“Mom, you love Dad,” Irie or Fern would say. We didn’t need to dial 911 to solve our domestic disputes as Ryan’s clients did. Our children, causing and resolving our fights, were the crux of meaning. They exacerbated Ryan’s poor health but inspired him to live longer; they alleviated my depression but crazed me with love and greed. Sometimes I found myself longing for men who yelled less, but I’d created the man Ryan had become, and I could not return him into the world so broken. He’d gone on damaging himself to make my wishes come true.
As I breastfed through each pregnancy, I’d sleep mostly in our children’s beds, their bodies like warm loaves of bread, fragrant and yeasty, a nighttime aphrodisiac. Engrossed in the nocturnal static of tending to their needs, I was not dismayed by my separateness from Ryan, but when a friend equated husbands sleeping on couches with the inevitability of divorce, I grew defensive and scared. I had forgotten about my husband, adopting a unilateral attachment philosophy—parent-to-child and rarely parent-to-parent. I squandered all my love on our children. Maybe I was drunk on power too. On rare evenings, I’d stand at the top of our staircase and call out, “Ryan?” This was our signal. How could any man resist the call of affection after spending days or weeks alone in a house filled with people for whom he longed? On some level, I was just a trickster, testing his willingness to continue the baby-making process.
One summer night, as I lay in our only air-conditioned room, on a sheet on the floor, Francis and Fern were both begging for “milky.” I could not nurse them simultaneously, and they took turns crying out in the dark. Intolerant of humidity and heat, Ryan was already irritable. He marched back and forth in our narrow upstairs hallway, trying to solve the breastfeeding problem. “Can’t anyone go to sleep in this house without a fucking tit in their mouth?” he yelled. He censored little to nothing, such that shitty and fuck were part of our family lexicon, as in, “I’m so tired of my clients’ shitty fucking lives.” But of course, though we never doubted his loyalty or love, Ryan was also tired of us. During the day, he fumed about mothers and fathers too doped up to feed their babies; and at night, he wondered when I’d ever stop feeding ours.
“You’re so pissed off all the time,” I’d accuse him. “Don’t our children give you the least bit of joy?”
“Yes, of course,” he’d say, softening around the edges. “But while you’re soaking up all their physical affection, I’ve been entirely cut out.”
And to an extent, Ryan was right. I relished being objectified by my babies. They’d reach down my shirt to twist my nipples like a spigot for milk. They’d duck under the folds of my skirt, lodging their heads between my legs. I invited their fingers inside my mouth, and I rubbed their saliva into my hands like some ancient salve. As I stared into baby Franco’s eyes, lashes fluttering, I finally began to wonder, when was the last time I’d looked into Ryan’s? What comes first, Daddy or the child; the family or the marriage? And how many nights during those years did I find my way into the warm dugout of Ryan’s body, or he into mine, intent on recreational as opposed to procreative sex? We needed desperately to hitch our wagons to the same star, but aside from our desires for each other, a figment of the past, we differed entirely in our wants.
How much of Linda Duffy’s story shone true, and how much did she embellish? When we look at the night sky, we find Orion the mighty hunter, but another stargazer may perceive a different picture in the constellation. Bright stars that appear close together are actually very far apart in the reality known as space. While Linda said she returned to live with Bob in an effort to reconcile, the courts had recently ordered Linda to pay $500 a month in spousal maintenance to Bob, as he was living exclusively on disability monies. Although Linda was in poor health, her husband was worse off, and she’d need to continue working to help support him. She also stood to lose the house and other assets in the pending divorce.
The dissolution of a marriage reduces a family into its own specialized glossary of symbols. In the failed marriage between Linda and Bob Duffy, symbols included but were not limited to the long-lost Camaro Bob was driving when he sweet-talked Linda into dating him at age seventeen; a 1960 Gibson dot electric guitar with flame top, a Fender Closet Classic Stratocaster, and a Canon Rebel digital camera with f/2.8 lens; a Ruger Mark III pistol and a Bushmaster AR-15, both of which Bob was court-ordered to relinquish after shooting a hole in his wall when his brain damage flared up; the laptop Linda took into her possession, even though Bob, also an amateur cosmologist, had saved his astronomy notes, schematics, and electrical circuits on the hard drive; and the fragments of broken glass tables and dinner plates with which Bob confetti-dusted the house in one or more fits of hysteria. Given his history, one wondered, was Bob a reliable narrator?
According to him, after a long afternoon, the day of the alleged crimes, he awoke to find Linda digging through his drawers and reading his email messages, trying to find something she might use against him in divorce proceedings. In her mad search, Linda came upon correspondence from Jackie, his friend and caretaker, and began reading her sleepy
