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I hope the visit is going well, or went well, as I wait for my Manboy’s return. I hope they are able to talk, that the hospital is quiet, that the nurses let him stay after hours. I hope that she will stay away, as as planned. I hope that she will stay away from the one I love.

When I answered the phone call this week, his father seemed odd, coldly distant. I did not recognize his voice, it has been so long.

Awkwardly, I coaxed warmth into my own voice, intended to convey feelings I dare not speak in words. “No, he’s at work. Let me give you his cell phone.” The number has been the same for years, since before the betrayal. I’m not suprised that his father has forgotten it.

“How are you?” I attempt one last stab of gentleness which hangs naked seemingly unnoticed in the air. 

A pause, “Fine.” Meaning, “Not well’, of course. How could he be well? I do not persist my interrogation. I have already overstepped my fragile bounds.

Painful moments and words unsaid swirling with emotion echo in the quick click as I put the phone down. Just as quickly I pick it up again to call my beloved, to warn let him know that his father is going to call. Any second. He says the phone is ringing as we speak, and hangs up. I am grateful that I have been able to tell him before he was caught off guard by the call.

Things didn’t used to be this complicated.

Before was innocence, sunning by a crystal swimming pool laying on perfect grass, eating pomegranites one season and figs the next, we never would have imagined such a turn of events. I was loved by the one I loved and not much more than that mattered. It was a short season, but the draw we each felt in us was enough to cause me to, not in a moment of folly, but in months of calculated devotion, full heartedly embrace loving someone from a land not my own. I knew that the price to pay for this would be an even deeper exile.

His family embraced me, a daughter. They were beyond kind, they were perfect. I awed in wonder at the love, twenty-five years of marraige, two children, boys, nourished from babyhood on church sermons and classical music. Their fingers and lips emulating the former as well as the latter, before spawning into the creativity of their own voice. Manboy’s songs echoed spiritual rawness to the degree that his brothers fingers came to life, creating melodies pure, jazz yet unheard.

In this house there dwelt a simplicity that I had not known myself, protected, blissfully sheltered.

There was another who loved my Manboy. She had loved him for years. Unrequitedly. Silently. With longing eyes that even from a distance it was evident to near strangers.

I was kind to her, distant, but I knew what she must have felt. Others warned me, fearing I hads not seen. I had seen. I had been told. I had been warned. And warned again. 

I was not threatened, he loved me. There was no danger. There was no need to be cruel.

I do not know what she felt the day we married, but it must have been something more terrible that I had realized at the time, the time when I was clothed in happiness. It must have been something dark, something desperate. It must have been something wicked, to make her do such a twisted thing.

She loved my Man, my Manboy. She did not love his father. Why then would she want to destroy a family? Why then would she do something so miserably desperate?

Almost four years have gone by. Only a shadow of what was remains. The house has long since been divided, lawyers summoned and papers signed. What was built over so many years at the cost of love was lost at the cost of a blind man’s mistake.

He now lays sick, in a hospital bed, married to her, estranged from those who were once his own. We choose not to take the risk to be close. We choose not to see her. We were angry for a time, torn. Now we are only sad.

 I hope it is nothing serious and that he will quickly be gone from the hospital. I hope that his son is kind to him during their visit, as such a visit is extremely rare. I hope that he can know that we love him. No matter what.