Chapter 16
Tessa
The GAL visit was scheduled for that same week. The morning they were due, I got out of bed before five and went to the kitchen.
By six, I had bacon in the oven, muffins on the cooling rack, and a coffee pot full of something I had no intention of drinking. By seven, I had cleaned the entire kitchen. By eight, I had cleaned it again.
I didn't hear Cole get up. I didn't hear him cross the carpet of the bedroom or come down the hall. He was just suddenly in the kitchen doorway, in the T-shirt he slept in and the sweats he kept folded on the chair, taking in the wreckage of food on every surface like he was reading a chart.
"Hey."
He came in. He walked past the cooling rack, the bacon pan, and the pristine kitchen like he wasn't surprised. He poured himself a cup of the coffee I hadn't been planning to drink and leaned against the counter across from me.
"We'll be fine."
I wanted to believe him. I nodded.
"Yeah."
It came out flatter than I meant it to. He didn't push. He just looked at me, the look he had when he was waiting to see if I needed something I hadn't asked him for. I shook my head. He nodded once and looked into his coffee.
I had been doing this all morning, wanting to tell him I was scared and not telling him. I was tired of my own face by eight in the morning.
"I made too much food," I said.
"You made enough food. We'll eat it."
"Noah's going to want pancakes."
"Noah eats whatever you put in front of him."
"He doesn't."
"He does for you."
He drank his coffee. He didn't smile at me. He didn't have to.
The hours between then and ten o'clock moved at no particular speed. Noah came down for breakfast. Cole made him pancakes. I changed twice and gave up. By nine-fifty, I was sitting in the living room with my hands folded in my lap.
The doorbell rang at ten.
She was a small woman, mid-fifties maybe, in a navy cardigan and the kind of low flats my grandmother had worn to church. She had a tote bag over one shoulder, a clipboard tucked under the same arm, and a smile that didn't look like one she had practiced in a mirror.
"Suzanne Delacroix. Suzanne, please. You must be Natalie."
She had my legal name. From the petition.
"I am. Please come in."
She came in and looked around the entry the way a friend would look around a friend's apartment for the first time. Interested. Not assessing.
"Oh, this is lovely."
Cole came out of the kitchen and put his hand out, and she shook it like she was shaking the hand of an old colleague—both palms, brief, no theatrics.
She declined coffee. She accepted water.
She followed me into the living room, sat down in the armchair we had pulled in from the corner the night before, and set the clipboard down on the coffee table beside her water glass.
There was one piece of paper on the clipboard. Nothing was written on it.
I made myself look away.
She asked us general questions to start.
How long Cole and I had known each other.
Since we were sixteen, Cole said, even and unembellished, the way he said most things.
He didn't explain the sixteen. How recently we had reconnected.
About the engagement. About my work at the bakery.
About Noah's school, his teacher, and how he was settling in.
We had practiced this two nights running over the kitchen table until I could speak about my own life as if it were a story that had happened to me.
Cole answered the questions I had been most afraid to answer.
I answered the ones I could answer in my own voice.
She didn't pick up a pen the entire time.
After about twenty minutes, she folded her hands.
"Would it be alright if I spent a few minutes with Noah? Just the two of us. Wherever he'd be most comfortable."
"His room," I said.
"Wonderful."
I got up, went down the hall, and tapped on Noah's door. He came out with his sleeves pulled down over his hands. He had been doing that more lately. I hadn't asked him about it.
"Hey, bud."
"Hi."
"Suzanne's going to talk with you for a few minutes. Just you and her. In your room. That okay?"
He nodded.
"I'll be right out here. So will Cole. You can come find us anytime if you want."
"Okay."
Suzanne held her hand out to him. He took it. The two of them went into his room, and the door closed behind them most of the way. It didn't close all the way. I noticed she had left it cracked deliberately.
Cole and I went into the master and sat on the edge of the bed.
We could hear the low murmur of voices through the walls. Indistinct. No words coming through. Cole sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped between them. I sat with my hands folded in my lap.
After a minute, he said, "She's good."
"You think?"
"She didn't write anything down. That's a person who's been doing this long enough to know what she's looking at."
"That makes me more nervous."
"It shouldn't."
He looked at me. I looked at the wall.
After a few more minutes, I stood up.
"I need the bathroom."
He looked up. Nodded. He didn't ask if I was okay. He had stopped asking that this morning, after the second time, when he had seen on my face that the question was making it harder.
I went out into the hall and closed the bedroom door behind me.
The bathroom was three steps down the hall on the left. I went in. I closed the door. I ran the water for a few seconds without doing anything else. I looked at my face in the mirror. I looked away.
I opened the door and stepped back into the hall.
Noah's door was four feet to my right, cracked the way Suzanne had left it. I had been planning to walk past it.
I stopped.
The voices were clearer here. Two feet from the door, I could make out the words.
I should have walked back to the bedroom.
I stood in the hall instead.
"...do you feel safe here, Noah?"
"Yeah."
"What does safe feel like for you?"
A pause. He was thinking about it.
"Quiet. Nobody yells."
I closed my eyes for a beat. I made myself open them again.
"Tell me about Cole. What does he do with you?"
"He picks me up from school. We work on the model planes after I finish my homework. He's teaching me how to use his tools."
"What tools?"
"Drill. Saw. He let me use the level. He says I have a steady hand."
"That's wonderful."
A small pause.
"He's building me a room."
"A room?"
"In the new house. On Ashford Street. He's fixing it up. He says we'll move in when it's done. The room is going to be on the second floor. He let me pick which one."
I had to put my hand against the wall.
I hadn't known.
I'd known about the house. I'd walked through it once, the first time Cole had brought us by.
After that, he'd been taking Noah there from time to time on the afternoons he picked him up from school—to teach him a thing or two with the tools, to show him the work as it went. Noah had told me about all of it.
He hadn't told me he was building Noah a room.
Cole had been building Noah a room and not telling me.
"...your mom and Cole. How are they together?"
I made myself listen.
A longer pause this time. Noah was thinking.
"Cole is very kind to my mom. He's careful with her."
"Careful how?"
"Like he doesn't want to scare her by accident. He's quiet around her. He doesn't move fast."
I was holding my breath. I made myself let it out. Slowly. Through the nose.
"And does your mom seem happy?"
A beat.
"I think my mom loves Cole. She doesn't say it. She doesn't even smile at him very much when I'm in the room. But I can tell."
I couldn't move.
"How can you tell, sweetheart?"
"She's not scared anymore."
I closed my eyes.
I opened them.
"And Cole?"
"Yeah?"
"Does Cole love your mom?"
"Yeah."
"How can you tell?"
"He looks at her when she's not looking."
I don't know how long I stood in the hall after that. Long enough for one of them to say something else I didn't register. Long enough that I had to make myself unstick my feet from the floor and walk back to the bedroom on legs that didn't feel like mine.
I opened the door. I closed it behind me. Cole looked up.
I didn't look at him.
I sat down on the edge of the bed beside him, picked up the phone I had set down before I'd left, and pretended to scroll through something. I wasn't seeing the screen.
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
He waited.
"Just tired."
He let it go. He didn't believe me—I could tell from the way his shoulders settled—but he let it go.
We sat there in silence for what felt like a long time and was probably ten minutes.
Then there was a knock on our door.
Suzanne was standing in the hall with her clipboard tucked back under her arm.
"I'd like to thank you both for today."
She had a different posture now. Something in her shoulders had eased. The smile she gave us was the same one from the doorway, only it had something else inside it now. Recognition, maybe.
"Noah is a thoughtful kid. You should know that."
"Thank you," I said.
"I'll be in touch within the week. I'd like to file my report sooner rather than later."
She extended her hand to me first. I took it. She squeezed. Cole walked her to the door. I heard them speak briefly, low, at the threshold. The door closed.
He came back to the bedroom.
He stopped in the doorway.
"How do you think it went?"
"Good. I think."
"Yeah. I do, too."
He nodded. Didn't come in. Didn't say anything else.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
I almost told him.
I didn't tell him.
"Noah did good," I said.
"He did. He really did."
"We did good."
The we did the work it had been doing for weeks now. He looked at me. The look held.
"Yeah," he said. "We did."
He went back out into the hall. I heard him in the kitchen, opening the fridge, taking out something to start lunch.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a long minute.
Then I got up.
I went into the kitchen. Cole was at the counter with his back to me, slicing tomatoes for sandwiches. I stopped in the doorway and let myself watch him.
He set the knife down, reached for the salt, and glanced over his shoulder.
He saw me.
He held my eyes the way he always did. A second too long. He didn't smile. He didn't say anything. He turned back to the cutting board.
My nine-year-old son had told a court official, an hour ago, that Cole loved me. The proof was in the looking. I hadn't believed it. I had wanted to. I hadn't been able to.
I stood in the doorway and watched him.
He had looked.