The Hotel

For a few seconds, I thought about getting in the truck. I knew the route south without looking at a map: Highway 213 to Salem, the interstate through the rest of Oregon, then ten hours to Santa Rosa if I drove hard and nothing went wrong. I pictured myself walking into the Fountaingrove Inn wearing the same clothes I had on at the desk. Then I looked at the check-in email again. Cassie was already inside that hotel, and driving all night wasn't going to tell me who was with her.

My hands weren't steady, and I dialed the same wrong digit twice. The third attempt went through. While it rang, I sat at the desk I'd built, in the house where my family was supposed to live with me. A woman answered with the polished voice people use near the end of a shift. “Good evening. Thank you for calling.”

“Hi. I need to be connected to my wife's room, please. Her name is Cassie Wolcott. It's a family emergency.” My voice sounded much calmer than I felt. She told me she could connect me if I had the room number. I said I didn't, then told her there had been an accident and I needed to reach her right away. That part wasn't true, but it was the only thing I could think of that might get me past the hotel's rule. Then she asked, “May I ask who's calling, sir?”

“Yes, my name is Bill Wolcott.” There was a pause while she decided what to do with me. I could hear voices in the lobby behind her and the faint tapping of a keyboard. Then she said, “One moment, please,” and put me on hold.

The hold music was the kind of instrumental music hotels used so callers wouldn't have to sit in silence. I counted because counting gave me something to do. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Thirty. I sat without moving, listening to music from a hotel in the town where I was born, until the line clicked and a man answered the telephone in my wife's room.

“Hello?” His voice was deep and relaxed. A television was playing behind him. I had never heard the voice before, and there was no hesitation in it, no concern about who might be calling the room a little after eight on a Friday night. He sounded like a man who belonged there.

“Can you put Cassie on, please?” I heard a hand cover the receiver. The sound went muffled, and two people said something I couldn't make out. Then the line cleared.

“Hello?” Cassie's voice was flat. She didn't sound surprised. She sounded like somebody had handed her the telephone while she was doing something else.

“It's me,” I said. She went quiet. I could hear her breathing and the television behind her. I told her the hotel check-in email had appeared on our computer at 7:43. She didn't ask what email I meant, what hotel I was talking about, or why I thought she was there. She knew exactly what I had seen.

I asked who he was. Cassie said, “A friend.” When I asked what friend, she told me, “You don't know him.” I didn't. I had been with her for almost a decade, and a man I'd never heard of had just answered the telephone in her hotel room. I could hear my pulse in the earpiece, but the first clear thought I had was about the kids.

I asked where the kids were. Cassie said they were fine and where they were supposed to be. I told her I'd talked to Mike earlier and that he claimed he didn't know she was in town, then asked again where Jaxon and the girls were.

“They're safe. Don't worry about it.” That answer broke through whatever calm I still had. “Don't worry about it? There's a man in your hotel room. Nobody has called me all day, and you're telling me not to fucking worry about it?”

“They're fine,” she said. Her voice never rose. “They're taken care of.” I still didn't know where the kids were or why Mike had denied knowing they were there. All I had was what Cassie had told me before the trip, what Mike had just denied, and the email showing that my wife had checked into a hotel.

“Are you sleeping with him?” My voice sounded smaller than I expected, and even as I asked, I thought it was a stupid question. My brain was spiraling. She didn't answer right away. I heard the man move somewhere behind her, and the pause lasted long enough that I had my answer before she gave it to me.

“Yes.” There was no apology or explanation. She said it the way somebody might answer a question about whether the mail had come. I asked how long. Her first question since taking the telephone was, “Does that matter?” I asked again, using her name this time, and after taking a breath she said, “A while.”

A while could have meant anything, and I think that was why she chose it. There was no date, no beginning, and nothing I could check against the years I thought we'd lived together. I don't remember everything I said after that. I remember crying, which was something I didn't do where anybody could hear it. I asked why, how long, and whether any of our marriage had been real. I asked about the wedding, the last decade, and the Cassie I'd met at a gas station in 2009. The questions came out faster than I could think through them.

Somewhere during that part of the call, I left the den and ended up in the master bathroom. I don't remember deciding to move or walking down the hallway. The next thing I remember clearly is sitting on the edge of the tub because my legs no longer felt dependable. Cassie didn't hang up. She stayed on the line while I cried and asked every question I had until my throat hurt and I had nothing left. Then she started talking.

She started telling me that she had been unhappy for years and that I had never seen it because I never looked. I said her name, but she kept going, accusing me of moving everyone six hundred miles away from family and friends. I reminded her that leaving California had started with her. She had made it sound fun, almost like an adventure, and at the time I thought the change might be good for us. I wasn't forced into it. We traveled from state to state looking for someplace new, and she chose Oregon because her mom lived there. But the girls didn't want to go, and I had asked her over and over if she was sure because I wasn't sure either. I was leaving my entire family behind, but I still thought we had a shot at something better, so I said yes.

“You'd already decided,” she said. Her voice was patient, which made it harder to argue with. “You just needed me to believe it was mine. That's what you do. That's what you've always done, and you don't even know you're doing it, which is the worst part.”

I remembered it differently, but in a few sentences she made me question what I remembered and why. The other man was still in the room, close enough to hear every word. She wasn't lowering her voice or trying to keep any of this between us.

“I haven't bought a thing in all the years we've been together without clearing it through you first,” she said. “Do you know what that does to a person?” Even then, I knew that wasn't how our money worked. Her name was on the accounts. She maintained the spreadsheets, and I needed her approval for anything over a number I never got to help set. But explaining all of that would have taken time, and Cassie was already talking about the kids. She said I was too strict with the girls and Jaxon and talked about how often I corrected them. I did have rules. No phones at the dinner table was one of them, and we ate together every night. I thought that was part of raising a family. She made those rules sound like another way I had failed the kids.

Instead of explaining why there was another man in her room, Cassie had turned the call into a list of everything wrong with me, and he was listening. I didn't recognize that as manipulation. I believed her. That is difficult to explain from outside the marriage, but from where I was sitting, she was the person who knew me best. For years, when we disagreed, she had kept explaining until I stopped defending myself. By the time of that call, being unable to make her agree with me felt like proof that I was wrong. I sat in the dark bathroom with the telephone against my ear and stopped trying to defend myself. I didn't think she was trying to hurt me. I thought she was finally telling me the truth about myself and that I had been too selfish or blind to see it before.

The man said something in the background. I couldn't make out the words, but I heard Cassie laugh. It was a small, ordinary laugh, the kind she used when she was comfortable. I was crying hard enough that I could barely talk, and she was sharing a private joke with the man in her room. That was when I understood how little my pain mattered in whatever life she was living there. I said, “I can't do this. I can't live like this.”

Her voice changed. It became softer, almost warm, and sounded like the voice she used when Jaxon woke from a bad dream. “I know,” she said. “Maybe it would be better if you didn't.” I didn't understand her at first. “What?”

“I'm just saying maybe it would be better. For everyone. For the kids, especially. They don't need to see you like this. It would be easier on them if you just weren't here anymore.”

The television continued behind her. I could hear the man moving and ice shifting in a glass. Cassie kept talking about children being resilient and how they eventually got over things. She said holding on was selfish and letting go was generous. At some point, I stopped trying to decide whether she was right. If the move was my fault, the money was my fault, and even the way I raised the kids had hurt them, then maybe I wasn't protecting my family the way I thought I was. Maybe I was the reason they were unhappy. That was when dying stopped feeling like something I would be doing to them and started feeling like something I could do for them.

Throughout our relationship, when Cassie said something was settled, I had treated it as settled. When I tried to defend myself, she kept explaining until I stopped. On my fiftieth birthday, I still trusted her more than I trusted myself. I didn't think I was obeying her. I believed I was doing what my family needed.

Then she directed me toward the cabinet behind the mirror and had me open it. Her voice never changed. I watched myself in the glass with the telephone against my ear, opened the cabinet, and took out the bottle she told me to get. I set it on the counter. I don't remember the cap coming off. The next clear picture I have is her voice in my ear and my left hand holding some of what had been inside the bottle. The television was still playing in her room, and the other man was still there.

What she said next is something I can't bring myself to put on paper. I remember every word, and I wish I didn't. I understood exactly what she wanted from me. That is where my memory stops. The next clear picture is the cold tile under my cheek, my left hand closed, and Cassie's voice still coming through the telephone. Thursday afternoon, I had stood in the driveway and waved while my family pulled away. Now I was on the bathroom floor, and I had stopped moving. Cassie was still talking.