23. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
I go down one step at a time and sit on the concrete beside her, not touching, and the dark is complete.
I can hear her breathing. I can feel the cold of the floor through my jeans, seeping into my bones.
The beam above us is cracked. I can see the line of it even in the dim light from the open door at the top of the stairs, a dark seam running through the wood where it nearly gave way.
I try not to picture her down here alone while that beam was cracking, while the house was screaming above her, and I picture it anyway.
“I keep coming back to the text,” she says, after a long time. “The one I sent you during the storm.”
“I saw it. After. When my phone charged.”
“I waited for you to answer. I turned the phone face down on the concrete because I couldn’t stand to watch it, and I sat there thinking any second I’d hear it buzz. You’d say you were coming, or that you were sorry, or that you loved me.” A pause, heavy with everything unsaid. “You never did.”
“My phone was dead. I didn’t get it for four hours.”
“I know that now. But down here, in the dark, all I could think was: he doesn’t know I’m here. He isn’t looking for me. He’s in that shelter with her and he isn’t even wondering where I am.”
“I was looking for you.” The words come out raw, scraped up from somewhere deep.
“When I got that door shut and you weren’t inside, I went for it.
I was going to tear through that door and run back to the house and find you.
Five of my men held me down, Ellie. Five.
I fought them the whole time the storm was overhead.
I was screaming your name and they wouldn’t let go. ”
She goes still beside me.
“You never told me that.”
“I didn’t know how.” I stare into the dark where the beam is.
“I didn’t know how to tell you I was fifty yards from you, trying to tear through my own men to get to that door, and I still couldn’t reach you.
I couldn’t save you. I couldn’t do a goddamn thing except lie on that concrete floor and listen to my house come apart and pray you found somewhere safe. ”
“You couldn’t have.”
“I should have looked.” Harsh, and it’s at myself. “Before I shut that door. I should have turned around and looked. I should have counted heads, should have called your name, should have done anything except trust somebody else to do the one job that mattered.”
Silence. Long and heavy and full of all the things we haven’t said.
“I’ve got things to tell you,” I say. “A lot of things. Things I should have said a long time ago, things I’ve been carrying around since before I met you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. If there’s any chance of this, if there’s any chance you’ll take me back, you need to know all of it. The whole truth. Not just the parts that make me look like a victim.”
She waits. The dark waits. Everything waits.
Then she says it, so quiet I almost miss it: “Tell me about the heater.”
I go cold. I’ve had that night in my pocket for six weeks, and I’ve taken it out and looked at it a hundred times and put it back, and I never once thought she had her hand on it too. “How do you know about the heater?”
“I don’t.” Her voice is steady in the dark. “I watched you follow her to the west wing and I watched you come back in five minutes and you never said a word about it. I know Daphne. And I know the look you get when you’re carrying what you don’t want to put down.”
So I tell her.
The heater that was running fine when I got there.
Nothing wrong with it, not a thing out of place.
Daphne in the doorway in a robe that wasn’t tied, saying it must have fixed itself, thanks for checking.
Me out of that wing in five minutes with my skin crawling, and then me standing in the kitchen deciding not to tell Ellie, because I knew how it would sound, because I was a coward, because I told myself nothing happened so there was nothing to say.
“I should have told you that night.”
“What else?”
So I tell her the rest. I’ve never said any of it out loud. Not to Jackson, not to Hollis, not to the preacher when he asked me at the graveside if I wanted to say a few words. I open my mouth in the dark and it comes.
“My mother came from money. Not a lot, but enough. Her family ran this ranch, back when it was a quarter of the size it is now. She was smart, beautiful, had her whole life ahead of her. And then she met my father.”
I can hear Ellie shift beside me, settling in to listen.
“He had nothing. Came from nothing, was going nowhere, had a smile that could charm the birds out of the trees and a face that made women forget he was trouble. She fell for him so hard she couldn’t see straight.
Her parents begged her not to marry him.
Everybody who knew her begged her not to marry him.
She did it anyway, because she loved him. ”
The words are coming easier now, flowing out of some place I’ve kept locked since I was fourteen.
“He was a drunk. A liar. A cheat. He ran around on her with anybody who’d have him, and in a town this small, that meant she knew about all of it. Everybody knew. She’d walk into the diner and the room would go quiet because they’d all been talking about who he was sleeping with this week.”
I feel Ellie’s hand find mine in the dark. I hold onto it.
“She stayed. No matter what he did, no matter how bad it got, she stayed. Because she loved him. Because she’d given up everything for him and she couldn’t admit she’d made a mistake. Because she believed if she just loved him hard enough, long enough, he’d change.”
“He didn’t change.”
“No. He got worse. And the worse he got, the more she clung to the word. Love. She’d say it all the time, to him, to me, to anybody who’d listen.
‘I love him. Love means you don’t give up.
Love means you stay no matter what.’” I shake my head in the dark.
“I was ten years old, in this house, sitting on the edge of her bed while she cried, telling her it would be okay. Twelve years old, listening to them scream at each other through the walls. Fourteen, watching her waste away to nothing because she couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t do anything but wait for him to come home and hurt her again. ”
“Jacob.”
“They died in a car accident. Both of them. He was driving drunk, middle of the afternoon, ran them off the road into a creek.” I squeeze her hand.
“I was at Jackson’s when it happened. Working in his barn, the way I had every weekend since I was twelve.
The sheriff came and told me, and the first thing I felt wasn’t grief.
It was relief. I was relieved my mother was dead because it meant she was finally free of him. ”
The dark holds us both. I can feel her crying now, silent tears, her shoulders shaking.
“After that it was my grandparents and me in this house. They kept me because they had to, but they didn’t want me.
They looked at me and they saw him. I have his face, his build, his coloring.
Every time they looked at me, they saw the man who killed their daughter.
” I take a breath. “They never hit me. They never starved me or locked me in closets or any of the things you read about. They just didn’t love me.
They fed me and clothed me and put a roof over my head, and they never once touched my hair or told me I’d done well or made me feel like I belonged there. ”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I swore I’d never feel anything that big.
” The words come out rough, broken. “I watched love destroy my mother. I watched my father use it as an excuse for every ugly thing he did. He said he loved her too, you know. All the time. He’d come home from whoever he’d been with and he’d tell her he loved her, and she’d believe him, and the whole cycle would start over.
” I shake my head. “I decided the word was a lie. A weapon. A thing people use to hurt each other and excuse the hurting. I decided I was never going to hold it.”
“Jacob.”
“I was selfish to marry you.” That one hurts coming out, and it’s true.
“I knew you loved me. I could see it every time you looked at me, every time you touched me, every time you said the words and waited for me to say them back. And I knew I couldn’t.
I knew I was broken in a way that might never heal.
And I married you anyway, because I wanted you too much to do the right thing and let you go.
I’m sorry for that before anything else. ”
Her hand tightens on mine.
“I love you.” The words come out and they’ve been waiting since I was fourteen to get out.
“I’ve loved you since you walked up to me at that wedding and told me I looked like I was at a funeral.
I’ve loved you every day since, even when I couldn’t say it, even when I was too scared to let you see it.
You were always enough. You were more than enough.
” I turn to face her in the dark, even though I can’t see her. “I was the one who wasn’t.”
She’s crying. I can hear it in her breathing, feel it in the way her hand is shaking in mine.
We sit there for a long time, not speaking, just breathing together in the dark.
“Words aren’t the problem,” she says finally.
“Faith is. I believed in you for a year without the words, Jacob. I decided your actions were the words. I told myself it was enough.” Her voice breaks.
“And then I sat down here in the dark, alone, and I found out it wasn’t enough. And I don’t know how to get that back.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Then don’t decide tonight.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Her voice is raw. “Just believe you? After everything? Just decide to trust you again because you said some words in a basement?”
“No.” I squeeze her hand. “Don’t believe me. Watch me. Not promises, not speeches, not words. Just me showing up. Every day. Doing the work. Earning it back one day at a time.” I take a breath. “You don’t have to do anything but watch.”
She’s quiet for a long time.
Then she lets go of my hand and stands. I hear her feet on the stairs, slow and careful in the dark.
She stops at the top.
“Jacob.”
“Yeah.”
“When you said it just now. In the dark.” A pause. “Did you mean it?”
“More than I’ve ever meant anything in my life.”
The door opens on a slice of kitchen light and closes again, and I’m alone in the place she almost died.
I sit there for a long time.
When I finally go up, the house is empty. Her car is gone. On the counter, a foot from where her recipe box sat for a year, there’s a juicer, still plugged in, the only thing in this kitchen that’s exactly where Daphne left it.
I unplug it. I carry it out the front door and across the yard and throw it in the construction dumpster, and it’s the first thing I’ve done in my own house in two months that I’m sure of.