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PART ONE
Birth
“You got to say, you need to say,
you better say, you oughta say . . .
Hell, hell, hell, hell, hell, hell,
HELL NO!”
—Ms. Sophia and Her Sisters,
The Color Purple: The Musical
E-MAIL TRANSMISSION
TO: [email protected]
FROM: duane.ca
[email protected]
DATE: 3/15/07
TIME: 9:57 PM
Hello. If this e-mail works and it’s Jamison Taylor, I think I found your PalmPilot in front of my house this morning. All I could find was the name Jamison Taylor inside and I Googled it and found this e-mail address. If it’s you, I have it.
E-MAIL TRANSMISSION
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 3/16/07
TIME: 5:03 AM
You don’t know how happy I was to get this e-mail. I had my assistants running around all day looking for that thing. Where are you located? Can I come pick it up?
Jamison
Foolish
October 26, 2007
It was 5:35 in the morning. I was doing 107 on the highway, pushing the gas pedal down so far with my foot that my already-swollen toes were beginning to burn. It was dark, so dark that the only way I knew that I wasn’t in bed with my eyes closed was the baby inside of me kicking nervously at my belly button and the slither of light the headlights managed to cast on the road in front of me.
I-85 South was eerily silent at this time. I knew that. I’d been in my car, making this same drive, once before. I kept wiping hot tears from my eyes so I could see out of the window. I should’ve been looking for police, other cars on the road, a deer, a stray dog that had managed to find its way to the highway in the dewy hours of the morning, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see anything but where I was going, feel anything but what I didn’t want to feel, think anything but what had gotten me out of my bed in the first place. My husband.
Jamison hadn’t come home. I sat in the dining room and ate dinner by myself as I tried not to look at the clock. Tried not to notice that the tall taper candles had melted to shapeless clumps in front me. Knowing the time would only make me call. And calling didn’t show trust. We’d talked about trust. Jamison said I needed to trust him more. Be patient. Understanding. All of the things we’d vowed to be on our wedding day, he reminded me. My pregnancy had made me emotional, he said. And I was adding things up and accusing him of things he hadn’t done, thoughts he hadn’t thought. But I was no fool. I knew what I knew.
Jamison’s patterns had changed over the past few months. And while he kept begging me to be more trusting and understanding, my self-control was growing thin. The shapeless clumps on the table in front of me resembled my heart—bent out of shape with hot wax in the center, ready to spill out and burn the surface. Jamison had never stayed out this late. And with a baby on the way? I was hot with anger. Resentful. I was ready to spill out, to spin out, but I held it in.
I helped our maid, Isabella, clear the table, told her she was excused for the night. Then I moved to the bedroom, and while I still hadn’t peeked at the clock, the credits at the end of the recorded edition of Ten O’Clock News proved that any place my husband could be . . . should be . . . was closed. I wanted to believe I was being emotional, but that would’ve been easier if I didn’t know what I knew. Maybe he’d been in an accident. Maybe he was at a hospital. Yeah . . . but maybe he wasn’t.
I laid in bed for a couple of hours; my thoughts were swelling my mind as round as my pregnant stomach. I knew what was going on. I knew exactly where he was. The only question was, what was I going to do?
Then I was in my car. My white flip-flops tossed in the passenger seat. My purse left somewhere in the house. My son inside of my stomach, tossing and kicking. It was like a dream, the way everything was happening. The mile markers, exit signs, trees along the sides of my car looked blurry and almost unreal through my glazed eyes. The heat was rising. My emotions were driving me down that highway, not my mind. My mind said I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with my first child. I didn’t need the drama, the stress. I needed to be in bed.
But my emotions—my heart—were running hot like the engine in my car. I was angry and sad at the same time. Sometimes just angry though. I’d see Jamison in my mind and fill up my insides with the kind of anger that makes you shake and feel like you’re about to vomit. And then, right when I was about to explode, I’d see him again in my mind, in another way, feel betrayed, and sadness would sneak in. Paralyzing sadness, so consuming that it feels like everything is dead and the only thing I can do is cry to mourn the loss. I wanted to fight someone. Get to where he was and kick in the door so he could see me. Finally see me and see what this was doing to us. To our marriage.
I didn’t have an address, but I knew exactly where she lived. My friend Marcy and I followed Jamison there one night when he was supposed to be going to a fraternity function at a local hotel. But having already suspected something was going on, I called the hotel and learned that there was nothing scheduled. That night six months ago, before he left, I gave him a chance to come clean. I asked if I could go. “No one else will have their wives there; it’s just frat,” he said, using the same excuse he’d been using for three weeks. He slid on his jacket, kissed me on the cheek and walked out the front door. I picked up my purse and ran out the back where Marcy was waiting in a car we’d rented just for the circumstance. When Jamison finally stopped his truck, we found ourselves sitting in front of a house I knew I’d never forget. The red bricks lining the walkway, the yellow geraniums around a bush in the middle of the lawn, the outdated lace curtains in the window. It looked so small, half the size of our Tudor in Cascade where the little house might envy a backyard cabana. It was dark and seemed empty until Jamison climbed out of the bright red “near midlife crisis” truck he’d bought on his thirtieth birthday. Then, the living room light came on, my husband walked in. And through the lace I watched as he hugged her and was led farther away from me. I fell like a baby into my best friend’s arms. What was I to do?
I promised myself I would never forget that house. So there was no need to look at the address. I knew every turn that had brought me there. I just couldn’t figure out why.
Now, here I was nearly half a year later, dressed in a silk, vanilla nightgown at five in the morning, making the same trip, but with a different agenda. I knew why and where, and something in me said it was time to act.
I saw that red truck parked in the driveway when I turned onto the street. It looked so bold there. Like it belonged. Like nothing was a secret. They were the perfect family. There was no wife at home, no child on the way; our love, our love affair, was the second life he was living. She was his wife. I was just the woman he was sleeping with. Sad tears sat in my eyes, my anger refusing to let them roll down my cheeks. Every curse I knew was coming from my mouth as I held the steering wheel tighter and tighter the closer I got. My husband, the person I thought knew me better than anyone else in the world, had turned his back on me for another woman.
I pulled my car into the driveway behind Jamison’s and turned off the ignition. The sudden silence hit me like the first touch of cold beach water on virgin feet. Without the hum of the engine, I realized I was alone. I’d gotten myself all the way there, but I didn’t know what I was going to do. I knew I had to act, but what was I going to do? Burn the house down or ring the door bell and sell them cookies? And if she came to the door, what was I going to say? Ask another woman if I could see my husband? Curse her out? Scream? Cry? Should I hit her? I hadn’t hit anyone in my life. What if Jamison answered the door? What if he was mad and told me to leave? If he said it was over?
The baby kicked again, but lightly, as if he was nudging me to go and get his father out of that house, away from that woman. Coreen Carter was her name. Marcy found it on a piece of mail she’d snatched from the mailbox when we followed Jamison. It was a simple name, but Coreen Carter couldn’t be that simple. She had my husband inside of her house.
The anger let go at that thought and the sad tears began to fall again. What was I doing? What was happening with my life? I felt like I was being torn inside out. My baby was the only glue that was keeping me together. I felt so alone in that car.
I snatched my cell phone from the seat be
side me and called Marcy. She picked up her phone on the first ring. She was an RN and her husband was an ER doctor, so she was a light sleeper.
“I guess little Jamison is about to make his arrival?” she assumed cheerfully, but I couldn’t answer. I was sobbing now. Sadness was coming from deep inside and I was sure the only sound I could make was a scream.
“Kerry?” she called. “You okay? Where are you?”
“Here.” I managed. There was no need for me to say where exactly. She knew.
“It’s six in the.... He didn’t come home?”
“No.”
“Kerry, why didn’t you call me? You don’t need to do that right now. Not in your condition.”
