Buddy

If walls could talk, humans would be far more careful with the secrets they divulge. So, I’m grateful they don’t realize how many ears are listening. If they did, we’d have nothing to discuss in their absence.

It used to be that way back when I was first constructed. I’m the wall dividing the master bedroom from master bathroom. My house came up over six months in the early 2000’s. Part of a housing development. It seemed that builders realized the real money was in buying up significant land for cheap, slapping shoddy materials together, and selling it in bits and pieces for large markups. I hate referring to myself as cheap, but here we call a spade a spade. Unlike the wall with the front door on the other side of the house. I hear her gossiping all the time. You’d think she was constructed from fire opal imported from Australia. I’m glad I can’t see her. Stuck up in all the wrong ways.

I’m not fond of the family that purchased us. There are six of them. Six. How does a family even grow to such a size? I was hoping for three or less. The man spends most of his time at a distance from me. I see him at night when he and the woman crawl into bed, turn their backs on each other. When he passes through my door to get ready for work in the morning. I see the woman a lot more. She seems to be named Mom, though the man calls her Chrystal. Must be a nickname. I’ve thought long and hard about a name for myself. I quite like the idea of having a name. But I don’t know many and the ones I do know don’t fit. The man’s name seems to be Babe. Or Dear.

Mom spends a lot of time with me. She passes in and out of my doorway. A towel in her hair. Fluffy slippers on her feet. Half dressed. Sometimes she sits on the bed for hours speaking into a device that she holds to her ear. The kids come through, roll their eyes. “Are you going to be done soon? You’re always on your phone.” She glares at them, covering the mouthpiece.

“Give me five minutes.” Then she adds defensively, “I am not always on my phone.”

For a long time, I thought she was speaking to Babe. The way she giggles and whispers. Divulges her dreams of grandeur and travel. “Oh, I would love to go to Bora Bora. We could lay out on the beach. You could rub me down with sunscreen. It would be like something out of a movie.”

More recently, I realized she wasn’t. One night, she hid on my other side, the bathroom fan on. The door locked. Babe had already come through and swopped his jeans for sweatpants. Tennis shoes for slippers. While she was in the bathroom, he sat down on his side of the bed and stared at the door. Straining his ears. Once, he crept up to the door and pressed the side of his face to it. She ran the sink facet full blast.

“Saturday?” She muttered quietly into the phone. “I don’t know if I can get away on the weekend. The kids will be in school all week. Why can’t we-?”

Babe chewed his lips. Folded and unfolded his arms. He paced across the room and back to the bathroom door. One of the children poked their head in the room. An older boy wearing an oversized black t-shirt and basketball shorts.

“Dad?”

Babe put his finger to his lips and followed the boy out of the room.

“I just don’t understand why we can’t Friday. Or Thursday.” Mom continued, squishing herself up pretzel style on top of the toilet seat. “Of course, I miss you.”

Babe came back in the room, hesitated, then leaned against the wall next to the door. I watched them both, enraptured.

“Fine. I’ll see what I can do.” She clambered to her feet. Shook out her limbs. Her phone back safely in her pocket. She shut off the sink and the bathroom fan. When she passed through me, she froze with her hand still on the doorknob. Stared at babe.

“You were in there a long time.”

She rolled her shoulders. Cocked a hip out to one side. “We’ve been married a long time. I think you know by now that women poop, too.”

He sucked in his bottom lip. “Then why were you running the sink?”

“Maybe because my husband was creeping on me and I didn’t want him to listen to my bodily functions?” Her faced glowed red.

He didn’t have a retort. Instead of words, he moved closer to her, holding out his hands, but never touching her. She took a step back. Cupped her elbows.

“What?”

“Can’t I want to touch my wife?”

Her brow furrowed. “You having a desire to isn’t the problem. Its your motive.”

He let his hands fall. “I want you.”

“That’s rich.”

She brushed past him and left the room. Babe sighed and chewed his lips more. He paced into the bathroom and gazed around. But there was nothing to see.

Mom went to bed first that night, almost as soon as the house quieted down, the children put away. She positioned her body pillow in the center of the bed, then rolled onto her side to face me. Babe came in a short while later, the glow of a hallway nightlight slanting into the room. He stared at the bed, shifting his weight back and forth between his feet. Finally, he grabbed his pillow and went back out, shutting the door silently behind him.

Mom sat up. She planted both feet on the floor, hair pineappled on top of her head. Shoulders hunched. She took long, slow breaths. Eventually, she stood and padded to the bedroom door. She cracked it and gazed down the hallway. After a minute, she closed the door once more and got back in bed. She didn’t sleep. By the time the moon was high in the sky, the light glinting in through the sheer curtains over the window, reflecting off my bright white surfaces, she’d lit up her phone.

As the sun rose in the morning, she moved from the bed back to the bathroom. She made a call once more, but this one had a very different tone.

“I can’t do it.” She whispered. The device pressurized into her face. “I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but I could see the way her shoulders hunched. The way the corners of her mouth dragged down as she fought against the draw of pain. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“It isn’t about him. I can’t do this to my children anymore.” She paused, listening intently. “He isn’t a bad man.” Longer pause. “I wasn’t lying. I do feel… so much for you. This isn’t about who I want more. Its about the babies I made a life for. They don’t deserve to go through hell.” She bit at her nails. “I would sacrifice everything for them.”

Babe entered the bedroom, his gait stiff. He glared at the closed bathroom door. Scrubbed a hand over his head.

“Please don’t call me anymore.” Mom murmured.

Babe marched up to the bathroom door and pounded his fist into it.

Mom jumped, covering the mouthpiece. “Wh-what?”

“You don’t have to hide in the bathroom. I know you’re cheating on me.” He crumpled in on himself as he said it, as if the words were more painful than the knowledge.

Mom hung up the phone. She scrolled through apps, clicking and clicking. “I’m not hiding. I can’t believe you think I’d do something like that.” Finished with her phone, she pocketed it and yanked open the bathroom door.

Babe lowered himself to the bed. His back slouched. His face a corkscrew of emotion. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.” Her hands found her hips. I couldn’t see her face from my angle.

“You are.”

“I think you want to believe that. So, you can spend years ignoring me. Pretending I don’t exist. That I don’t have needs, too. And then, when you’re ready to walk away, you can blame me for it. It isn’t because you checked out of our relationship after Anna was born, its because I’m an ungrateful, unfaithful whore.”

Babe found his anger then, too. He towered over Mom, rage boiling up inside of him. Do human ears smoke when their heads get too hot?

“This is how you’re going to play it? Like I’m some jackass looking for an easy way out?” He stomped closer to her. “I’ve got news for you. I work for a living. I bought this house. If I want out of this marriage, I can hire a divorce lawyer and be just fine on my own.”

“Then why don’t you?” She snapped back. “You think its easy staying home raising four kids while you’re gone physically all day and mentally all night? You want to pretend like because I don’t make money I don’t contribute at all?”

“You want to know why I don’t?” He loomed in her face.

“Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“Because I’ve loved you since the day we met. Yeah, in Kindergarten. You were wearing highlighter pink overalls and you know what I said to my mother when she dropped me off at school the next day? I pointed you out and I said ‘I’m going to marry her.’”

The back of her neck turned red. “You didn’t.”

“I sure as hell did.” He emphasized his statement with enigmatic nodding. “I loved you when you got braces in sixth grade and refused to smile because Billy Emerson started calling you Trash Mouth. I loved you in high school when you came to every single one of my basketball games with a mug of hot cocoa and a kiss. I loved you from the other side of the country while I was in college. Spending every moment wishing I’d chosen a different school so I could see you outside of breaks.”

“Dillon…”

“I loved you when I took you to the Grand Canyon for the weekend and proposed to you as the sun set over the sheer cliffsides. I loved you the night you woke me up, after your water had broken in our bed and the fluid soaked into my pajamas.” His voice grew horse. Tears dug channels down his cheeks. “I loved you in the minutes your heart stopped after they cut Anna out of you. And I held your hand and kissed your face and begged you to come back. I loved you when six months later, you rolled the car running to the grocery store for some taco shells because I didn’t want soft tortillas.”

“You loved me through all of that,” Her voice came out damp. “But after the storms all passed, you found the ability to stop.”

“No.” He choked out. “I’ve never stopped. Its you who checked out. Its you who pushed me away. You are the one that decided we were no longer worth fighting for.”

“How dare you put this all on me!” She squealed.

“Every time I’ve tried to touch you in the last six months, you’ve shot me down. I ask you if you want to watch a movie together, no. Play a game. No. Go out to eat. Do anything together. No.”

He stared at her bowing head. She didn’t argue.

“I thought, she just needs time. She’ll find her way back to me. It’s been a rough couple of years. But you haven’t. And me giving you the space you’ve demanded has only fueled your desire to get your needs met elsewhere.”

“I’m not having an affair.”

“Then why did I see you having lunch with someone else last week? Why wasn’t your sister supposed to tell me you’d asked her to watch Anna?”

“She called you?”

“Of course, she did!” He roared, hands in his hair. “Apparently, she cares more about our relationship than you. I tracked your phone. I saw you.”

“I-I haven’t done anything wrong!”

Babe’s eyes squeezed shut. “Just stop the lies. Your caught.”

“I met someone, okay? I did. But I never did anything. We talked. We texted. We had lunch one time. We never touched.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s the truth. What’s the purpose in lying now?”

He sucked in his cheeks. “Are you in love with him?”

She sniffled. “I’m in love with the idea of being in love again. I’m in love with the idea of not being defined by what’s expected of me. House cleaner. Child raiser. Cook. Chauffer. I’m in love with the idea that someone else can see me for just me. And have that be enough.”

His hands gripped her biceps. “I didn’t marry you so you could keep house and raise children for me.”

“Maybe not, but that’s certainly what’s happened.” She whispered. “You go out to work every day and provide for us and that’s…” Her head bowed. “That’s great. I’m grateful. But when you come home, I’ve also been working all day. And you look at me like I’m a slow motion train wreck that you wish you didn’t have to see but can’t quite tear your eyes away from.”

Babe dragged her forward into his arms, a rainstorm passing over his face. Her body stiff in his arms. Arms by her sides. “I can’t even explain to you how… devastating it was to lose you. To watch you die while I held our new baby girl in my arms. How devastating it was to rush to the hospital and see you all bruised an broken after your car crash. I look at you and all I can think about is how broken my heart is at the thought of losing you. I can’t live without you.”

Her arms came up around him.

When they finally finished holding each other, Mom perched on the bed for an hour searching on her phone. Finally, she made a phone call and scheduled an appointment with something called a ‘Couples Therapist.’ That night, they went to bed at the same time. She wrapped her arms around her body pillow, but he curled up behind her. Their hands clasped.

The next morning, the monsters came in and jumped on top of them, shouting and cajoling. Mom and Babe made room for them under the blanket and put a cartoon on the television on their dresser. Neither of them watched. They gazed at each other.

“I love you.” Babe said, taking her hand once more around the squishy body of their youngest daughter between them.

She squeezed his hand. “I love you, too.” She whispered.

A while later, they left the room, their noise migrating to other parts of the house. The wall their bed is shoved up against let out a big sigh.

“Well, that was dramatic.” It said.

“Do you think they’ll stay together?”

“Partners for life. Just like you and me, buddy.”

Buddy. That had a nice ring to it.