The Wait
There is a geography to a marriage in trouble. At its worst, the distance between us in our own bed felt like something you could measure in miles.
There had been a time when we slept naked, wound into each other, as much skin touching skin as two bodies could manage.
Now I would lie awake listening to her breathe on the other side of it. We had both earned it, years of drift and accumulated resentment.
Then, after seventeen years sober, I picked up a drink. I still don't entirely know why. The drink led somewhere darker, the way it does for me, and by the time I found the bottom it had taken nine months and nearly everything with it.
The job went first. Friends disappeared. Then my dignity. Then, for a time, any reason to stay alive. There were nights I lay on the bathroom floor not knowing if I would see morning, my cheek against the cold tile, my whole body a single point of shame.
Margot watched all of it, the wreckage, the shame, the long way back, and stayed longer than anyone had a right to ask.
When I finally got sober again, we both knew I needed to go. I packed my car and drove three thousand miles. We called it a break. Margot stayed behind.
Nine months later Covid hit. She called that same day. I had a yard, space to breathe, a pool I never used. She booked a flight. For months we moved through the same rooms like strangers who knew too much about each other.
Long walks in the orchard, her voice rising into the trees as she told me what I had put her through, sometimes so loud the birds lifted out of the branches.
Walk after walk I made space for her anger, and slowly, without either of us planning it, the telling began to clear something between us.
There were days when the sun came through the trees and caught the side of her face, and I would think about how I had known that face since we were barely adults.
Once she lifted her arm to gesture at something and the light made her shirt almost transparent. I looked away.
Every morning before she woke, I logged onto a meeting, strangers on a screen from all over the country, all of us trying to stay inside our own lives without escaping them.
Stretches where we found each other again: A hike, her hand in mine, the feeling that we might actually make it. There were a few nights we found our way back into bed together, urgent and careful at the same time, like people who knew what they stood to lose.
I touched her with the fear that she might pull away mid-reach, that each time could be the last time she let me.
Afterward she would lie very still beside me, not quite gone but not fully there either. Then she would get scared and pull back, tell me it couldn't work, and the distance would return as suddenly as it had lifted. I had begun to feel like a man auditioning for his own marriage, never sure if he'd gotten the part.
Hope, I was beginning to understand, was its own addiction. And her ambivalence was not indecision. It was fear.
Every time I moved toward her she stepped back, and every time she stepped back I waited, and the waiting had become its own kind of diminishment. I was rebuilding myself, day by day, and she was not yet sure she could trust what I was becoming.
One morning I woke up and the hope was simply gone. I printed the divorce papers, set them on the table in front of her, walked to the bedroom, and stood alone by the window.
The hurt in my chest had shifted into something I didn't recognize. Not worse. Just different. Like a weight finally set down.
I had loved this woman since we were young. The decision had come with such force that my vision had gone soft at the edges. My hands were still. Somewhere in the house I could hear her moving. I was looking at the mountains but I couldn't quite see them. Three years of talking had taken us as far as it could.
That is when she came in.
Her hands came to my shoulders from behind.
I didn't turn around.
There was something different in her touch, a searching quality, like she was looking for something in my skin. I could feel that she was naked without looking.
Her arms wrapped around me and pulled, not carefully, not the way she had been touching me these past years, but hungrily, her fingers grabbing at my flesh like she was trying to take hold of something she had almost let go…
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