23. Ashton
Ashton
“I’m pregnant,” she says.
I open my stupid mouth and hand her the worst thing I’ve got. “Is it mine?”
I hear it the second it’s loose. It’s the glass already tipping off the counter, that half-beat where you know the sound it’s about to make and your hand’s too slow to matter. The color drops out of her face, then floods back up her neck into her cheeks, and her eyes go wide, wet, and lit at once.
That question came up out of the oldest part of me, the part that’s kept score my whole life.
Protect the ground. Cover the boy. Don’t put your name to a thing you haven’t checked.
I ran her through a firm the night I met her.
I dig before I’ll trust a soul. I drove down here with an apology sitting ready in my mouth, and what came out instead was a man asking a woman to prove her claim.
“Imogen.”
She slaps me.
Flat palm, her whole arm behind it, and my head goes sideways with the crack of it down the empty corridor. The sting blooms hot, then numb, then hot again. She isn’t crying now. Whatever was rising in her a second ago has dropped under something with no give in it.
“Fuck you,” she says. “Fuck you, Ashton.”
“I didn’t come here to do that.”
“You woke half the building to get up here.” Her voice stays low, which is worse than screaming. “I open my door and tell you the biggest thing I’m ever going to have to tell a person, and the first sound out of you is you looking for the exit.”
“That isn’t what I was asking.”
“It’s the exact word you used.” Her hand finds the edge of the door. “You want it confirmed, go confirm it. You’re good at that. Send a man, pull a file, have the results brought up by a courier in a nice envelope.” The door swings toward my face. “I’m sure it’s covered on page two somewhere.”
“Ten seconds. Give me ten.”
“You had the whole drive down, and you spent it getting to that.” An inch from my nose now. “Don’t come back to this door.”
It shuts, the deadbolt turns, and I’m standing in a hallway that smells like a stranger’s reheated dinner, my own handprint cooling on the side of my face. I don’t lift my fist to the wood again, because I’ve taken enough out of her tonight to last us both a year.
I drive back with nothing in my mouth, because there are no words that pull that sentence out of the air again. She put the biggest thing in her life in my hands, and I checked it for fraud.
“Son of a bitch.” I hit the wheel with the heel of my hand, once, hard enough that the horn barks and dies, but it doesn’t help, because the man I want to hit is the one driving the car.
The rest of the drive is a blur of green lights and my own face in the mirror not looking back at me. By the time I’m in the elevator going up I’ve stopped trying to make sense of myself.
Every lamp in the penthouse is burning when the elevator opens, which is wrong for the hour, and then the sound reaches me and I understand why.
Luke. Crying, and not the fresh kind. The worn kind, gone hoarse at the edges because it’s been running a while, the after part of the nightmare that no one alive knows how to fix.
Lola’s standing outside his door with her hands lifted halfway and empty, no pad, no plan, the one person who keeps my whole life in order, run flat into a thing that won’t take an order.
“He’s been calling for Imogen for twenty minutes.” She keeps her voice down, but there’s an edge under it I’ve never heard from her. “I tried calling you. Where were you?”
I pull the phone out and the screen’s full of her missed calls, six of them, because I’d put it on silent outside Imogen’s building so it wouldn’t go off mid-speech. I was getting slapped in a hallway while my kid screamed for a woman who wasn’t coming.
“I was out,” I tell her, because the rest of it doesn’t help anyone in this hall. “What does he need?”
“He won’t have me near him. He just keeps saying her name.”
Lola looks at me, and for once there’s nothing professional in her face. Just a woman who has watched this family come apart one piece at a time, telling me with her eyes that she’s out of moves.
I go in. He’s bolt upright in a knot of sheets, his face shining, red, and undone, the rabbit flung to the far wall. He sees me, but the crying doesn’t ease the way it always has when I walked in. Instead, it gets even louder.
“Where’s Imogen?” The words break apart coming out, snagging on the hiccups. “I want Imogen. I had the wave one. She wasn’t here, and you weren’t either.”
“I’m here now. I’ve got you, bud.”
“I don’t want you.” There’s no spite in it anywhere, he’s just communicating his needs. “I want her. She comes when I do the screaming, she promised she’d always come. Where did she go?”
“She’s at her own home tonight. You know that, buddy.”
“Why isn’t she here?” His whole face caves. “Doesn’t she love me anymore? Did I do something wrong, is that why?”
“No.” I say it fast, because out of everything I’ve broken tonight, this is the one thing I can tell him straight. “No, Luke. She loves you. That’s real, and it isn’t going anywhere, and you didn’t do anything wrong. None of this is about you.”
“Then why won’t she come when I need her to?”
I don’t have an answer for that one, so I do the only thing left. I take out my phone where he can see me, because he needs to watch me try, and I call her.
It rings, and rings, and goes to her voicemail.
I hang up and call again. This time it doesn’t even ring, she sends it straight through, and I know exactly what that is.
It’s her looking at my name at three in the morning and pushing it away.
I’ve earned that. But Luke watches the call die in my hand, and it just makes him cry harder.
“Try again,” he says.
“She’s not picking up, bud.”
“Try again anyway.” His voice breaks on the last word. “So she knows you’re still trying.”
I dial a third time. It goes straight through again. I put the phone down on the blanket between us where he can see it, so he knows I’m not hiding it from him, and I don’t say anything about what that means.
I give him the only thing I’ve got left in me, which is to stay on the floor and not leave.
I sit down on the floor by his bed, and for once I don’t try to fix it. I learned that much watching her from a doorway. I don’t give him steps. I don’t tell him to breathe slow or count the waves down or save the dream for morning.
I just put my back against his mattress and leave my hand open on the blanket where he can reach it if he wants, and I let him cry.
I let him kick the sheets loose and throw the pillow and call out for her, over and over, a woman who isn’t walking through that door tonight no matter how hard he wants it.
It goes on for hours. He drops down and climbs back up and drops again, and somewhere in the middle of it he throws the pillow at the wall.
“I hate the wave dream,” he says, hiccuping. “I hate it more than anything.”
“I know. I’d haul the whole ocean out by the bucket if it’d shut that dream off for good.”
He stops crying long enough to give me a wet, withering look. “That’s stupid. You can’t do that.”
“No,” I tell him. “I can’t.”
“It’s wrong here. The house is wrong without her in it. It doesn’t even sound the same.”
“I know it doesn’t, bud.”
“You don’t know. You don’t hear stuff like I do.”
I let that stand, because tonight he’s the one telling the truth in this apartment, and I’m the one who’s been bending it for weeks.
He comes apart slower after a while, the sobs spacing out, his breath dragging long and wet between them.
I stay where I am. My leg’s gone numb under me but I don’t shift it, because shifting it might remind him that I’m the one here and not the one he wants.
Right now, I’ll take being the wrong person over being no one.
Somewhere past six he’s wrung dry and hoarse and finally going under for real, and he rolls his face toward me in the dark with his eyes barely cracked, and he says the thing I’m going to be hearing in the quiet for the rest of my life.
“You made her leave.” He doesn’t say it as a question, but an accusation instead. ”She was here, and then she wasn’t. And it’s because of you.” His eyes drift shut. “It’s all your fault.”
I don’t tell him he’s wrong, because every word of it is true.
I sit there on his floor until his breathing goes deep and even, and then I sit there a while longer, because there’s nowhere to go where that sentence isn’t following me.