Chapter Two #2
Day Two held its own logistics, the way every day does regardless of what a person is quietly deciding underneath them.
Wyatt’s robotics club had a field trip to a science museum forty minutes across town, permission slip signed a week prior, and I drove him myself because the carpool mom had a dentist appointment, and spent the ride listening to him explain, with total seriousness, why a rover built for Mars would fail immediately on Europa, a fact he seemed to find personally reassuring.
Birdie’s library book — a picture book about a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, due back Friday — turned up under the couch during the search for a missing shoe, and she held it against her chest afterward like something rescued rather than found, the fierce relief of a seven-year-old whose objects matter to her with a gravity adults have mostly trained themselves out of.
I noticed, doing both of those things, that I was doing them the way I always did them — competently, without complaint, on schedule — and that the film’s four seconds hadn’t touched either child’s morning at all, which felt, that day, like both a relief and an accusation.
I told him that same evening, over a dinner neither of us was eating with any real attention, because a marriage in crisis does not, it turns out, suspend a single one of the small logistics that run underneath it.
I’d rehearsed the sentence twice in the car on the way home from the museum, the way I’d once rehearse a difficult radio call before keying the mic, and it still came out sounding, when I finally said it, exactly as ordinary as I’d intended.
“I want to take the kids up to Larkspur Falls for a while,” I said. “My dad’s not doing well. I haven’t seen him in person since Christmas, and Wyatt’s old enough now that I don’t want him to lose the chance to know his grandfather while there’s still a version of him left to know.”
It was true. Every word of it was true, which is, I’ve come to understand, the most reliable way to tell a lie you can live with — you simply don’t say the other true thing standing right behind it.
Rhys looked up from his phone, where he’d been reading the festival’s early coverage with the half-attention of a man who has learned to read and converse at once. “For how long?”
“A couple weeks. Maybe longer. I want to see what shape the lodge is really in — Dad’s care facility bills are eating whatever’s left of the business, and nobody’s looked hard at the books in years.
” All true. I watched him nod along to it, relieved, I think, in a way he wouldn’t have examined too closely, because a wife taking the kids to see her ailing father is not a crisis a man has to do anything about.
It asks nothing of him. It doesn’t require him to change a single thing about the next film, the next studio call, the next room he’d stand in and reach, without thinking, for the smallest available version of what I was to him.
“That makes sense,” he said. “I’ve got the press tour starting Thursday anyway — three cities in five days, I’ll barely be home.
Good timing, actually.” He said good timing the way you’d say it about a scheduling conflict resolving itself, and went back to his phone, and I sat there across from him with my coffee going cold and understood that he had just told me, without meaning to, exactly how much room my absence was going to make in his life: none that he’d notice as a gap, only as a convenience.
“I’ll drive up Thursday,” I said. “Give the sitter a break, get the kids out of school a few days early — I already emailed Ms. Prentiss.”
“You’ve already got it all arranged,” he said, and smiled at me, warm, unsuspicious, a man complimenting his wife on her competence the same easy way he’d complimented three hundred strangers on their applause two nights earlier. “That’s my Hollis. Always three steps ahead.”
I smiled back. I did not tell him that always three steps ahead was, at that exact moment, doing a version of the same work she holds the fort had done on that stage — a true thing, said kindly, that cost him nothing and asked nothing of him and left me, once again, fully responsible for both of us having a plan.
I finished packing that night after the kids were asleep, and made one stop on the morning of Day Three, before Rhys was even awake, that I didn’t mention to him: the storage facility, eleven minutes from the house, a beige climate-controlled building I’d visited maybe six times in four years and could still have found blindfolded.
The unit was smaller than people expect nine hundred hours of footage to be, once you account for how much data actually compresses onto a modern drive — two gray shelving units, drives labeled in my own handwriting by expedition and year, a filing box of the original permits and insurance binders I’d kept as a professional habit long before I had any reason to think of them as evidence.
I spent forty minutes with a hand truck confirming, drive by drive, exactly what I already knew I had.
Nine hundred hours. My name on every contract, every unit lease, every line of the work-for-hire letter my father had made me get notarized four years earlier over my own mild protest that it seemed excessive.
I loaded four of the drives into the trunk of the car, underneath the kids’ suitcases — the earliest expedition, the one where a twenty-two-year-old version of me had first learned what a satellite window cost, still labeled in handwriting rounder and more hopeful than mine is now.
I told myself, driving home, that I was only bringing them along to log the old footage properly while I finally had the uninterrupted time, the way I’d tell myself anything, at that stage, that let the truer reason stay quiet a little longer.
Wade always said a good logistics plan accounts for contingencies you hope you’ll never need.
I hadn’t thought of myself, packing that trunk, as planning for a contingency. I understand now that I was.
Rhys left for the airport before the kids were even up on Thursday morning, a car idling at the curb, a garment bag over his shoulder, three cities in five days between him and whatever came after that.
He kissed my forehead in the kitchen — an ordinary gesture, warm, unremarkable, the kind of kiss a man gives a wife he has no reason to think he’s about to lose — and said, “Give Wade my best. Tell him I owe him a phone call I keep meaning to make,” which was true, and which he had been meaning to make for roughly four years, and which I did not point out to him on his way out the door, because I had a car of my own to pack, and a route to plan, and two children to feed breakfast to before we left a house I already suspected, standing in that kitchen with his kiss still cooling on my forehead, I would not be coming back to in the same way I was leaving it.
I watched his car pull away from the front window with Birdie’s cereal bowl still balanced on my hip, and did the thing I do instead of anything else: I checked the weather for the drive north, confirmed the route, and started, quietly, making a list.