Page 37 of Valley of the Moms
“Yes. No. Well, maybe,” he admitted. “Actually, I was just cleaning out Anna’s office and I was going through some of her things.”
“Show me what you’ve got,” she said. She took her glasses off and put them in a bowl in the hall, the same bowl where Anna had kept her own glasses. Those Denny had moved to a closet upstairs, but he paused for a moment, to take stock. The glasses didn’t take up nearly enough space.
Di hooked her arm into Denny’s and he walked her into the office, now a bona fide disaster. Halfway through, he had abandoned the task and had gone upstairs to search on his computer, and now the room was just an explosion: papers, books, pieces of art he had taken down from the walls.
“I was thinking maybe I’d paint it another color,” he said. “I always hated this.”
“The name was something horrific, wasn’t it?”
“Hague Blue. Like the Hague.” He laughed. “I was thinking maybe just a bright white office. Start over again.”
“Of course you were,” she said.
They sat down on the floor amid the paper and the books. The room had folded in on itself, far smaller now than it had been before. Di spread her hands out and made a seat for herself among a sea of stuff.
“I didn’t realize . . . about the PTO . . . the president stuff,” Denny said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
Di looked up at him. Her eyes were soft. She pressed the center of his forehead with her thumb. “That was your business withAnna,” she said. “I felt like there was a reason she didn’t tell you, and I really did not want to get in the middle of it, life and death notwithstanding.” When she finished talking she left her thumb there for just a second longer, and he could feel it, the warmth of her hand. She drew it down across the bridge of his nose and held her whole hand to his cheek for a second and looked him squarely in the eye before breaking away.
“I guess I get it,” he said, distracting himself, distracting her. “There was a lot we didn’t understand about each other, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t the right fit. I just wish I hadn’t found out about it this way.” He picked up one of the cards featuring his wife’s smiling face. “Mostly, I just wish she had known that I would have supported all of this. I wish I had been better at expressing that to her. It’s my fault. I missed too much.”
“It’s not. You couldn’t have prevented it.”
“What if I could have?”
“They call it the conditional tense for a reason,” Di said. “There are conditions attached. You can’t go back in time, so why try?”
“Fair, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to,” he said.
“I know,” Di said, leaning in again. Now the hand was on his arm, just a light touch, feather-light. Soft. Friendly, he thought, although, on second thought, maybe it wasn’t. It was hard to read these gestures in a room like this, in a house like this. “I should have told you.” Some of the notebooks were stacked before Denny. Di grabbed one and began palming through it. “I haven’t seen this before,” she said.
“Those are just some notes, I think. That Anna had been taking.”
Di stopped to read more closely. “More like weird personality profiles if you ask me. I love Anna to death, but she could really overdo it with the psycho pop.”
“Loved,” he corrected.
“Right.” She sighed. “You understand what I meant.” Di squeezed his shoulder in commiseration.
“To me, it read like she was just making notes about everyone for the PTO. And that some people maybe caught her attention more than others,” Denny said.
“I wouldn’t mind taking a peek?” Di said, with a look that asked his permission.
“Sure, but just leave it here. And keep it between us.”
“Between us,” she said. She flattened her palm and placed it on his knee. “Just between us.”
Denny couldn’t understand exactly what happened next. Di, with her cropped hair and long eyelashes and hand on his knee. Di, leaning in, breath on his cheek. For a second, his instinct was to push away, but he also wanted something else, to be embraced, to have someone look at him or hold him or make the spaces in the house that had felt wide and barren since Anna disappeared go away. He had not realized how much he had missed in being alone, every morning, a space in the bed, every night, a hollow. Every moment, carved out by grief.
And Di, too, hadn’t she been carved out, made skeletal with this loss?
Later, lying in bed, her head notched into his arm the same way Anna’s once was, he would think about it. Was it betrayal or healing? Di was married, of course. That was her own cross to bear.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Di said, but Denny missed the silence, the way Anna always curled up after, like morning glory at night.
“I’m not thinking of much, really,” he said. He was thinking of the ocean, of the way Anna used to look at it, and of the stranger in his bed and of how it had felt nice until it hadn’t, of how easy it was to make a mistake, something you could not take back. He was thinking about how trust was the kind of thing you could misread and about how he had misread something important, something right in front of him: He could feel it in the room, a haziness descending.
“I know it’s strange, me being here,” Di said. “But I think she would have wanted us to find comfort in one another.”
