8. Marnie
Marnie
The slideshow is my job because it was always going to be my job.
Two hundred photographs for the reception, set to three songs Drew picked and one April picked, projected on a wall at the venue between dinner and dancing. I've got the bins of family photographs out on the living room floor on a weeknight in September, and I'm nineteen days from a wedding.
Here's some of what's covered in the bin photos.
April at four in a Halloween costume that was supposed to be a cat and looked like, in photographs, as a raccoon with a thyroid problem.
Keith asleep at the kitchen table on Fern Street with a spreadsheet printout stuck to his cheek, 2004, our first machine that could do more than one thing.
Me, seven months pregnant with Nathan, packing a lunch on the counter with April on a stool beside me putting a sticker on the bag.
The tiny rental. Brown carpet. The window unit that we ran in one room and slept all four of us in front of.
April's cast after falling off the swings at school, purple, signed by everyone in her second grade class and by a man at the Holiday station who felt bad for her.
Camping at Wild River, the year it rained the entire time and we played Uno in the tent for eleven hours and April cried, and then, on the last morning, wanted to stay.
The office Christmas party when there were seven employees. Seven. I made two hams. Devi is in the back of that photo doing something funny with a candy cane and her mouth.
The picture of the day we closed on this house, all five of us on the front step, Erin in a car seat that Keith is holding at a bad angle.
I sit on the floor of my living room for four hours and I do not build a slideshow. I build an argument.
Because here's what I finally understand, at eleven o'clock at night with a photo of a purple cast in my hand.
I'm not angry that Sherry came back.
I've turned that over for six weeks like a stone in a pocket and it never fit. I told April to go meet her. And I meant it. I would tell her again.
What I'm angry about is that everybody in my house has started behaving as though the story of this family begins on August ninth of this year, and everything before that was a long intermission.
Almost twenty-four years is not backstory. It's the whole book. There is not one single artifact in these bins that Sherry Corbett is in, and there are almost nine thousand mornings in here, and every one of them was a choice somebody made at an ungodly early hour in the dark.
Keith gets home after eleven. Late night, earnings prep, and he's still got the lanyard on.
He stands in the doorway looking at the mess.
"How's it going?"
"It's going."
He crouches and picks up the picture from the closing day, and he smiles at it, and for a second I think we might be about to have the good version of this conversation.
"Look at Erin's neck," he says. "I'm strangling that child."
"You held her like a briefcase for eight months."
"I really did."
I put the cast picture down. "Keith. Can I say something and can you not answer before thinking about it?”
He sits on the arm of the chair. "Okay."
"I need you to stop making me the problem."
"Marnie."
"That was fast."
He puts the photo down. "Go ahead."
So I try. I start with the bins. I tell him about years of mornings and about the fact that I have spent six weeks being asked, in a hundred small ways, to make room, and that I have made room every single time, and that not once has anyone asked her to make room for me.
I tell him about the tent and the half step and Katrin on a chair.
I get maybe four minutes.
Then he says, "You know what you are to April."
And something in me lets go of the rope.
"I do," I say. "I'm starting to wonder if you do."
"That's a hell of a thing to say."
"You liked the picture."
"What picture?"
"Katrin's picture. There's nothing like a mother's love. You liked it, Keith. You sat somewhere and read that sentence and pressed the button. In fact, you heart emoji-ed it, when do you ever use a heart emoji?”
He actually laughs, which is the worst possible move available to him.
"I like everything. I like fifty things a day. Devi's kid's soccer. My cousin's boat. I don't read them, Marn, it's a thumb. I didn’t even realize it was a heart.”
"It's not a thumb to me."
"That's my point!" He's up now. "That's exactly my point. It's a thumb, and you've turned it into evidence. You've got a file. Don't think I don't know you've got an entire detective’s case file up there in that head of yours.”
"You said that thing to me in this kitchen about being jealousy and you have never taken it back."
"Because I keep watching you make my daughter's reunion with her mother into something about you."
The room goes very quiet.
I have never once in twenty-two years heard him say that. Her mother. Not Sherry, not her biological mother, not her.
I look at him and I can see he hears it a half second after I do, the way April did in the dining room, and unlike April he does not correct it.
"March of two thousand three," I say.
"What?"
"Four hundred and twelve dollars in checking. April's boots split at the toe and I taped them from the inside so the kids at Rosemont wouldn't see. I went to the Payless on County Road 9 and I put a pair of red boots down and picked them up three times."
He's looking at me with no idea where this is going. That's the part that guts me. He truly has no idea.
"I bought them," I say. "I skipped my cleaning that year and the year after, and that's why I've got a crown on the bottom left, and you have never known that story, and I never told you, because you were working and it would've killed you."
"Marnie."
"That is your daughter's mother. That woman in the shoe aisle. I'm not asking you to put it on a plaque. I'm asking you to stop handing my job title to somebody who was in Arizona."
His jaw goes. The muscle at the hinge.
"You want me to punish her," he says quietly.
"That's what this is. You want me to hold twenty-two years over a woman's head forever, and I did that.
I did that for two decades, Marnie, I was so good at it, and it didn't do one thing for April except teach her that her mother was a monster she came out of. "
"I never once said monster."
"You didn't have to."
He picks up his lanyard. He says, "I've got an investor call at seven," and he goes up.
I stay on the floor with the bins until one thirty in the morning. I build the slideshow. It's beautiful. It's got the raccoon cat and the purple cast and Wild River and Keith asleep on a spreadsheet.
I put in the picture of Sherry from the scrapbook, the one in the hospital gown at nineteen. Second slide. Right where it belongs.
I come up to bed just before two.
Keith is asleep on his side with his back to me and his phone face up on the nightstand, charging, because he has never once in his life turned a phone face down. That's not a defense of him. It's just true, and it's going to matter later.
The screen lights the ceiling.
12:47 a.m.
Sherry Corbett.
I don't touch it. I stand at the end of my own bed in the dark and I read the preview line, which is two lines, because he has previews on.
I'm sorry, I know it's late. I can't stop thinking about what April said
That's where it cuts.
I get in bed. Flat on my back, eyes open. At 1:51 the screen lights up again and goes dark, and I don't look at that one at all, and the not looking takes everything I have.