9. Michael
— ? —
Michael
The first call went through and rang out, which meant nothing. So did the second.
The third did the thing where it rings once and then goes somewhere quiet, and I stood in the hall of my mother’s house and looked at my own phone like it had betrayed me.
Levi came past with a mug.
“She’s blocked you.”
“She hasn’t blocked me.”
“That’s the blocked noise. That is the exact noise. I know that noise intimately.”
“How do you know the blocked noise? You barely use your phone.”
“Because I’ve been blocked,” Levi said. “By professionals.”
“Yeah, professional my ass.”
“By a woman in Chatham and I’m not going into it.”
“You’ve never mentioned a woman in Chatham.”
“There’s a reason for that, Michael, and the reason is that I was blocked. Comprehensively. With prejudice.” He held out the mug, thought better of it, and drank from it himself. “Use mine.”
“What?”
“My phone. Go on. She’ll pick up for me, she thinks I’m charming.”
“Nobody thinks you’re charming.”
“Willow does. It’s my one asset and I’d like it used.”
He handed it over without a word, which should have warned me, and I rang my wife from my brother’s phone standing in my dead father’s hall.
It rang once and went somewhere quiet.
I looked at the screen. Levi looked at the screen.
“That’s my phone,” he said.
“I know it’s your phone.”
“I haven’t rung her. I haven’t rung her since before you came out. There is no version of this where she’s blocked me for something I’ve done, because I have not done anything, and I want that established.”
***
I went into the kitchen and picked up the beige phone off the table in the hall on the way, which nobody has sat by since my father died and which has one of those cords you have to unwind before you can use it.
She picked up straight away, because it was the house number.
“Willow.”
Nothing. Then a small breath that might have been a laugh, or might have been something else entirely.
“Michael, that phone has been in that hall my entire adult life. I know what number it shows. I know what it sounds like when it rings.”
“Don’t hang up.”
“Give me one reason.”
“Because I love you and I’ve never once said it in a way you believed, and I would like the chance to say it properly.”
“That’s true,” she said. “You haven’t.”
“Then let me come there and say it to your face.”
“Michael, you’re saying it properly now. Down a phone in a hall, to a woman who’s already gone. That’s the whole problem and you still can’t see it, and I am not going to be the one who explains it to you again. I’ve explained it until I ran out of ways to say it.”
“But-”
“Say it to somebody who’s still married to you.”
Beeping. The old kind, from an old handset, which is somehow more final than the new kind.
I put it down and unwound the cord because it had tangled and I did not have anywhere else to put my hands.
***
Pia was in the doorway with a tea towel and had been for a while.
“That’s the house phone.”
“It is.”
“Right.” She came in and put the towel down. “Michael, when you’ve got a minute. Not now. When you’ve got a minute, I want you to sit down and think about what she did before she got in that car.”
“What she did.”
“She was on that dock at lunchtime. She was at my kitchen table by the evening with the boy asleep in the next room, and her phone face up in front of her, and she wasn’t texting anybody.” Pia folded her arms. “I didn’t ask what she was doing. I thought I knew.”
“Pia.”
“Levi’s number. My number. The house. There’s a phone on a hook in the boat shed that nobody has used since your father died and I would put money on that one as well, and if you go and try it you’ll find out I’m right and then you’ll have to live with having tried it.”
“That’s four numbers.”
“It’s more than four and you know it. She’ll have done the office in town, because you’d have thought of the office in town by tomorrow.
” She picked the towel back up. “She didn’t lose her temper and block you and then get angrier and block the rest of us.
She sat down and did the entire family in one go, in order, before she was out of that parking lot, like a woman closing an account. ”
I stood in that kitchen with my hand still on a phone cord.
“She’d been thinking about it,” I said.
“She’d been thinking about it a long time,” said Pia. “That’s not a woman who snapped. That’s a woman who’s had the list written for a while and finally had a reason to use it.”
***
I went up to the cottage before anybody in the house was awake. There was a light on in it already.
She opened the door with a mug in one hand and a headset around her neck and did not look surprised to see me, which took something out of my legs.
“You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
“Rotterdam is ahead of us and nobody there has ever cared what time it is here.” She stood back off the door. “Do you want to come in, or is this a doorstep?”
“It’s a doorstep.”
She nodded. She did not do anything with her face. I had come up that path wanting her to make it difficult, and she was not going to, and I understood then that she had known since the dock and had spent every hour since deciding how to stand.
“The Antwerp call is at two,” she said. “I’ve moved it twice already and if I move it again he’ll take it as a message.”
“Krystal.”
“And the customs schedule needs a signature or the whole western route sits in a yard for two weeks.”
“You’re not doing the schedule.”
“Someone has to do the schedule.”
“You’re not doing it,” I said, “because you don’t work for me anymore.”
The gulls went off down at the water, and neither of us said anything through it.
“Right,” she said.
“I’ll pay out the contract in full. You’ll have a reference from me and it will be an honest one, because you have been good at this job and I’m not going to lie about that to make myself feel better.”
“That’s generous.”
“It isn’t generous. It’s what I owe you.”
“No, I mean it’s genuinely generous, and I’d like you to notice that you’re being generous to me and you have not once been generous to her.” She drank from the mug. “Is this about the boat?”
“It’s about all of it.”
“You’ll need to be more specific. I did the job you hired me to do, and it only took one stupid kiss to undo it.”
“It wasn’t just a kiss. It was in front of my wife.”
She let that sit.
Then she said, “She asked you on Saturday.”
“Yes.”
“It’s completely fair and you know it, because you have been standing there working out how to tell her, and you can’t, because there’s no version of this that isn’t you doing on your own what you wouldn’t do for her.” She almost smiled. “That’s not for Willow, Michael. That’s for you.”
I had nothing. I have sat in front of Prentice and I have sat in front of men who wanted the company off me and I have always had something, and I stood on that step with my hands in my pockets and had nothing at all.
“Will it bring her back?” she said.
“No.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Because it should have never happened.”
She looked at me for a while.
“I’ll be off the island first thing tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll leave the keys in the door. And for what it’s worth, I never once-”
“Enough.”
“All right.”
I got as far as the gate.
“Michael.”
I turned around.
“Did she ever tell you why we stopped speaking?”
The whole property was going light behind her.
“No,” I said.
“Then she still hasn’t,” said Krystal, and shut the door.
***
Levi found me on the dock in the afternoon.
He did not sit down. Levi does not sit down for these things. He stands and looks at the water and delivers sentences like weather reports.
“You know the whole island stopped inviting them to the same things years ago.”
“Stopped inviting who?”
“Willow and Krystal.” He looked out at the water. “Pia knows. The Coffins know. Alice Pell knows, and Alice Pell doesn’t know what day it is half the time. Everyone worked out those two don’t speak, and they worked it out ages back, and they arranged around it without anybody ever saying a word.”
“Nobody told me.”
“Nobody tells you anything. You’re not in the room.”
“I’m in every room.”
“You’re in the room where the money is. That’s one room, Michael, and it’s not the one where anybody says anything real.”
“Levi.”
“You put her in a cottage on this property,” he said. “On this property. Where your wife spends her summers. Where your son plays. And nobody could work out whether you’d done it on purpose or whether you genuinely didn’t know.”
“Why would I do it on purpose?”
“That’s the question everyone’s been enjoying.
” He turned around and gave me his full attention, which he had not done all week.
“The kind version is that you didn’t know.
The kind version makes you an idiot. Everyone out here has gone for the kind version, because they like Willow and they’ve known you your whole life, and you should know that they had to choose. ”
He drank the rest of what he was holding and went up the dock without another word.
***
My mother was in the sunroom with the paper and did not put it down when I came in.
“Mom.”
“You’ll want to sit.”
“I want to ask you something.”
“I’d still sit.”
I sat. She turned a page, taking her time.
“Have you spoken to her?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“And that is between us. She’s my wife.”
“She’s a woman who has been living in this family for years,” Kristina said, “and you have never once asked me what I’ve said to her, so I don’t propose to start telling you now.”
“Will you talk to her for me?”
She put the paper down at last and looked at me over the top of her glasses.
“No.”
“Mom.”
“This island decided what you are within a day, Michael, and it was not a difficult decision for anybody. I am not going to spend a single favor of mine trying to correct it, because I do not have that many left and because you would only need me to do it again.”
“That’s a no.”
“That’s a no with reasons attached, which is more than you gave your wife on a boat.”
I sat in that room with my hands between my knees, like a child waiting to be told what he had done wrong.
“He’d have known what to do,” I said.
“Your father?” My mother took her glasses off and set them on the arm of her chair. “Your father would have done exactly what you did and then bought her a house to make it go away. Don’t reach for him. He is no use to you here.”
“Then tell me what to do.”
“Work out why you stood still,” she said.
“Not why you married her, not why you hired the girl, not what you’d say if you had the evening again.
Why you stood there in that tent with your mouth open while a man insulted your wife.
Until you can answer that you will keep doing it, and no amount of being sorry will stop you. ”
She picked the paper back up.
“There’s soup in the kitchen,” she said. “You look like a docker.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask whether you were hungry. I said there’s soup.”
“Mom.”
“Michael, I have given you the only useful sentence you are going to get from anybody this week, and now I would like to read my paper in peace, and I would like you to eat something before you fall over.”
So I ate the soup, in my mother’s kitchen, standing up, out of a bowl she did not warm. It was the temperature of the room and it tasted like nothing at all.
***
I went out and sat on the wall at the top of the drive where you can see both roads, and I did the thing I have done all my life, which is take it apart. Every piece. Every moment. Looking for the place where it went wrong.
I have never once been unfaithful to my wife. I have never wanted to be. I did not kiss anybody, I did not want to be kissed, and when it happened I put her away from me in front of a client and a deck full of people I employ, which cost me something I am still paying for.
I know her order in every restaurant on this island and the two in Boston. I know she does not sleep on planes. I know she reads the last page of a book first and lies about it, and I have never once called her on it because I like watching her pretend.
And she sat in a parking lot with a two-year-old in the back and went through my entire family, one number at a time, in order.
Pia came out at some point and stood next to me with two mugs and did not hand me one.
“Are you doing the list?”
“What list?”
“The list. Everything you’ve done for her. All the things she doesn’t know about.”
“I might be.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s a good list,” I said. “It’s a very good list.”
“I bet it is,” said Pia. “I bet it’s excellent.
I bet it’s comprehensive and detailed and proves you’re a wonderful husband.
” She drank from one mug. “The problem is she’s got a list too, Michael.
And hers is older, and hers is all the things you didn’t do.
And she’s had it a lot longer than you’ve had yours. ”
“Comforting. Won’t you give me the other mug?”
She drank from both mugs and went back inside and left me there in the dark with both lists, and neither of them added up to a woman who stayed.