He only saw Trista briefly on Sunday morning before she left for the airport. He would have driven her himself, but she’d already summoned a cab before he woke up. She seemed subdued, worried, but this scarcely registered with him. All his thoughts were focused on springing Martine from the hospital.
The night before, Martine had quizzed him thoroughly on the phone about what time he’d be there to pick her up. She’d remained all too quiet on his previous visits, barely replying when he spoke to her, but now he entertained the tentative hope that Martine was willing to give their marriage another chance. Maybe a couple of weeks at Sweetwater Cottage, just the two of them, would smooth things over.
As soon as Trista’s taxi disappeared around the corner, Rick started for the hospital. He bought a bouquet of flowers from a roadside vendor, and when he reached Martine’s floor at the hospital, he bounded off the elevator, smiling at the nurses and aides at the nurses’ station. Martine’s room was only a couple of doors down the hall, and he rounded the corner prepared to kiss her hello.
The bed was empty.
A cold hand clenched his heart. Of course he thought the worst. Visions of emergencies straight from TV dramas sprang to mind, all punctuated by doctors running down the hall, their lab coats flying, and someone yelling, “Stat! Hurry, she’s coding!”
He rushed back to the nurses’ station, losing a couple of daisies in the process. The flowers skidded across the highly polished tile floor as they scattered. Oblivious to his panic, one of the aides, a young girl named Kitty, glanced up from her coffee and doughnut. A scrim of powdered sugar trailed unheeded across her upper lip.
“Where’s my wife? Is she all right?”
“Yes, Mr. McCulloch, she checked out about an hour ago.”
This stopped him in his tracks. “She did?” He was incredulous. They’d discussed on the phone last night how he would be there to pick her up as soon as Trista left. He’d told Martine jokingly that he’d drive her directly to Star-bucks for a chai tea latte because she claimed that she was going through withdrawal; she usually treated herself to one every day.
“A man came to get her.” Kitty took another bite of her doughnut.
“A man—?” For one horrifying moment, a new picture of Padrón forcing Martine out of the hospital at gunpoint flashed through his mind. But Padrón was dead.
As this irrational vision faded, one of the nurses sitting behind the counter extended her hand, and in it was a white envelope. His name was scribbled on the front. It was Martine’s handwriting, distinctive and easily recognizable by its wide lower loops.
“Mrs. McCulloch left this for you,” she said.
He accepted the envelope, slitted it open and walked slowly to the waiting area in a nearby alcove, where he sank onto one of the chairs to read the message.
Rick,
I’m sorry, but I can’t go home with you. Steve is taking me to his apartment for now, and I’ll send someone to our house to get my things as soon as I can. I want out of the marriage, and we’ll have to talk about it. I can’t face hashing things over now. I need to heal first, and then I’ll be in touch.
Martine
Steve Lifkin, an attorney in the law office where Martine worked as a paralegal, was the guy who had written Martine those love notes. The letters had left no doubt in Rick’s mind that Martine and Steve enjoyed an intimate, ongoing relationship of almost a year.
He glanced up when Kitty passed by. “Mr. McCulloch? Are you all right? You’re so pale.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said tonelessly. He stood, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, but shoved it back in again. His first instinct was to call Martine and ask her what the hell she was doing. If she was with Steve, though, she wouldn’t talk to him anyway. He wondered how she could have gone from joking about chai tea lattes last night to moving in with Steve today. He wondered what he was going to do with himself for the rest of his life, and he wondered why he cared.
In the days that followed, Martine’s belongings disappeared mysteriously, piece by piece, from their Kendall home, as well as furniture that she’d brought into the marriage. The grandfather clock that had always stood in the foyer of her family’s Columbia house, the engraved crystal wineglasses that were her mother’s. Blank spaces on the walls appeared where Martine’s beautiful watercolor paintings had been; the stained-glass window that she’d crafted so carefully was missing from where it hung on the screened porch. Every day when he arrived home from work, Rick would amble around the house, glumly taking note of the things that were newly missing, then sit down to a tasteless frozen dinner heated in the microwave.
At first he’d thought that before she left Miami, Trista must have known Martine wasn’t going to come home from the hospital with him, but when she called two days after Martine left the hospital, she seemed astonished when he told her that Martine was living at Steve’s place.
“Oh, Rick, I’m sorry,” Trista said, her voice low. Other women shrilled when they were upset, but not Trista. If anything, she became more centered.
He greeted this with silence. Though Trista and Martine had grown apart in recent years, he couldn’t imagine Martine’s embarking on such a course without running it past Trista first.
Trista sighed. “Rick, she told me on Saturday that she was going to file for divorce. She mentioned that you’d had a fight before Padrón forced her into the car, and she said she wanted to leave you. I couldn’t talk her out of it. I tried. She never mentioned that another man was involved.”
“She and Steve have been having an affair for almost a year. Maybe she’ll fill you in on what’s happened,” he said.
“She doesn’t talk to me,” Trista replied despairingly. “And I don’t understand her or the things she does sometimes.”
“Ditto for me.”
After they hung up, Rick buried his face in his hands. Through his pain, he was furious with Martine for putting them through this and angry with himself because his wife had felt a need to include another man in her life. He was well aware that it was too late to go back and change the way things were, and he didn’t much like the way they were going to be, either.
Shortly after this conversation, Rick descended into a depression the likes of which he had never experienced. As always when things got tough, he began to ruminate over his life as it was before things got so complicated. Before he had a job that was becoming increasingly difficult to perform.
Maybe that was because he was drinking too much, staying out later and later at one bar or another and avoiding one-on-one social situations of any kind. Still, he believed that he was performing his job to the best of his ability until his boss called him into his office late one Friday in early March.
“Rick,” Shorty said, walking around his desk and perching on the edge of it as he was wont to do when attempting to establish rapport. “You’ve been through a lot, and I think you need a break. I hope you don’t take this as a put-down, and I have great respect for your ability, but I’m going to put you on an extended leave starting today.”
Rick hadn’t seen this coming at all. “Extended leave?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll welcome you back after a few months. We’re giving you time to pull yourself back together, that’s all. I’ll keep in touch, and—”
“What have I done wrong?” Rick was in a state of bewildered disbelief; how could this be happening? On top of everything else?
Shorty sighed and stared out the window for a long moment. “Son, you’re not playing at the top