Just Breathe. Susan Wiggs
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“I need to know if you’re safe. Is he violent? Have you ever had an incident of domestic abuse?”
“Oh.” Sarah deflated against the back of the chair. “Oh, God, no. Nothing like that.” In truth, she felt as though a violent act had been committed against her, but it wasn’t the sort you could report to the police. “He was unfaithful.”
Birdie sent her a matter-of-fact look. “You should get tested, then.”
Sarah regarded her blankly, uncomprehendingly. Tested. Then it dawned on her. Tested for STDs. For HIV, even. Son of a bitch. “I, er, yes, of course. You’re right.” A cold ball of fear formed in her gut. The realization that he’d put her in physical danger added fresh horror to the betrayal. “Sorry. That didn’t occur to me until now. I still can’t believe Jack did this.”
“Jack.” Birdie opened the laptop on her desk. “I’m going to make some notes here, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. This is all new to me.”
“Take your time. So your husband’s legal name…?”
“John James Daly,” Sarah supplied. “I kept my maiden name after we married.”
“And that was…”
“We’ve been married five years as of last June—2003. I met him when I was in college—University of Chicago—and married him right after graduation.”
Birdie nodded. “The Bay Beacon ran a beautiful picture and did a little piece about it.”
Sarah was surprised Birdie had noticed the picture and remembered it, but perhaps that had more to do with the uneventfulness of small-town life than to Sarah’s importance. The twice-weekly local paper had always kept readers abreast of small matters—weddings and births, tides and the weather, roadwork and school sports. When she was in high school, Sarah had submitted some editorial cartoons to the Bay Beacon, but the paper’s editor had declared them too edgy and controversial. Ironically, her drawings had poked fun at big-city developers vying for the chance to build shopping malls and condos right next to America’s most pristine national seashore.
“I never saw the piece,” Sarah said. “We live—I mean, I lived—in Chicago.” She twisted the wedding set some more. “I wish I’d come back to visit more often than I did, but Jack never liked coming here, and time just seemed to slip by. I should have pushed harder. God, I feel like such a loser.”
“Let’s get one thing straight.” Birdie folded her hands on top of the desk.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t ever need to justify yourself to me. I’m not here to judge you or to hold you accountable or anything like that. I’m not going to criticize any choice you’ve made, insult you or divulge details about your personal life to strangers.”
Sarah’s face burned with shame, because she knew exactly what Birdie was referring to. When Birdie was a senior in high school, she’d had a breast reduction. It was no secret; after all, she’d gone from having a triple D rack to wearing tank tops. Sarah had lampooned it in her underground comics. Why not poke fun at the meanest girl in the school? Now Sarah knotted her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry about that stupid high school comic book.”
“Don’t be. I thought it was funny.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, kind of. Back then, I tended to like anything that was about me. I was awful in high school, with or without the boobs. To be honest, I sort of liked the attention of being featured in the funny pages. It was a long time ago, Sarah. Let’s hope we’ve both moved on.”
“I’m still drawing,” Sarah admitted. “I have a syndicated comic strip, but I get my inspiration from my own life these days, not other people’s.”
“Good for you.” Birdie shook her head. “Some people spend their whole lives filled with regrets about stuff that went on in high school. I’ve always wondered why that is. It’s just four years. Four lousy years in a life that can span a century. Why do people get so fixated on those four little years?”
“Good question,” Sarah said quietly.
Birdie took a form from the printer on the credenza behind the desk. “This outlines the terms of our agreement. I want you to read it carefully and call me if you have any questions.”
The sheet was covered with dense legalese, and Sarah’s heart sank. The last thing she wanted to do was wade through this. But she was on her own now, and she had to look out for herself. She studied the first paragraph, and her eyes started to glaze over. “Do you have a Reader’s Digest version of this?”
“That’s as simple as it gets. Take all the time you need.” She waited while Sarah read over the document, seeing nothing questionable—other than the fact that this was going to cost a lot of money. She signed the agreement and dated it at the bottom. “Done,” she said.
“Done. So let’s get started. Mind if I record this interview?”
“I guess not. What are we going to talk about?”
“I need the whole story. Everything from the beginning.”
Sarah glanced at the old-fashioned clock on the wall. “Do you have other appointments this afternoon?”
“I have all the time you need.”
“He’s in Chicago,” she said. “Can I be here and, um, divorce him if he’s in Chicago?”
“Yes.”
Divorce him. It was the first time she’d actually said it aloud. The words came out of her yet she didn’t understand them. It sounded like a foreign phrase. She was mimicking random syllables in a strange tongue. Div Orsim. Divor Sim.
“Yes,” she repeated, “I do want a divorce.” Then she felt sick. “That’s like saying I want to disembowel myself. That’s how it feels right now.”
“I’m sorry,” Birdie said. “It’s never easy. But one thing I can tell you is that even though the loss hurts, it also creates new space in your life, new possibilities.”
Sarah fixed her gaze on a spot out the window, where the waters of Tomales Bay flowed past. “I never meant to stay in Chicago,” she said. “Never could get used to the god-awful weather there. After graduation, I planned to live in San Francisco or L.A., work for a paper while trying to get a comic strip into syndication.
“Then I met Jack.” She swallowed, took a deep breath. “His whole family is in the construction business. He got a contract from the university to build a new wing for the commercial-art studio, and I was on the student advisory committee, with the job of supplying input for the designers.”
She felt a smile turn her lips, but only briefly. “The students would feed them our pie-in-the-sky ideas and Jack would tell us why our plans wouldn’t work. I drew a series of satirical cartoons for the student paper about the situation. When Jack saw them, I thought he’d be furious. Instead, he asked me out.” She shut her eyes, wishing the memories were not so painful. But God, he’d been charming. Handsome and funny and kind. She had adored him from the start. Often, she’d wondered what he saw in her, but she didn’t dare ask. Maybe she should have asked. She opened her eyes and stared at her knotted-together fingers.
“The family welcomed me with open arms. They treated me like their newest daughter.” She still remembered her sense of wonder at the historic mansions in the shady neighborhood where Jack’s family had lived for generations. “You have to understand, this was huge for me. After losing my mother, my dad and brother and I unraveled. It just felt so good to be with a real family once again. Jack grew up in the same place and had friends he’d known from nursery school. So I just…stepped in to this ready-made world. It seemed effortless. I suppose I was in love with him from the beginning and was changing my plans