Where Is Sadee?

The kids and the grandparents are tired after a busy day at the backyard pool, and when they're in bed John waits alone in the den for Sadee to arrive back home.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids. This is episode 6, “Where Is Sadee?”

The start and the end of the age-demographic continuum in the house get equally exhausted at about the same time. The kids are at it again with playing, energized by a sugar high from the ice cream, but this time it’s up in their rooms and not in the pool. The doors of their rooms are open, as I prefer and insist on, and so I can hear the scattered sounds of play, sometimes an electronic device of some kind, sometimes conversation (likely Lolly videochatting with a friend), sometimes physical objects being moved or clunking together or simply being dropped. They spend the afternoon like that, the sounds diminishing “with every tick of the clock,” as Fred likes to say, until around when it would be time for dinner, when there is only silence up there.

Here downstairs, in the family room intentionally devoid of electronics, Fred and Rose and I are sitting in a semi-circle, lush buttery-leather armchairs that pull you in like quicksand, and we mostly talk about nothing whatsoever. I don’t really know or care about these people as people very much, and I’ve experienced many incidents where’s it’s been obvious that the feeling is mutual. I’m their grandchildren’s father, and so it’s important that I be kept happy and treated civilly, but they have no interest in me beneath the patina of dependability that I exude, even though I’m unemployed. They do appreciate that I’m apparently a good father, and take the fact that the kids adore me as evidence, but that’s where it ends.

“Quite a day at the pool,” Rose ventures.

“Um-hmm,” Fred manages.

I have to resort to facts and details before things deteriorate to middle-class grunting.

“Well,” I say, “when Sadee and I were first looking for a new place, we never had in mind at all that it needed to have a pool. It seemed like a luxury to us and as for me I thought it would also be a pain in the ass to maintain.” Light chuckles. “But it’s turned out to be great and as you know the kids just love it, and I have to say that I myself have spent many afternoons and evenings just lying down out there, not even going into the water. We pay a pool company a contract for the summer and they send a guy over every two weeks to take care of the basics.”

“Um-hmm.”

“Um-hmm.”

These seniors at that other end of the continuum are fading now. I see Rose nodding asleep sporadically and then jerking herself awake when her chin hits her chest. I decide to put them out of their misery and tell them they should go to bed and that I’m happy to stay up waiting for Sadee to get home.

“She must be spending a fortune,” I joke, “because I was expecting her home way before dinner.”

Rose and Fred utter a few weak protests at leaving me by myself, but their tired bodies quickly win out and they pad downstairs to the guestroom.

It’s still early, just after eight. I actually wake Grady up when I go into his room and so I help him get his clothes off and get into bed. Lolly is already tucked away by herself. I turn the lights off and leave the doors slightly ajar. When I go downstairs again I can hear Rose and Fred talking about something intently, Rose’s voice rising a bit even. I can’t quite discern what the conversation is all about, but just as I pass the door to downstairs I distinctly hear my name. I don’t want to know, I really don’t. Maybe they’re extolling my ability to be home from a “conference” and still manage the basic domestics of taking over the kids and tending to guests. Or maybe they didn’t like seeing me in my underwear. Or—I stop speculating, because I know it will only get worse.

I take a seat in one of the plush overstuffed fabric armchairs in what we call the den. It’s dark in the room with all the lights off, except for the occasional headlights that go by on the street outside. They seem to surveil as if they were helicopters, moving on when no threat has been determined. I will be able to see Sadee as she arrives home, right up to the landing just outside the front door. Will she be staggering? Will she have bought so much that it takes both her friends to help with the loot? Will she kiss some man in a dark-coloured Audi and then come in and tell me she left all her purchases with Sally?

That’s my latest, what to call it—obsession? It’s a little ridiculous given the lack of any change in Sadee’s behaviour, given I’m the one who just lied and have come home worn out from a two-day job fair that didn’t exist. Sadee tells me I tend to overthink things. I have to acknowledge she’s right.

“Jesus, John, for fuck sake,” she said during an argument we had last week. “What are you even talking about? Do you really think I have time for you and my career and the hundred things that need to get done for the kids, and also be screwing someone else?”

I have no answer, but, perversely, I now fold into my obsession the fact that her denial was premised on being too busy, not that she loves me, not that our marriage is sacred. I go on to imagine that with a little applied time management, a harried professional woman could indeed squeeze in a lover and still mostly be home for dinner.

I slouch down into the armchair and consider the odd arrangement I am in. I’m married to a woman who is either outright cheating on me or is one hundred percent faithful, confused when I start to act a little wonky. I have this mind-and-gut assessment of what she may be up to. There’s really no evidence, in fact there is categorically zero evidence, that she is having an affair. But my gut feeling is categorically that she is. My therapist from a couple of years ago (I went secretively) told me that gut feelings are not to be ignored or to be always overridden on the basis of intellectual, intelligent judgment.

“But there’s the conundrum,” the therapist told me. “In a way, you have to use your mind, your intellectual part, to assess whether the gut feeling is a true guiding light telling you what you don’t want to admit to yourself, or is the frivolous result of some random obsession.”

“But the gut doesn’t lie,” I replied.

She pondered that for a moment, looked down at her notes. “Well, in a sense, you’re right. But it’s more primal than the mind, and sometimes you don’t know what that crazy animal is roaring about.”

I’m drawn back to the present when headlights brighten the driveway and I see Sadee getting out of the car.