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Georgia is lying down in the back, and Gwyn is up front with Thomas, who is driving. Georgia seems to be sleeping in the back, which feels like more evidence that she is fine, that she has worked herself up—and nothing more.
Thomas hasn’t bothered to change his clothes—neither of them has, making them look especially fancy, especially out of place, in this breaking-down van. She looks at the dashboard, which is covered with painted-on butterflies and socialist bumper stickers, a communist flag sticking to the top, suctioned there by a small cup. She doesn’t look at her husband.
Thomas is looking straight ahead too, out the windshield, away from her. She knows that he wants to say something. He is still, after everything, just trying to figure out how.
“I never thought it would get this far,” he says, finally. He speaks almost inaudibly. In case Georgia is awake. In case she is listening.
“That’s no excuse,” she says.
“You would have told me I was making a mistake and tried to convince me to do something else,” he says.
“So you lied for you?”
“I lied for both of us.”
“How do you figure?”
His whisper gets louder. “You would have told me I was making a mistake and tried to convince me to do something else.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I was trying to make it easier, Gwyn,” he says.
She turns and looks at his profile, his wide-open eyes. Usually they look innocent to her, and probably will again. But right now they just look cowardly. “Who says it should be easy?”
“I didn’t say easy. None of this is easy. I said easier.”
“Fine, Thomas, who says it should be easier?”
He looks upset. He looks so upset that she looks away. What is she hoping to accomplish? To make him feel so bad that he stays? That won’t make her happy, not for long anyway. Not in a sustainable way. Besides, she learned this lesson a long time ago: just because a man looks upset, just because he is upset, doesn’t mean he is going to do anything to correct the situation. For himself, for anyone else.
She turns and looks at her husband, carefully, takes a deep breath in. “You really think you love her,” she says.
“I wouldn’t be putting us through this if I didn’t. I wouldn’t be risking everything.”
“It wasn’t a question, Thomas.”
“What is your question?”
She won’t ask it. Not after thirty-five years of marriage, thirty-six years since they sat together on her building’s roof on Riverside Drive. She won’t ask it and sound like a love-struck teenager—even if, at our core, whenever we are asking someone to love us who won’t, we are all love-struck teenagers, trying to understand: Why not me?
“Will it make you feel better, Gwyn?”
“What?” she says. She doesn’t know what he is talking about. She hasn’t said anything out loud.
“That I’ll be sorry?”
She looks at him, and wonders if he believes that. He should. Because Gwyn can’t compete with Eve now. She can’t offer him the exact pleasures that go along with the opportunity to be a clean slate, again, everything possible in the eyes of someone new. But Eve—or whoever comes after Eve—can’t save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she has spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don’t. But if you don’t, you get to the same point with the next person, don’t you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can’t see in yourself.
“Maybe it will all work out for the best,” she says.
“Really?”
“No.”
Which is when Georgia calls to her from the back. “Mom, I need you! Can you come back here? I can’t find my necklace, my horseshoe necklace. The one that Denis got me. Maybe I left it back at the house. But I thought I had it on. And it could be back here. It could be back here somewhere. Can you help me look, please? Because it does that. It falls off.”
“Coming,” Gwyn says, as she unstraps herself and starts to head to the back of the van, where Georgia is on her back. But Thomas stops her. He reaches out and touches her arm, holds her there on the inside of her elbow.
