Morning Mist

My tea tasted like nothing. Frustrated, I nearly slammed my mug down and picked up the box of teabags I hadn’t yet put away. Lavender chamomile, expiration date: November 2024. It was only January… wait, what was the date? 

I pressed my fingers to my temples. I hoped I didn’t have Covid or something, being that I could not taste my tea or remember what day it was. Whatever, I thought. I don’t need to taste my tea. I just need it to calm me the hell down.

It had been two days. I couldn’t remember the date, but I knew it had been two whole days since I caught him with her, in his damn office. I had wanted to surprise him. He ended up being the one to surprise me.

I gripped my mug again, so tightly that my knuckles turned white. Upon taking another sip, I realized that not only could I not taste it, but it didn’t feel hot. It tasted like nothing, and now it felt like straight up nothing on my tongue, too. Was I having a stroke? This is what marriage does to you, I thought. It destroys your nervous system and sends you into disrepair. 

Thinking about my tea was barely helping keep the image of him betraying me at bay. I needed to do something else to distract me. I thought about calling Kerry, but my sister would be at the gym at that hour, or her book club, or having coffee at her next door neighbor’s kitchen table and chatting endlessly about nothing important. That was part of my problem. If Kerry’s husband had cheated on her, she would easily be able to toss him out of her life and still maintain a wide support system of women who would hold her up, dry her tears and reassure her that she was beautiful and no man deserved her anyway. They would call her husband a pig, bring her a casserole and bottles of wine as if someone had died and make sure she never felt alone, or ashamed, or at fault. It felt silly to even consider, because Mel would never, ever cheat on Kerry. Somehow, my sister had chosen all of the right things, and I had chosen all of the wrong things.

Kerry would probably be pregnant soon, and I would give birth to a messy, volatile divorce. I was immensely happy for my sister, but also envious of her ability to just take life by the reins and make it exactly what she had always wanted it to be. 

I walked over to the window and pressed my forehead against it. Thick fog crowded the backyard, making the morning look particularly gloomy. I hoped the cold glass would shock me to my senses, but it must have been too warm in the house, because I felt almost nothing at all.

I really had thought, years ago, that I was making all of the right choices. I was the sister who got married first, admittedly a little prematurely. We had felt so ready for it, though. It just made sense to get married and buy a house and spend the rest of our lives together. Sometimes I wished I could travel back in time, find my younger self, grab her by the shoulders and shake her into making different choices- choices that put herself first.

It wasn’t bad at first. I can still feel those years now, the early days of our marriage. The way we couldn’t keep our hands off of each other, the way we made love on every single surface in our new house, the way my entire universe revolved around him. I used to dress up in skirts and low cut blouses while he was at work, scrub the house clean, and make him a feast for dinner. The second he walked through the door I was always leaning against the table, watching him observe first the food, and then me.

Then came the miscarriage. With that, came a toll on my body. I miscarried so early that it didn’t really affect Emilio the way it affected me. Things began to turn. I could not get myself to change out of my sweatpants or wash my hair on some days. On the worst days, I ate nothing and put myself to bed before he even came home from work, leaving him nothing to eat either. Looking back, this was not my fault. Emilio was a grown man who was perfectly capable of feeding himself. At the time, he didn’t see it that way.

A sharp shudder coursed through my body, scattering my thoughts. I sighed and shuffled over to the smart thermostat. The digital screen lit up and displayed the temperature as 72 degrees. Shivering, I closed my eyes and let out an exasperated sigh. It had to be broken. It was freezing in the house. 

I looked around at the kitchen. That kitchen… it had been what truly made me fall in love with this house. The huge vent hood that sucked in hot air and disposed of it outside, the marble island in the middle of the room, and the walk-in pantry were of utmost convenience. My true adoration was for the window nook in the back of the kitchen, where I spent almost every morning curled up against the deep blue pillows with a mug of coffee or tea, gazing out into our yard. In the event of divorce, I was most likely going to lose my kitchen. He would probably move his new girl into my home. My stomach churned like heavy, wet clothes in the washing machine.

It wasn’t that I was trying to avoid divorce. Finding him in his office with one of his students was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say. I tried to hold on for so long, with a white-knuckle grip, but there is only so much you can take. After the miscarriage, I remember lying in my bed wearing a tattered t-shirt, crying into my unwashed sheets after he had told me that I made him feel much worse than he already did. “It’s like being married to a dead person,” he’d told me after I refused to get up to make something to eat. “You’re like a fucking corpse.”

Back then, leaving him did not cross my mind. I was instead terrified that he would leave me. With each gut-heaving sob, I tried to will myself into getting better so that he would want me again.

Now, I wanted so badly to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. It was as if my eyes were so tired from all of the tears and everything I had seen that they had just decided to be done.

The worst part of it all was that when I had opened the door to his office, a box of our favorite apple cider donuts cradled in my arm, I had met his student’s gaze first. They stopped what they were doing, and I could feel his shock before even looking at him, but she had smiled. She actually smiled at me, that bare chested, barely-of-age graduate student on my husband’s office couch.

That was the image I could not shake from my mind. That, and the realization that Emilio seemed to be more inconvenienced by my reaction than panicked or remorseful that I had discovered what he’d done. You should have locked the door, I wanted to say to him. Then I wouldn’t have had to witness him with a student on the same burgundy colored couch that I used to lay on in his early teaching days, twining my legs against the leather and trying to distract him from the papers he would be grading.

That was the very image burned into my brain the day after I had found them, when I stood across from him in the kitchen, gripping the edge of the island counter top. “I will tell the dean,” I hissed at him. “I’m going to tell everyone at that godforsaken school what you have done, and with exactly whom.”

He started to plead with me, and I was so overwhelmed with the responses that flooded my mind that I just tried to walk past him towards the stairs.

“Liana,” he’d said, reaching out and grabbing my wrist with such force I worried he might break it. “You really, really do not want to do this.”

I looked up into his garden-green eyes, the eyes that I had known and loved for so long. Those eyes had seen every inch of me, inside and out. For only a second, I wanted to melt into his chest and sob, begging him to fix this.

Then I had thought of that girl, crying in her bed after her miscarriage, thinking she wasn’t enough for the one person she loved most in the world. 

“Let go of me,” I said slowly, holding his piercing gaze as I pulled against his grip. His eyes were so familiar, but I had never seen that look in them before. It was a look of pure rage, or maybe disgust.

He had dropped my wrist. And then… had he left? Maybe I’d left first.

A sudden noise sent my thoughts scattering again. I looked up and could see the front door knob turning from the kitchen. My heart skipped at the thought of Emilio walking through the door. I couldn’t remember how our argument had ended the day before. What was I going to say now?

I braced myself for his heavy, angry presence. When the door swung open, I exhaled in relief. It wasn’t Emilio. It was my sister.

“Kerry,” I gasped thankfully, moving around the island and towards her. 

Kerry walked right towards me too, but she didn’t meet my gaze. She walked right past me, to the window nook. I watched as she pressed her hand to the window and stared out into the mist for a moment.

“Kerry,” I said again, joining her at the window. I reached out to touch her shoulder, but she felt strange beneath my hand. 

My sister turned around, and I saw that her eyes were red-rimmed and wet with tears. Her sweet face puckered the way it did when she cried, making it look like she’d tasted something sour. She still didn’t look at me. She looked up at the ceiling.

“Liana,” she said shakily. “Liana, if you can hear me, please know that I’m sorry.”

“What?” I tried to make her turn towards me, but she was as heavy as stone.

She sobbed once, loudly. I’d never heard her cry that way before. “And I miss you. I will always miss you.”

I stepped back, feeling even icier than before.

As my sister collapsed and wailed, I suddenly remembered. I remembered how my argument with Emilio had ended the day before.

I remembered what he had done.