Даниэла Стил - Turning Point

When she set both boys back down on the ground, she looked up at Andy and tried to read what she saw in his eyes. Fear, distrust, resentment, pain, longing. She wasn’t sure what he felt for her anymore, or what she did, as she put her arms around him, and kissed his cheek.

“How was your flight?” he asked her.

“Long” was all she could think of to answer, as they walked along with her bags on a cart. Wendy watched her as she and Tom followed at a distance. She wondered how Stephanie was going to handle the complicated currents that lay ahead. She and Tom were walking to the cab stand together, and Tom whispered to her.

“I’m glad I’m not him. He’s got a nasty surprise ahead.” Stephanie’s affair with Gabriel was no secret to them. Only Andy didn’t know what was in store. It made them both feel awkward when they said goodbye to her. She introduced them to Andy, who nodded and smiled and asked them how they’d enjoyed Paris, and they tried not to sound overly enthusiastic, as a compassionate gesture to him. Stephanie hugged Wendy and promised to call her, and kissed Tom on the cheek and wished him luck with his housekeeping and he laughed.

“You have no idea how much there is to do. I’ll be scrubbing and throwing things in a Dumpster for the next two weeks. I should probably move.”

They walked outside together, as Stephanie and Andy and the boys headed for the garage with her bags. She kept up a constant stream of conversation with Aden and Ryan but she and Andy had hardly spoken to each other since she arrived. She didn’t know what to say and she was afraid he would see something in her eyes. She hated lying to him, but she felt she had no other choice. And worst of all, she felt loyal to Gabriel now, but seeing Andy, she realized that as his wife, she owed him a great deal too. She felt torn in half, and fell silent on the drive home, as the boys screamed and yelled and chortled in their car seats in the back seat, while Andy didn’t say a word. She wondered if he knew.

It took them forty minutes to get to their house, and as Stephanie walked in, she felt a tidal wave sweep over her, as though she’d been lost at sea for a month, and had just been washed back on shore at home. Yet part of her didn’t want to be here, and wanted to be with Gabriel in Paris, not in San Francisco in the house in the Upper Haight.

Everything looked neat and tidy when she walked in, and Stephanie realized Andy had made a superhuman effort to get it all cleaned up for her. She was sure it hadn’t looked that way while she was gone.

“The house looks great,” she said to Andy with a smile.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, and she was suddenly reminded of how cold and angry he had been when she left. Nothing seemed to have improved, and there was suddenly a chasm between them that she had no idea how to bridge, or if she should try. She didn’t want to mislead him, nor tell him the truth in the next six weeks, and it was going to be a juggling act while Gabriel was there, trying to spend time with him. She had a knot in her stomach thinking about it, as she walked into their bedroom, and put down her purse and coat, while Andy carried in her two big bags, one of them mostly filled with toys and clothes for the boys. She had bought a sweater for Andy on sale, but nothing else. She had already divorced him in her mind while she was gone. And now she was back and he was real.

“Do you want something to eat?” Andy asked her, as though he didn’t know what else to say to her. She shook her head.

“No, I’m fine. We ate a lot on the plane.” It had taken eleven and a half hours to get home, and she’d been too nervous to sleep.

She opened one of the bags and took out what she’d bought for the boys and brought it to their room. They loved the toys, and she left the clothes on a chair, to hang them up later, and hugged them both again. They had grown in the past month. And then she went back to her room, took out the sweater for Andy, and laid it on the bed. It seemed a meager offering for his taking care of their two boys for the four weeks that she’d been gone. He walked into the room then, and she looked up at him, trying not to see the question in his eyes. Everything felt off between them, as though they were strangers living at the same address. She couldn’t resurrect her feelings for him.

“The boys look great,” she said quietly.

“Aden had a cold last week, but he’s fine now.” He had told her on the phone, but they were both groping for words in the awkwardness between them.

“It feels good to be home,” she said, feeling like a liar, but she didn’t know what else to say. She handed him the sweater and it was too small. He was taller and wider than she remembered. How could he become so unfamiliar in four short weeks? But she had filled them with another man.

He disappeared from the room then and left the sweater on the bed, while she unpacked her bags. She didn’t see him for the next two hours, when he came back and said dinner was ready. The boys clattered downstairs from their room, where she could tell from the doorway they’d made a mess, and Andy had set the table and made hamburgers on the barbecue, with frozen French fries and a salad. The boys’ favorite meal. It felt like she’d never left. Or like only her ghost had returned. She felt like a prisoner here. She couldn’t even pretend that it was nice to be back. She missed the bistro down the street from the apartment, the friends she’d made in the last month, the streets and buildings of Paris, and Gabriel’s arms around her while he told her everything would be fine. She had promised to text him when she arrived, but she hadn’t yet. She’d been afraid to turn on her phone, and didn’t want Andy to see his texts. She was going to read them later, and answer him when she was alone. She hadn’t done it before dinner because she was afraid that Andy would walk in and ask her who she was texting. Just being in the house with him seemed like a lie. She had built a whole new life in Paris, or planned it, and now she had flown backward in time.

The boys provided ample conversation during dinner, and Stephanie helped Andy clean up afterward. He turned on the TV in the den, and watched a basketball game, and she went upstairs to give the boys their bath and put them to bed. Andy came up when she called him to kiss them good night, and then she found herself alone with him in their bedroom, with all the awkwardness between them, and he looked at her and closed the door so the boys wouldn’t hear them.

“Something’s wrong, Steph, isn’t it? It feels weird between us now.” She couldn’t deny it, but she didn’t want to admit it either. Not this soon. They had left each other on bad terms a month before, and nothing had changed between them. Only now she was in love with another man.

“I don’t know, I guess four weeks is a long time. And things weren’t great with us when I left. You didn’t even say goodbye to me.” But they had spoken on the phone since, though only about the boys.

“I was pissed. I didn’t think you should go. You knew that and you went anyway.” And as he said it, it suddenly hit her that she wasn’t willing to give up a month in Paris for him, for her work, but she was willing to move her whole career to Paris for Gabriel. What was so different about them? Why was she willing to give up so much more for Gabriel than for her husband? But Gabriel made her feel loved. Andy made her feel guilty all the time, and now she really was.

“I thought the trip was important for my work,” she said honestly. “It was an honor and an opportunity.”

“And what I do is insignificant, is that it?” he asked, looking disappointed again, with the familiar angry edge to his voice.

“If you got a chance like that, I wouldn’t stop you. And I know it was a long time.”