The Name Tattooed On Her Arm

I eased myself out from under her, so gentle, and laid a throw pillow where I had been so she would not wake. I stood in the middle of my own living room not knowing what to do with my hands. I did not wake her. I did not shake her by the shoulders and demand to know who Cody was. I have never been a shouter, and anyway there were no words in me. There was just a roar.

I did the only thing I could think to do. I grabbed my keys and I drove across town to Denny Fowler’s place, my buddy since grade school, and I sat on his back steps and drank two beers I did not taste while he asked me what was wrong and I told him nothing, nothing, I just needed to be out of the house. He is a good enough friend that he did not push. He just sat with me in the dark and let me be a man who could not talk. Around eleven I drove home slow, came in quiet, and found Marlene had moved herself up to bed. I lay down on the far edge of the mattress and stared at the ceiling until sleep finally took me the way exhaustion takes you, without permission.

The morning she asked about a tattoo

I woke before her, which almost never happens. I lay there listening to her breathe and I thought, in the gray light, that I would have to say something. That a man cannot see what I had seen and go on pouring cereal and counting nails at the store like the floor of his life had not shifted. But I am telling you the plain truth when I say I did not want to. I did not want the answer. I wanted my old life back, the boring beautiful one, and I was willing to swallow almost anything to keep from breaking it open.

I got up and started the coffee. Marlene came down in her robe with the sleeves long, and she moved around the kitchen soft and a little nervous, and she poured herself a cup and stood by the counter looking out at the yard the way she had been doing all spring.

Then she said, in a light voice that was trying too hard to be light, “Gary, you remember that three hundred dollars my aunt Rita sent me for my birthday? The money I couldn’t figure out what to do with?”

“I remember,” I said, and I kept my eyes on my coffee.

“I think I might drive over to Bedford and get a little tattoo,” she said. “Something small. On my arm, maybe. What do you think I ought to get?”

And my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

Because I understood, standing there, exactly what she was doing. She thought I had not seen it. She was going to go get a second tattoo, some flower or some vine or some little bird, laid right over the top of that name, to bury it before I ever laid eyes on it. She was going to erase Cody under a rose and I was supposed to say oh how pretty and never know.

I am a terrible liar. My kids will tell you I cannot keep a Christmas present secret to save my life. But that morning I found I could do it, because the fear of losing her was bigger than my face. I looked at the counter and I said, “Flowers are nice. You always liked the wild ones out back. Get flowers.”

She let out a breath. Her whole body loosened with relief. “Flowers,” she said softly. “Yeah. I think flowers.”

And that relief of hers hurt worse than the tattoo had. Because it told me she was hiding, and hiding well, and had been for days. It told me my wife had a whole secret room inside her that I had never been let into, and that she was about to wallpaper over the door.