16. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
Three weeks went by.
I read the letter the night he gave it to me.
I had meant to be stronger about it. I put it in the drawer of my childhood desk, under a stack of my own school reports, and went downstairs and ate my mother’s casserole and laughed at one of my father’s jokes, and then I had come back up and lasted eleven minutes.
I’m not going to write out what it said.
It’s mine. He wrote it alone at a desk in a house I had emptied out, in handwriting that got worse as it went, and there’s a line in the middle of it about the night I told him to mind his own business that I’ve read more times than I’ve read anything else in my life.
What I’ll write down is what it did.
I had been managing. That’s the honest word for the three weeks before it. I had a system. I did not answer on the first ring, I did not read the messages twice, I did not let myself picture the house. I had built a small gray structure to live inside and it was holding.
The letter took the roof off.
Because a voicemail is a man talking. You can hate a man talking.
But handwriting is a man sitting down. It’s an hour of him, alone, choosing words for you and crossing them out, and you cannot be angry at an hour.
I sat on the floor of my old bedroom at midnight, eleven weeks pregnant, and missed my husband so badly that my hands shook, and there was nothing in me that could be recruited to hate him, not one cell, I looked everywhere.
And that was so much worse than the gray structure. That was so much worse than any of it. Because grief you can sit inside. Missing someone is a thing that walks around your house.
I put it back in the drawer. I did not put it back in the envelope.
And then I want to be honest about the three weeks that came after it, because they were not dramatic and they mattered more than anything that was.
He did not call every day. He called on Mondays and Thursdays, and he asked how I was sleeping and whether I had taken the iron, and when I said I didn’t want to talk he said all right and hung up without making me feel it.
He sent nothing extravagant. He drove up twice and fixed things in my parents’ house without being asked and left before dinner.
He wrote to the board, four times, and copied me on all of it. He did not once mention the word Paris.
That was the part that got under my guard. He had waited three months to say it, and then he said it in a hospital room and never used it as a lever again. Not once. He had the biggest ask of his life sitting in his mouth and he just held it there and let me have the time.
My mother said, on day nine, that a man who could do that could probably also have said it in September. She was not wrong. But she also stopped putting an extra place at the table like a warning, so.
***
The phone call came at nine in the morning of the third week.
I was still in bed, half asleep, my hand resting on my stomach the way it always did now. The baby wasn’t big enough to feel yet, but I liked to imagine I could sense it there. A presence. A promise.
“Mrs. Fairchild?” The voice on the other end was professional, brisk. “This is Miranda Okafor from Architectural Solutions. We’re three weeks into the Newport project and I need you on site. Today, if you can bear it.”
I sat up, suddenly awake. “Today? That’s short notice, Miranda.”
“I apologize, but there’s an issue with the foundation plans that we need to address in person. The sooner we can resolve it, the better. Can you be at the site by two?”
I thought about my options. I did not have a car in Boston, because my car had been sitting in the garage at Fairhaven since Christmas along with the rest of my life.
My parents were both at work. And I hated driving, had hated it since I was seventeen, which was an inconvenient thing to hate when the site was a remote woodsy location three hours away on roads that required good tires and a driver who wanted to be there.
“I’ll be there,” I said, because I was not going to let transportation issues derail my first solo project in nine years.
I hung up and immediately regretted my confidence. How exactly was I going to get to a remote location three hours away with no car and no ride?
I was still trying to figure it out when there was a knock at the door.
My mother must have forgotten her keys. I pulled on a sweater and padded downstairs in my bare feet, not bothering to check the window before I opened the door.
It wasn’t my mother.
Heath stood on the porch, his cheeks flushed from the cold, his hands shoved in his pockets. He looked like a man who hadn’t slept well, with shadows under his eyes and stubble on his jaw.
“Oh,” I said.
“I just...” He shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking embarrassed. “I was in the area. And I saw these onesies in a store window. They were cute. So I bought them. And I wanted to bring them to you.”
He pulled a small bag out of his pocket and held it out to me. His ears were turning red. His whole face was turning red, actually, the flush spreading down his neck in a way I had always found endearing.
I took the bag and looked inside. Three tiny onesies, each one softer than the last. One had little ducks on it. One had a pattern of stars. One simply said Future Engineer in block letters.
My heart squeezed.
“These are...” I couldn’t help smiling. “These are really cute.”
“Yeah?” His whole face lit up. “I thought you might like them.”
“I love them.”
We stood there for a moment, neither of us quite sure what to say. The morning sun was bright behind him, making him squint slightly. He looked younger somehow. Less polished. More real.
“What were you up to?” he asked tentatively. “Before I interrupted.”
“Actually, I was trying to figure out a problem.” I leaned against the doorframe, still holding the bag of onesies. “I have a client meeting this afternoon. At a site about two hours from here. And I don’t have a car.”
“I have a car.”
“I know you have a car.”
“I could drive you.” He said it too fast, the words tumbling over each other in his eagerness. “If you want. I mean, I don’t have anything else to do today. And it would give us... I mean, if you wanted...”
“Heath.”
“Yes?”
“Are you offering to drive me three hours to a job site and then three hours back?”
“I’m offering to spend time with you.” He met my eyes, and what I saw there made my chest ache. “However you’ll let me. Whatever you need.”
I should have said no. I should have called a cab or rented a car or found some other solution that didn’t involve spending four hours in close quarters with my estranged husband.
But I was tired, and the meeting was important, and the truth was that I wanted to see him.
Even after everything, I wanted to be near him.
“Fine,” I said. “Let me get dressed.”
His smile could have powered a small city.
He had rolled his sleeves before he got in the car.
I don’t think he decided to. It was cold and he’d rolled them anyway, and now there was a forearm on the gearshift eighteen inches from my knee, flexing every single time the road turned.
I looked out the window. I kept looking out the window for nine solid miles, watching the shoreline go by so I would not have to look at him.
This is a man who let his mother call you a common little whore in a ballroom, I told myself. This is a man you have a folder about. There’s a lawyer in this state with your signature on a document that ends him.
My body received this information and did absolutely nothing with it.
That’s the part nobody warns you about. I had assumed the wanting would go when the trust went.
That they were bolted together, that you could not possibly have one while the other lay in pieces on the floor of a parking lot.
They’re not bolted together. They’re not in the same building.
I could hate him with my entire mind and my thighs would still press together at a junction, and there’s no dignity available anywhere in that, none, I have looked.
A hundred and five days had become a hundred and forty-eight. The count kept itself.
“You’re quiet,” he said, somewhere around the second hour.
“I’m working.”
I was not working. I had not worked in ninety minutes. I was watching my husband’s hands on a steering wheel and doing arithmetic, and I knew the answer without having to do the arithmetic, which was somehow the worst thing that had happened to me all week.
Heath put on a playlist I recognized, a collection of songs we used to listen to together, and I found myself singing along without thinking. The music filled the car, filling the silences, making it easier to just exist in the same space without the pressure of conversation.
We talked a little. About the project, mostly. I told him about the building I was designing, a small retreat center in the woods, and he asked questions that proved he was actually listening. It felt familiar. Easy. The way things used to be before everything went wrong.
I caught myself relaxing into the rhythm of it and had to remind myself to stay guarded. This was not forgiveness. This was just a car ride.
The site was exactly as remote as I remembered. A winding road through dense forest, the trees bare and gray in the winter light. The retreat center would sit at the top of a small hill, with views of the surrounding landscape that would be stunning once spring arrived.
“I’ll wait here,” Heath said as he pulled into the small parking area. “Take as long as you need.”
“You don’t have to wait in the car. You could come look around if you want.”
“Really?”
“It’s just a bunch of trees and a construction site. But the view from the top of the hill is nice.”
We walked up together, our breath fogging in the cold air. I pointed out where the main building would go, where the walking paths would wind through the forest, where the meditation garden would eventually bloom with native plants.