Chapter One
I'd always lived a fairly blameless life. Up until the day
I left my husband and then ran away to Hollywood, I'd
hardly ever put a foot wrong. Not one that many people
knew about, anyway. So when, out of the blue, everything
just disintegrated like wet paper, I couldn't shake a
wormy suspicion that this was long overdue. All that clean
living simply isn't natural.
Of course, I didn't just wake up one morning and skip the
country, leaving my poor sleepy fool of a husband
wondering what that envelope on his pillow was. I'm making
it sound much more dramatic than it actually was, which is
strange because I never used to have a penchant for
dramatics. Or a penchant for words like "penchant," for
that matter.
But ever since the business with the rabbits, and possibly
even before that, things with Garv had been uncomfortable
and weird. Then we'd suffered a couple of what we'd chosen
to call "setbacks." But instead of making our marriage
stronger -- as always seemed to happen to the other
luckier setback souls who popped up in my mother's women's
magazines -- our particular brand of setbacks performed
exactly as advertised. They set us back. They wedged
themselves between myself and Garv and alienated us from
each other. Though he never said anything, I knew Garv
blamed me.
And that was okay, because I blamed me too.
His name is actually Paul Garvan, but when I first got to
know him we were both teenagers and nobody called anybody
by their proper names. "Micko" and "Macker" and "Toolser"
and "You big shithead" were some of the things our peers
wereknown as. He was Garv, it's all I've ever known him
as, and I only call him Paul when I'm extremely pissed off
at him. Likewise, my name is Margaret but he calls me
Maggie except when I borrow his car and scrape the side
against the pillar in the multistory parking garage.
(Something that occurs more regularly than you might
think.)
I was twenty-four and he was twenty-five when we got
married. He'd been my first boyfriend, as my poor mother
never tires of telling people. She reckons it demonstrates
what a nice girl I was, who never did any of that nasty
sleeping-around business. (The only one of her five
daughters who didn't, who could blame her for parading my
suspected virtue?) But what she conveniently omits to
mention when she's making her proud boast is that Garv
might have been my first boyfriend but he wasn't my only
one.
However.
We'd been married for nine years and it would be hard to
say exactly when I'd started to fantasize about it ending.
Not, let me tell you, because I wanted it to be over. But
because I thought that if I imagined the worst possible
scenario, it would somehow be insurance against its
actually happening. However, instead of insuring against
it, it conjured the whole bloody thing into existence.
Which just goes to show.
The end came with surprising suddenness. One minute my
marriage was a going concern -- even if I was doing
strange stuff, like drinking my contact lenses -- the next
minute it was entirely finito. Which caught me badly off
guard, as I'd always thought there was a regulation period
of crockery-throwing and name-calling before the white
flag could be waved. But everything caved in without a
single cross word being exchanged, and I simply wasn't
prepared for it.
God knows, I should have been. A few nights previously,
I'd woken in the darkness for a good worry. Something I
often did, usually fretting about work and money. You
know, the usual. Having too much of one and not enough of
the other. But recently -- probably longer than recently,
actually -- I'd been worrying about me and Garv instead.
Would things ever get better? Were they better already and
I just wasn't seeing it?
Most nights I didn't come to any conclusions and lapsed
back into an unreassured sleep. But this time I was
afflicted with sudden, unwelcome X-ray vision. I could see
straight through the padding of the daily routine, the
private language and the shared past, right into the heart
of me and Gary, into all that had happened over the last
while. Everything was stripped away and I had a horrible,
too-clear thought: We're in big trouble here.
It literally made me cold. All the little hairs on my skin
lifted and a chill settled somewhere between my ribs.
Terrified, I tried to cheer myself up by having a little
fret about the amount of work I'd have to do the following
day, but no dice. So then I reminded myself that my
parents were getting older and that I'd be the one who'd
have to take care of them, and tried to scare myself with
that instead.
After a while I went back to sleep, scratched my right arm
raw, ground my teeth with gusto, awoke to the familiar
sensation of a mouth coated with bits of grit, and carried
on as usual.
I was to remember that We're in big trouble here when it
transpired that we actually were.
On the evening in question, we were supposed to be going
out for dinner with Elaine and Liam, friends of Garvs. And
who knows, if Liam's new flat-screen television hadn't
fallen off the wall and onto his foot, breaking his big
toe in the process, so that I'd gone out instead of going
home, maybe Garv and I would never have split up?
The irony is, I was praying that Elaine and Liam would
cancel. The chances were good -- the last three times we
were supposed to meet, it hadn't happened. The first
time...