Seven Years Waiting for a Fake Marriage novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Slippers
Elliot reaches the dormitory door after seven years and a little boy opens it; he lays the rejected requests and the divorce papers on the table, and the boy asks whether he is the man in his mother's drawer.
A boy in dinosaur socks opened the door and looked up at me.
He was about six.
"Mom!" he yelled over his shoulder. "There's a man here, and I don't know him!"
I stood on the mat with my bag on my shoulder and one hand pressed against my stomach.
It had taken me two days and three trains to get here.
For seven years every request I filed to visit this place had come back stamped Denied.
The one that finally got through had a tumor report stapled to it.
A woman's voice answered from deep inside the apartment, warm and a little distracted.
"Russ, can you see who it is? I'm in the middle of something. Tell them I'll be right out."
It was my wife's voice.
I had only ever heard it through a phone speaker, and never once that gentle.
A man came down the hall in his socks.
He saw me and stopped so fast that his glasses slid down his nose.
"Elliot," he said. "What are you doing here?"
I knew his face from the corner of the video calls.
Russ Tidwell, her research assistant, round and pleasant and gone pale.
"I'm tired, Russ," I said. "Can I come in and sit down?"
He pushed his own slippers toward me with his foot.
They were too big, but I put them on.
The living room smelled of toast and printer paper.
There were crayon drawings stuck to the refrigerator, and a child's rain boots by the radiator.
Russ took the boy's hand. "Come on, Sam. Mom has a visitor."
I looked at him, and he heard what he had said.
His mouth stayed open for a second.
I reached out and ruffled the boy's hair.
It stuck up at the back in two swirls, side by side, and my hand stayed there a moment longer than it should have.
"I'll take him to his room," Russ said. "Elliot, you two should talk."
"Come back afterward," I said. "This is about you too."
Lorna came out of the study with a folder against her chest.
She stopped in the doorway.
The folder slipped, and a few pages slid across the floor.
"You should have called," she said. "I'd have met your train."
Her hair was shorter than in the last video call, and her cheeks were burned brown by the sun.
I waited for her to say my name softly, the way she had said Russ's.
She didn't.
"That boy," I said.
"Sam is Russ's son." She said it quickly. "His mother left. The other kids teased him at school, so we let him call me Mom."
She moved toward the couch and kept her hands open and still.
"Russ and I are coworkers, Elliot. That's all we are."
I didn't answer her.
I thought about the male voice that cut in during our calls, and the striped pajamas hanging on a hook behind her chair.
I thought about every vacation she had cut short for an emergency.
I wasn't stupid.
I had spent seven years letting her think I didn't see it, because I wanted to be sure before I walked out.
Russ came back and sat down on the arm of the couch beside her, close.
That told me where I stood in this house.
"If you'd told me you were coming," Lorna said, and reached for my hand.
I moved it away.
Then I opened my bag and took out the folder I had carried across the country.
It held every request I had sent in seven years, with a red stamp on each.
Under Reason, each one said the same thing: Rejected by L. Kessinger.
I set it on the coffee table.
"I went to your supervisors myself," I said. "I wanted to know why my wife was never available."
"They told me you were the one who turned me down. Every time."
She looked at the stamps and then at the carpet.
"Elliot, those were critical phases. The project couldn't spare me."
"The project spared you for the sports day."
Her head came up.
I pointed at the framed photo under the television.
In it, Sam stood in a paper medal with Lorna kneeling beside him in a sun hat.
The date printed in the corner was March 7th.
"That week I was in the ICU," I said. "A truck hit my car. I called you from the bed."
"You told me you couldn't leave the project and that I should be strong."
Russ spoke up fast. "It was a critical week. She only took an hour for Sam."
I looked at the two of them, shoulder to shoulder, watching me like an intruder.
For seven years I had asked myself what I would say when I finally got here.
I had never once planned to be this calm.
I took two sheets out of my bag and laid them side by side on the table.
One was my diagnosis. The other was a divorce agreement, signed on my side.
"I have a tumor in my stomach," I said. "I'm not here for sympathy, and I'm not here to argue about the past."
"I'm here to end this."
Neither of them breathed.
So I put the pen on top of the papers and pushed them across the table to my wife.
Small footsteps came down the hall.
Sam stood in the doorway holding a glass of water in his left hand, carefully, with both eyes on the rim.
He crossed the carpet, set it down in front of me, and stepped back.
Then he looked at Lorna.
"Mom," he said, "is this the man from your drawer?"
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