12. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
I watch him through the gap in the curtains.
He’s parked on the street, his fancy car looking ridiculous in my parents’ working-class neighborhood. The retiree next door has already walked past twice, craning her neck to get a look at him. By tomorrow, the whole block will know that Hannah’s husband is camping out in his car.
Good. Let them talk. I spent years managing what everyone thought of my marriage, curating it like a gallery show, and look where the reviews got me. The neighbors can have the exhibit. I’m done being the docent.
That first night, I lie in my childhood bed and listen for his engine.
It never starts. Around two in the morning I get up and check, telling myself I’m hoping he’s gone, and there’s his silhouette in the driver’s seat, head tipped back against the rest, a billionaire sleeping folded up in a sedan on a street where nobody has ever valet-parked anything.
I go back to bed. I don’t sleep either. There’s a strange, awful intimacy in it, the two of us lying awake fifty feet apart, wrecked by the same marriage.
“He’s still out there,” my mom says from behind me the next afternoon. “It’s been six hours since he last tried the door.”
“I know.”
“Your father’s getting twitchy. He keeps looking at the gun cabinet.”
“Tell him not to shoot my almost-ex-husband. The paperwork would be a nightmare.”
“That’s my girl. Practical to the end.”
My mom comes to stand beside me at the window. We watch Griffin together in silence. He’s just sitting there, hands on the steering wheel, staring at the house. Every few minutes he checks his phone, probably hoping I’ve texted him back.
I haven’t. I won’t.
Day two starts with him getting out of his car at 7 a.m.
I watch from my window as he walks up to the house. He’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday, wrinkled now, and he hasn’t shaved. He looks like hell.
My mother intercepts him at the door.
“Good morning, Griffin.” Her voice is polite but cold. “Hannah still doesn’t want to see you.”
“I know. I just…” He drags a hand down his face. “Can you at least tell her I’m sorry? Can you tell her I love her and I’m sorry and I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right?”
“She knows.”
“And?”
“And she still doesn’t want to see you.”
He stands there for a moment, his shoulders slumping. “Can I at least know what I did? I mean, I know the speech was bad, but this seems like… there has to be more. There has to be something else.”
My mother doesn’t answer. She just looks at him with an expression that would wilt flowers.
“Please,” he says. “I’m begging you. I don’t know how to fix this if I don’t know what I broke.”
“Maybe you should have thought about that before you broke it.”
She closes the door.
I don’t know what I broke.
I stand at the top of the stairs with my hand pressed over my mouth.
He still doesn’t know I heard him. He thinks this is about the speech, about Julie, about one bad night.
He’s out there running through everything he did in front of witnesses, and it hasn’t once occurred to him that the worst thing he ever did to me, he did in a private room, to his best friend, with a glass of scotch in his hand.
And I’m not going to tell him. Not yet. Let him sit in that car and take inventory. Let him find it himself.
I watch him walk back to his car. He sits there for another six hours.
Day three, it rains.
It starts before dawn, and I wake to the sound of it drumming the roof and my first thought, before I’m even fully conscious, is that he’s out there in it.
I hate that it’s my first thought. I lie in bed and try to replace it with anger, with the hallway, with the sound of his voice saying owed, and mostly it works.
Not a light drizzle, either. A full-on downpour, the kind that floods the streets and turns the yard into a mud pit. I watch the rain pound against my window and think about Griffin out there in his car, probably getting soaked every time he opens the door.
Around noon, I see my mother walk out of the house with an umbrella and something in her hand.
She crosses the yard to his car and taps on the window. He rolls it down, and I see her hand him a bottle of water and what looks like a sandwich.
She doesn’t say anything. Neither does he.
He holds the sandwich in both hands like it’s made of glass, and even from up here I can see his mouth working, thank you or I’m sorry or both, words she’s already turned her back on.
She walks to the house through the rain at exactly the pace she walks everywhere, unhurried, unbothered, righteous, and he watches her the whole way like a man watching the last boat leave.
I’m waiting in the kitchen when she comes back in.
“You’re feeding him?”
She shrugs off her wet jacket. “I’m not going to let him die of dehydration, Hannah. Whatever he’s done, he’s still a person.”
“He’s a person who broke my heart. You heard what I told you he said. You want to feed that? Feed it.”
“Yes,” she says, maddeningly calm. “I do. Because in this family we don’t starve people, we just don’t forgive them until they’ve earned it. Those are different things, Hannah, and the day you mix them up is the day you turn into his mother.”
That lands like a bucket of cold water.
“I know.” She hangs the jacket on a hook by the door. “But I raised you to be kind, even to people who don’t deserve it. I have to live by my own rules.”
I don’t have an argument for that. I never do, with her.
My mother argues the way water argues with rock, patiently, from below, and you don’t realize you’ve been reshaped until years later when you catch yourself being kind to someone who doesn’t deserve it and hear her voice coming out of your mouth.
“He asked about you,” she says, filling the kettle like we’re discussing weather.
“Asked if you were okay. Asked if you were eating. Asked if there was anything he could do.” She sets the kettle on the burner and finally looks at me.
“He didn’t ask me to pass along a message, and he didn’t ask when you were coming out.
First smart thing I’ve seen him do all week, knowing there’s no answer he’s entitled to. ”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just gave him the sandwich and walked away.”
I look out the window. Griffin is eating the sandwich, his eyes fixed on the house. On my window.
I step back so he can’t see me, and I stand in the middle of my childhood bedroom with my heart doing something complicated and unwelcome, and I remind it, out loud, whose side we’re on.
Day four, the weather clears and my dad takes over guard duty like a man relieving a night watch.
He sets up a lawn chair on the front porch and sits there with a cup of coffee and a book, occasionally glancing toward Griffin’s car. Every time Griffin tries to approach the house, my dad just shakes his head and points back toward the street.
By the afternoon, they’ve developed a kind of routine. Griffin gets out of his car, walks halfway up the path, my dad shakes his head, Griffin goes back. They don’t speak. They don’t need to.
“He’s persistent,” my dad says over dinner. “I’ll give him that.”
“He’s annoying,” I mutter.
“That too.” He takes a bite of pot roast and chews it with the deliberateness he brings to everything, a man who has never once been rushed in his own kitchen.
“Kid hasn’t eaten a hot meal in four days.
Hasn’t showered. Keeps wearing the same funeral-looking suit.
” He points his fork at the window. “That’s either love or lunacy out there, and I’ve been married to your mother long enough to know they’re the same animal. ”
“Dad.”
“I’m just making an observation.” He goes back to his plate. “You know you’re going to have to talk to him eventually, right?”
“No I don’t.”
“Hannah.”
“I don’t. I can just… wait him out. He’ll give up eventually.”
My dad and my mom exchange a look.
“What?” I demand.
“Nothing,” my mom says. “It’s just… that boy has been sitting in his car for four days. He doesn’t look like he’s planning to give up anytime soon.”
“Then I’ll wait longer.”
Another exchanged look. I ignore it and go back to my dinner.
Day five, I have a breakdown.
It hits me out of nowhere. My mom has left an old photo album on the dresser, not on purpose, just my mother being my mother, and I make the mistake of opening it.
There I am at nineteen, in a college sweatshirt, laughing at the camera with my whole face, a girl who has no idea what’s coming.
Three pages later there we are at graduation, his arm around me, and I’m looking up at him instead of at the lens, already orbiting.
I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by stuffed animals and posters from high school, and suddenly I’m crying so hard I can’t breathe.
All the grief I’ve been holding back, all the anger and hurt and fear, comes flooding out in one massive wave.
I cry for the girl in the sweatshirt who had no idea what was coming. I cry because I can’t warn her, and because even now, knowing everything, I’m not sure she would have listened.
My mom finds me curled up on the bed, sobbing into a pillow, the album still open to graduation.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She lies down beside me and pulls me into her arms. “Let it out. Let it all out.”
“I loved him so much,” I choke out. “I gave him everything. And it wasn’t enough. I was never enough.”
“That’s not true…”
“It is. He said it himself. He didn’t marry me because he loved me. He married me because he felt like he owed me.”
My mom is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “Can I tell you something? Something I’ve never told you before?”
I nod against her shoulder.
“At your wedding, when you were saying your vows, I watched Griffin’s face. And there was a moment, just a second, where he looked… surprised. Like he couldn’t believe you were marrying him. Like he didn’t think he deserved you.”
“That’s not…”
“I’m not done. At the time, I thought it was sweet. I thought he was just overwhelmed by how much he loved you. But now, looking back…” She sighs. “Maybe he was surprised for a different reason. Maybe he couldn’t believe you were marrying him because he knew, even then, that he hadn’t earned you.”
I pull back to look at her. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to know that this isn’t your fault. Whatever was wrong with your marriage, whatever was broken, it wasn’t because you weren’t enough. It was because he didn’t know how to be what you needed.”
“That doesn’t make it hurt less.”
“I know.” She strokes my hair. “But maybe, someday, it’ll make it easier to let go.”
Day six brings the first almost-funny thing to happen all week. The family across the street starts a betting pool.
I hear about it from my mother, who heard it from the mail carrier, who heard it from someone’s teenage kid. The whole neighborhood is apparently taking bets on how long Griffin will last.
The retiree next door has twenty bucks on two weeks. The family across the street thinks he’ll fold in days.
“What do you think?” my mom asks.
“I think he’s never lost anything in his adult life and he has no idea how,” I say, and then, because it’s also true: “And I think he’s too stubborn to give up.”
“That’s what I told the mail carrier.” She pauses. “I put fifty on a month.”
“Mom!”
“What? Might as well make some money off your misery.”
“You bet AGAINST me getting rid of him?”
“I bet on him being exactly as stubborn as you are. There’s a difference.” She pats my knee on her way past. “Fifty bucks says I know my daughter’s taste in men. God help us all.”
Despite everything, despite the week and the wreckage and the man camped at the curb, I almost laugh, and the almost feels like the first solid ground I’ve touched in days.
Day seven, I wake up before the sun, and I lie there in the gray light with my hand on my stomach, and I make a decision.
It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t weakness.
It’s arithmetic. There is a person coming who will belong to both of us, and there is a truth sitting in my chest that I’ve been carrying alone for a week, and a man outside who has camped through rain and rifle and ridicule without knowing the half of what he’s actually being punished for.
I’ve been hiding in my parents’ house for a week. A whole week of watching Griffin through the curtains, of letting my mother bring him water and sandwiches, of letting my father guard the door.
This can’t go on forever. I can’t spend the rest of my pregnancy holed up in my childhood bedroom, avoiding the man who’s technically still my husband.
It has to end. I’m going to tell him about the baby, tell him exactly what I heard, and then say goodbye.
He can’t keep camping on my parents’ street like the world’s best-dressed hostage crisis, and I can’t keep flinching from my own front yard.
I put on real clothes for the first time in a week. I brush my hair until it shines, because I refuse to look broken for this. I look at myself in the mirror and see someone I barely recognize, tired, pale, but still standing, and I put my hand flat on my stomach and hold my own gaze.
“Okay,” I tell both of us. “We’re doing this.”
Then I walk downstairs, through the kitchen, past my mother’s carefully blank face, and out onto the front porch.
Griffin is out of his car before I’ve even made it down the steps.