Save Me

How could anyone know Owen Monahan like I do? His dark hair has been graying at his temples for years. His eyes are the same shape and silvery green color as his mother’s. His favorite candy is Snickers, and when I remember, I stock bags of the fun-size bars in our freezer. He is a lifelong Red Sox fan, and the ticket stub from his first game at Fenway, where Bruce Hurst pitched, has been in a frame on his dresser for as long as I’ve known him. He is afraid of spiders but not of blood scans, reduced white cell counts, or poking around a person’s body for tumors. I know his hands—the scar on his third knuckle (an oyster-shucking mishap), raggedy hangnails. I know that he doesn’t dance, even after several drinks. He uses a black office-supply binder clip instead of a money clip or wallet. He watches old comedies like Airplane! when he’s stressed. He worries that his father isn’t proud of him.

We have roots, a history.

“What do you mean, someone else?” I can taste the bile in the back of my throat. “What do you mean, Owen?” The room is spinning.

He shakes his head as if this isn’t going how he’d expected it to go. How did he expect it to go? “Let’s sit down,” he says.

I collapse into the left side of the sofa, my usual spot. Twenty minutes ago, I was emailing Annie, inviting her and Jack to dinner next week. Owen sits down next to me—right next to me, in the center of the couch—and I recoil as if he is a stranger and not the person I love more than anyone or anything on earth. He pulls back, giving me space.

“Tell me,” I say, my ears ringing. “Tell me what you mean.” I’m certain we can both hear my heart pounding.

As he starts to speak, tears well in my eyes and the room goes blurry.

“I don’t know how to say it, Daph,” he’s says. He won’t look at me. He’s talking into his lap. It’s all so clinical, the way that he reveals the details.

It happened in January. He met her at the hospital. She’s a social worker in his division.

“So right after Christmas, then?” I say, my voice rising with each word. “After we went up to my parents’ house and invited your parents to join us and the six of us sat around my mother’s dining room table, eating pie and talking about whether we should hire someone to tile the guest bathroom? I assume you’d met her, your…relationship had started?” My skin is tingling. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

“I-it’s not like that,” he stutters.

“What’s her name?” I say, barely able to catch my breath.

“Bridget.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long have you been seeing her?” I wail. My voice is shaking so much. My heart is beating in my ears.

“I’m not seeing her, Daphne. I just—”

“You just slept with her.” When the words come out of my mouth, the reality of what’s happened really hits me. I grab a handful of his sleeve and start shaking him. “Owen, how could you?” How is this possible? How is this happening? “Owen, how? How?”

“I know, Daphne, I know,” he says, his voice soft, as if it will cushion the blow. He circles his fingers around my wrists, attempting to calm me, and I snatch my hands away.

“You know?” I wail. “You don’t know how this feels! I can’t believe this!” I press my hands to my face, as if by not seeing him, I can make the whole thing go away. “How could you do this, Owen?”

“I’m so sorry.”

When I look up at him, he’s shaking his head like he’s the one who’s been hurt.

“And she knows about me? Your wife?” I’m sobbing. I use my sleeve to wipe my nose.

He rubs his hands over his mouth.

“Owen, answer me!”

“She knows about you,” he says through his fingers.

I can’t believe this. How? How is there a she? I don’t understand what this means, why he’s confessing it now, but I can’t bear another second of it. Not now.

“Get out,” I say. “I need you to leave the house right now.”

“Daphne, can we—”

“Go, Owen!” I say, fighting to keep my voice steady as I stand and point toward the door. “Get out now.”

For a long time after I hear his car reverse down our long gravel driveway, I just sit there on the couch. Surely this isn’t real. How could Owen—my Owen—cheat? Owen is not a cheater. He’s my husband, my best friend, the person who makes sure the doors are locked before we go to bed at night. He is upright, beloved by his patients and their families, the better one out of the two of us who rolls his eyes at me when I gossip. He is steady, solid, my north star, the thing I can always count on. There is no way that Owen would do this.

Sometime around midnight, I consider calling my mother. I’m sure she’s up watching Letterman as always, but this will kill her. Owen is the son she never had—she literally tells him that, squeezing his shoulders. When we visit, she bakes his favorite brownies and checks with us beforehand to find out what type of cereal is his current preference. She leaves him voicemails. You don’t need to call me back—I’m just calling to say hello! On the rare occasion when I vent to her about some argument we’re having, she’ll say, in her antiquated stand-by-your-man sort of way, “Oh, honey, Owen works so hard, cut him some slack.” As if being an internist at a cutting-edge medical practice is just something I do to pass the time until Owen gets home from the hospital. I suppose that’s easy to forget now, given Owen’s heroic cancer slaying. I suppose a lot of things are easy to forget, but not the events of this night.

I think about calling Lucy, my younger sister. I start to call Annie, my best friend. Instead, I stumble to the bathroom and I vomit, through the sobs, over and over again, because the only person who could make me feel better right now is my husband, and on so many levels, I don’t know where he is.

It is so unoriginal.

She’s twenty-six, ten years younger than me.

Bridget Batton. That’s her name. It’s sickening. It sounds like the name of a bobble-headed local TV weather girl. Not even—it sounds like the name of a bobble-headed local TV weather girl in the dumbed-down comedies that Owen loves. I wish that she was a weather girl, or a silly actress, or a department store perfume spritzer, or a professional cheerleader, or anything other than what she is, which is a social worker at the hospital who counsels the pediatric cancer patients whom Owen treats. You would think that someone whose career is based on compassion wouldn’t sleep with other women’s husbands, but I guess the Mother Teresa parallel only goes so far.

I held out all night from looking her up online, knowing how badly it would hurt me, but on my way into work this morning, as I was standing bleary-eyed at the coffee shop where I picked up an extra-strong espresso drink, I gave myself permission to do it. The second I came into the office, I sat down at my desk, still wearing my coat, and pulled up the Web page for Owen’s department. So that’s her, I thought, analyzing her orthodontically perfect smile, her high cheekbones, the long straight brown hair not so unlike my own. This is the woman who had sex with my husband.

The Google search was severely productive. Bridget Batton got her master’s in social work at Columbia University, which, according to the US News & World Report website, is one of the top-ranked programs in the country. Like Owen (and unlike me) she does triathlons, and her online race results show that she’s accustomed to placing in the top ten for her category (which is the impossibly young sounding 25–29 age group). She is originally from Austin, Texas. I have always secretly despised women from Texas because every single one I’ve ever met has had long, long hair and long, long legs and a teeny-tiny Barbie doll wardrobe. Bridget is not an exception. In a sorority photo I found online, she’s wearing a minidress and cowboy boots and actually pulling it off.

But that’s not the worst image. There’s another one of her, this one from a 2009 edition of a local New Jersey newspaper, and in it, she has her arm around a sweet-looking, bald thirteen-year-old boy. The article details the boy’s ongoing leukemia treatment and how Bridget, his counselor, helps him get through his thrice-weekly chemotherapy by reading Harry Potter with him, quizzing him before his Spanish tests, and even getting his favorite athlete, a receiver for the New York Giants, to surprise him at the hospital. The author of the article seems to be nominating her for sainthood, and reading it, I forget for a minute that the woman whom the boy’s mother declares is “a godsend, a lifesaver” is also the woman who my husband… I feel sick. How can a person like her do the thing that she’s done? How could Owen?

Without thinking, I pick up my phone and start to call him. I need him to tell me that this was an awful joke and that a marching band and a television camera are going to barrel into my office any minute now and reveal that this was all a prank and we’ve won a Caribbean vacation. His voicemail comes on—the generic message, nothing too personal, which is probably a good thing. Hearing his voice might kill me.

I glance at the clock—it’s 7:45. Is he at work? At a hotel? Curled up in bed, running a finger along her shoulder? But he said it was just one time. I press the button to end the call. What is there to say?

There’s a knock on my door—ba-dum-dum. Annie’s knock.

“Come in.” Phlegm catches in my voice as I say it.

“Good morning!” she sings, and then, “Oh, God.” She closes the door behind her.

I rub my fingertips under my eyes. I was able to pull on some work clothes and brush my teeth before I left home but that’s as far as I got. “I haven’t slept.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I can tell. What’s wrong?”

“Do you have a minute? My first patient’s not for another twenty.”

“Mine’s in five,” she says, checking her watch. “But it’s okay. What’s wrong?”

I take a deep breath. The tears start welling up before I can spit it out: “Owen cheated on me.”

Her hand goes to her chest. “What?”

I put my head in my hands, and the next thing I know, her arms are around me. She smells like cinnamon and talcum powder, like the good mother of three that she is.

“Some woman he works with,” I say, clutching her shoulders.

“Oh, Daphne,” she says. “Oh my God!” I can hear it—the immediate fury in her voice—and I know that it’s not just because I am one of her closest friends, and until thirty seconds ago, Owen was, too. A few months after Annie started working here, we were having a glass of wine together after work when she told me how her mother ran off with an old boyfriend when she was twelve. She has no tolerance for infidelity.

“I know.” I swallow hard but the tears keep rolling down my cheeks.

She reaches and plucks a tissue out of the box on my desk. “I mean—” She shakes her head. “Owen?”

“Apparently so.”

“I just can’t…”

“I know.” The tears keep coming. I swipe them away, quickly. “I can’t believe I’m still crying. I cried all night. I can’t stop.”

“I don’t understand this,” Annie says, shaking her head. “Just three weeks ago…” She points a thumb over her shoulder, as if gesturing back to the Saturday last month when the four of us went to dinner—she and Jack, me and Owen—and then back to their house for drinks afterward when they needed to relieve their sitter. It was the kind of perfectly uneventful, wonderful night that you can only have with good friends, sipping our drinks in our socks in their family room, reaching into the bowl of chocolate-covered almonds on the coffee table that Annie had improvised to serve for dessert. “I had the longest talk with him that night about all of us renting a place at the beach together this summer,” she says, shaking her head.

“He mentioned it on the way home, too,” I say. And then after we got home, we had sex in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. This was not like us lately. It was not married sex. It was—was it because of her? Was he thinking of her?