Page 1 of Wreckage and Rain

Chapter 1: Am I Invisible

Summer

The champagne has gone warm in my hand and I keep holding it anyway, because if I set it down I have nothing to do with my hands, and a woman standing alone at a party with nothing to do with her hands might as well be holding a sign over her head that says look how alone she is. So I hold the glass. I have been giving myself small tasks for forty minutes. Hold the glass. Look like you're about to go somewhere. Look like the somewhere is by choice.

Why the fuck am I even here.

I know why I'm here. I'm his wife, this is his father's gala, and there used to be a version of this night where that meant something in a room like this. Where I came in on his arm and the crowd reshuffled to make room for us, because we arrived as a unit. I came down those steps forty minutes ago in the red dress, the one that used to stop him mid-sentence, and he was already gone, swallowed three people deep, two fingers grazing the base of my spine on the way past like a man checking a door is shut behind him. I've stood by this bar ever since, waiting for him to remember I came with him.

That's the ugliest way to say it. It's also the only honest one, and I am so tired of saying it to myself in the voice of a woman being reasonable.

My eyes go to him before I tell them to. They always do. He's lit up, the way he gets in a room like this. Head back, that laugh going before anyone's finished being funny. When he aims that at you, no one else in the room exists. I'd know. It used to be aimed at me. He's giving it now to some man I've never met, with Cheyenne Aldrich at his side, and I'm fifteen feet away, and he has no idea I'm in the room.

I want to throw the glass at the fountain and watch it go to pieces against the stone just so something in this courtyard would make a noise that matched what is happening inside me.

I don't. I take a sip of warm champagne instead and it tastes like a penny held under my tongue, and I keep my face arranged, like a statue, while no one sees the silent war that is raging inside of me.

She is standing where I stand. That's the part that takes the air out of me, every time, and it has been every time for months now. Not on him. She is never on him, she is too good for that, she has never given me the gift of something I could point at and name out loud without sounding like exactly the woman they have all quietly agreed I'm becoming. She just finds the half-step of space at his left where a wife goes and fills it, so smoothly that two hundred people look at them and their eyes slide right over the place where I should be and find her there and think nothing of it. She has made me the one who is being sensitive, the one who is looking into things. I can't prove it. There is no moment, no hand, no word, no single frame I could pull and show somebody and say there, that, there it is. It is the most violent thing anyone has ever done to me and it is being done in increments too small to photograph, and I am supposed to stand here and watch my whole life get carried off one grain at a time and smile at the people who pass, because the alternative is to be the wife who made a scene, and I have been so good about not being her. It is a slow death by a thousand cuts.

My mother-in-law, Vivienne saunters over to me like a cold draft under a door. No footsteps, just the air changing the closer she gets. She is built out of ice and the absolute certainty of a woman who has never had to ask twice for anything in her life.

"Summer, darling. You look lovely."

"Thank you, Vivienne. You look beautiful, as always." It comes out of me instantly: warm, smooth, trained into me over years. Icould do it bleeding out on the floor. Some nights I think that's exactly what I'm doing.

She lets me watch her look at the dress, takes her time so I feel every second of it. Every other woman here understood the brief, the navy, the bone, the tasteful disappearing into the wallpaper, and I came down those stairs in a red you can see from the harbor.

"Red." Her head tips. The smile assembles one muscle at a time. "How brave."

There it is, the little knife she has been slipping me for years, wrapped so pretty I used to thank her for it. Brave means you don't belong here and look, sweetheart, you've gone and proved it in a color we can all see. It goes in clean. I won't find the actual cut until I'm alone in the car later and something brushes it.

I keep the smile up. The smile is the best thing I make, better than anything I've ever published, wide and warm and welded shut so not one person in this courtyard gets to see what just happened to me.

"I thought so too." Light as anything. "Life's too short for beige, don't you think?"

Something moves behind her eyes and it isn't anger, Vivienne doesn't spend anger, it's expensive and she's frugal. It's the look you give a water ring somebody left on good wood. Not a crisis. A note. She'll see to it. "Enjoy the party, dear." And she's gone back into the navy and the perfume hangs there a second after she does, like she left it to keep an eye on me.

I shouldn't look for him again. I tell myself don't, and then I do it anyway, like a tongue going back to a broken tooth over and over, just to confirm the pain is still where I left it.

He is still by the fountain. The man is gone. It's just the two of them now and she is saying something close to his ear, she has to, the quartet, the noise, and I watch my husband's shoulders come down. I know that drop. God help me, I know exactly whatthat drop is. There was a whole decade where I could cross a room he was wound tight in and put my flat hand between his shoulder blades and feel the entire rigging of him let go all at once under my palm, like something untied. I haven't felt him do that under my hand in longer than I can stand to count. And he is doing it right now, ten feet from a string quartet, for her, and he doesn't even know his own body is doing it, and that is what finally gets all the way into me, past the smile, past the training, into the soft part where I actually live. It isn't her hand near his arm. It isn't the champagne I can see them not quite sharing. It is his face. He is looking at her with the same look he gave me when we were teenagers in the gravel behind the diner with the heat still coming up off the asphalt in the dark. Like I had invented something. Like the world had been one way and then I walked through it carrying a tray and it was a different way after.

He is giving that away. In front of his father's entire world. He doesn't know he is doing it, and I would put the house on that, and that is so much worse than if he knew. If he knew I could fight him. There would be a him to fight. You can't fight a man who is drifting. You can't grab something that's already slipping through your fingers. There's nothing to point at. No moment, no fight, just the distance getting wider every time I look, and a glass of warm champagne, and a red dress, and a smile I welded on myself.

It would take nine steps to reach him. I know because I counted them, that is the kind of night this has become, counting the steps to my own husband like a hostage measuring a room. I could cross them. I could slide my hand into the crook of his arm with the easy assurance of a woman who never doubted the chair was hers, and Cheyenne would give the space back the second I took it. She always does. That's how I know she's winning.

I can't make my feet do it.

The nine steps stay nine steps. I can't walk them. And that's my answer, to the question I haven't let myself ask.

***

I get to him forty minutes later, in the gap she leaves when she goes wherever it is she goes to let my husband briefly exist without her hovering over him.

"Hey." I put my hand in the crook of his arm. He's warm through the jacket. He always runs warm. The first winter we were together I used to put my freezing hands flat on his bare stomach just to hear the sound he made, and he never flinched away, he'd just pull me in closer and take the cold, and I don't know why that's what comes up now, here, with my hand on his sleeve like I'm asking permission to touch my own husband.

"Hey, babe." He kisses the top of my head. Quick. His eyes have already gone past me to the next handshake before his mouth is out of my hair. "You good?"

"Dance with me."