The Rest Will Come Read online

She wanted to kill him.

  “Morning,” he said cautiously.

  Emma had so much to say she might vomit actual words at his feet. Unfortunately, her mind no longer communicated with her voice; her tongue lay thick and useless behind her teeth, as if her pain forced her to forget how to speak.

  “Look, Em,” he started, looking down at his hands.

  He poured that familiar tone, that gentle ease into feigned remorse that had seduced her before all too easily. That had beguiled her the night after the bikini. Emma shook the depressive slack from her face and hardened into a look that forbid him to finish the lie.

  She knew now that they were all lies. Lies were his native tongue.

  He fell silent, not knowing what to do. The air heaved in the quiet, felt thick in Emma’s slow breaths.

  “You didn’t come home last night.” Her voice sounded foreign and unpracticed to her.

  “Em, I—”

  She glared at him again. “You knew I knew. You knew I knew about her. About Jessica. You knew I knew when you got off work. You knew I knew you would be with her.” She looked Justin dead in the eyes. “You really don’t give a fuck about me.”

  When she said it, it was the truest thing Emma had heard in a long time. He did not care about her. At all. He did not consider her as he recklessly lived his life. She was like furniture in their home, something to sit on or look at. Emma found clarity in that truth, soul-crushing, suicide-inducing poignancy.

  “You don’t give a fuck about me,” she said again, whispering desperately to herself.

  “Emma, I—p…”

  Emma lifted her hand to block his empty words. “Did you ever? Did you love me? Why did you even marry me? How many other women have there been? How many did you sleep with then come home and lay next to me?”

  The idea of even more adultery brought vomit into the back of her throat. She pursed her lips and doubled over, moaning chaotically.

  “No!” she said before he could even reply. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know.”

  She wrapped one arm around her heaving stomach and cradled her head in her other palm, wilting into a ball on the carpet. She did not care how she looked to him. She did not care how pathetic her sobs may have sounded echoing in his face and against the white walls. He did not want her anyway; she was never enough.

  Justin stood over her as she wept into the floor for too long. By the time he moved, Emma had forgotten he was there. He crouched down and placed a hand on her shaking back. His touch felt vile to her, and she writhed violently away, curling up against the entertainment center with her tear-stained cheeks bright red.

  “Don’t touch me. You had sex with her hours ago when you knew I would know. Don’t touch me with that hand.”

  Justin tossed up his arm and let out a sigh, dropping himself onto the coffee table behind him. “Emma, what do you want me to do?”

  Die.

  “I want you to be the man I married. I want you to be my husband. I want you to not lie to me about everything and go around cheating on me like I’m an idiot. I want to have the life we were going to have, the children we were going to have.”

  “That was the life you always wanted. That was always your plan.”

  “So this is my fault?”

  Justin rolled his lips in and turned away. “So what do you want to do? Counseling? Just end it?”

  Emma looked at him dumbfounded. He was trying to wrap this up, trying to expedite her pain because it made him uncomfortable. He was trying to get out there back to whatever life he had created without her.

  “Are you going to change?” Emma asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you going to want kids again?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  Emma let her mouth hang open a moment in surreal disbelief. “Then we’re done.”

  “Okay.” Justin popped up and almost clapped his hands to break the moment. “I’m just going to get out of here for a while. I imagine you don’t want to see me.”

  “Don’t you think we should maybe decide what we’re going to do?”

  “You said we’re ending things.”

  “Justin, we’re married. You don’t just end things. We have to get a divorce. We have to divide things. We have to figure all that out.”

  “Yeah, well, you know, whatever you want. We can do that later.”

  Justin hopped into his shoes, already moving toward the door. It must have been such a relief to him. He was free.

  He left Emma in a silent house, a prisoner of her grief.

  Chapter 6

  Emma could hear Ronnie giggling through her front door, and something about the sound increased the weight on her chest. Everything around her was so bright and so loud; the world itself was assaulting her. The streetlights shone down, slicing the dark and causing her to squint. The whoosh of passing cars and the edge of Ronnie’s muffled laugh abraded her ears. She wrapped her fingertips into the cloth of her hoodie and tied to curl into it, to disappear among the thin folds.

  Her eyes throbbed from so many unrelenting hours of crying. The lids were so raw that it hurt to blink. Her head felt heavy and depleted, her dehydrated brain weighting her skull. When she reached her hand to the door, her arm quivered in front of her.

  Sound and light poured over Emma like a wave when Ronnie opened the door. She recoiled and shrank away from it, attempting to step back into the shadows.

  “Emma?” Ronnie squinted then reached for her, pulling her into the abrasive light.

  Emma looked like a zombie. All the color had drained from her face, making her features appear gaunt and lifeless, drawing all the attention to her red and abused eyes. She had lost herself in one of Justin’s hoodies, though she did not know why she was wearing it. She had reached blindly into the closet and fled the empty house. From the mingling of shock and concern on Ronnie’s face, she must look as horrid as she felt.

  Ronnie dragged Emma through the door by her shoulders.

  “Emma,” Ronnie said, “what the hell happened?”

  Emma tried to find the words to articulate what had happened, the phrases to encapsulate the recent implosion of her entire life. Terrence sat on the couch behind Ronnie, a silent stun upon his features. Beer bottles and opened containers of Chinese delivery littered the coffee table.

  Emma had interrupted a date.

  “It’s over,” Emma mumbled before the wretched sobs began anew.

  Ronnie wrapped around Emma and did not say a word; she simply held her. From beneath Ronnie’s arms, Emma heard Terrence get up and gather a few things.

  “I’ll give you guys some time. Be home later,” he said to Ronnie, kissing her on the cheek on his way out.

  After the door closed behind him, Ronnie dragged Emma to the couch and flipped off the TV. She took Emma’s face in her hands, wiping the overflowing tears with her thumbs. Emma did not want to look her in the face. She did not want this to be happening; she did not want any of this to be real. She had spent the past hours since Justin vanished trying to convince herself it was not. Saying it again only made it feel all the more authentic.

  Ronnie repeated, “What happened?”

  Emma struggled to breathe through her tears, forcing the air out between thin, taut lips while she choked on the sob. She strained to swim above the pain, to grasp at a lifeboat of lucidity against the swirling tide in her mind.

  “H-he finally l-left his ph-phone,” Emma stuttered. “Forgot it completely when he left for work.”

  “Moron.”

  “Oh! He’s so much more stupid than that!” Anger exhumed her words from the fog, tugged her voice out from under the depression. “He saved the entire conversation with this bitch. From the bikini and before. Everything. Right there on his phone. Ronnie, she knew about me. They talked about me. They LOLed about me.”

  Ronnie sat up more rigidly, grew taller. “That bitch.”

  “Which one?”

  “Both of them.�
�

  “It gets worse.”

  “Fucking of course it does!”

  “So I confront him. You would have been proud. I didn’t cry, I didn’t beg him for answers. I told him I knew and to get home after work so we could deal with it.”

  “Yes! Good for you.”

  “He didn’t come home. He knew I knew about this girl. He knew I knew when he would get off work. He knew I would know he was with her, and he didn’t come home. He went and fucked her then came home and slept on the couch.”

  Ronnie tensed beside her even tighter, her face blooming in shades of blood. Emma knew this look well. This look usually ended in them getting kicked out of wherever they were at the time.

  “Then I fell apart,” Emma said.

  “Well, yeah! Jesus!”

  “I started blubbering and raving like a crazy person. All ‘you don’t give a fuck about me, you don’t love me, you never loved me.’ Falling down crying. Screaming at him. It was embarrassing.”

  “Who cares? What, do you need to save face in front of him? He deserved every minute of it.”

  “And more, but I don’t like him seeing how much he’s hurting me.”

  “Fair enough. Then what happened?”

  “Nothing,” Emma said. The sadness crept back into the edges of her sentences. “He didn’t care. Ronnie, he was relieved. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “Well of course, Em. He has been outside of your relationship for who knows how long? He’s already over it. He’s probably glad to not be hiding it anymore.”

  “It’s more than that. I don’t even recognize him anymore. In these few weeks, he is a completely different person, and I don’t know who is real—the guy I married or the guy now. I think the guy I married never really existed.”

  The tears started to squeeze out again at the thought of her huge lie of a life. Emma felt so impossibly stupid and oblivious. Ronnie said nothing, only rubbed her back.

  “I know, I know,” Emma said, burying her face in her hands. “You were right about him.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But you were thinking it.”

  “That is the last thing I was thinking right now.”

  “Either way, you were. He’s a complete piece of shit.”

  “That doesn’t make me happy. I never wanted to see him hurt you like this. Even to be right. And you know how much I love being right.”

  “Yes, it’s like a sickness.”

  “A sickness because I’m so good at it.”

  “Too soon,” Emma laughed through her sobs.

  Laughing felt strange yet distantly familiar. It hurt Emma’s cheeks to turn up, but the sliver of levity eased the weight for an instant.

  “When is the last time you ate?” Ronnie asked.

  “Um, maybe yesterday sometime.”

  “Oh no. No, no. You are eating now.”

  “Ronnie, no. I really don’t want to.”

  “Shut up.”

  Ronnie got up and marched into her small, understocked kitchen.

  The thought of food repulsed Emma. She could imagine the dry, ashy sludge in her mouth, rocking around between her lazy teeth, gagging her. She wanted no part of it. She did not want taste on her tongue, did not want the sensation of digestion in her gut. She wanted to starve away her feelings, waste away her body until she disappeared completely.

  However, Ronnie would not be contested. It would be pointless to argue.

  Emma’s phone sang from her purse on the floor. Ronnie reached down and snagged it.

  “It’s Noah,” Ronnie said, holding out the glowing phone.

  “No, I can’t talk to him while I’m like this.”

  “Emma, he’s your brother.”

  “I know he is, which is why I can’t. He’ll remember when our mother was like this after our parents’ divorce. I don’t want him to see that I became her.”

  “Talk to your brother.”

  “Later.”

  Ronnie dropped the phone back in the purse and headed to the kitchen.

  “You are not your mother just because Justin cheated on you.”

  “Aren’t I? Doesn’t that make me exactly my mother?”

  “I know it brings it all up, but plenty of women get cheated on. Guys are assholes.”

  “It wasn’t just that she got cheated on. He cheated on her with Mrs. Davies from down the street when her dumbass son Jeremy was constantly at our house. Everyone in the neighborhood knew. It was quite the scandal. My mother was humiliated. She cried all the time. You know, like me right now. She was so pissed and embarrassed she could not even deal. Like me right now.”

  “Oh ouch. And you had to watch all that.”

  “I remember her embarrassment. And Jeremy Davies was such a little asshole. I never realized why he was always over. He just was. Driving me crazy. Then when we all found out, he was at our house again taunting me.”

  You might as well just kiss me now, Emma, because we’re going to be family. Your dad is my daddy now. He doesn’t want your stupid mom anymore. He doesn’t want your ugly mom! She’s just a fat, dumb slut, and nobody will ever want her again.

  Emma heard Jeremy’s voice clearly in her head, the way his fatty cheeks muddled his words. The abrasive sound climbed out of her depression and deafened her. She shook her head until the room around her resurfaced.

  “We got in a fight,” Emma said.

  “You got into a fight? Emma? Emma got into a fight ever in her life?”

  “Well,” Emma hesitated on the memory as the focus in her eyes wavered, “I guess it wasn’t a fight. I hit him.”

  “Jeremy? Like, you punched him?”

  “We were playing in the basement and I hit him with a metal pipe that was down there.”

  “Emma! What?”

  “In the head. More than once.”

  “How is it that you’ve never told me about any of this? Not your mom’s humiliation, you assaulting a kid with a weapon.”

  “It’s embarrassing. And my mom put me in a lot of therapy after.”

  “I knew about the therapy. I just thought it was for the divorce. What happened to this kid?”

  “Noah came down before I could really hurt him. He went to the hospital, and that was even more drama, but he was fine.”

  “I’m at a loss here. I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Well, that is a miracle!”

  “Shut up.”

  “My little attack made things even worse for my mom. More drama and embarrassment. I think that’s why she immediately moved us to Denver and got all obsessed about finding a new husband and getting back to where she said she was supposed to be.”

  “Okay, let’s work on not letting that happen to you. You already live in Denver at least, and you definitely aren’t still assaulting people because Justin would have had that shit coming!”

  Emma snickered in spite of herself, and thought again of the fireplace poker.

  Wallowing on the couch, her head felt the slightest bit lighter not being in that vacant house, at having vomited all her pain, even her past, into Ronnie’s lap. The fading conversation had been the first time she had said anything coherent about how she was feeling since she had picked up Justin’s phone. Hearing external thoughts made it seem almost possible that she might still be sane.

  Almost.

  Her head still felt dreadfully heavy, so Emma leaned onto her elbows and juggled her skull between her palms, rocking, letting her fingertips sink into her cheek. She glanced over at the dormant flat screen TV. Had the television doubled in size? She furrowed her brow, then noticed a gaming system below, wires snaking out and pooling on the floor around it.

  Ronnie hated video games.

  Bewildered, Emma sat up a little straighter, lifted her weary head to survey the usually monotonously familiar space.

  Work boots and male sandals were stacked among Ronnie’s black sneakers.

  “Ronnie?”

  “Yeah, yeah, he
re I come.”

  Ronnie appeared carrying a plate, which she heaped with selections from the Chinese containers. Emma found the gag in her throat. Ronnie forced the plate into Emma’s lap.

  “Did you get a new TV?” Emma asked.

  “Um, not exactly.” Ronnie started gathering up the Chinese containers and moved away from Emma.

  “Ronnie, why do you have a gaming system? And boy shoes? Is Terrence living here?”

  “Maybe,” Ronnie said, her back still to Emma.

  “Ronnie! When did that happen?”

  Ronnie dropped the boxes in the refrigerator and turned back around.

  “Maybe a couple weeks ago.”

  “How could you not tell me that? This is huge, Ronnie! At one time you barely let them sleep over. How did this happen?”

  “Em, you had too much going on. I couldn’t tell you I was moving in with Terrence while you were dealing with Justin cheating on you and your marriage ending. It wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want you keeping things from me because my life is a mess.”

  “I wasn’t. I was just focusing on you first.”

  “Oh my God, Ronnie. You live with a boy.”

  “Eeew, I know.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “No!” Ronnie paused. “Maybe.”

  “Ronnie!”

  Emma had officially crossed into an alternative reality. A horrible and disorienting world where her marriage was a hollow lie and a failure and where Ronnie was having sex with one person and allowing him to stay in her house longer than twenty-four hours.

  “I say again, how did this happen?”

  “I don’t know really. We just sort of decided to not fuck anyone else.”

  “Which you also didn’t tell me about.”

  “His lease was up at his place, and somehow, it became him moving in here.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Awww, Ronnie. You’re growing up! I’m so happy for you.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. I can be happy for you and still be unhappy for myself at the same time.”

  “Fair enough. Now eat, woman.”

  Emma looked down at the piles of rice and noodles quivering in her unstable lap. She poked at a grain of rice. The texture felt vile against her skin. Ronnie leaned forward with a stare that said “EAT.” Emma sighed and brought the forkful to her lips. Merely the scent of the comingling ingredients made her stomach seize up. She took a deep breath and shoved the food between her teeth.