The Marriage Lie

Claire turns onto the ramp for Georgia 400 and floors the gas, and we roar south in blissful, blessed silence.

5

No matter how many times I assure her it’s not necessary, Claire walks me up the flagstone path to my front door. I dig through my bag and pull out my keys, sliding them into the lock. “Thanks for the ride. I’m going to be okay.”

I open the door and walk through, but when I go to close it, Claire stops me with a palm to the stained-glass panel. “Sweetheart, I’m staying. Just until your parents get here.”

“No offense, Claire, but I want to be alone.”

“No offense, Iris, but I’m not leaving.” Her high-pitched voice is surprisingly firm, but she softens her words with a smile. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but I’m staying, and that’s that.”

I step back and let her pass.

Claire glances around the foyer, taking in the honey-colored walls, the gleaming pine floors stained almost-black, the carved railings on the original staircase. She cranes her head around the corner into the front parlor, empty save for a tufted beige sofa we’re still paying off—our Christmas gift to each other from Room & Board—then points toward the back of the house. “I assume the kitchen is that way?”

I nod.

She drops her bag by the door and heads down the hallway. “I’ll make us some tea.” She disappears around the corner into the kitchen.

As soon as she’s gone, I latch onto the newel post, this morning’s memories assaulting me. The weight of Will’s body on mine, heating me with his hands and hot naked skin. His lips in the crook of my neck and heading south, the scratch of his morning beard against my breasts, my belly, lower still. My fingers twining in his hair. The water sluicing down Will’s muscled torso as he stepped out of the shower, the brush of his fingers against mine when I handed him a towel. His smooth, warm lips coming in for just one more kiss, no matter how many times I warned him he was in serious danger of missing his flight. That very last flick of his hand as he rolled his suitcase out the front door, his wedding band blinking in the early-morning light, before driving off in his car.

He has to come back. We still have dinner dates and hotel reservations and birthday parties to plan. We’re going to Seaside next month, a Memorial Day getaway with just us two, and to Hilton Head this summer with my family. It was only last night that he pressed a kiss to my belly and said he can’t wait until I’m so fat with his baby, his arms won’t reach all the way around. Will can’t be gone. The finality is too unreal, too indigestible. I need proof.

I dump my stuff on the floor and head down the hallway to the back of the house, an open kitchen overlooking a dining area and keeping room. I dig the remote out of the fruit basket, and with the punch of a few buttons, CNN lights up the screen. A dark-haired reporter stands in front of a cornfield, wind whipping her hair all around her face, interviewing a gray-haired man in a puffy coat. The text across the bottom of the screen identifies him as the owner of the cornfield now littered with plane parts and human remains.

Claire comes around the corner holding a box of tea bags, her eyes wide. “You really shouldn’t be watching that.”

“Shh.” I press and hold the volume button until their voices hurt my ears almost as much as their words. The reporter peppers the man with questions while I search the background for any sign of Will. A flash of brown hair, the sleeve of his navy fleece. I hold my breath and strain to see, but there’s nothing but smoke and cornstalks, swaying in the breeze.

The reporter asks the old man to tell the camera what he saw.

“I was working on the far west end of the fields when I heard it coming,” the old man says, gesturing to the endless rows of corn behind him. “The plane, I mean. I heard it before I saw it. It was obviously in trouble.”

The reporter pauses his story. “How did you know the plane was in trouble?”

“Well, the engines were squealing, but I didn’t see no fire or smoke. Not until that thing hit the field and blew. Biggest fireball I ever seen. I was probably a good mile or so away, but I felt the ground shake, and then a big blast of heat hot enough to singe my hair.”

How long does it take a plane to tumble from the sky? One minute? Five? I think of what that must have been like for Will, and I lean over the sink and gag.

Claire reaches for the remote and hits Mute. I grip the countertop and stare at the scratched bottom of the sink, waiting for my stomach to settle, and think, What now? What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Behind me, I hear her scrounging around my kitchen, opening cabinets and digging around inside, the vacuumed hiss of the refrigerator door opening and closing. She returns with a pack of saltines and a bottle of water. “Here. The water’s cold, so take tiny sips.”

Ignoring both, I move around the counter to the other side and collapse onto a bar stool. “Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.” Claire gives me a questioning look. “The stages of grief according to Kübler-Ross. I’m clearly in the denial phase, because it makes no sense. How could a man headed to Orlando end up on a westward-bound plane? Was the conference moved to Seattle or something?”

She lifts both shoulders, but her expression doesn’t seem the least bit unsure. I may be in denial, but Claire’s clearly not. Though she might not say it out loud, she accepts Liberty Air’s claims that Will is one of the 179 bodies torn to pieces over a Missouri cornfield.

“It’s just not possible. Will would have told me, and he definitely wouldn’t have kept up the running dialogue about going to Orlando. Just this morning, he stood right where you’re standing and told me how much he hated that city. The heat, the traffic, those damn theme parks everywhere you look.” I shake my head, desperation raising my voice like a siren. “He’s been so stressed, maybe he didn’t know the conference had been moved. Maybe that’s where he’s been all this time, roaming around the scorching Orlando streets, trying to track down the new location. But then why not call me back?”

Claire presses her lips together, and she doesn’t respond.

I close my eyes for a few erratic heartbeats, the emotions exploding like bombs in my chest. What do I do? Who do I call? My first instinct is to call Will, like I do whenever I have a problem I can’t figure out myself. His methodical mind sees things differently than mine, can almost always plot a path to the solution.

“You should design an app,” I told him once, after he’d helped me chart out an entire semester’s worth of drug and alcohol awareness programs. “You’d make a fortune. You could call it What Will Will Say?”

He’d patted his lap, smiling my favorite smile. “Right now he says you’re adorable and to get over here and give me a kiss.”

Now I press my fingers to my lips and tell myself to calm down, to think. There must be someone I can call, someone who will tell me this is all just one huge misunderstanding.

“Jessica!” I pop off the stool and sprint to the phone, resting on a charger by the microwave. “Jessica will know where he is. She’ll know where the conference was moved.”

“Who’s Jessica?”

“Will’s assistant.” I punch in the number I know by heart, turning my back on Claire so I don’t see her creased brow, her averted gaze, the way she’s chewing her lip. She’s humoring me, just like Ted did.

“AppSec Consulting, Jessica speaking.”

“Jessica, it’s Iris Griffith. Have you—”

“Iris? I thought y’all were on vacation.”

Her comment comes so far out of left field, it takes me a couple of seconds to reboot. Jessica may be a whiz at answering phones and coordinating the schedules of a bunch of disorganized techies, but she’s not got the fastest processor in the cache.

“Um, no. What makes you think that?”

“Because you’re supposed to be on an all-inclusive, baby-making vacation to the Mayan Riviera. Will showed me pictures of the resort, and it looks ama—” She swallows the rest of the word, then sucks in a breath. “Oh, God. Iris, I must be confused. I’m sure I got the weeks mixed up.”

I know what Jessica is thinking. She’s thinking he’s there with another woman, and I don’t even care because what if she’s right? What if Will is alive and well and lounging on a beach in Mexico? Hope hangs inside me for a second or two, then fizzles when I realize that he wouldn’t. Will would never cheat, and even if he did, Mexico would be the very last destination on my heat-hating husband’s list. A cruise to Alaska would be more like it.

“He can’t be in Mexico,” I say, and it’s everything I can do to keep my voice calm, to smother my frustration in a coating of civility. “He’s one of the keynotes for the cyber security conference, remember?”

“What conference?”

My eyes go wide. Why would anyone at AppSec ever hire this woman? “The one in Orlando.”

“Wait. I’m confused. So he’s not in Mexico?”

And Lord help me, this is where I lose it. I suck a breath and scream into the phone loud enough to burn the back of my throat. “I don’t know, Jessica! I don’t fucking know where Will is! That’s the whole fucking problem!”

Shocked silence all around, from Claire behind me and from Jessica on the other end of the line. It’s like silence in stereo, ringing in both ears. I should apologize, I know I should, but a sob steals my breath, and I choke on the awful words that come next. “They—They’re saying Will was on that flight that crashed this morning, but that can’t be right. He was on a plane to Orlando. Tell me he’s in Orlando.”

“Oh, my God. I saw the news, but I had no idea, Iris. I didn’t know.”

“Please. Just help me find Will.”

“Of course.” She falls silent for a moment, and I hear her clicking around a computer keyboard. “I’m positive I didn’t book his flight for today, but I have his log-in credentials for the airline accounts. What airline was the plane that crashed again?”

“Liberty Airlines. Flight 23.”

Another longish pause filled with more clicking. “Okay, I’m in. Let’s see... Flight 23, you said?”

I drop both elbows on the countertop, cradle my head in one hand, squeeze my eyes shut, pray. “Yes.”

I hold my breath, and I hear the answer in the way Jessica sucks in hers.

“Oh, Iris...” she says, and the room spins. “I’m so sorry, but here it is. Flight 23, leaving Atlanta this morning at 8:55 a.m., headed to Seattle and returning on... Huh. Looks like he booked a one-way.”

My legs give out, and I slide onto the floor. “Check Delta.”

“Iris, I’m not sure—”

“Check Delta!”

“Okay, just give me a second or two... It’s loading now... Wait, that’s so weird, he’s here, too. Flight 2069 to Orlando, leaving today at 9:00 a.m., returning Friday at 8:00 p.m. Why would he book two tickets in opposite directions?”

Relief turns my bones to slush, and I sit up ramrod straight. “Where’s the conference? I called the hotel on Universal Boulevard, but it must have been moved.”

“Sorry, Iris. I don’t know anything about a conference.”

“So ask somebody! Surely somebody there knows about the conference your own company planned.”

“No. What I meant was, AppSec doesn’t have any conferences on the books, not until early November.”

It takes me three tries to get my next words out. “And Mexico?”

“The tickets aren’t on Delta or Liberty Air, but I can check the other airlines if you’d like.”

There’s pity in her voice now, and I can’t listen to it for another second. I hang up and Google the phone number for Delta. It takes me nine eternal minutes to make it through the queue, and then I explain my situation to a procession of customer service representatives before I finally land with Carrie, the perky-voiced family assistance representative.

“Hi, Carrie. My name is Iris Griffith. My husband, Will, was booked on this morning’s Flight 2069 from Atlanta to Orlando, and I haven’t heard from him since he landed. Could you maybe check and make sure he made the flight okay?”

“Certainly, ma’am. I’ll just need his ticket locator number.”

Which would mean hanging up and calling Jessica back, and there’s no way I’m giving up my place in the phone line. I need answers now. “Can’t you find him by name? I really need to know if he was on the flight.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible.” Her voice is singsong and chipper, delivering the bad news like I just won a free meal at Denny’s. “Privacy restrictions will not allow us to give out passenger itineraries over the phone.”

“But he’s my husband. I’m his wife.”

“I understand that, ma’am, and if I could verify your marital status over the phone, I would. Perhaps you could drop by your nearest Delta counter with a valid identification, someone there—”

“I don’t have time to go to a Delta counter!” The words erupt from the deepest part of my gut, surprising me with both their suddenness and force, and the woman on the other end of the line goes absolutely still. If it weren’t for the background noises, computer clicks and human chatter, I’d think she hung up on me.

And then there’s a high-pitched squeal like interference on a microphone, and it takes a second or two to identify the sound as my own. I break under the weight of my desperation.

“It’s just that he also had a ticket on Liberty Air Flight 23, you know? But he wasn’t supposed to be on that airplane. He was supposed to be on yours. And now he’s not returning my calls and the hotel doesn’t have any record of him or the conference and neither does his assistant, even though she thought he was in Mexico, which he most definitely is not. And now, with each second that passes, seconds where I don’t know where my husband is, I’m losing more and more of my mind, so please. Take a peek in your computer and tell me if he was on that flight. I’m begging you.”

She clears her throat. “Mrs. Griffith, I...”

“Please.” My voice breaks on the word, and it takes a couple of tries before I find it again. The tears are coming hard and fast now, hogging my air and clogging my throat. “Please, help me find my husband.”

There’s a long, long pause, and I clasp the phone so tightly my fingers ache. “I’m sorry,” she says after an eternity, her voice barely above a whisper, “but your husband never checked in for Flight 2069.”

I scream and hurl my phone across the room. It bounces off the cabinet and lands facedown on the tiles, and I don’t have to look to know it’s shattered.

* * *

I spend the rest of the afternoon in bed, fully clothed and bundled in Will’s bathrobe, fuming under my comforter. Will lied. He fucking lied. No, he didn’t just lie, he lied and then backed up his lie with a fake conference, one he corroborated with more lies and a fake full-color flyer that’s a masterpiece of desktop publishing. Fury fires in my throat and grips me by the guts and overshadows every other thought. How could Will do such a thing? Why would he go to all that trouble? I am shaking so hard my bones vibrate, mostly because now there’s no reason for him to have been on a plane to Orlando.

My parents arrive just before dark, like they said they would. From under my layers of cotton and feathers, I hear their muted voices talking to Claire downstairs. I imagine my mother’s horrified expression when Claire tells them about my breakdown at school and the phone calls with Jessica and the Delta agent. I see Mom crane her neck toward the staircase with obvious longing on her face, the way she’d hurriedly wrap up the conversation with Claire so she could rush up the stairs to me. Two seconds after a car starts outside on the driveway, a body sinks onto the edge of my bed.

“Oh, darling. My sweet, sweet Iris.” Her voice is soft, but her consonants are hard and pointy—along with her love of meat and potatoes, a stubborn sign of her Dutch heritage.

As awful as it sounds, I can’t face my mother. Not yet. I know what I will see if I throw off the covers: Mom’s eyes, red-rimmed and swollen and filled with pity, and I know what the sight of them will do to me.

“Your father and I are just heartbroken. We loved Will and we will miss him terribly, but my heart breaks most of all for you. My sweet baby girl.”

Tears prick my eyes. I’m not ready to speak of Will in past tense, and I can’t bear for anyone else to, either. “Mom, please. I need a minute.”

“Take all the time that you need, lieverd.” You know Mom is devastated when the endearments revert back to her native tongue.

The bed shifts, and she stands. “Your brother will be here by nine. James was in surgery when they got the news, so they only just left Savannah an hour ago.” She pauses as if waiting for a reply, but when she doesn’t get one, she adds, “Oh, schatje, is there anything I can do?”

Yes. You can bring me Will. I need to wring his neck.

6

I wake up and the first thing I think is Where’s Will? Where is my husband?

The clock says it’s seventeen past midnight. I strain for the sound of water running in the bathroom, for the slap of bare feet on the closet hardwoods, but other than heated air whistling through the vents, our bedroom is quiet.

The day comes roaring back like a head-on collision. Will. Airplane. Dead. Pain steals my breath, stretching from my forehead to my heels.

Terror overwhelms me, and I lurch upright in bed, flipping on the light and sucking deep breaths until the walls stop pushing in on me. I flip down the covers and reach for the divot in the mattress where Will’s body lay only yesterday. Without Will in it, our king-sized bed has grown to the size of an ocean liner, swallowing me up with all the emptiness. I run a palm over his pillowcase, pluck at a couple dark hairs caught in the cool cotton. I close my eyes, and I can still feel him, physically feel the heat of his skin, the scratch of his beard sliding across my shoulder blade, the weight of him rolling onto me, my own gasp as he pushes inside. One minute he’s here, the next he’s gone, like a morbid magician’s disappearing act.

And now I’m supposed to believe he’s in pieces on a Missouri cornfield? I can’t wrap my head around the concept. It’s sheer insanity.

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.”