Thumb Drive

It's Christmas in Cleveland when Victoria Crane watches her husband pick his teeth with his own fingernail and finally sees her marriage clearly.

Emma Larssen

A few days before Christmas, my husband and I packed our kids into my minivan for the annual pilgrimage to Cleveland, Ohio. For the thirteenth time, he and I (and now our three offspring) were making the journey home to the city we’d grown up in and where our parents still lived. The kids were thrilled; they’re the only children on earth who grew up believing Cleveland was the greatest city in the world, a Shangri-La of Malley’s ice cream and Sokolowski’s pierogi and every imaginable West Side Market delight, to say nothing of the promise of late nights, Christmas presents, and snow.

The drive was nearly eight hours, but they’d trained for it their entire lives; at ages ten, seven, and four, they were pros. Strapped into their various restraints as my husband queued up a playlist on his phone, the children’s moods were high. Mine was in the toilet.

Three weeks earlier, my husband had informed me that he was moving out. What I had seen as the ordinary dissatisfactions of a marriage that included workaholic dad, creatively frustrated stay-at-home mom, and three young kids with big personalities was, in his opinion, proof that we were not happy and never had been. To say that I was blindsided by this announcement would be an understatement; if he’d made it in Sanskrit, it would have made more sense to me.

I asked the most obvious question first: Is there someone else? Is it that student of yours? Not because I’d ever suspected he would cheat, but because that’s what the people on TV always ask when their spouse announces they’re leaving. Also, I’d soon discover it’s what everybody asks you when you tell them your husband is leaving. Of course not, he said — even seemed offended — then proceeded to list his grievances. I was always annoyed with him; my whole life revolved around the kids; we lacked emotional closeness. Privately, I wondered whether he’d ever had a conversation with another married parent.

My response was to insist on therapy; I wasn’t going down without a fight. We assembled a veritable team of professionals — a his-mine-and-ours of therapists — and a standing schedule of coffee dates where I’d grovel for our future together. He wouldn’t come out and say he wanted a divorce, and I fixated on this spark of hope. I took it as tacit acknowledgement that he had doubts, that maybe he still loved me enough to want to try and build something better from this wreck.

It wasn’t.

We’d briefly considered telling the kids about the separation right away because the reality of living together in one house with this information roiling between us, while acting like everything was fine, felt a lot like I’d imagine shelling pistachios feels after someone has pulled out all your fingernails with pliers.

But one night our youngest demanded we both put him to bed – maybe he felt the strangeness permeating our household – and sitting in the darkness looking down at our kid, imagining the great everlasting crack we were about to cleave through his world, we chickened out. We decided we would wait until after New Year’s. My husband helpfully (and with suspicious speed) devised a schedule for us to split time with the kids so we didn’t have to be in the house together. For the first time, he was getting home early enough to feed them and handle bedtime three or four nights a week... and my only job was to gtfo.

I moved through December in a fog of terror, grief, and shame, unable to eat, sleeping twelve hours a night, my brain spiraling perpetually around the central question of my life: how to save my marriage. While he had the kids, I would go sit in a coffee shop pounding out analyses and strategies and pleas to the universe (or my husband) on my laptop — over our ten-month separation, I wrote two hundred thousand words about my marriage — or I’d go to an AA meeting (I’d been sober almost 25 years) and cry.

Three weeks of this routine had already taken its toll. I’d lost ten pounds; I routinely burst into tears in the checkout line at Whole Foods; and midway through wrapping the Christmas presents, I disintegrated into something like a panic attack writing out a gift tag from “Mom & Dad,” wondering if this would be the last year I ever wrote those words. (It was.) But this? Driving to Cleveland with my family, performing the joy of the holiday season for three small people who didn’t know what was happening, and a legion of relatives who did? This felt like it might actually kill me.

While my kids pawed through their backpacks to eat their best snacks first, and my husband drove, I defaulted to the worst possible pastime: staring out the window, thinking. The fantasy I nurtured constantly was that if I could figure out how to change, my husband would stay. On my most hopeful days, I imagined we might come through this separation with a better, stronger marriage. Maybe I’d even get him to acknowledge there were areas where he could improve! But one of the cryptic, crazy-making things he would say over those first few weeks was that I didn’t have all the information. There were things I didn’t know and that he wasn’t ready to tell me, but when I heard them, I might realize I didn’t want to stay married either.

The most important thing I didn’t know, staring out at the slushy highway, was that my marriage was already over. Though many excruciating revelations would emerge over the months to come, it would be nearly a year before he finally gave me an honest answer to the question I’d asked, the night he said he was leaving. Of course there was somebody else. Of course it was exactly the student and protégée he so admired. Of course he was not going to walk away from a shiny new life with someone who saw him as a brilliant hero, to slog through the mire of seventeen years’ worth of accumulated baggage with someone who’d seen him at his worst. I didn’t know yet how effortlessly he could lie to my face, or the lengths he would go to in the hope that I would be the one to lose patience, cry uncle, and call it quits, all to spare him from having to be the bad guy.

All I knew that morning was that I couldn’t imagine a life without him. He was my best friend, the love of my life, the person who made me feel complete and at home. Our kids needed us to stay together. I needed it, too. Watching the world fly by outside my window, choking back the acid that had burned my throat since the night he spoke those words, I truly did not believe I could survive losing him.

He reached out to skip a song on his playlist. I watched him press the button on the dashboard, then pop his thumb into his mouth and begin gnawing at it while he stared out at the road. After a few seconds, he peeled a slim crescent of fingernail off with his teeth, then plucked the sliver between two fingers and held it out to examine, turning it side to side. I stared at it too from the passenger seat, mesmerized. Then he took the sliver and began using its pointy tip to pick something from between his teeth, still gripping the wheel with his other hand, eyes back on the road. He dragged the little crescent of nail up and down between each tooth and when he was finished, he flicked it with his thumb and middle finger; I watched it arc through the air between us and fall to the floor.

The voice that spoke to me in that moment was so clear it might have been sitting right behind me, except it wasn’t anyone else’s voice; it was my own. Seriously?! that voice exclaimed. This is the guy you’re gonna die without? The guy your entire world and happiness revolve around? This fucking guy?! I blinked. Closed my mouth. Turned back to the window.

Over the course of our separation, every single fear I had about my marriage and my future came true. I still feel so sad for that version of myself: for everything she had yet to go through, all the ways she believed she had failed. But another thing I didn’t know then was that losing him was a step toward becoming the version of myself I longed to be. Maybe it was that future me, the one who knew how it would all turn out, who spoke to still-married me from the great unknown and gave her a glimpse of the strength she didn’t yet know she had. Because for a brief moment as we hurtled toward our final family Christmas together, I saw it: I was going to be just fine.

Victoria Crane has a master’s in creative writing from Hollins University, and her short fiction has been recognized by Glimmer Train, The Masters Review, and New Millennium Writings, among others. Most recently, a story of hers appeared in Tulip Tree Publishing’s Stories That Need To Be Told anthology, and another is set to appear in the spring issue of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She’s a Cleveland native now living in Charlottesville, VA with her three mostly-grown kids and an ultimate mastiff named Roxanne.

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