The Half Life Read online

  Piper, it began. I’ve been trying for so long to tell you how unhappy I’ve been, but you won’t—or can’t—listen. I am sorry. I know that the situation we’re in is as much my fault as yours, and maybe more.

  “Ya think?” Piper muttered, scowling down at the wrinkled paper.

  The truth is, you don’t need me. Not to pay the bills, not to take care of Nola, not to run the house. You can do it all yourself, and it turns out that I need to be needed. Mary needs me.

  “Mary,” Piper said, her lip curling as she pictured the possessor of such an ordinary name. It probably belonged to someone tiny and fragile whose helplessness was her defining characteristic. She pictured Mary as girlish and birdlike, a woman incapable of changing her own lightbulbs or defrosting meat in the microwave, someone who’d look at Tosh with big, wet eyes and breathe, “Oh, thank you,” as he fixed her doorbells or tightened her leaky faucets.

  When you get home from Paris, we should talk about the next step. I’d like to make it as nonconfrontational as possible, and keep Nola’s best interests in mind.

  There was a wide blank space, as if he’d been sitting there, pen held lightly in his long, fine-boned fingers, thinking . . . and then he’d written, in his firm hand,

  I will always love you.

  Piper gave a shaky, tearful sigh, then folded the letter and put it back in its envelope, put the envelope back in her purse, and settled her purse in her lap.

  What now? Tosh had written that he would always love her; the letter made it sound as if he was already gone, as if there was no hope. Besides, how could she make him feel needed in the way he wanted to be? Could she feign incompetence or quit her own job? Could she make herself small enough so he’d feel big again?

  Across the room, a businessman closed his laptop with a snap. Piper gathered her things and got herself moving.

  The concierge, a blandly handsome young man in a navy blue suit, sat behind a polished walnut desk. As Piper approached, he gazed up at her happily, as if he’d been waiting all morning for her arrival.

  “Hello,” she said, sitting down in the upholstered chair across from him. “I wonder if you can help me? I need to rent a car.”

  “Of course, madam,” he said, and bent to his computer. After five minutes and a murmured phone call, he told her that a rental service would deliver a Lexus to the hotel within the hour, and would she like that billed to her room?

  “Oh,” Piper said. She bent her head. “I was staying with a friend last night. I—we—we were supposed to fly to Paris, but with the volcano . . .”

  “Of course,” said the concierge, his fingers rattling over the keyboard again. “For how many nights will you be joining us?”

  “One,” said Piper. A plan was beginning to form in her mind, a course of action, the steps she’d take, and like the spirit in A Christmas Carol, she could do it all in one day. She slid her credit card across the desk and, when the man was done with it, asked, “Do you have a pool?”

  For the first time, a trace of emotion made itself evident on his face. “Of course we do!” he said, sounding indignant, as if she’d suggested that he’d left the house without pants. “We have a swimming pool with a hot tub adjacent, saunas and steam rooms in the men’s and women’s locker room, a full-service spa offering massages and body scrubs.”

  Piper thanked him. She collected her key and took the elevator to the lower level. Her swimsuit was in her carry-on, neatly stowed in its own gallon-size Ziploc bag. When she traveled for business, there were always complications, canceled flights, and last-minute delays. She couldn’t schlep her running shoes and workout gear on and off the plane, but many hotels had pools, and there was always room to stick a swimsuit in her laptop bag or purse.

  * * *

  In the ladies’ locker room, filled with the sounds of chiming New Age music and the chatter from a trio of white-haired women gossiping on their way to the sauna, Piper collected a key for a locker, shucked her clothing, pulled on her suit, and stepped under the shower, then out into the heavy, humid air of the swimming area. The water was perfect, the exact temperature, she thought, of her own blood. Slipping into the shallow end, she did a few laps of breaststroke, then pushed off, hard, against the wall of the pool and propelled herself through the water for lap after lap, until her face was red and her heart pounding hard, thundering in her chest, reminding her that she was still alive.

  An hour later, dressed again and smelling of chlorine and the hotel’s conditioner and body wash, Piper cruised into her neighborhood behind the tinted windows of a sedan the color of smoke. “I’m in love with someone else,” Tosh had told her—no sense in denying it or trying to tell herself that she’d misheard or that he hadn’t meant it or that he could be convinced otherwise. And if he intended to be with this woman, this Mary, Piper would have to get used to being on her own. The thought—a divorce, a life as a single mother—left her feeling queasy and breathless. She pulled to the curb, putting the car in park and doing the deep-breathing exercises she’d picked up from a pamphlet on in-seat yoga on one of her transatlantic flights—in, hold for a count of five, out slowly, eyes closed, picture your happy place—and then she drove on, heading for the one thing in her life that was certain, the one thing that could anchor her through the coming storms.

  She pulled the car into a parking spot across the street from Bright Beginnings. At nine o’clock sharp, Piper’s mother, holding Nola’s hand, walked her through the school’s wrought-iron gate and left her, with a kiss, at the school’s red-painted door. Nola wore her pink gingham Windbreaker and the pink sneakers that fastened with Velcro and were encrusted with fake jewels—they had cost sixty dollars, but Piper had been powerless to resist. Underneath her hooded sweatshirt, Piper recognized her daughter’s favorite overalls—ozeralls, Nola used to call them up until last year, when she was still mixing up her v’s and z’s.

  Nola had inherited the best of both parents—Tosh’s slanted cat’s eyes and tawny, golden skin and Piper’s hair, light brown dusted with gold, that fell down her back in glossy ringlets. As Piper watched, her daughter tucked her lunchbox under her arm and raced into the classroom. Piper felt something inside her, tight as a fist, unclench and relax. “You’re a wonderful mother,” her own mother had told her—this on Nola’s last birthday, when they’d rented a bouncy castle for their backyard and had pizza and juice boxes for the kids and mimosas and beer for the moms and dads. Piper had waved the words away, but Deborah had been unexpectedly insistent. “No. You truly are. It’s a pleasure to watch you. You impress me,” she’d said, and Piper had tried hard to ignore the note of surprise she heard in her mother’s voice, concentrating, instead, on the compliment.

  Piper piloted the rental car slowly through her own neighborhood and parked in front of the row house she and Tosh had bought eight years before, a solid three-story brick structure with window boxes painted to match the front door.

  * * *

  The house was fine; she had enough money and a good job—a job she actually liked, which made her a rarity among working Americans. She was lucky. Yes, lucky, in spite of everything. When her father had left her mother to start his new family, things had been tight for a while, until Deborah finished her nursing degree and got a job with benefits. Piper hadn’t known how tight for years, or that it was her grandmother, Deborah’s mother, who would step in with a “helping check” when the refrigerator broke or her mother needed money to pay for a field trip or a week at the summer camp Piper just had to attend. “I spent four years of my life scared out of my mind. I practically camped out by the mailbox the first week of every month,” Deborah had told her at Nola’s birthday party, emptying her glass of orange juice and champagne. “You don’t remember any of this?” When Piper said she didn’t, her mother looked pleased, as if by keeping Piper safe from the economic realities of her early years, she’d done her job.

  There would be no financial struggles for Piper to hide from Nola, no helping checks or pan
ic over a broken appliance. Nor would Nola be lonely: She had Carleen, a sitter she loved, and her grandmother, who, while a bit prickly, adored her. Nola would be all right. Eventually Piper would be too. She had her health, friends, a job she liked, good routines that could sustain her. And maybe someday she’d have love again . . . or maybe, she thought, with the morning’s smile resurfacing, maybe she’d just have sex. She’d hang around the airport lounge, even when she didn’t have a flight to take, she’d pick up men and take them back to a fancy hotel. She’d become notorious, a scarlet woman at forty, with her supersexy cellulite and her C-section scar.

  Laughing at herself, Piper turned left down the one-way street, a ghost of a woman in a ghost-gray car, thinking that what she needed now that she’d calmed herself, now that she’d touched the bedrock foundations of her existence, was information . . . and she knew just who could give it to her.

  She pulled up to a Wawa, bought a banana and a bottle of water, pulled her cell phone out of her purse, and dialed her best friend. “Piper!” Sarah, who lived two blocks from Piper’s house and had quit her job as a guidance counselor to stay home with her three children, sounded happy to hear from her. Happy and relieved. Things had been tense between them since Piper had broken down and confided to Sarah three months earlier that Tosh was sleeping in the basement. Her friend had tried to help, tried to ask if the marriage could be saved. Piper hadn’t been ready to listen or even to admit that the marriage needed saving, but now she was ready to hear whatever her friend could tell her. Looking back on their awkward, anxious conversation, she suspected Sarah must have known more than she’d revealed. It was time to find out.

  “Why aren’t you in Paris?” Sarah asked over the voice of her youngest demanding more Goldfish crackers, and Piper explained about the volcano. “So you’re free?” Sarah asked, sounding envious. “I’ll see if I can get a sitter. Can we get lunch? Get facials? Go see a matinee? Your mom’s looking after Nola, right?”

  Piper paused, not knowing what she was going to ask, not knowing what her friend would say. “Let’s have lunch,” she said.

  She thought it would take a half bottle of wine to get Sarah to spill. In fact it took half a glass. Sarah, she realized, knew more than she’d let on and wanted to tell her, had probably wanted to tell her since she’d found out but knew that she couldn’t, that it wasn’t her place, and that Piper might be tempted to shoot the messenger instead of her husband.

  “She’s got terrible teeth,” Sarah said, and then polished off the rest of her riesling. Face flushed, eyes sparkling, she looked up at her friend. “And she smells like an ashtray.”

  “She smokes?” Somewhere, deep inside herself, Piper was curled up and crying, wailing like Nola when she couldn’t get her boots zipped or wasn’t allowed to stay up late or was denied a third Oreo. But here at the seafood restaurant that looked out over the azaleas that bloomed against the fence at Rittenhouse Square Park, she was calm, her voice steady, her hair, which she’d blown dry in the hotel locker room, combed and neatly twisted on top of her head. In the heels and suit she’d worn to the airport, she looked, she thought, like a strong woman, the master of her own destiny, even though inside she was mourning.

  “She’s a single mom,” Sarah whispered. “She’s always at the playground. I’m sure that must have been where they met.”

  “Does she have a boy or a girl?” Underneath the table, Piper crossed her fingers, clenching them tight, hoping it was a boy. She thought that maybe she could bear the thought of Tosh and another woman—maybe someday that would be endurable—but not the idea of Tosh and another little girl, a girl who was not Nola, the daughter they’d made together.

  “Boy,” Sarah said promptly, and Piper felt herself relax. Sarah’s voice cracked as she said, “I wanted to tell you for so long, but I didn’t know how.”

  Piper took a sip of her water, feeling the cubes chatter against her front teeth. Her hand was shaking. She set the glass down carefully and wiped her hand on her napkin. She’d ordered a Caesar salad with grilled shrimp for lunch but knew she wouldn’t be able to manage even a bite. “Does he know you know about Mary?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I saw them, but they never saw me.”

  Piper didn’t want to know, but she forced herself to ask. “Saw them. . . ?”

  “In the park. And the supermarket once.”

  “Were they—” Before she could say kissing, Sarah jumped in.

  “Holding hands.” She made a face. “He was lighting her cigarette.” Rolling her eyes in an extravagant gesture of contempt, Sarah said, “God, who smokes anymore? In front of kids?”

  A terrible thought seized Piper. She could feel the water and the dregs of the wine she’d had the afternoon before rise up in her throat. “They weren’t with Nola?”

  Again, Sarah shook her head. “No. With her little boy.”

  The waitress came with their lunches. Sarah took a sip of her soup, then set the spoon down and said, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Piper’s voice was soft. She’d felt so good that morning, euphoric after the sex and the swimming, competent and in control, but now her whole body was shaking, as if it would fly apart. She clenched the muscles of her legs, twined her fingers together, and tried to still the tremor that had started rattling down her spine.

  “What would you do,” she asked, “if you found out Rob was cheating? If he was in love with someone else?” Piper swallowed hard, feeling as if there was a shard of ice caught in her throat. “Would you fight for him?” It was, of course, a ridiculous scenario—Sarah’s Rob, an amiable teacher of social studies, would no more leave her and their children than he would grow another head. “Never mind,” Piper said as her friend opened her mouth. “It’s apples and oranges.”

  “I’d fight for him,” Sarah blurted. “For Tosh. He’s Nola’s father, and you love him.”

  “He doesn’t love me.” Piper gulped again at the sound of those unthinkable words hanging in the air, then pressed on. “He said he didn’t. He’s been saying it for months. I just didn’t want to listen.”

  “Oh, honey.” Sarah reached across the table and took Piper’s hand. “I don’t know. Maybe couples therapy?”

  Piper shook her head. She could imagine how that would go: Some patient, well-intentioned person with a couch and a box of Kleenex, asking them questions. Piper would talk and Tosh would get quieter and quieter, sitting perfectly still and self-contained, his handsome face impossible to read, probably counting the moments until he was free and could go to his Mary. Suddenly she was consumed with a desire to see him, to haunt him the way a ghost could, to see who he was when he didn’t know his wife was watching.

  She murmured an apology to her friend, left money on the table over Sarah’s protests, and walked briskly across the park, back to the garage where she’d left the car. Sarah knew Mary’s last name and had a vague idea of where she lived. It took Piper only a few taps at her BlackBerry to find an address; a bill slipped into the hands of the lot attendant brought her rented car roaring around the corner, and then she was on her way again.

  Twenty minutes later, Piper pulled the car up to the corner; a corner that was, in her opinion, an embarrassingly short distance from her own house. She’d provisioned herself with a gossip magazine, a jumbo cup of coffee, and a turkey sub, in case she had to wait. She’d also taken the opportunity to use the ladies’ room at the coffee shop where she’d bought lunch, so she’d be good to wait for hours, even until the night. But it took less than an hour before her husband rounded the corner. Her heart stuttered when she saw him, walking with a bounce in his step and a brown paper bag—from the Fooderie, she bet—tucked under his arm. He was wearing his My Morning Jacket T-shirt and the jeans they’d bought together at Bloomingdale’s, the day the store had a special consultant—“the jeans doctor”—there to tell men which cuts and rinses to buy. “He says I need them shortened,” Tosh had reported, and Piper pointed out that she’d
been telling him the exact same thing for years. “Yes,” Tosh had said, “but you don’t have an advanced degree in denim.” For years, that had been a joke between them—“Oh, yeah?” Tosh would say when she said she knew how to cook a duck breast or which preschool was best for Nola. “Where’d you go to denim medical school?”

  Piper groaned out loud, wrapped her arms around her torso, and bent forward as if she were going to throw up, thinking that this hurt worse than labor or the time she’d broken her arm playing lacrosse when she was fifteen, that it hurt worse than anything: the loss of their jokes accrued over years of time together, the way his defection ended their history with the finality of a page being ripped in half. She could hear the bag sloshing as he walked. Tosh used to bring her beer from the Fooderie when Nola was tiny, bottles of peach- and raspberry-flavored Belgian lambic, because his mother had told him that beer was good for nursing women and Piper hated the way most beer tasted. Her fingers were on the handle, ready to fling the car door open and confront him, call him out right there on the sidewalk, but he looked so light, so unburdened, that all she could do was watch and feel sick with grief.

  She slipped quietly out of the car and walked behind him, hoping he wouldn’t turn around, and knowing somehow that he wouldn’t . . . because she wasn’t there, not really. Really she was in Paris, sitting quietly in the corner of a conference room with a translator murmuring beside her, or on a plane flying over an ocean . . . or maybe even on a plane that was no longer flying, a plane that had sputtered and coughed and then spiraled down into the sea. When he stepped to the front door of Mary’s house, keys in one hand, the brown paper bag tucked tight in his other, she stepped up behind him, whispering his name.

  “Tosh.”

  For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t hear her, that he wouldn’t turn, that somehow she really was in Paris and this was all a dream. But Tosh spun around, dots of color flaring in the smooth brown skin of his cheeks, eyes bright with shock.