Climbing out of bed is like swimming upstream. My body is heavy, my limbs sluggish and stiff, and there’s a vise clamping down on my lungs that makes it hard to breathe. I’m still in Will’s robe, and it’s all tangled and twisted around my body. I loosen the belt, rewrap the terry cloth around my torso and retie everything snug around my waist. It still swims on me, but it’s warm and comfortable, and it smells like Will—all of which means I may never take it off.
Downstairs, the kitchen television flashes blue and white streaks in the darkness. Muted coverage of the crash. I stand there for a long moment, staring at a reporter before a field of charred earth and steaming chunks of metal, and it strikes me that he might be enjoying this a little too much. His eyes are too big, his brow too furrowed, everything about him too theatrical. He’s waited his entire career for a story like this one; better make it good.
Behind me, the lump on the couch shifts—my twin brother, Dave, in a Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt and plaid pajama pants. “Been wondering when you’d get down here,” he says in his deep, dusky bass that makes him sound like a sports announcer instead of the Realtor he is. He lights up a joint the size of a cigar and sucks in a lungful, patting the cushion next to him.
“I’m telling Mom.” Other than crying, it’s the first time I’ve used my voice in almost seven hours, and my throat feels scratchy and sore. I plop down on the couch.
“My husband’s a doctor,” Dave says through held breath. “It’s medicinal.”
I snort. “Sure it is.”
He offers me a toke, but I shake my head. I’m already a wreck. Probably not the best idea to throw marijuana, medicinal or otherwise, into the mix.
We sit under the cloud of sweet-smelling smoke for a long while in silence, watching the muted images on the screen. The carnage is too much to take in, so I concentrate instead on the reporter’s solemn face. He gestures for the cameraman to follow him over to a giant hunk of fuselage, then points to an abandoned child-sized shoe, and I try to read his lips. What a hungry sticker. Cheese candy. A goat and three trolls. How do deaf people do this?
The reporter’s forehead crumples into rows and rows of squiggles, and Dave shakes his head. “That motherfucker is having entirely too much fun.”
Everything you’ve ever heard about twins is true; Dave and I are living proof. We look alike, we act alike, we share the same habits and gestures. We both have fat lips and bony knuckles, we’ll watch any sport but can’t stand playing them, and we refuse to eat anything that has the slightest dash of vinegar in it. We even have twin telepathy, this inexplicable connection that lets us know what the other is thinking without either of us saying a word. Case in point? I knew he was gay before he had figured it out for himself.
He stubs the joint out on a teacup saucer already littered with ashes and sets it on the side table. “Just so you know, Ma is a wreck. She’s already brought home one of everything from Kroger, and she’s got a list a half mile long of all the things she’s going to fill your freezer with. If you don’t let her coddle you soon, you’re going to have enough food here to open a soup kitchen.”
“Coddling would make it real.” I sigh and press into him, leaning my head on his shoulder. “I keep telling myself it’s not. That Will is going to walk through that door on Friday evening, hot and rumpled and grumpy, and I’ll get to scream I told you so. I told you Will wasn’t on that plane. I keep waiting for someone to pinch me, to take me by both shoulders and shake me so I’ll wake up, but so far, nothing. I’m stuck in a fucking nightmare.”
“Sure as hell feels like it.” He picks up my hand, twines his fingers through mine, rolling the ring around with a thumb. “Nice Cartier.”
I blink back new tears. “Will and I are trying to get pregnant. You might be an uncle already.”
Dave looks at me for a good thirty long and silent seconds. He doesn’t say a word, but then again, he doesn’t have to. How long are we going to keep this up? his eyes say. This talking about Will like he’s still here?
As long as humanly possible, my answer.
But when it comes to the pregnancy, he doesn’t seem the least bit surprised. “What took y’all so long? James and I figured you’d have an entire brood by now.”
“Will wanted to wait. He said he wanted me all to himself for a while.”
“What changed his mind?”
I have to think about that one for a moment. “I don’t know, and honestly, I never thought to ask. I was just so excited he finally came around. He says he wants a little girl who looks like me, but if this is all true, if I really am stuck in this nightmare, I hope it’s a little boy who’s just like him.”
“Even after the conference that wasn’t?”
Of course Dave knows about Will’s invented conference. I’m sure my mother dragged it out of Claire, then dissected his lie for hours with anybody who would listen. I’m sure she’s come up with a long list of theories as to why Will would do such a thing, why he would go to the trouble of creating a conference flyer, why he would book two flights to opposite ends of the country.
But of course I already know the answer. So I wouldn’t know where he was going, what he was going to do there, who he was going to see. Any or all of the above.
The helpless fury that had me shaking under my comforter earlier threatens to bubble to the surface, and I swallow it back down. I love my husband. I miss him and want him back. The emotions are so big and wide, they leave no room for anger. I barter with a God I’m not entirely sure I believe in: Bring Will back, and I won’t even ask where he’s been. I promise I won’t even care.
“One lie doesn’t negate seven years of marriage, Dave. Does it piss me off? Maybe. But it can’t erase the love I feel for my husband.”
He concedes the point with a one-shouldered shrug. “Of course not. But can I ask you something else without you biting my head off?” He pauses, and I give him a reluctant nod. “What’s in Seattle? Besides rain and Starbucks and too much plaid, I mean.”
I lift both hands. “Beats the hell out of me. Will grew up in Memphis, and he moved to Atlanta straight out of grad school at University of Tennessee. His entire life is here on the East Coast. I’ve never even heard him talk of Seattle. As far as I know, he’s never been there.” I twist on the couch, stare into cat eyes the same dark olive shade as mine. “But what you’re really asking is, do I think Will is having an affair.”
Dave gives me a slow nod. “Do you?”
My stomach twists—not because I think my husband was cheating on me, but because everybody else surely will. “No. But I don’t think he was on that plane, either, so clearly I’ve not got the tightest grip on reality. What do you think?”
Dave falls silent for a long moment, contemplating his answer. “I have a lot of unanswered questions when it comes to my brother-in-law. Don’t get me wrong, I adore the guy, mostly because of how fiercely he loves you. You can’t fake that kind of love, the kind that, every time you walk into the room, fills his face with so much happiness that I have to turn away—and I’m a gay man. I eat that shit up. So to answer your question, no. I don’t think your husband was having an affair.”
My heart, which was already hanging by a thread, cracks in two. Not just
