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There were dreams that she had as a child, fairytale wishes as flimsy as gossamer, that died with the loss of innocence. There were dreams that she had as an adolescent, heady escape fantasies often linked to fame and fortune, that faded with maturity. Then there are the dreams she had had as an adult, pragmatic and robust, dreams that should have be attainable and yet she fears she may have managed to kill them. She is accustomed to the death of her dreams but these particular dreams weren’t just for her, they were for her marriage, her husband, her children, and she really should have taken better care of them. She’s given up on dreaming, it’s a part of sleep and that is something that she believes she will never experience again. Sleep is a luxury, the reward of the good and the pure; it does not visit the unfaithful or the murderers of rats and imaginary nannies.
She is no saint and has never even wanted to be one, she always considered that you are not really living if there isn’t a least a little dirt on your hands but even she finds it difficult to forgive her recent behaviour. She has always been an expert manipulator, it’s something that she is proud of but her manipulation used to be subtle and skilful, it did not involve deliberately injuring others. She may not like Nina and she is pretty sure that the feeling is mutual, in fact she suspects that Nina’s sole mandate is to destroy her life and to keep her from her children and while she wouldn’t be entirely upset to hear that Nina had been in some sort of horrendous and disfiguring accident that doesn’t justify deliberately scalding her legs. The universe obviously agrees with her assessment because even though Parker survived his first day of kindergarten with her support, by proxy though it was, her efforts were quickly forgotten and he created an imaginary friend to replace her. She has managed to avert that crisis but wonders what trauma she may have caused her son but forcing him to witness the hit and run killing of Mrs Mulberry. She feels like her mistakes are accruing interest at an uncontrollable rate and laments that fact that she wasted her stimulant abuse on a time when she had comparatively little to worry about.
Tom has been amazing recently, they are in virgin territory and yet he seems to have the uncanny ability to know exactly the right things to say and do but his comfort and support only compound her guilt. Her thoughts should never have strayed in the first place and they certainly shouldn’t continue to wander but she can’t stop thinking about Bree, she rarely thinks of anything else. Bree has cut her deeply and expertly, removing all but her essential organs, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. She knows that Bree has a lot to contend with and that she probably isn’t in the best frame of mind and while it would hurt, she could understand Bree rejecting her to be alone, what she can not comprehend is that Bree appears to have thrown her over in favour of George Williams.
Bree hasn’t actually announced that she is formally dating the pharmacist and it is not the subject of gossip on the street, yet, but she has seen them together and given the proximity to Rex’s death Bree is being surprisingly forward in this courtship. The other night she accidentally saw Bree kissing George on the forehead, well as accidentally as you can do anything when you attach yourself to the window like a limpet after hearing a car pull up in your neighbour’s driveway. She has no words to describe how watching that made her feel, she doesn’t own Bree, can’t officially lay any claim to her and Bree has done her best to make it clear that it’s over but yet she felt so betrayed. The kind of betrayal that Tom is far more entitled to feel than she is and while she always knew that her actions would hurt him if he ever found out, her attraction and love for Bree were so strong that she never really felt bad about what they were doing and she still can’t bring herself to believe that something so special could have been so wrong. She didn’t realise that was possible to feel empty and angry at the same time but apparently it is because as she watched Bree she felt nothing and yet everything. Bree’s lips touched skin that wasn’t hers and she thought she might die but she survived only to have to live through the horror of seeing Bree tenderly hold hands with another. She may have latent ventriloquist skills that she was unaware of because Andrew appeared and seemed to be the vessel of her primal rage, doing everything that she wanted to do but couldn’t, he was her surrogate, possessed by the incubus of her wrath. If she had have been capable of movement she would have applauded him for each and every push and shove that he gave George and awarded him a standing ovation for the moment when he pushed the creepy little opportunist to the ground.
She is sure that George can not be trusted but doesn’t know how to convince Bree of this, without proof how is she meant to say anything that doesn’t sound like the bitter ranting of a scorned lover. She is not sure how she will cope with watching Bree be in relationship with him but maybe this in her penance, it will be excruciating but it’s probably no where near the punishment that she deserves.
To add insult to her plethora of injuries she has lost her closest confident. There were things that she was could never share with Tom and that was before she created the situation where she had real secrets that Tom can never learn. She has no other friends to turn to, she grew distant from the people in her old life, not intentionally but they moved apart with a slow but steady force, continental plates drifting away, the changes too subtle to cause tremors but resulting in a rift valley that is now too wide to cross. The other women of her neighbourhood don’t really hold a candle to Bree, she loves them and enjoys spending time with them but they are not the ones to burden with her plight. Her only other contact with the human race occurs at work but that is a place full of overpaid children and people who resent the fact that she is a mother, it is as though she is not entitled to be there because she didn’t sacrifice her life for her work. The irony of that is that right now she would give anything to go back and change things - to have prioritised her career, to have stayed on the fast track to success, to never have married Tom, to never have had children, to never have moved to suburbia and, most importantly, to never have met Bree Van de Kamp. Her head is fuzzy with circular logic but the spirals all lead to the same point, to the certainty that her life has fallen apart and that she doesn’t have the skills to put it back together again.
Tom finds her on the bed, imploding in a spectacular fashion and convinces her that situation with Parker is solvable but that problem is just the tip of an extremely large iceberg and although Tom can’t see it, she really is the worst person in the world. She falls onto his chest and feels his heart beating against her hand and can’t believe that she has been doing things that could cause that heart to break. She can’t help but feel that he is too good for her and that she had no right to want more from his life than him. He manages to find the sleep that escapes her and as she strokes his brow, she hopes that his dreams are peaceful. She lies awake the entire night wondering how she is going to survive lying beside him night after night knowing that she has cheapened what they have and that, in spite of everything, part of her would prefer to be lying beside Bree.