differences, until 2010. My father selected cruelty.
I don’t know if my mother knew about the divorce papers, or the alleged fault, but I can imagine how mad that would have made her. In her mind, if anyone was cruel, it was him. And if anyone was going to leave, it should have been her. But she didn’t believe in divorce.
The divorce papers in my father’s desk were undated. They could have been from ten years prior, before Adam was born. They also could have been drawn up the day before their car accident.
Divorce doesn’t cause car accidents. I know this. But if I’m being honest, I’ve had questions.
The fact that the tire skid marks show them swerving right before the sharp left into the guardrail.
The fact that my mother’s body was turned sideways so her back was pressed up against the car door.
The fact that my father had bruising on both shoulders and both sides of his face, even though he only hit the doorframe on the left side.
The police didn’t reveal any of this to an eight-year-old. They probably didn’t even tell my grandmother. They declared the deaths an accident. These were details I found in my own personal quest for answers as to why I had to grow up without parents. I didn’t ask God; I didn’t turn to drugs. My answers were always found in rational assessment; that’s how I became a lawyer.
But what if, as Adam asserts, all the arguments I saw between them weren’t the passionate flip side of an intense love, but deep hatred and rage?
It’s possible that day my father had planned to tell my mother about the divorce, and that’s why we were at Nana’s. If that was the case, and she had seen that he marked cruel and inhumane treatment as his grounds, I can see my mother breaking. Finally. Explosively.
I relax into the bed and let my imagination take over, knowing the answer to my problems is within my reach. A few minutes later, a tingling kicks in and the hairs on my arms stand up straight, like I’m channeling ghosts.
I can’t sit still any longer. I open my laptop and begin to write a new story. One I’d been too scared to see before.
THE FLYNNS’ LAST DAY, July 1997
Kathy Flynn hadn’t slept a wink last night even though she had the entire bed to herself. She replayed the night before over and over in her mind. Adam and Margot were happy to visit their nana so they could have a night alone, Bill’s idea. The drive back from his mom’s house had been fine. Mostly quiet, a little stilted, but fine.
Bill had eaten his lobster special with gusto. Kathy found it both disgusting and endearing. There was enviable joy in the way he devoured that cockroach of the sea. But as soon as he was finished, Kathy could tell something was wrong. Bill looked like half of his dinner was lodged in his throat. He couldn’t swallow and his breathing was labored. Kathy said nothing. Without any clue as to what was coming, she already knew she didn’t want to hear it. Kathy opened her purse and reapplied her lipstick, fiddling with her compact to avoid his gaze.
“Kathy,” he said.
Kathy waved the waitress over.
“A little more ice water. And then the check.”
“No dessert for you two?”
Bill and Kathy said no at the same time. It was the last thing they would agree upon.
“Kathy,” Bill started again. “I want a divorce.”
The relief Kathy felt bubbled up through her chest and out her mouth in the form of a laugh. In the past few minutes, Kathy had imagined a dozen terrible things Bill might say when he finally worked up the courage: he was leaving her for another woman, he was leaving her for another man, his mother called and something had happened to one of the kids, he lost his job and the bank was foreclosing. This didn’t even register as a threat. It was a joke.
