“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.
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.
A couple months on the coast would do her good. The saltwater cure, right? Wasn’t that what the writer Isak Dinesen had said? “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.” Faye should get more than enough of all three photographing the Sea Islands in the middle of summer.
As soon as she’d packed her bags and drove away from Hagen’s house for the final time, Faye hit the road. In summer tourist-season traffic, the drive from Columbia to Beaufort took nearly four hours. Who were all these people lined up in car after car heading to the coast? What did they want? What did they think they’d find there? Faye wanted to work, that was all. She wanted to do well with this assignment since one good job led to another and then another. Life stretched out before her from now until her death, her work like the centerline of the highway and if she kept her eye on that line maybe, just maybe, she might not careen off the edge of the road.
Faye took the exit to Beaufort, the heart of what was known as Lowcountry in South Carolina. It felt like its own country as the terrain turned flatter and greener and swampier the deeper she drove into. After the exit, she passed a huge hand-painted sign off to her right. Lowcountry Is God’s Country, it read in big black letters. Interesting. If she were God she’d pick the Isle of Skye in Scotland maybe. Kenya. Venice. But Lowcountry?