12 - Marriage Cluster
By SoulFire77
- 87 reads
THE INTERVIEW
12: Marriage Cluster
Q51. "When was the last time you and Linda laughed together?"
Dale opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. The question required him to search his memory, to sift through the recent past for a moment of shared joy. He reached for it—laughter, Linda's face lit up with amusement, the two of them connected by something funny.
The search took longer than it should have.
"I don't—" He frowned. "We laugh. We must laugh. But I can't—"
"Take your time."
He tried to think. The mornings were quiet now, careful. She made coffee; he pretended to read the news on his phone. The evenings were the same—dinner, dishes, the blue glow of the television filling the silence between them. When did they laugh? When did they do anything but orbit each other, two bodies in a shared space that had long since stopped feeling like home?
"There was a thing," he said slowly. "A few weeks ago. Something on TV—a commercial, I think. Something stupid. She laughed, and I laughed because she was laughing. But it wasn't—it wasn't us laughing together. It was just sound."
"Just sound."
"We used to laugh," Dale said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears—distant, like he was hearing himself from another room. "When we were young. When everything was new. She had this laugh that started in her belly and came out in these little hiccups, and I would say things just to hear it. I would do anything to hear that laugh."
"What happened to it?"
"Life happened. Work happened. We stopped being people who laughed and became people who managed things. Schedules. Finances. A daughter who needed things we didn't know how to give. The laughing stopped, and we didn't notice it stopping, and now—" He spread his hands. "Now I can't remember the last time she laughed like that. The real laugh. The one that came from somewhere deep."
"Do you miss it?"
"I miss everything." The words came out before he could stop them. "I miss who we were. I miss who I was when I was with her. I miss the life we were supposed to have, the one that got away from us while we were busy surviving."
Q52. "What happened to your marriage?"
"Nothing happened." Dale heard the defensiveness in his voice and tried to soften it. "That's the problem. Nothing dramatic, nothing you could point to. We just—drifted. Slowly, over years. The distance grew so gradually that we didn't see it until it was too wide to cross."
"When did the drifting start?"
"I don't know. Maybe it was always there. Maybe we were never as close as I thought we were." He considered the possibility, turning it over like a stone. "Or maybe it started when Melissa was born. When we stopped being a couple and became parents. When everything started being about her instead of about us."
"You resent your daughter for that?"
"No. God, no." The denial was immediate, visceral. "I don't resent her. I resent—" He stopped, searching for the truth. "I resent myself. For letting her become an excuse. For hiding behind fatherhood instead of doing the work of being a husband."
"What work did you avoid?"
"All of it. The talking. The listening. The being present when it was hard, when there wasn't an easy solution." He rubbed his eyes. The headache had settled into something duller, a constant pressure. "I was good at work problems. Give me a broken system, a failing process, a team that wasn't performing—I could fix that. But a wife who was lonely, a marriage that was dying by inches—I didn't know where to start. So I worked more. I stayed late. I made myself useful in the only way I knew how."
"And Linda?"
"Linda did what Linda always does. She adapted. She found ways to fill the spaces I left empty. Friends. Her job. Her own inner life that I wasn't part of. She built a world that didn't need me, because I'd taught her that I wouldn't be there."
Q53. "What does Linda not know about you?"
The question was dangerous. Dale could feel its edges, the places where an honest answer could cut.
"She doesn't know how scared I am." The words came out anyway, pulled from somewhere beneath his careful defenses. "Every day. She doesn't know that I wake up at 3 AM in a panic, calculating how long we can last on her salary alone. She doesn't know that I've thought about—"
He stopped.
"Thought about what, Dale?"
"Nothing." He shook his head. "It's not relevant."
"Everything is relevant." Ms. Vance's voice was gentle, insistent. "What have you thought about?"
The silence stretched. The room waited. Dale could feel the question pressing against him, demanding an answer he didn't want to give.
"I've thought about what would happen if I wasn't here," he said finally. "Not—not in a planning way. Not seriously. But the thoughts come, late at night, when everything is dark and quiet. I think about how much easier it would be for her. The life insurance. The mortgage paid off. No more dead weight to carry. She could start over. Find someone who—" His voice cracked. "Someone who deserves her."
"Does Linda know you think this way?"
"No. God, no. She'd—" He couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't imagine what Linda would do if she knew the shapes his thoughts took in the dark.
"Why haven't you told her?"
"Because it would break her. Because she'd worry. Because—" He took a breath. "Because I don't want to be the thing she has to fix. I've already taken so much from her. I can't take her peace of mind too."
Ms. Vance was still. Her pen rested on the legal pad. Her eyes held his with that patient, absorbing attention.
"That's a heavy secret to carry alone."
"They all are." Dale looked down at his hands. "The secrets we keep from the people we love. They're the heaviest things we carry."
Q54. "Describe your wedding day. What she wore. The flowers."
Dale closed his eyes and reached for it—the church on Elm Street, the summer heat, the woman walking toward him down the aisle. Linda at twenty-three. His whole life ahead of him. His whole life behind him now.
"She wore white," he said. "A simple dress—we couldn't afford anything fancy. Her mother had done something with the veil, added lace from her grandmother's dress. She carried—" He paused. "She carried roses. Pink roses. Or—" He hesitated. "Maybe they were white. I remember them being pink, but—"
"What else?"
"The church was small. We knew everyone there. My parents, her parents, cousins and friends from high school. Someone was playing the organ—'Here Comes the Bride,' the traditional one. And she came down the aisle, and I couldn't—I couldn't believe she was walking toward me. That she'd chosen me."
"What did her face look like?"
"She was—" He reached for it. Linda's face, framed by the veil, lit by the stained glass windows. Young and hopeful and terrified and beautiful. But the image was—it was there, he could sense it, but the details—
"She was smiling," he said. "She was always smiling then."
"What kind of smile?"
"The—the happy kind. The wedding kind." He opened his eyes. "I'm sorry. I know what she looked like. I just can't—I can't see it clearly right now."
"You described the roses as pink. Then you weren't sure. What do you see when you picture the bouquet?"
Dale tried. The bouquet, held in Linda's hands as she walked toward him. Pink roses. He'd said pink. But when he looked at the memory, really looked, the color kept shifting. Pink, white, something in between. The flowers themselves were blurring, becoming generic, becoming just an idea of flowers rather than the specific blooms his wife had carried on the most important day of their lives.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I don't know what color they were."
Q55. "Tell me about the scar on Linda's hand."
The question caught him off guard—a sudden specificity after the blurring of the wedding.
"How did you—" He stopped. He must have mentioned it. Somewhere in the hours of talking, he must have said something about Linda's hand. "It's on her left hand. Between the thumb and forefinger. A thin white line, about two inches long."
"How did she get it?"
"A kitchen accident. 1997. Melissa was two, had the flu, high fever, wouldn't stop crying. Linda was making soup—chicken noodle, from scratch, because Melissa wouldn't eat the canned kind—and she was exhausted. The knife slipped." He could see it, the memory unfolding. Linda at the counter, the knife in her hand, the sudden red bloom. "There was so much blood. I came running when she screamed. I thought—for a second I thought something had happened to Melissa."
"But it was Linda."
"It was Linda. I wrapped her hand in a dish towel and drove her to the ER while Melissa screamed in the back seat. Six stitches. She joked about it afterward—said she'd been wounded in the line of motherly duty."
"What did the soup taste like? The one she was making?"
"I don't—" Dale frowned. "I don't know. I don't think we ever finished it. We went to the hospital, and by the time we got back—" The memory was clear up to a point, and then it softened, blurred at the edges. "I don't remember what happened to the soup."
"But you remember the scar."
"I've touched that scar for almost thirty years. Every time I hold her hand, it's there. This little white line that says—" He stopped.
"That says what?"
"That she gave everything for us. Her body, her time, her—everything. That scar is a record. Of what she sacrificed while I was at work."
Ms. Vance made a note on her legal pad. The pen scratched against paper, a small sound in the quiet room.
And somewhere else—somewhere far away, in a doctor's office in Greensboro—a woman named Linda Kinney looked down at her left hand.
She turned it over, examining the webbing between thumb and forefinger. There was a scar there. A thin white line, about two inches long.
She couldn't remember how she'd gotten it.
Something about the kitchen, maybe. Something about—soup? But the specifics wouldn't come. Just a vague sense of pain, of urgency, of something that had mattered once and now was just a mark on her skin with no story attached.
She frowned, rubbed her thumb across the old wound. It meant something. She was sure it meant something.
But what?
A patient called her name from the waiting room, and she shook her head, dismissed the thought, and went back to work.
Q56. "What was your mother's voice like?"
The question came without warning, a hard pivot from the scar.
Dale reached for it—his mother's voice, the sound of her calling him for dinner, singing in the kitchen, saying his name. The voice that had been the first voice he'd ever known, the voice that had shaped his earliest understanding of love and safety and home.
The sound wasn't there.
"She had a—" He stopped. Tried again. "Her voice was—"
It was gone. The shape of it, the texture, the specific quality that had made it hers—gone. He could remember that she had a voice. He could remember that she'd used it. But the voice itself, the actual sound of it—
"I can't," he said. "I can't remember."
"That's okay."
"It's not okay." His own voice was rising, panic threading through it. "I just—I was just talking about her kitchen. The pot roast, the Sunday dinners. I could see it, smell it, feel it. But I can't—why can't I hear her?"
"Memory is unreliable, Dale. We've talked about this. The auditory fades faster than the visual. It's perfectly—"
"I could hear my father's voice this morning." He cut her off, something he wouldn't normally do. "When I was getting dressed. I could hear him in my head, clear as if he was standing next to me. And now—now I can barely remember—" He pressed his hands against his temples. "What's happening to me?"
"You're under stress. Your mind is—"
"This isn't stress." He looked at her, at her calm face, her patient eyes. "Something is wrong. Something is—" He gestured at the room, at the walls that seemed closer, at the clock still showing 3:47, at the water stain spreading across the ceiling like something growing. "Something is wrong in here."
Ms. Vance set down her pen. She folded her hands on the table in front of her, composed, unhurried.
"Dale," she said gently. "What do you think is happening?"
He opened his mouth to answer. To say: You're taking something from me. Every time I answer a question, something goes missing. The memories I describe are fading even as I describe them, and you know it, you're doing it, you're—
But the words wouldn't come. Because how could he say that? How could he accuse an HR representative of stealing his memories through interview questions? It was insane. It was paranoid. It was the kind of thing a man said when he was cracking under pressure, when eleven months of rejection had finally broken something inside him.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I'm tired. I'm sorry. I don't know what's happening to me."
"It's okay." Ms. Vance picked up her pen again. "We're almost done with this section. Just a few more questions about your marriage, and then we can move on."
The door was behind him. He could feel it there, patient and waiting. The door he'd come through. The door he could leave through.
Any time he wanted.
Q57. "What is the kindest thing Linda has ever done for you?"
Dale tried to think. There must be—there had to be hundreds of kind things, thousands, across thirty-one years of marriage. But when he reached for specifics, he found only impressions. She was kind. She had been kind to him. The specific acts of kindness blurred together into a general sense of warmth without edges or definition.
"She stayed," he said finally. "Through all of it. The long hours, the missed dinners, the way I retreated into work instead of being present. She could have left. Should have left, probably. But she stayed."
"Is staying kindness? Or is it something else?"
"I don't know what else to call it."
Q58. "What would Linda say is the kindest thing you've ever done for her?"
The question was a mirror of the last, but harder. Dale tried to see himself through Linda's eyes, to find a moment when he had been genuinely, selflessly kind.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I don't know if there is one. I've provided. I've been reliable, mostly. I've shown up. But kind—" He shook his head. "I don't think I've been kind. I've been functional. That's different."
"You don't think she'd name anything?"
"She might. She's generous that way—she'd find something, make it bigger than it was, because that's who she is. But I can't think of what it would be." He looked at Ms. Vance. "Does that make me a bad husband?"
"That's not for me to say."
"No. I guess it's not." He took a breath. "I guess it's for me to know. And I do know. I've always known."
Ms. Vance nodded slowly. She closed her legal pad, set down her pen.
"I think," she said, "we should talk about your daughter now. In more depth than before."
Dale's hands were trembling on the table. His mother's voice was gone. His wedding day was blurring. And somewhere in a doctor's office across town, his wife was touching a scar she no longer remembered getting.
"Okay," he said. "Let's talk about Melissa."
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