Day One
At seven p.m., Kathleen Held was in a taxi heading home from JFK to Greenchester, a full three hours earlier than originally scheduled.
It had worked out so perfectly, she felt almost giddy. She’d been able to switch to a nonstop flight from LA, which meant: (A) not having to change planes in Chicago—so, a 50 percent lower chance of dying in a fiery crash, or so she reasoned; and (B) that she’d get to enjoy a whole quiet evening at home, alone. After five days with her sister’s family, listening to Margo drone on about the value of alternate nostril breathing and being forced by Nick to sniff and describe the various strains of genetically engineered cannabis his company grew (Pot! They all smelled like pot!), she was starving for solitude.
Her daughter, Aggie, was staying in LA for a few more days before school started—yet another forced attempt at cousin-to-cousin bonding. Margo’s kids might as well have been a different species from Aggie, all long limbed, sun bronzed, and aggressively outdoorsy. But Aggie, sweet soul that she was, always went gamely along with whatever vigorous outings were planned.
Bill, meanwhile, would have just left for the large and extremely important campaign fundraiser he was attending that night at a country club in Scarsdale. Had Kathleen switched to an even earlier flight—which, in fact, she could have—he would have tried to convince her to go to said extremely important fundraiser with him. And it would inevitably have led to another one of the silent, simmering nonarguments they’d had so many of since he’d begun his US Senate campaign eight months before.
Tonight, thank god, there would be none of that. No simmering, no guilt. No having to stuff her soft middle-aged midsection into shapewear and make small talk with smug limousine liberals. Instead, just an easy, sleepy reunion when Bill came home—the kind where the light would be off and she might even be asleep but would wake up at the sound of the bedroom door opening. She wouldn’t mind. She liked listening in the dark as he undressed: the clink of belt buckle, the whoosh of cloth, a muttered curse if he stubbed his toe. When he crawled into bed, she would whisper a “Hi,” and he would whisper a “Hi” back. Then he would roll toward her, kiss her cheek, and slide his arm over her belly, where it would stay all night, heavy and warm and familiar.
She just wished their bedtime reunions weren’t the only times things felt right between them anymore—when she didn’t feel like she was being squashed into a corner by Bill’s glorious career.
Maybe, she told herself, as she watched streetlights whip past along the Van Wyck Expressway, she needed to make sure that Bill knew, even if the rest of the world didn’t, that she was more than just a supporting character in his story. She would start as soon as he got home tonight. Maybe she’d even wait up for him. Yes, she would. With that small gesture of engagement, she could begin the work of nudging the balance between them back into a better, healthier place.
In the meantime, though, the evening was hers.
By the time the taxi turned onto her street, she had started picturing where she’d be in a matter of minutes: sitting on the three-season porch in a fresh change of clothes (she imagined some loose, breezy linen ensemble that she didn’t actually own), having a glass of white wine, catching up on her New Yorkers, ignoring the dog.
Instead, she came home to smoke billowing out of the garage.
“That doesn’t look so good,” the taxi driver said.
Kathleen bolted out of the car. The driver was close behind her.
“Is anybody in the house?” he asked.
“No—I mean yes! Nugget. Shit.”
“Nugget shit?”
“Nugget, our dog,” said Kathleen. “He’s in there.”
She started toward the house, but the driver flung his arm in front of her chest. “Don’t you go in there, ma’am. You call 911. I’ll go get your dog. My twin brother’s a firefighter.”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“You want your dog to die of smoke inhalation? What does he look like?”
“He looks like a dog,” said Kathleen. “He’s the only one in there. But the house doesn’t look like it’s on fire. I can really just—”
“Big dog? Small dog?”
“A Yorkshire terrier. Small. With a missing eye. But—”
“Small one-eyed dog. Got it. Give me your keys.”
She handed him the keys, just to get rid of him, and called 911. When she got off the phone with the dispatcher, she moved a few paces over the lawn toward the garage. The smoke was thicker than it had been seconds before, and there were now tendrils of flame creeping out from under the roof. The left-hand garage door was open, and Kathleen saw that the source of the blaze was Bill’s 1969 Dodge Charger, which he’d bought on a whim the year before. It was completely engulfed in flames. In spite of herself, Kathleen felt a flare of triumph. She’d told him repeatedly it was a deathtrap. She’d been referring to its lack of three-point seat belts and airbags, but the fact that it was now on fire was not altogether surprising to her.
Still, poor Bill was going to be heartbroken. She dialed his number and was waiting for him to pick up when suddenly there he was, emerging from the garage, stumbling and coughing, a spent fire extinguisher in his hands, wearing nothing but a half-unbuttoned white dress shirt and boxer shorts.
“Bill, Jesus!” She ran toward him. “What’s happening? Are you okay?”
He staggered forward a few more steps, then tossed the fire extinguisher aside, fell to his hands and knees, hacking and coughing, and vomited onto the grass. Kathleen knelt beside him and rubbed his back. After a few final mucus-drenched coughs, he looked at her. “I’m sorry, Kath,” he croaked.
“Sorry for what? What happened?”
In the distance, there was the wail of sirens.
“Shit,” Bill said, and commenced coughing again.
“I got him! All good!” The taxi driver was coming down the front walk, Nugget a small hairy lump in his arms. “Hey!” He pointed to Bill. “You’re that guy running for president. I saw you on the news.”
“Senate,” Bill managed to gasp.
The driver grinned. “Sure, that’s where it starts.” He handed Nugget to Kathleen, nearly knocking her to the ground, then pulled his phone out of his pocket and crouched next to Bill to snap a selfie.
“Delete that!” Bill yelled, his voice suddenly strong and clear.
“Don’t worry,” said the driver, standing back up. “I won’t show it to anyone. Just my wife.”
“Please, delete,” Bill said before he was wracked by another coughing fit.
An ambulance and a fire engine were pulling into the driveway now.
“All right, all right.” The driver tapped at his phone in a not entirely convincing way. “I guess you being in your underwear and everything.”
For the first time, it occurred to Kathleen to wonder: Why wasBill in his underwear? The Nantucket Reds, she saw now—an inside joke going back to when they were first dating and had gone to Nantucket for his sister’s wedding, at his parents’ enormous summer home. The day before the wedding, they’d gone into a shop that was entirely devoted to clothing in that simpering, stupid, milky tomato soup color. Kathleen, relatively new to the East Coast at the time, had told Bill she couldn’t believe men actually wore it. He bought a pair of boxer shorts on the spot to prove that they did. She had bought him a pair every Christmas since, to the point where it wasn’t quite a joke anymore.
“Bill,” she said now, “why are you— Were you in the middle of getting dressed? In the car?”
He turned his head toward her, and the look in his eyes was one of utter defeat. “I’m so sorry, Kath,” he rasped. “She’s not…She just…”
Kathleen felt the blood drain from her limbs. Please let him be referring to the car, she thought. But Bill was not the kind of man who referred to cars or boats or any other mode of transportation as she. She wouldn’t have married him if he were.
He started coughing again, and this time it sounded decidedly fake.
Kathleen stood and turned slowly around. Atop the low wall on the other side of the driveway was a woman in a disheveled blue cocktail dress, barefoot, slumped over on her side, her face partially obscured by the low-hanging branches of a rhododendron. A pair of hot-pink panties dangled from her left ankle.
“Uh-oh,” said the driver.
“Who…is”—Kathleen could barely force the words from her throat—“that?”
Bill did not reply.
“Is she dead?” the driver eventually said.
“She drank too much,” said Bill.
“I don’t know,” said the driver. “She looks pretty dead.”
“Excuse me,” Kathleen said, a scrap of breath having returned to her lungs, “could you give us some space, please?” She turned and thrust Nugget into the driver’s arms. “Keep him if you want.”
“Nah, I’m not really a dog person. And the missing-eye thing…”
“You can’t keep him,” said Bill. “Just go away.”
The driver shrugged and ambled down the lawn.
“Who is that?” Kathleen asked Bill again. She couldn’t bring herself to say she. It would confirm the fact that there was, indeed, a she in their yard. A she in their life.
But before Bill could answer, or take his fake coughing up a notch, two EMTs appeared, one man and one woman, and clapped an oxygen mask to his face.
Kathleen turned away. Across the driveway, the that in the dress was also being attended to by an EMT. Kathleen recognized her now: one of a bevy of twentysomething women who worked on Bill’s campaign. The one with an impossibly small waist; an incongruously bulbous, perfect ass; and huge teardrop-shaped eyes fringed with antennae-like eyelashes. She looked not unlike a cartoon ant—something Kathleen herself had pointed out to Bill. In their bed, no less. Had his laughter been strained or forced? Not that she recalled. All she remembered was that it was one of those intimate moments of connection they’d had far too few of since his campaign had begun.
And no wonder: he was fucking the ant woman. A woman half his age who was technically his employee. If he was going to do this, did he have to be such a goddamned cliché about it? Kathleen had never felt so small. So foolish. So raw and exposed—as if her very skin had been stripped away.
She felt an intense need to hold on to something. Even Nugget, maybe. But the taxi driver was down at the edge of the street now, still holding the dog, talking with the small crowd of neighbors that had assembled.
The firefighters were deluging the garage with water, and the EMT in the driveway had wrapped a blanket around the woman in the blue dress and was leading her away. She was crying hysterically. Bill, meanwhile, was arguing with his own EMTs, who were trying to convince him he should come to the hospital for monitoring.
“A man your age…” the woman EMT said.
“A man my age?” Bill practically whimpered. “I’m only forty-nine.”
The EMTs exchanged a look.
“You should go to the hospital,” Kathleen said. The last thing she wanted was to be alone with him in their house. Although the thought of him being in the ambulance with the ant woman wasn’t much better. The thought of anything hurt—sent her heart smashing into a brick wall. How could this be happening?
Bill shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s just a little smoke.” He swallowed back a cough and then, absurdly, looked at Kathleen and mouthed I love you.
Kathleen felt the sudden violent urge to be as far from him as possible. “I’m going to get Nugget.”
She started down the lawn to where the taxi driver was holding up Nugget’s paw, making him wave at a neighbor’s cellphone camera. She hadn’t gotten more than a few steps when the female EMT caught up to her.
“Hey, ma’am?” the EMT said softly. She touched her palm to Kathleen’s shoulder, and for a second Kathleen thought perhaps she was going to try to comfort her.
“It’s okay, I’m fine,” Kathleen said, though in fact, she was suddenly on the edge of tears, just from that gentle touch. (Would it be strange if she hugged the EMT? Yes, it would.)
“You just had a little, um…leak,” the EMT said. She shrugged off her jacket and tied it around Kathleen’s waist.
“A leak?”
“The fire chief will want to give the all clear before he lets you into the house, but I think you could sneak around the back door and change if you wanted. I’ll cover for you.”
“What do you—?”
“You’re clear.” She turned Kathleen toward the house and gave her a little shove. “Go!”
It wasn’t until she was rounding the back corner of the house that Kathleen realized, with a growing sense of dread, what had probably happened: In her haste to get home after her flight landed, she hadn’t stopped to use the bathroom at JFK. And therefore, she hadn’t changed the tampon she’d been wearing since she’d left LA—the weird, flimsy, organic hemp, made-by-women-in-Malawi tampon she’d had to borrow from her sister when her period showed up four days early with a vengeance, the way it so often did of late. Except, of course, when it didn’t show up at all. (What a joy it was to be forty-seven.)
Inside the house, she flung off the EMT’s jacket and raced to the bathroom off the kitchen, where she climbed up onto the toilet and peered over her shoulder to see herself in the mirror. And there it was: on the very bottom of the seat of her pale green capris was a circle of dark, ugly blood the size of a saucer.
She sat down on the toilet and sobbed.
Day Two
Kathleen woke up the next morning with her pajama top soaked in sweat, smelling like a foot. As with her periods, there was no predicting when her body would decide to release the valves on whatever hormones controlled her sweat glands, drenching her in her sleep.
Sitting up, seeing Bill’s side of the bed empty, the linens flat, she was slapped with the memory of what had happened: Fire. Boxers. Floozy. Blood. Her life as she’d known it gone, never to return. Her husband was a cheater. She was a perimenopausal, middle-aged fool. Their daughter’s tender heart would be shattered. Everything would change.
She closed her eyes and laid her forearm across her face to block out the light.
She couldn’t believe this was happening.
But no; no, the pathetic truth was, she could. The fear that Bill might cheat—though not necessarily in this strange and dramatic a fashion—had been quietly growing, tumorlike, inside her for the past several years. Ever since he had first gotten involved in politics, first on the Greenchester board of trustees and then the state assembly, where he was currently in his third term, his energy and charisma had ratcheted steadily upward. People started telling him he was a born politician. (“Please, public servant,” he’d joke.) And it was true. It amazed Kathleen, how he seemed genuinely interested in and sometimes even enraptured by everyone he spoke with, whether it was an octogenarian ranting about the Deep State controlling his insulin levels via satellite or a PTA mom in Larchmont ranting about GMO foods in the cafeteria. Even more amazing was his earnest determination to actually solve the problems people brought to him. (With the exception of the Deep State–related ones.)
But as Bill grew more comfortable in his politician’s skin, the way women reacted to him changed. Kathleen saw it happening: the way they looked at him, how they angled themselves when they spoke to him—canting a hip, dipping a chin, thrusting a breast or two. And she saw the way he leaned into it, even when she was right there beside him. When he held his hand to the small of her back, as he sometimes did when they were at one event or another, she’d increasingly had the feeling that he was doing it not only to reassure her that he was still hers but to remind himself.
But, fine, dammit, if she was really, really honest with herself, the fact was that from the moment she and Bill had started dating, she’d harbored a quiet, low-grade worry that someday he would wake up and decide he deserved someone more attractive and exciting than her. For the first ten years of her adult life, she was the nice-enough-looking one the wingman gamely bought a drink for and chatted with while his buddy flirted with the hot one. The one that men cautiously took to lunch for their first date, instead of dinner. But then along came this man, seated next to her at her college roommate’s wedding, a law school classmate of the groom, with a strong jaw, kind eyes, and an endearingly toothy grin. He was smart and charming and quick to laugh, and he was, for some reason, captivated by her.
At their own wedding two years later, Bill had said that he loved Kathleen’s intelligence and sense of humor and the way she kept him grounded. She said she loved his idealism and boundless enthusiasm. What she didn’t say was that she also loved the very fact that he thought she—ordinary Kathleen Eleanor Anderson from Ohio, whose looks were a high seven on a good day, and who had never accomplished much of anything—was enough for him.
But obviously she no longer was. If she ever had been.
Was the ant woman the only one? It didn’t seem possible, given the opportunities Bill had for temptation, especially over the past eight months. He was away campaigning for days at a time, going to meetings and fundraisers and county fairs from Poughkeepsie to Buffalo. For all she knew—and, clearly, she knew next to nothing—he’d nailed a civic-minded carnie in every port. A horny liberal housewife at every whistle-stop.
And yet it wasn’t as if Kathleen could have forbidden him from running for office. When Bill told her he wanted to try for the soon-to-be-vacated New York US Senate seat, she hadn’t said what she really thought, which was: If you do this, Aggie and I will have to share you with even more people. Our slice of you will grow smaller. And already it is so much smaller than it used to be. Instead, she had put on her brave, benevolent, supportive-spouse smile and said, “I think if this is your dream, you have to do it.”
After all, he’d told her the exact same thing once, back when she had a passion of her own. Before she’d accepted the fact that she wasn’t nearly thick-skinned or resilient enough to hack it as a writer.
In college, she had managed to publish two short stories and a treacly sonnet in the school’s literary journal. As a senior, she’d applied for fellowships that would have allowed her to research and write the novel she had in mind, a retelling of the myth of Hecate, Greek goddess of crossroads, magic, and witchcraft, who had led Demeter to the underworld to rescue her daughter Persephone, a torch in each hand. She’d had visions of herself poring over thick volumes of classical scholarship in stately academic libraries and toiling away at her manuscript in the cottages of exclusive writers’ colonies. But nothing she applied for came through. (The committee was intrigued by your interest in hexagons, the least prestigious of the fellowships had said in its rejection note, but we regret that we are unable to fund your research at this time.)
Then there were the brief, devastating years of her creative writing MFA program, where she’d earned faint praise from her classmates (There’s some really nice stuff here!) and cryptic, dismissive comments from her professors (This is sturdy and well-constructed but ultimately slight. Several narrative junctions to admire, but the characters feel larval. Best of luck.).
After limping her way to graduation, she didn’t write anything for several years, but then she’d met Bill, who had goaded her into sharing some of her grad school stories with him and encouraged her to submit them to journals. When two out of four of her stories finally found acceptances, her confidence had been buoyed adequately enough that she’d resumed working on her Hecate novel. And when she managed to land an agent for it, she’d cried happy tears, snot running down her face. Bill bought a bottle of champagne, and they had celebratory sex on the floor of the apartment they’d just moved into together.
But there would be no further celebration. The Hecate Chronicles was swiftly rejected by the first ten publishers Kathleen’s agent sent it to. When the agent suggested some revisions (including a more fun, Hecate-free title) and another round of submissions, Kathleen had said thanks but no thanks—every one of those rejections had felt like a pencil to the eyeball—and consigned the novel to the proverbial drawer.
Sometimes she thought of it and felt a pang of regret. Should she have persevered? Believed in herself more fiercely? She admired people who managed to push through rejection and defeat and keep on going. People like Bill. But whatever thick, fibrous stuff he and others like him were made of, she was made of something weaker.
There was a quiet knock at the bedroom door.
“Kath, you awake? Can I come in?” Bill had slept in his study, presumably. The night before, when the fire marshal told them it was safe to go back in the house, Kathleen had simply gone up to their bedroom and locked the door. When Bill had knocked, she’d told him to go away. She didn’t specify where.
She told him the same thing now.
“I made you a cappuccino,” he said. “At least let me give it to you.”
“Dammit, Bill!” He knew there was no way she would be able to resist one of his cappuccinos. She, herself, was scared to death of the espresso machine—always had the feeling it might start hipster-splaining at her if she made an amateur move that would detract from the awesomeness of her beverage.
Bill shuffled in. He was barefoot, wearing clothes he must have scavenged from the laundry room—a pair of athletic pants and an old 5K T-shirt. Kathleen winced. Seeing him looking so soft and familiar, so hers, she felt an instinctive urge to go to him, bury her face in his neck, and let him comfort her. But you couldn’t have the person who betrayed you comfort you for having betrayed you. And the sadness of that, twisted up with the fury she felt, was nearly unbearable.
“You smell like smoke,” she said, and took the cappuccino from him.
Bill sat on the end of the bed. “Yeah.” He kept his eyes on his hands, folded on his lap. The glint of his wedding band was a fist to her gut. “They’re going to have to demo the garage. I’m sorry. The Honda is probably okay, but the bikes, unfortunately—”
“The garage? The bikes? Are you kidding? Fuck all that!”
Bill flinched. She rarely swore.
“Fuck the garage, and fuck you,” she went on. What an excellent word it was—a spiky little kick to the shins. She should say it more often.
“I never meant for anything to happen, I swear to god, Kath. Tish asked if I could give her a ride to the event, because her car was in the shop, and her fiancé”—he paused carefully here for this to sink in, as if the fact that the woman was cheating, too, canceled the whole thing out—“couldn’t drive her. But then I realized I’d forgotten my phone charger, so I stopped back here, and—”
God, he was a terrible liar. “No-bull Bill” he’d been dubbed with some carefully planted tweets by campaign volunteers. But she could practically hear the gears grinding in his brain. And Tish? That was the girl’s name? What was that even short for? Tisharella? Tissue?
“When’s the part where you take your pants off?” she asked.
“Well, they fell off actually, when I got out of the car. After it burst into flames. I guess the engine just overheated somehow and—”
“So your pants were undone.” Undone to reveal one of the pairs of Nantucket Reds that Kathleen had so carefully rolled up, tied in jute twine, and slipped into his Christmas stocking. Did it give him even a moment’s pause, knowing that these were the boxers he was wearing, that the ant woman would see? And if it had, what did it mean about Bill’s feelings for her, Kathleen, that he was able to ignore that pause and keep going? Had his love for her worn that thin?
“I didn’t mean for anything to happen,” Bill said again. “Especially now, with the campaign going on—”
Kathleen nearly spit out her cappuccino. “ ‘Especially with the campaign going on’?”
“That came out wrong. I just meant— Please. I love you so much.”
Kathleen felt the ache of tears and dug the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. Bill put a hand to her back. “Kath,” he said softly.
She jerked away. “Has it happened before?”
“No,” he said after a pause that was far too long. “Nothing like this.”
“Oh?” She laughed, a strangled sort of sound. “Something like something else?”
He sighed and stayed silent for a long time. Kathleen closed her eyes and waited.
“There was a kiss,” he finally said.
Of course there was.
“Once, about a year ago. I was drunk. It didn’t mean anything. And it’s not going to happen again, Kath. I swear on my life. I love you.”
“Stop. Saying. That.” She looked at him and tried to see the man she loved, whose life was so tightly interlaced with her own. But all she could see—all she let herself see, maybe, because it was ever so slightly less excruciating and infuriating—was an arrogant, duplicitous middle-aged man trying to save his own ass. “Go away. Please.”
“Fine.” Bill slowly stood and trudged toward the bathroom. “I’m just going to get my razor.”
A few seconds later he emerged, electric razor in hand, looking stricken. “What happened to your pants?”
Kathleen had forgotten that she’d left her underwear and bloodstained capris soaking in the sink. Wonderful. More humiliation. “What do you think happened?”
“Oh.” His mouth became very small, and he pinkened. He had always been weirdly, Waspily squeamish when it came to bodily functions. It was a quirk she normally found endearing. But not today. “I didn’t know you still got your period that…badly. I mean, I know things had started getting more irregular, but I thought maybe—”
“Please stop talking.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “But there’s just one thing. We need to be ready. In case the media finds out.”
Kathleen’s body flashed with panic. Fuck. She’d been so deeply mired in sorrow and anger for the past fourteen hours, it hadn’t even occurred to her: someone—an emergency worker, a neighbor—might squawk to the media about what they’d seen. And Bill’s affair wouldn’t just be their own family’s drama but everyone’s.
His campaign had gotten higher-than-normal coverage right from the start, owing to his opponent, Kurt Kyrgowski, aka Kürt Krÿer, former front man of Toxic Lord. Krÿer, sporting a grayer and marginally less ratty version of his hairstyle from the ’80s (BuzzFeed: “Is Kürt Krÿer wearing a rug? Look at these pics and vote!”) had won the Republican primary in a surprise upset, and suddenly the race was one of the most watched in the country. Krÿer was an anti–gun control, anti-immigration, Blue Lives Matter, born-again Christian (he said he deeply regretted the goat-blood rituals of his ’83 tour) and nobody expected him to actually win the general election in true-blue New York. But by reporting on him constantly, the media was doing its best to ensure that he might actually have a chance.
Now anything having to do with either Bill or Krÿer was national news. Most recently, it was the Wendy’s incident: someone had spotted Bill coming out of a Wendy’s with a vanilla Frosty, snapped a selfie with him, and posted it on Twitter, tagging Wendy’s, which led to an adorable, witty tweet from Wendy’s offering Bill a lifetime supply of free Frostys. This led to calls for a boycott of Wendy’s by Republicans, which resulted, predictably, in endless selfies of Democrats holding Frostys. This was promptly followed by a backlash from some environmentalists, who criticized Bill and his “hypocritical, faux liberal” supporters’ use of plastic straws and cup lids. At which point Wendy’s started running a thirty-second online commercial touting their plan to transition to 100 percent recyclable and compostable packaging by 2040. This did not satisfy the environmentalists in the least, but by then nobody was paying attention anymore because there’d been a mass shooting at a high school in Illinois. ...
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