Chapter 39
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Jack
Ididn't sleep.
I lay on top of the covers for two hours after Maddie left, listening to the house settle around me, and somewhere around six I gave up and got up and stood in the shower until the hot water ran out.
Then I went downstairs and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window, watching the street go from dark to grey to the pale light of a morning that hadn't decided what it was yet.
I heard Lily at seven. Not the jagged and desperate sound from last night; just the ordinary sound of her moving around upstairs, the bathroom door, the particular sequence of drawers that meant she was getting dressed.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs for a moment, listening, and something in my chest unclenched that I hadn't known was still clenched.
She came down in her uniform, her backpack slung low and her dark hair a wild, unbrushed halo around her face. She stopped on the bottom step and squinted at me, her eyes too old for her face.
"You look tired," she said.
"I'm fine."
She held my gaze for another second with that same direct, unblinking assessment I’d seen a thousand times on Cassie’s face.
Then she turned, marched into the kitchen, and pulled her cereal box from the cupboard.
I watched from the doorway as she sat and ate, her spoon clicking rhythmically against the porcelain in the quiet room.
She was okay. A little quieter than usual, a little more careful in the way she moved, but she was here and she was eating her cereal and she was okay.
I'd half thought about keeping her home.
When I'd gone up to check on her at six she'd been sleeping peacefully, nothing on her face, and for a moment I'd stood there thinking about it.
A day on the couch, a film, nothing expected of either of us.
But then she'd started stirring and I'd stepped back.
When she appeared at the top of the stairs in her pleated skirt and stiff collar, I understood. She didn't want a day on the couch; she wanted the armor of her routine. She needed the ordinary shape of a Tuesday to act as a dam against everything else.
Cassie had always been good at that. Keeping things ordinary when ordinary was what held you together.
"Okay?" I said, when she'd finished.
She looked at the empty bowl. "I had a bad dream," she said.
"I know. I was there."
She looked up at me. "You stayed."
"Yeah."
She nodded, like this was information she was filing as reference.
Then she picked up her backpack and went to the door.
She put her shoes on with her usual focused attention, and that was that.
I walked her to school. She pointed out the cat on the wall the way she always did.
We didn't talk much. At the gate she turned and looked at me for a moment.
"Will you be here at three fifteen?"
"I'll be here," I said.
She nodded and went in.
I stood at the gate until she'd disappeared through the door. Then I turned and walked to the garage.
* * *
Bellows had a Tacoma in the first bay and a pile of parts on the bench. The radio was on low, the same as every morning. He looked up when I came in, looked at my face, then back down at the Tacoma without saying anything. I put my jacket on the hook and got to work.
The Tacoma needed a new timing belt. Straightforward job, the kind my hands could do without much from my head, which was exactly what I needed.
I tried to compartmentalize the night, to shove the memory of that dark hallway and Maddie’s face across the kitchen table into a corner where they wouldn't interfere with the torque.
It didn’t work.
I kept seeing her face. The way she'd looked when she said I meant it.
The way she'd said not that I've forgotten and the weight of everything that was in those four words: the acknowledgment and the warning, the thing she was still carrying that I had put in her hands twelve years ago. All that I had walked away from.
I'd been telling myself for weeks that the past was the past. That we were adults.
That what was happening between us—whatever it was, whatever it was becoming—could exist without that night being reckoned with.
That we could build something new without first going back and standing in the rubble of what I'd broken.
Maddie had looked at me at four in the morning with a decade's worth of careful distance stripped away. She’d said she was glad I was back, but she’d also made sure I knew she hadn’t forgotten. Both of those things were true at once, and they'd occupied the same thin air in the kitchen.
I knew that. I’d always known it. I’d just been waiting for the right moment—some perfect, polished alignment of the stars where the words would come easy and the hurt would be manageable.
But standing there with my hands deep in a Tacoma’s engine on a sleepless Friday morning, I finally understood.
This was the ache of a man who had been running from something for twelve years only to realize he’d been on a treadmill.
The "right moment" was a ghost. It was never going to arrive on its own, and it certainly wasn't going to be convenient.
I reached for the ratchet on the edge of the bay.
It wasn't there.
I looked around. Found it on the floor, further than I'd left it. I picked it up and went back to work, trying to remember where I was in the sequence. I couldn't, and had to start the whole check again from the beginning.
Focus.
I focused. Got the belt off, got the new one laid out, started working through it methodically the way I always did. For twenty minutes it held. Just the work, just my hands, just the sequence of tasks that had an end point and a right answer.
Then I was reaching for the torque wrench and my brain served up the image of Maddie putting her hand on my arm in the hallway. I missed the edge of the workbench and the wrench came down on my left hand.
"Christ—"
I straightened up, gripping my hand, the sharp bright pain of metal on knuckle radiating up my arm. I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed.
"Hm," Bellows said, from somewhere behind me.
I turned around. He was at his bench, not looking at me, doing something unhurried with a set of brake calipers.
"Something on your mind?" he said.
"I'm fine."
"Mm." He turned the caliper over in his hands. "That's the second time you've said that this morning."
"I dropped a wrench."
"You did." He set the caliper down and picked up another one. "How's the kid?"
I looked at my knuckle. It was already swelling slightly, but nothing was broken. "She's okay. Had a rough night."
He nodded, then went back to his calipers.
I went back to the Tacoma.
Five minutes passed. Ten. The belt was going in right, the sequence coming back, my hands finding their way even if my head was somewhere else entirely. I was almost back in it when Bellows spoke again.
"You going to do something about it?" he said. "Or just drop things."
He was still at his bench, still not looking at me. His voice had the same flat and unhurried quality it always had, the same tone he used to tell me about a car's problem or the weather or anything else that was simply a fact in need of acknowledging.
"About what?" I asked.
He gave me a look.
I went back to the Tacoma.
The morning kept moving away from me. I finished the timing belt, moved on to an oil change on a Civic, worked through the job sheet in the methodical way that had always been the thing I was good at—one problem at a time, one task at a time, nothing that couldn't be taken apart and put back together if you knew what you were doing.
The problem was I didn't know what I was doing.
Not with this. I knew how to fix an engine.
I did not know how to stand in front of Maddie Clarke and say the thing I needed to say, the thing I'd been not-saying for twelve years, and have it come out right.
I didn't know if it could come out right.
I didn't know if right was even available to me at this point.
What I knew was that it had to be said. That nothing else could happen—nothing real, nothing that lasted—until it was.
At lunch Bellows put two coffees on the shelf and sat on his stool by the door. I cleaned my hands and picked up my mug, then leaned against the wall.
"I need to tell someone something," I said. "Something I should have said a long time ago."
Bellows drank his coffee. His mouth remained shut.
"I don't know how to do it without—" I stopped. "I don't know how it lands."
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Usually lands better than not saying it."
"Usually."
"Not always." He turned the mug in his hands. "But you already know that. That's why you haven't said it." He looked out at the forecourt. "Question is whether you're more afraid of saying it or of not saying it."
I stared at my coffee.
I already knew the answer to that. Had known it since four in the morning, since the hallway, since the way she'd said maybe not ever like she was trying to believe it.
"Yeah," I said.
Bellows nodded once. He finished his coffee and got up.
"Timing belt done?" he asked.
"Done," I said.
"Good." He put his mug down, then stretched his back. "Get the Civic finished by four."
He went back to work.
I finished my coffee, put the mug on the shelf, and went back to the Civic. My hand ached where the wrench had caught it, but I worked around it.
Three fifteen I was at the school gate.
Lily came out with her backpack and fell into step beside me without saying anything. We walked home the way we always walked home. She pointed at the cat on the wall. I nodded.
Halfway down Clement Street she said, without looking up: "Maddie was home last night. I heard her."
I looked at the pavement ahead. "She was. For a bit."
Lily nodded and we kept walking.
"I like Maddie," she said, out of the blue. Three flat and certain words.
I looked at the street ahead of us, at the ordinary Friday afternoon of it, at the cat on the wall watching us pass.
Me too, I thought.
And that was the damn problem.