“You’re at home?” Eileen asked, surprised. All the kids were now talking at once in the background.
“Yes. Guys, be quiet so I can hear. Yes, after you called, I cancelled my last meeting and came home. How you holding up?”
Eileen found an empty table outside a Mexican food restaurant that looked cleanish and lowered her tote onto the empty seat. “I’m not sure. I think I’m just moving from one thing to the next.”
“I’m so sorry. I wish I could be there with you.”
Eileen closed her eyes. She wouldn’t cry again. Not in the middle of the airport. “I wish you were too. But honestly, I’m glad you’re home with the kids.”
“Speaking of that…what have you told them, exactly?”
“I said she had an accident. Not that she shot herself.”
“They’re reporting her death on the news,” he whispered into the phone. “It won’t be long before the details come out.”
Eileen took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll talk to them.”
“I feel awful. I’m sorry. I never meant for you to have to handle that on your own.”
“I think it will be awful no matter how they find out.”
He was right, of course. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re there. I love you.”
“I love you, too. We’ll get through this.”
Eileen opened her tote, took out the envelope, and laid it on the table. “Actually, I was calling for another reason. Thank you, by the way, for taking my car in today.”
“I’m happy to do it.”
“But there was an envelope on your windshield this morning. I meant to leave it for you, but with everything, I forgot.”
“An envelope? That’s weird… Oh, I bet it’s from Carl next door. We were talking last week. He’s started selling insurance on the side, trying to make some extra money. He hit me up. I didn’t know what to say. We don’t need to be messing around with insurance right now. He was going to put together some quotes.”
“Do you want me to open it?”
“Sure.”
Eileen bent back the brass tabs holding the flap in place.
“I’d say just throw it away, but I’m probably going to have to talk with him and find a way to tell him we’re not interested right now. God, I hate when friends try to sell you shit. No,” Eric said to the kids, his mouth away from phone. “I did not say the S word… Well, how about you mind your own business?”
Eileen reached into the envelope and pulled out several thick pages.
As she stared down at the pages in her hand, she vaguely heard Eric ask the kids, “What do you want for dinner?” She didn’t breathe. A sickness rushed through her bloodstream, stunned her senses, paralyzed her limbs.
They were large, eight-by-eleven-inch black-and-white pictures. There were six. Her fingers gently pushed them apart, spreading them out across the table to reveal different scenes, different settings, but always the same main characters. Each picture a punch in her gut more powerful and painful than the last.
She stared at them.
There was a handwritten note in black ink torn from a spiral notebook paper-clipped to the photo that most clearly showed Eric and Lauren’s faces. The note was signed—Dave, Lauren’s husband.
A man in a dark gray suit walked toward her table. Pulling a black carry-on suitcase, he held his phone in his free hand as he spoke into the headset attached to his ear. His eyes swept over the table as he passed by, then met hers for the briefest of moments, understanding igniting between them before he looked away. Eileen heard him keep speaking into his headset. “What was that? Yeah, sorry… Brian’s quotas weren’t met for that quarter.”
She looked around, suddenly remembering she was in an airport surrounded by people. A woman with two small children sat at a table only three feet away, their paper-wrapped tacos half eaten.
“Eileen?” Eric asked. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”
She listened to the sound of her husband’s voice. She loved him. Too much—that’s what Clare had once told her: “You love him too much.”
“Yes,” she managed to say. “I’m here.” She raked the photos and the note together, aligned their edges, and hid them back in the envelope.
“What was it?” he asked her.
“What?” Eileen pressed the flap of the envelope down over the sharp brass tabs and spread them flat.
“The envelope? Quotes from Carl?” he reminded her. “Are you okay?” She could tell from his tone that he was referring to Clare’s death. He was asking if she was okay. He was implying that maybe she wasn’t, because she had learned a few hours ago that her sister had shot herself. He had no idea what she’d just seen.
“Eileen? Can you hear me?”
“Yes. It was just insurance sales stuff…from Carl.”
They had been married almost fifteen years. They had three children. She loved him more than she should—too much. “Sorry,” she choked. “Um, they’re actually boarding. I made a mistake about the times.”
“Are you sure you should be traveling alone right now?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“Eric… I have to go. They’re boarding my flight,” she said.
She hung up and placed her phone facedown on the table next to the envelope. Near her spine, a black hole cracked open and spread across her back, through her stomach, wrapped around her heart, pressed her lungs. An empty space of loss so large, her whole life fell inside out.
Eileen closed her eyes, willed herself to breathe, and swallowed back the agony clawing its way up her throat. The images of her husband fucking Lauren Andrews were burned into her field of vision, as if she had been staring at the sun. Their entwined limbs, his naked ass, her spread legs. Eric on top of her, behind her. His exposed throat, her full tits. Expressions contorted at the height of orgasm.
And worse. Their bodies spooned, outlined by only the drape of a sheet, faces slack with sleep. Eric’s arm hung over Lauren’s thin waist, her cropped brown hair spread across the pillow they shared, his lips resting at the base of her neck.
Eileen put her hands over her face, pressed her eyes, willed the scenes to disappear. Images she knew she would never unsee.
“You love him too much,” Clare had once said.
Chapter 5