24. Delphine #3
“So let me add it up.”
And I did. Out loud, in the dark, in a hotel room, and I made him lie there and listen to every line of it, and it was the cruelest thing I’ve ever done to a person I love and I would do it again tomorrow.
The charity. That was the first one. I had walked into a room full of people who wanted me gone and taken it back off his mother with nothing but my own voice, six weeks ago, and I had won, and if I got on a plane in March I would be an ocean away from the only thing in nine years with my fingerprints on it.
I could not run it from France. I’m not that arrogant.
Somebody would have to actually run it, day to day, in the room, in Newport, and I would be a voice on a video call twice a month, which is exactly what Montana had tried to make me into and I would be doing it to myself.
“That one has a shape,” I said. “I don’t like the shape, but it has one. I stay chair. Somebody good runs it in front of me and I oversee. And I already know who.”
“Blythe.”
“Blythe.” I almost laughed. “God, of course Blythe. I’ve been doing the numbers for two years and thinking that was the job.
It was never the job. Half that money is soft, Heath, it follows a person, and I’m the wrong person, I’m the one who sits in the kitchen with a spreadsheet.
Blythe walks into a room and it rearranges itself around her.
” I pressed my thumbs into my eyes. “She’ll be better at it than me by June.
That’s going to hurt for about a year and then it’s going to be the best thing I ever did. ”
“That’s not losing it.”
“No,” I said. “It’s handing it to somebody. It’s just not free.”
“And the lodge?”
“The lodge I finish.”
I did not have to think about that one at all, which told me a fact about myself I had not known an hour earlier.
“It’s forty-two beds in a wood in February and it’s the only thing on this earth with my name on the drawings, and I’m fixing that wall in March if I have to dig it out with a teaspoon myself.
So we go after. Or I fly back for it. Or you sit in Paris on your own for three weeks and learn what that feels like.
” I heard him laugh, once, in the dark. “I’m not asking, Heath.
I’m telling you what’s happening. That’s the difference. You’ll want to get used to it.”
“God,” he said, with enormous feeling. “Yes.”
And then I said the other one, and my voice went.
“My mother.”
He was very still.
“You had them on a plane in four seconds and I need you to understand that you cannot have them on a plane. They have a life. Dad has the garden and his terrible watercolors and forty years of the same four men on a Thursday, and Mom has a whole town of people who need her, and they’re sixty-three and sixty-six and they’re not props, Heath, they’re not a problem you solve by relocating them.
” My throat closed. “She opened the door in December and I was crying so hard I couldn’t say my own name and she just took me inside.
She didn’t ask what happened. She didn’t ask for four days. ”
“Del.”
“I would be an ocean away from that.” It came out in pieces.
“That’s the price. Not a career. Not a charity.
My mother, four thousand miles away, and I get her at Christmas and on a screen, and one day I’ll get a phone call at three in the morning and I’ll be eight hours from a bed I need to be sitting next to.
That’s what Europe costs. That’s the actual number and there’s no clever version of it and I do not want you to fix it. I want you to lie there and know it.”
He did not fix it.
That’s the truest thing I can tell you about my husband, more than the nursery and more than the letters and more than the boathouse. He lay there in the dark with his hand not quite touching mine and he let me sit inside the worst true thing in my life, and he did not reach for a single tool.
“I know it,” he said.
“Say the rest.”
“And I’m asking you anyway.” His voice broke on it.
“That’s the whole grovel, Del. That’s all of it.
There’s a lease with a signature date and it’s the first of March and it’s two weeks away, and I’m asking my wife to pay for it, out loud, with her own mother, and I’m not going to pretend it’s a gift. ”
Two weeks. He had been carrying that date since a hotel room in Boston in January, and in five weeks of driving me around and building me a nursery and letting me tell him no, he had never once used it on me.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll come.” I was crying and I did not particularly care.
“Not because you asked well. Because I want to go. Because I’ve wanted to go since the hospital and I’ve been too proud and too frightened to say it out loud, and because I’m not doing it again, Heath, I’m not sitting in a house in Newport for another nine years being the reason you didn’t.
I want to see it. I want to see the thing your father drew and never got to build.
I want my name on a building in a country where nobody has ever heard of your mother. ”
We stayed awake until it got light.
And at some point, around four, with my head on his chest and his heartbeat going under my ear, I understood that I had not been given anything.
I had bought it. I had put my mother on one side of a scale and my whole life on the other and I had chosen, and the loss did not go anywhere, it just sat down next to the joy and got comfortable, and that’s what an adult decision actually is and nobody tells you.
I’ve never been so tired. I’ve never been so completely myself.
“One condition,” I said, somewhere near morning.
“Anything.”
“Don’t ever do that again. Don’t hand me the finished version. Bring me the dead bird and put it on the table.” I felt him laugh, once, under my ear. “That’s all I ever wanted, Heath. I never needed you to solve it. I needed you to bring it home.”
“Partners,” I said.
“Partners.”
He pulled me close, wrapping his arms around me, and I felt the last of the tension drain from both of our bodies. For the first time in months, maybe years, we were truly on the same page. Looking forward instead of back. Building instead of breaking.
“Hey, Heath?”
“Hmm?”
“When do we leave?”
He laughed, a real laugh, full and warm and free of the shadows that had haunted him for so long.
“As soon as they let us. As soon as we can pack up our lives and go.”
“Good.” I pressed a kiss to his chest. “I’m ready for somewhere new.”
“So am I, sweetheart.”
I closed my eyes, finally feeling sleep beginning to pull at me.
“France,” I murmured.
“France,” he agreed, his voice soft and certain. “Our new beginning.”