Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [97]
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Jennifer?”
“Nothing. I mean nothing.” She shook her head. And then she passed the point of no return. “I’m just saying…you don’t know what was going on.”
“I don’t, no.” He paused, feeling the great weight in her silence. “Do you?”
If Jennifer had been sober, she would have stopped there, before it was too late. She wasn’t sober. She was drunk. And she didn’t get drunk.
If Jennifer had stood up then, she would have realized how drunk she was. She might have felt nauseated, excused herself, gone to lie down, and let the feeling and the moment pass. But she didn’t stand up. And it was out of her mouth before she even knew she was going to say it.
“I know that Amanda didn’t belong to my dad.”
Mark himself was a little anesthetized by alcohol, so his world didn’t stop when she said it, rather began spinning alarmingly on a new axis.
“What?”
“Mum had an affair, when she was married to Dad. She got pregnant. With someone else’s baby. I guess she was a little more fecund than me.” She laughed an ugly humorless laugh. “And pretty bloody careless. That must be why Dad left her.”
“How do you know?” Of all the questions, that was a bizarre one to start with. Shock was setting in.
Still it wasn’t dawning on Jennifer. What she was saying.
“She wrote it, in her letter to Amanda. Didn’t let her dirty little secret die with her.” Until she said it, she didn’t even know she thought of it that way. In vino veritas.
“Amanda told you that?”
“She told Lisa. Lisa told me. It’s just you and Hannah who don’t know. Who didn’t know.”
Mark didn’t say a word.
His face made her start backpedaling. That, along with the fact that drunken logic allowed her to return almost immediately to the point of her revelation, which actually had nothing to do with her mother. “But that doesn’t really matter, does it? It was a long time ago. I suppose she could have told you, maybe she should have told you. But she didn’t. Guess we’ll never know her reasons. The point is…” For a moment, she forgot what the point was, but then it came back to her, and she nodded her head as though the point had been spoken out loud to her, before resuming. “The point is, babies don’t fix things, do they?” She looked as pleased as a prosecution barrister delivering closing remarks in an open-and-shut case. He wanted to slap her mouth closed.
Mark looked at her as though he suddenly didn’t recognize her and stood up. “I think that’s enough. I’m going to go to bed now. I think you should, too, before Hannah gets home.”
Jennifer stood up in front of him. He was only a couple of inches taller than her. She was too close to him. When she spoke again, he smelled the red wine on her breath.
Then, a moment of clarity. “Oh God. Mark. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at her.
“You’re a good man, Mark. A really good man. I’m sorry she did it. Too good a man to be lied to. A really good man.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t you apologize for your mother.”
“Well, she sure as hell never did.”
“She had nothing to apologize to me for.”
“What about Amanda? What about my dad? She didn’t apologize to them, either.”
Jennifer knew she should let this go, but the rage and distress on Mark’s face was making her defend herself.
“And you. You’re so sure, are you? That she had nothing to apologize to you for? What is it they say? Once a cheater, always a cheater. Isn’t that it? She’d done it once, hadn’t she. Fucked someone else, when she was married.” She drew out every syllable in the word, made it ugly and violent. “How can you be sure she didn’t do it to you, too? She might have been sleeping with other men the whole bloody time. Are you even certain Hannah is yours?”
“Why are you saying all this?”
“Maybe because someone needs to. All these secrets. All these months of deifying her. She was the perfect bloody woman, wasn’t she? No one could possibly hope to live up to her complete…marvelousness. The perfect wife, the perfect mother. Who could compete with that? Certainly not me.