Chapter 18
Patrick
Erick wants the elephant book.
He always wants the elephant book. We have read the elephant book approximately four hundred times and I know it well enough to recite it in my sleep, which is fortunate, because tonight I am not reading it so much as producing the sounds of reading while my mind is somewhere else entirely.
“Daddy.”
“Mm.”
“You said the wrong part.”
I look down at him. He has his mother’s steadiness and my complete inability to tolerate imprecision, which means he will either be very successful or very difficult to live with. Possibly both.
“What did I say?”
“You said the elephant went through the mud. He went into the mud. There’s a difference.” He says difference with four syllables, very deliberate, and looks at me with an expression that communicates, clearly, that he is doing me a favor by correcting me.
“You’re right. I apologize.”
“It’s okay. You can try again.”
I try again. He nods, satisfied. We continue.
Three pages later the elephant gets properly stuck and makes its sound of distress, and I make the sound too, and Erick loses it completely.
He laughs the way only four-year-olds laugh, with his whole body, like the elephant farting in the mud is the funniest thing that’s ever happened.
It’s the same laugh every time, the exact same sound, the complete loss of control.
You’d think I wouldn’t laugh anymore, after so many times, I know what’s coming.
But his laugh pulls me in every single time. I laugh too.
“Again,” he says.
I make the sound again. He dissolves again. We do this three more times.
We get to the end of the book and he is still grinning, heavy-eyed, and then he goes quiet in that way he has right before sleep, all the energy draining at once. I’m about to close the book when he says, in his settling-down voice, the careful one he uses for things he’s been thinking about:
“Dad. Can I get a new mom?”
I go still.
“Tommy’s dad got married again,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Tommy says sometimes adults do that. Get married again.” He looks up at me with complete sincerity. “Can you do that?”
There is no correct answer to this question. I know this immediately and I take a breath and I say, “Sometimes adults do, yes. I’d have to find someone who was right for both of us. That’s not easy.”
He considers this seriously. Then: “Maybe you could ask Elena. She’s pretty.”
My chest does something I don’t have a clean word for.
“Elena has her own life,” I say. “It’s not as simple as just asking.”
“Why not”
“Because adults have complicated situations. It takes time to know if someone is right.”
He thinks about this for a moment, brow furrowed, deeply engaged with the logistics of adult relationships. Then: “Okay. But you could still ask.” He pauses. “Can we go to the zoo?”
“Yes.”
“The weekend after next? Because this weekend I’m at Grandma and Grandpa’s.”
“The weekend after next. I promise.”
That satisfies him. He closes his eyes. Within two minutes he is completely gone, the way he always goes, like a light switched off, no transition, just suddenly asleep and entirely unreachable, his face slack and perfect and unbothered by anything.
I sit on the edge of his bed for a long moment.
He is four years old and he is already trying to fix things.
He does not know what he’s asking. He does not know that he just said the name of the woman I can’t stop thinking about in the same breath as the word mom, and that I am now sitting in the orange glow of his nightlight holding both of those things at once with no idea what to do with either of them.
I turn off the light and stand in his doorway in the dark and I understand something I have been avoiding understanding: the wall I built around him is also a wall I built around myself. I put his name on it because that was easier than admitting the name on it was mine.
I go to the kitchen. I pour something I don’t particularly want and stand at the counter and look at her text.
Can’t tomorrow. Sorry.
She had something in her calendar. I saw it, she may not know I have visibility into the shared system, or maybe she does and she did it on purpose.
A block for the evening, edited three times, the label changed until it read, in the preview, Love and then a word cut off.
I sent the dinner invitation knowing it was there.
I told myself I was asking because I wanted to take her somewhere.
The truth, which I was aware of and chose not to examine too closely, is that I thought if I asked she would tell me.
That the invitation would open a door she’d been keeping shut and she’d say what she was doing, and I’d know, and the not-knowing would stop being a problem.
What came back was two words and no explanation. And I don’t have the right to push further than that. She set the terms. I agreed to them. If she’s not offering more, I don’t get to demand it just because I want it.
That doesn’t make it easier to stand here not knowing.
I put the glass down and go stand at the window. The city at eleven doesn’t register human problems. I have always found that useful.
I want to know her. That’s the blunt fact I’ve been walking around for weeks.
What she does when she isn’t in my office.
What she was before this job. What she wants badly enough that she edits a calendar entry three times and then doesn’t explain why she’s not free.
I want to take her somewhere with a table and a real conversation and I want her to still be there at the end of it.
I take the glass to the bedroom.
Sarah’s photograph is on the shelf where it has been for three years. Silver frame, Cinque Terre, three months before.
I look at her.
What comes isn’t the careful penance I’ve practiced. What comes is fast and unbidden, wet road, the headlights catching something at the edge, the reflex, the correction that came a half-second too late. The sound. The silence after. That specific quality of silence.
She was twenty-nine. She had a terrible sense of direction and she made friends on trains.
She would have been a good mother, and I have carried the weight of that fact every day like a debt I could never fully pay.
I kept her in every room. Penance, yes, but also, I think now, holding the frame in both hands, also fear.
If I let go of the grief I might lose the last shape of her.
And losing the last shape of her would mean I had nothing left to punish myself with, and I was not ready for that.
Erick said: maybe you could ask Elena. She’s pretty.
He is four years old and completely without armor and he is already trying to put the pieces of his life into an arrangement that makes sense to him.
Her photo is always on my nightstand. Always in view. Tonight, for the first time, I don’t leave it there. I set the frame in the drawer, slowly, with both hands.
I’m sorry, I think, and this time it means something different than it has before.
Not the guilt. Not the ritual. Just: I’m sorry you’re not here.
I’m sorry I can’t keep doing this. I’m sorry I don’t know how to stop being the man who caused the accident without also stopping being the man who loved you.
I close the drawer.
I have no idea how to do this. I have no idea how to want something and let myself have it. I have three years of evidence that I am very good at neither of those things.
I sleep badly. I wake at five and don’t go back.
At seven I’m in the office. The floor is quiet this early, just the city through the glass and the Bergamo contract open on my desk and the specific quality of silence that belongs to a space before anyone else arrives.
At seven-fifty I’m standing in the doorway of my office with a coffee I’ve already finished, not entirely sure what I’m doing there, when the elevator opens.
She steps out wearing something green I haven’t seen before, her hair is down and she looks like someone who had a very good night.
She doesn’t notice me. She drops her bag at her desk, pulls up her screen, and I can see she’s almost smiling, the private kind, the kind turned inward, toward something she’s not sharing with the room.
She still doesn’t see me.
I go back into my office and close the door most of the way and sit down.
I say nothing. I respond to two emails. I take a call from the Singapore office and I handle it correctly and completely and without any visible sign of the distraction that is currently sitting thirty feet away at the assistant’s desk, looking like that, for reasons I have no right to ask about.
By ten o’clock I have made a decision.
I’m not performing. I’m not cold because I’ve calculated that cold is useful or because I’m protecting the terms she set.
I’m cold because I am genuinely out of my depth and I don’t have a register for this, for wanting someone who has drawn a clean line and stood behind it while I’ve spent two weeks walking toward it from the other side.
I don’t know how to want something I can’t move toward without breaking the only agreement she was willing to make.
She sends me a scheduling note at ten-fifteen, professional, correct, two sentences.
I read it and put my phone down and look at the city.
Somewhere in it, last night, she was somewhere I didn’t know about. She came back from it looking like that. And the terms say I don’t get to ask.
The terms are going to be a problem.