William only nodded.
“God,” I said again, quietly. “My God.”
Then William said—he was sitting with his long legs out in front of him; his socks looked dirty and his feet were pointed outward—“Lucy, what scares me is the feeling of unreality I’ve had. It’s been five days and I just can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t real. But it is. And it scares me. I mean the sense of unreality scares me.” Then he said, “Go look in the bedrooms. All of Estelle’s clothes are gone, and most of Bridget’s, and Bridget’s furniture is all cleaned out. And the kitchen has only half the stuff left.” He turned his head to look up at me, and his eyes seemed almost dead.
He told me that he had felt waves of exhaustion these five days. He’d slept without dreaming, and he often slept twelve hours, rising only to go to the bathroom, and the fog of his fatigue would descend again. He said, “I never, ever saw this coming.”
I touched his shoulder. “Oh Pillie,” I said quietly. I looked around again. The vase was glass with colored glass shapes in it. “Oh dear God,” I said.
* * *
—
After many minutes, William turned and crossed his arms on my lap where I still sat on the couch and then put his head on his arms. I thought: I could die from this. I touched his head of full white hair.
“Is it true that I’m unreachable a lot?” He looked up from eyes that seemed smaller and were now red. “Do you think that’s true, Lucy?”
“I have no idea if you are any more unreachable than the rest of us,” I said, because it was the nicest thing I knew to say.
William got up and sat next to me on the couch. “If you don’t know, then who does?” He said this with what I thought was an attempt at humor.
“Nobody,” I said.
And he said, “Oh Lucy,” and he reached for my hand and we sat on the couch holding hands. Every so often he shook his head and whispered, “Jesus.”
* * *
—
Finally I said, “You have the money, Pill. Don’t stay here. Go to a nice hotel until you get this sorted out.”
And it was funny, but he said, “No, I don’t want to go to a hotel. This is my home.”
I say it was funny, because he called it his home. Of course it was his home. The man had lived here for years. He had eaten countless meals at those wooden tables with his family, he had showered here, read the news, watched television here. But I have still never felt that I had a home. Ever. Except for the one with William years and years ago. I have told you that before.
* * *
—
I stayed there for the afternoon. I went—because he asked me again to do so—and looked into his bedroom and also Bridget’s, and everything he had said was true. The blue quilt was a mess on their bed; she had not taken the quilt. There were dust bunnies on the floor of Bridget’s room, I suppose from beneath her bed, which had been taken. “Where is Bridget going to sleep when she comes over?” I asked William when I came back into the living room, and he looked surprised and said, “I haven’t thought of that. I guess I’ll have to get her another bed.”
“And a bureau,” I said. Then I said, “Go take a shower and let’s go out to eat.”
So he did that, and he looked better as he stepped back into the living room in a different—a clean—shirt, rubbing a towel over his white head of hair.
* * *
We spoke of many things that night at dinner. The restaurant was an old, comfortable-seeming place, and at that time of year we easily got a table and we sat toward the back, and we talked. But I felt terrible. I felt terrible for this man who used to be my husband. We talked a long time about Estelle and Bridget, and then a little bit about our girls; he asked that he be the one to tell Chrissy and Becka about Estelle leaving, and I said, Of course.
Then William said, holding a piece of bread, “Catherine had a kid before me,” and I said, “I know that.”
William told me how he had researched it—before this conference—and realized his mother must have become pregnant a few months after his father went to England and then to Germany. “So the kid,” William had done the math, had all the dates, “would have been about a year old. She would have been practically walking, Lucy, when my mother just strolled right out the door.” He looked at me then, and the pain on his face was estimable. It broke my heart, and somewhere I faintly understood that he must have felt that his mother had betrayed him as two of his wives had done.