Tiffany Reisz - The Night Mark

“I’m a melodrama queen.”

“I believe it. Do you think you’re the only person who has ever lost anybody? Everybody loses somebody eventually.”

“But not everybody loses Will.”

“I lost Will, too. Goddamn it, Faye, he’s dead. And I’m not and you’re not. You have a husband who loves you very much—”

This is the most you’ve talked to me in six months.

“You live in a mansion.”

I hate this house. It feels like a prison. Everything’s made of iron and it’s turning me to iron.

“We have all the money we could ever need or ever want.”

Your money, not mine.

“You don’t even have to work.”

“I miss working.” She said that out loud because Richard’s email had reminded her how much she missed working and how much she resented Hagen telling her she shouldn’t. “But you don’t want me to work. It makes you look bad in front of your boss because he’s a chauvinist.”

“He’s old-fashioned. That’s all.”

“And you say I live in the past.”

Hagen turned his back to her. Who could blame him? Why he hadn’t dropped her yet she didn’t know. Masochism maybe? Heroism? Maybe he wanted to save her. Maybe he was too embarrassed to admit he couldn’t.

And the truth was he had a point. She did live in the past. She hadn’t watched a movie made after 1950 in four years. Today she’d watched Casablanca while lying in their bed. They were all dead—Rick and Ilsa and Sam who never did play it again. A DVD of The Maltese Falcon sat on top of the television, waiting to be watched for the tenth or twelfth time; she couldn’t remember. Bogie was dead. Hammett was dead. And the Maltese Falcon never did get found, did it? People searched for it, fought for it, died for it, and in the end it was nothing but a hoax, lead where there should have been gold.

“Okay,” she said.

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll stop living in the past.”

“You will?” He sounded skeptical, as if she’d agreed just to shut him up.

She climbed out of bed and walked to the closet. From the top shelf she pulled a battered silver suitcase—eighty dollars from Target—with a peeling Boston Red Sox sticker on the side. A relic from her old life. She’d carry it into the new one.

“Faye?”

“I’m going to New Hampshire to stay with Aunt Kate and Mom. Then we can file there.”

“File?”

“For divorce,” she said.

Hagen laughed.

“You’re filing for divorce. In New Hampshire.”

“New Hampshire—famous for maple syrup and quickie divorces. I need to see Mom anyway. Not that she’ll see me, you know. She doesn’t remember anything that happened after 1980. She thinks there are just the two Star Wars movies. I’m not going to tell her any different. I must get my living-in-the-past tendencies from her.”

“She has dementia. She has an excuse. You don’t.”

“You’re right. I don’t have an excuse to live in the past, so I won’t live in the past anymore. I will move on with my life and into the big bright future. I can’t wait to see what this beautiful world we live in has to offer me—can you?”

Her anger gave her a rush of energy like she hadn’t felt in years. She stuffed clothes and socks and shoes and underwear into the suitcase, haphazardly but with purpose. Hagen watched her with bemusement at first, a look that slowly turned to realization as she slipped on her jeans. She wasn’t kidding.

She snatched her book off the floor and flattened the pages Hagen had crushed by throwing it across the room. She found her purse and her charger. She grabbed her phone. And as soon as it was in her hand, she felt it buzz with a text message.

Faye—forgot to tell you that they need an answer by tomorrow. If you want the job, let me know soon as you can.

“You’re actually leaving,” Hagen said, and she heard the first note of sincerity in his voice all evening. They were an ironic couple, never saying what they meant. Irony had failed them tonight.

“You want children, and I can’t give them to you.”

“We can try IVF. We can adopt. We can—”

“I don’t want to try IVF, Hagen. I don’t want to adopt. I don’t want...”

“What do you want?”

What did she want? She looked at her handsome husband with the good job that paid all the bills and took all her worries away. He could give her everything she was supposed to want.

“I don’t want to die here,” Faye said.

It wasn’t the dying that bothered her in that statement. It was the here. She didn’t want to die here in this cold, cold house with this cold, cold husband she slept with in a bed made of cold, cold iron.

“And I will die here if I stay,” she said with cold iron finality.

The look on his face said he believed her even if he wasn’t willing to admit it. She waited. He didn’t say anything more.

She paused at the bedroom door. She’d stay at a hotel tonight, then fly to her aunt’s house in Portsmouth tomorrow. She’d file for divorce there and let Hagen have everything. There would be nothing for the lawyers to fight over as long as she didn’t ask for anything. She’d be divorced by June 5, her thirtieth birthday. Ah, June—a great month for weddings, a better month for divorces. Widowed and divorced, two miscarriages and two failed IUI treatments, all before she turned thirty.

Give the lady a prize.

“You won’t contest the divorce?” Faye asked.

“No,” Hagen said.

Faye nodded.

“For what it’s worth,” Faye said, “I wish...”

Her throat tightened to the point of pain.

“What, Faye? What?”

“I wish I’d never married you. For your sake. Not mine.”

She looked at him, and he looked at her. She wondered if they’d ever see each other again. And she waited for her tears to come but they were gone, the valley dry again.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “you’re not the only one.”

And that was it. He didn’t weep. He didn’t scream. He didn’t argue. He didn’t beg. And when she picked up her suitcase and left Hagen alone in the bedroom, he didn’t follow her. It was over.

She put the suitcase in the trunk of her Prius—a gift from Hagen that he would probably demand she give back—and hit the button to open the garage. Before she backed out, she pulled her phone from her jeans pocket.

She reread Richard’s email. Sounded like a big project, this fund-raiser calendar thing. Landscapes, houses, ladies in dresses... She hadn’t worked a big job like that since getting married. She hadn’t done much of anything since getting married. But she’d need the money. And she’d need the distraction.

Faye hit Reply and typed her answer.

Richard—I just left husband.

In other words, I’ll take the job.

2

Faye made the divorce easy on Hagen and he stayed true to his word and made it easy on her. Faye asked for nothing but the Prius and the twelve thousand dollars she’d had in her bank account on their wedding day. He handed over the car keys and wrote her a check. And that was that. He got the house, the other car, the boat, the money and the all-important bragging rights. She’d left town, which gave him the freedom to conjure up any story he wanted. He could tell the world she’d cheated on him with every man alive if he so desired to play the cuckold. He could say she’d refused marriage counseling if he wanted to play the martyr. Or he could tell them the truth—that he wanted babies and her body clearly wasn’t on board with this program. She’d lost Will’s baby. She’d lost Hagen’s. And the two insemination attempts had failed.

Three strikes was an out, but four balls was a walk.

Faye walked.

It was easier to do than she’d thought it would be. Hagen hadn’t put up a real fight. Knowing him, he’d probably been secretly relieved. The past four years she’d slowly lost touch with the world until everything had started to take on the feel of a TV show, a soap opera that played in the background. Occasionally, she’d watch, but never got too invested. Finally, she’d simply switched off the television. The Faye and Hagen Show was over. No big loss. The show only had two viewers and neither of them liked the stars.