His new wife asked me whether he had ever said anything cruel about the abortion. I almost laughed because I had spent twenty-six years believing that particular memory belonged only to me. She told me she had found an old recording while sorting through his things, and there was a part she couldn’t understand. She said he had always described himself as someone who had simply gone through a difficult time in his first marriage. Then she looked at me and asked, “Was he always that good at pretending nothing happened?”
I told her that the comment about the pill had happened eleven hours after the procedure. I told her I had been too exhausted to argue and too embarrassed to explain why the words had stayed with me. She listened quietly and then said she had heard him make similar comments about women who were “too emotional” or “too difficult,” always in a joking tone that gave him an escape if anyone objected. I realized she wasn’t asking because she wanted gossip. She was asking because she had begun recognizing something familiar in the man she had married.
Then she asked why I had stayed another four years. I told her that sometimes you don’t stay because you are happy; you stay because leaving requires admitting that the life you built isn’t what you thought it was. I said I had spent those years hoping the man I remembered from before the abortion would come back. She looked down and said she had spent nine years hoping for the same thing. That was when I understood why she had found me instead of asking someone else.
Before she left, she asked whether I regretted staying. I told her I regretted how long I had mistaken endurance for loyalty, but I didn’t regret surviving it in the only way I knew how at the time. She thanked me for telling her the truth and said she needed to hear it from someone who had known him before she did. I told her she didn’t owe me belief, anger, or even an explanation. She stood at the door for a moment and said, “I think I finally understand why he never wanted me to ask you anything.” Then she left, and I sat alone with a memory I had spent twenty-six years trying not to remember.
