and drove off into the dark.
It started out a day like any other chilly, gray-sky April morning. I woke up feeling Marcus’s lips on my forehead, hearing the soft clink as he set down a cup of tea beside me. “How is the mother-to- be?” he asked, and I smiled. Neither of us was trying to pretend that the situation was anything other than what it was, but Marcus still treated me like I was expecting. We had the ultrasound pictures stuck to our refrigerator with a magnet; we sent Annie downloadable recordings of our voices reading the baby stories and singing lullabies, and kept a calender marked with red Xs through each day before the baby’s arrival hanging on my dressing room door.
Once Marcus was showered and dressed and off to work, I padded to my dressing room and pulled on the workout clothes I’d laid out the night before — tights and running pants, a long-sleeved Under Armour shirt with a fleece jacket on top of it.
My trainer met me in the lobby, and we jogged across the street, across the wide sidewalk through the gap in the stone gate and into the park for the usual ninety minutes of torture. Back at home, my breakfast was waiting for me on a tray: a white china plate covered with almonds, dried apricots, a peeled, cored apple cut into slices so thin they were translucent, and a hard-boiled egg. I looked longingly at Marcus’s soaking tub before skinning off my sweaty clothes. It wasn’t as if my shower was Spartan: the water assaulted me from a half-dozen nozzles and there was a marble ledge, specially designed so I’d have a place to prop up my foot while I shaved my legs. Some couples had his-and-hers sinks. Marcus and I had his-and-hers bathrooms. “It’s the secret of a happy marriage,” I’d told Annie. “That, and Viagra.” The truth was, Marcus liked to visit me in my bathroom, knocking on the door in his bathrobe. Sometimes he’d slip into the shower with me, getting his hands slick with soap and running them over my body, and sometimes this would lead to sex, but, more often, he’d just pull up the chair from my vanity and sit by the shower, talking about nothing and everything, his children, his colleagues, the next trip we’d take. At first I’d been shy about letting him see me backstage — he didn’t need to know that I used concealer or plucked my eyebrows — but, after a while, I found that I genuinely enjoyed his company, and I looked forward to those mornings more than any other part of the day.
By ten o’clock I was out the door, dressed, hair blown straight, makeup applied. In my office, I sipped a latte and returned calls and e-mails for an hour and a half, revising a press release announcing my jewelry company’s new line of charm bracelets (“The perfect gift for Mother’s Day!”), calling to confirm receipt for the invitations we’d sent for a cocktail party in honor of a bridal magazine’s new editor, their fourth in three years. I was taking my assistant Daphne to lunch at Michael’s. Then I’d head to the salon for a bikini wax and a facial. On Friday, Marcus and I were flying to the Bahamas for the fiftieth birthday of one of Marcus’s partners’ wives — a first wife. Seeing one of those was sort of like glimpsing a rare bird or monkey, a member of an endangered species, upright and uncaged and walking among us.
Daphne and I were halfway through our salads, and I was listening to her tell me about her latest boyfriend’s new job — something to do with corporate branding and search-engine optimization — when my phone trilled from inside my bag. I bent down to look at the number. When I saw that it was Marcus’s office, I picked up fast, pressing the phone against my ear and bending my head close to the table. Marcus and I emailed. The only times he’d call me during the workday was when it was an emergency.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Croft?” Kelly, one of Marcus’s executive assistants, was on the line, and she sounded as rattled as I’d ever heard her.
I was on my feet before I knew it. Daphne stared at me.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Croft, but I told you everything they told me.”
“I’ll be right there,” I told her. I ran out the door and into the first cab I saw, snapping out the hospital’s address, hardly able to breathe.
What would I do without him? I thought, as the cab made its way downtown. How would I live? How would I pay the bills, how would I manage the staff? I had no idea how any of it worked. I hadn’t wanted to learn. I’d been superstitious, thinking that too many questions would be asking for trouble. I’d turn myself into Bluebeard’s wife. If I went poking around, I’d find. . what? A row of my beheaded predecessors rotting in the basement? Documents showing that Marcus was secretly broke? And what was I doing, thinking this way at a time like this? Marcus. My husband. The man I’d come to love, with all my heart, in spite of myself.
Through the windows, I saw a man with a plastic bag over his hand holding a little dog’s leash, a boy and a girl walking side by side, one earbud of the iPod she carried in each of their ears. I pulled my telephone out of the purse and called Trey at the office and Tommy on his cell phone and Bettina at Kohler’s, saying that I didn’t know what was happening, but that I’d been told it was urgent; that I was on my way to the hospital and that they should probably join me.
“I’ll leave right now,” said Trey.
“Be there as soon as I can,” said Tommy.
Bettina hadn’t said anything before she’d hung up. I knew she was thinking that this was, somehow, my fault, even though I’d been the one to call the doctor that first time, and I’d been the one to monitor his diet, to make sure he took his medication, to buy a treadmill and hire a trainer, to tell him, every night, how much I loved him.
The cab dropped me off by the emergency room. I ran through the automated doors. “Marcus Croft,” I said to the receptionist. My chest was as tight as if someone was squeezing it, the skin of my forearms pebbled with goose bumps. The receptionist pecked at her computer, then gave me directions: elevator to the C wing, down the second hallway, left and then another left, check in at the blue desk, and I hurried away, not feeling the floor underneath me or seeing the faces of the people I passed.
When the elevator doors slid open, there were three nurses gathered around a desk, talking quietly. A blue light flashed in the hall, and an orderly pushed an empty stretcher. “Marcus Croft,” I said. All of them looked up, guiltily, like schoolgirls caught passing notes, and I knew, in that instant, what had happened.
“Oh, God.” My knees felt like they’d melted, and I would have fallen if I hadn’t managed to grab the edge of the desk.
“Where is he?” My voice was loud and high and frantic. I could see my reflection in the pane of glass behind the desk, skin pale, hair disheveled, eyes unrecognizable.
“I’m so sorry,” said the nurse. She was short, round-faced, copper-skinned, wearing white clogs and pale-pink scrubs. I knew exactly how I must have looked to her: too pretty, too thin, too young. I might as well have been wearing a tiara that spelled out the words TROPHY WIFE in flashing neon bulbs above my head.
There was a waiting area up there, a few benches, a few people, the inevitable television bolted to the ceiling, blasting talk-show noise into the hallway. That hospital smell of chicken-noodle soup and industrial cleansers, of blood and rubbing alcohol, filled the air. A mother sat with a toddler in one corner, a little girl she bounced on her knee.
“Do you want to see him?” asked the nurse.
I did not. I wanted to hold in my memory the way he’d looked the first time I’d seen him in the Starbucks: healthy and fit, splendidly dressed, completely in control of the world around him, confounded by the coffee. Still, I nodded and let the nurse lead me down a hallway and into the tile-floored room where my husband had died.
Marcus lay on a bed, on top of dirtied sheets, alongside a single inside-out rubber glove. There were stickers pasted to his gray-furred chest, wires hooked up to box on a wheeled stand, an IV plugged into his arm. The room smelled like shit. His eyes were closed, his hair sticking up on the back of his head, and his face seemed to have somehow collapsed, giving him the look of a much older man.
“We need to get him cleaned up before the children see him.” My voice came out just right: clear and
