26. Willow
— ? —
Willow
The splint came off on a Thursday and the woman who took it off said the words full weight-bearing, and I went out to the parking lot and picked my son up off the ground with both arms, and had to stand there for a minute.
He was extremely pleased and completely unbothered.
“Mama up.”
“Mama up.”
“AGAIN.”
“You are enormous and I am doing this once.”
I did it four more times.
He was not there to see it. He had moved himself back to his mother’s house the week I could do my own buttons, with no announcement and no conversation, the sofa blanket folded on the arm one morning and the rota still on the fridge.
He un-moved in the exact way he moved in, so that neither of us would have to have a position on it.
The letter was on the wall by the gate that afternoon, under a stone, the way everything has arrived at this house all season.
He did not stay. I heard the car and I did not go out, and by the time I did there was a folded thing under a stone and nothing else, and the lane was empty all the way down.
I made a cup of tea I did not drink. I got Archie down. I sat at Ruth’s table with the short leg and the fifteen pages under it and I read two whole sheets of my husband’s handwriting, which I have not done since a form at a courthouse.
I am not going to write it all out.
It is two sheets of hotel paper and it is a list, and there is a line down the middle.
On the left, a thing he did. On the right, what he is going to do about it.
That is the whole architecture, and there is not one adjective in it anywhere, and I had not understood until I was halfway down the first sheet that he had written it to be checked.
You told me about the chair and I said he is two, he puts things on things.
You asked me at a kitchen table to keep it professional and I told you what you were instead.
You said the ferry did not freeze. You were right and I said she’d know, as though you were a source. You were standing on that dock.
I did not know what you eat.
And at the bottom of the second sheet, in different ink, added later:
There is no ask at the end of this. I have read it back four times looking for one and taken two out.
I sat in that kitchen for a long time.
Then I went and got my coat.
I have not been up that drive since the dock.
I want that understood, because it took me until I was at the bottom of it to notice.
I lived in that house for the whole of the summer.
I have been in and out of it since I was a girl.
And from the afternoon I walked up a dock with my son on my hip, I have not put one foot on that property, and nobody has ever asked me to, and every single thing that has happened since has happened at my gate, or at a pond, or in a shop, or in Ruth Folger’s kitchen.
He came to me. All season. He came to me and I let him, and I never once had to decide anything.
I sat at the bottom of that drive with the engine running for longer than I am going to admit to, and had a full conversation with myself about turning around, and lost it.
Sal was in the drive with the hood up on something.
He straightened. He looked at my car, and then at me, and then he did a thing with his chin at the house that I have thought about a lot since, which was: he’s in.
“Is his mother here?”
“His mother,” said Sal, “has gone to the Athertons’ and will be there until she is finished, and she went while you were still sitting at the bottom of this drive deciding, and I do not know why you are asking.”
“Sal.”
“I’ll be at this hood for a while,” said Sal, and put his head back under it. Then, from inside it: “It’s a good car, that.”
“It’s a hire car, Sal.”
“You’ve not been up here since the summer,” he said, to an engine.
“No.”
“No.” He turned something that did not need turning. “I’d have driven you.”
“I know you would, Sal.”
“I know you know,” he said, “and I’d like it on the record that I have not once offered, because I could see it wasn’t mine to offer,” and then he put his head back under that hood and did not come out of it again.
Michael was in the hall.
Not doing anything. Standing in that hall by the table with the beige phone on it, in the room nobody has sat in since his father died, with his sleeves down and the top button of his shirt done up like a man expecting to be told something.
He had heard the car. Of course he had heard the car.
“You’re here,” he said.
“I’m here.”
“You’ve never-”
“I know.”
“Willow, you’ve never once-”
“Michael, say it out loud and I will get back in that car, and I have spent quite a lot to get as far as this hall.”
He shut his mouth.
Good, I thought. Because I have exactly one feeling available today and it is already spoken for.
“I read it.”
“Right.”
“That’s all you’re getting for now. I read it, and I am not telling you what I thought of it while standing up in a hall, and if you ask me I will lie.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you.”
“You were about to look at me in a way that asks.”
“That,” said Michael, “is a completely unreasonable thing to police and I am going to try anyway.”
He did not offer me tea. That is worth recording, because that man has offered me tea in situations where the building was on fire, and he stood in that hall with his hands where I could see them and did not offer me one single thing, and I understood that he had worked out what today was going to be from the sound of the car.
I did not sit down. There is nowhere to sit down in that hall, which I now understand is deliberate.
“I’ve got a thing to tell you,” I said, “and it is not about you. That’s the part I need you to hold on to, because you are going to want to make it about you inside about a minute, and I would like a clear run.”
“All right.”
“Krystal and I were friends from when we were seven.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know how. She was at my house four nights a week. My mother fed her more than her own mother did, and when my mother died she did not come, and I want you to hold both of those things at the same time, because I have had to.”
He did not move.
“There was a boy called Cody,” I said.
And then I said the rest of it.
I am not going to put it down here. I have said it out loud exactly once in my life, in a hall, to my husband, and that is where it is going to stay.
It is not a complicated story and there is nothing clever in it.
It is the oldest and most boring story there is, and it happened to me when I had nobody at all, and the reason it took the whole of me was not the boy.
It was that I found out in the way you find out on an island. Which is that four people already knew.
“I stopped speaking to her,” I said. “I never said why. Not to her, not to my mother, not to anybody, because if I had said it out loud then everybody would have had it, and then it would have been a thing about me. So I let the island think we’d drifted.
And the island is very good at that. It arranged around us and nobody ever asked me one question about it. ”
Michael had gone white and had not moved at all, and the only thing about him doing anything was his jaw.
“Say something.”
“I’m not going to say the first one,” he said, “because the first one is about what I’d like to do to a woman who is on a ferry in the morning, and it is for me and not for you.”
“Thank you.”
“The second one is a question and I’d like to ask it properly. Can I?”
“Ask it.”
“Were you on your own?”
And that is the only part where my voice went.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ruth knew,” I said. “I didn’t tell her. She knew, and she told your mother, and made her swear never to use it, and Kristina has had it since before our wedding.”
“My mother has-”
“Yes.”
“Since before-”
“Yes, and you can take that up with her and I would pay to watch, but not today.”
He said, “You told me you were still close.”
And there it is.
“I did.”
“In our hallway. She’d just gone down the elevator and I asked you and you said you were still close.”
“I said yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it was ten o’clock at night and you were holding a folder,” I said, “and because if I’d given you the real answer you’d have asked a second question, and there was no second answer ready, and there never has been.”
“Willow-”
“And because I was frightened of what you’d do.
” My voice went somewhere and I did not stop it.
“You’d have fired her. You’d have fired her that night, out of a phone, in a hallway, before either of us had eaten.
And then it would have been the biggest thing you had ever done for me, and I would have had to be grateful, and I have spent my entire marriage being grateful for enormous things I did not ask for. ”
He put his hand on the table with the beige phone on it.
“So I didn’t tell you,” I said, “and you hired her, and you put her in a cottage on your mother’s property, and every single thing that has happened since has had my silence in the middle of it. That is not me letting you off. You have got your own list and I have read it. That’s mine.”
The clock in that hall did the thing it does on the half hour.
“Say something.”
“I’m working out which thing,” Michael said, “because there are about four and three of them are for me and not for you, and I’ve learned that much.”
“Take your time.”
“No, I’ve got it.” He looked up. “I would have fired her.”
“I know you would.”
“That night. In the hallway. And you’re right that it would have been the biggest thing I’d ever done for you, and you’re right that you’d have had to carry it, and I have thought that was the same as loving somebody for about as long as I’ve known you.
” He came off that table. “And the reason you couldn’t tell me is a thing I built.
Not the boy. Not her. The reason. That’s mine and I’m having it. ”
“Michael-”
“I’m not making a speech. That’s the entire thing.” He put both hands behind him on the edge of the table. “There’s a thing I have to give you back first. You’ve stood in this hall and emptied your pockets, and I’m not keeping anything in mine.”
“Go on.”
“I knew there was a why.”
“What?”
“Levi told me the two of you don’t speak.
The day after the dock, on the dock, looking at the water the way he does.
And she asked me, standing on that cottage step with her keys still in the door, whether you’d ever told me why you stopped speaking.
” His jaw did the thing. “I had it from both of them inside one day, and I never once asked you.”
So he did wonder, I thought. He just never made me watch him do it.
“Why not?”
“Because asking meant getting an answer with me in it. Everything on this island had an answer with me in it by then, and I didn’t want one more. So I put it away and called it tact, and it wasn’t tact. It was the curtains, in a different shape.”
“Do you want to know the only thing I want to say about the actual story?”
“Go on.”
“You had nobody, and I was in New York learning about tonnage, and I did not ring you.” He held my eye. “That’s not on the list. I wrote that list in a hotel and I did not have that one, because I didn’t know it, and I’d like it added.”
And I stood in a hall in a house I have never once driven to, in front of a man with his top button done up, and could not think of a single sarcastic thing to say, which has not happened to me in years.
“Right,” I said.
“Right.”
“I’m going to go, because if I stay here I’ll do something.”
“Understood.”
“That was not-” I stopped. “That was not a hint.”
“It absolutely was,” said Michael, “and I am going to be very good about it, and you are going to hate that.”