Chapter 20 #2
By now Noel has emerged dressed from the bedroom. I feel his presence at my back even before he grabs onto the tail of my shirt. “Please don’t bullshit me,” I say. “I thought we were going to be honest with each other from now on.”
Demi laughs unhappily. “Oh, this is rich. You’ve been fucking your boyfriend in my house all afternoon and you’re going to demand honesty from me? For fuck’s sake, Luca. You can’t be serious with this.”
“I’m not hiding the fact I fucked him in our house.” Our house. I almost want to laugh at myself. What a fucking joke. I am little more than a guest here.
“Not like you could’ve. I’ve practically walked in on top of you.”
“I’m literally right here,” Noel interjects. “You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not.”
I take a deep breath. “Demi,” I say with a deliberate calm I do not feel, “just tell me if you are or aren’t. Because it’s kind of not fair.”
“You want to talk about what’s fair?” She puts her hands on her hips. “Because I’m well versed in fairness. I’ve got my own lengthy list of grievances, if you want to pull up a goddamn seat.”
And I’m sure she fucking does but I’m not taking the bait. She’s clearly dodging my question. I repeat myself: “Are you seeing someone, yes or no?”
“Why do you care?” she returns, and now she’s angry too. Her dark brown eyes spark with it in the darkness of the hallway. “We agreed we could see other people.”
“You demanded to meet Noel. Had me bring him here so you could shit all over him, but I don’t get to return the same courtesy to whoever it is you’re seeing? How the fuck is that fair, Demi? She’s my child, too. I have a right to protect her as much as you do.”
I’m mad at Demi; furious, actually, just as I was at the lunch if not more.
Doesn’t matter how sorry she was or if she made up for it or not by helping him today.
Because it turns out I still haven’t quite forgiven her for that.
For making him feel small. For hurting him when all he ever did was fucking try.
Without looking I reach for him, and his hand slides into mine.
My wife’s shoulders sag. She turns and drops into a chair in the little reading nook, slapping her hands over her eyes. “Okay,” she says. “Yes. I’m seeing one of my colleagues.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Months now.”
“Months,” I repeat. “How long is months?”
“Oh god, Luca, I don’t know. It’s been on and off. Does it really matter?”
I don’t know if it matters. I have no idea what the fuck matters anymore.
All of what’s left of my sense is deserting me.
There’s just anger and pain and bewilderment and I don’t understand anything right now, why my life is such a fucking shit show.
My dad is dying and my whole family has turned against me and my pregnant wife has a secret boyfriend, for some reason.
And instead of being forthcoming about that, she chose to target mine. “Why did you lie when I asked you?”
“I didn’t lie, exactly.” She folds her arms over her chest. “We were off at the time.”
“And never at any point in the last three months of us living together did you think to mention him, whoever it is?”
“He’s married,” she bursts out. “Okay? Happy?”
I think Noel mutters oh Christ but it’s under his breath, so quiet that I don’t think Demi hears him. “Great,” I say. “Does his wife know about you?”
“I don’t know, but they’re getting a divorce. I mean, he was going back and forth for a while, but they’ve filed now, so—”
My head hurts. Some invisible force has put it in a vise and it’s hard think past all that and everything fucking else.
I rub my face and try to think of what else to say, if there even is anything left to say.
I suddenly don’t have the energy for this conversation anymore and I want to bail so badly.
Noel’s fingers squeeze mine and I glance at him.
He’s watching me, eyes searching mine. Willing me to keep my shit together, I think, but it’s so goddamn hard.
I kind of get it now, the appeal of just melting down, losing my shit completely, not caring how it makes me look.
Just digging right into that awful feeling, getting to the heart of it and sitting there for a good long while.
Noel never leaves me guessing about how he feels, for better or worse.
It’s a hell of a way to communicate but it works, in a fucked up way.
“Demi,” I start, and then stop. I want to ask if she was seeing this guy all those times she claimed to be visiting her sister.
I want to know when I get to interrogate him, this mystery married man of hers.
If I can run a fucking criminal background check on him, maybe dig up some old unpaid speeding tickets and point to them as being why I’ll never leave him even five minutes in the presence of my daughter, paint him as a danger and a bad influence.
I could be petty and awful—but what’s the point?
Because the reality is this: we aren’t together.
We don’t love each other that way. We are married in name only at this point, and I’m starting to forget why that even is.
We might be friends, but only tenuously now.
We lost each other the moment I moved out in January, all of that camaraderie we had dissipating in an instant and being replaced with resentment instead.
Having a baby together isn’t bringing us any closer in any tangible way—if anything, the baby has become a wedge, or a lever. An obligation for us to stick around each other to our own detriment.
And it fucking sucks because I want this all to work. So badly. I want to be able to cohabitate and coparent with Demi. I want this to be smoother sailing than it has been. I have played my own part in the deterioration of our relationship, I know. I have fostered this lack of trust she has in me.
I just don’t know how to move forward.
And I don’t know what the right thing to do is.
Demi and Noel are both looking at me, waiting for me to say or do something, but I’m just utterly lost. I grope for words, find some, toss them out there between us after rattling them around like dice. “We’ll talk about this later,” I say. “We’re going to go.” Those seem adequate enough.
“Are you going to come back?” she asks.
“Do you even want me to?” I say.
“God, Luca. I don’t even know anymore.”
I guess that makes two of us. I don’t like being here. This house is not home. Demi is right after all: it is her house, not mine. It was supposed to go to her when we got divorced.
We step out into the rain-washed evening.
It’s darker than usual with all the street lights out, all the windows of my neighbors blank and black.
A light rain patters on the leaves of the plants in the overgrown garden and I wonder if Demi’s new boyfriend is more inclined to landscaping than either of us are.
I wonder if he’s the handy sort, if he’s going to move in someday and make a bunch of changes to the little house I once called home until it is utterly unrecognizable.
I almost hope so. Because I don’t want to ever come back here, when we finally do end things for real, and see anything I know anymore. I want it to become something foreign. I don’t want to see a single landmark I ever had fondness for. I think maybe it’ll hurt less that way.
In the truck I turn the key in the ignition, and the roar of the engine turning over seems especially loud.
It’s an early 2000s playlist that’s playing off my phone through the Bluetooth, and I reach over and turn the volume way down.
I wait for Noel to make some smart comment about my music, but he doesn’t.
I feel his silent and pointed gaze on me.
“Jesus,” I say at last, breaking the silence. Not that it was uncomfortable. Our silences usually aren’t. “What the fuck am I doing any of this for?”
“For your daughter.” He has such a sweet voice, even when he’s being sharp with me. “That’s the impression I’m under, anyway.”
“It’s been such a disaster, though. A total waste of time. Everything I’ve done this past year—the past decade—” I stop myself, take a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. You must think I’m a fucking loser.” And he’d be right.
“You are a loser, but not for the reasons you think,” he says. “Stop apologizing.”
He almost gets me to smile again, but it doesn’t quite stick to my face.
“I think I’ve managed to blow up every single meaningful relationship I’ve ever had this year alone.
You, Demi, my family—I’ve nuked every single one.
Fuck, I don’t even care that Demi’s dating someone, I just care that she did what she did to you.
I hate that she treated you that way. You didn’t deserve that. ”
“Your family isn’t your fault, Luca. They failed you, not the other way around.”
“But it still feels like my fault. For not being the son my dad could be proud of. And because of that, I feel like I don’t even have a right to be sad about it, about any of this, but I am anyway.
Even though the writing’s been on the wall for years and years.
They don’t like me, they were never going to accept who I am.
My dad’s going to go to the grave hating me.
He’s making a goddamn point of it.” I bow my head until it touches the steering wheel. “I’m so stupid.”
“You’re not stupid for caring,” Noel says.
“Look at where that got me, though. Do you know what Dad said? That I disgusted him.”
“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I wish I’d been there with you.”
“Better that you weren’t.”
“I’m not afraid of him.” That defiance again, chin raised, his amber eyes glittering. “Luca, I’d dig him a nice deep hole and push him in myself if I thought it would help you. If it would make you feel safe. I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
“But I am,” I say. “I’m afraid for you. Even if it’s stupid, and he’s old and decrepit like you said—I just think of what happened with Arin, except I’m superimposing your face on his, and—”
“It’s not like that, though.” He argues this very gently. “He can’t hurt me.”
“The logical part of me knows that. It’s the rest of me that doesn’t believe it.
” I rake my hair back from my face, then scrub it with my hands until my skin stings.
“Jesus. Everything I’ve fought to keep, everything I stuffed down for years—it’s all gone now.
It was all so fucking pointless in the end.
And the worst part was that I dragged you into it and fucked you over, too.
Treated you the exact way my dad did me.
” Drag my fingers down my cheeks and stare out into the wet evening and the dark street.
See a candle flickering in one window. “Jesus, why do you even like me? All I’ve done is hurt you in the worst ways possible. ”
“Because I love you, for starters,” he replies, leaning across the center console. “Luca, you’re fucked up, but it’s not the end of the world. You’re in this insane cycle of generational trauma. It’s not easy to break free of that.”
“That’s not an excuse. It’s not good enough, Noel.”
“No one said it’s an excuse. It’s just a reason.
” His fingers reach and find mine. “Just like all my baggage and shit is why I’m the way I am.
You’re still a good person. I know you want to be better because you’re trying.
The way you’ve gone to bat for me, stood up to Demi for me—hell, even coming out to your dad when you had no way of knowing if you’d ever see me again. What’s that if it’s not trying?”
“I’m sorry.” The words are almost lost as the rain drums more heavily on the roof of the truck. “For the way I treated you before. I’m so fucking sorry.” Didn’t know how I was ever going to make it up to him. Could bow and scrape and grovel for eternity and it’d never be enough, I don’t think.
“You know…I remember when you told me it was okay if I still loved my mother, even knowing everything you know about her.” He gazes up at me. “Luca, the same goes for you. It’s okay if you love your dad. It’s okay if you need to grieve him. It’s okay.”
I didn’t know it, but that’s it. The exact thing I did need to hear, something that resonates at last. Some understanding clicking into place. Maybe it’s not grieving the man, exactly, but grieving what we could’ve had and lost, for reasons so inane that it hurt to contemplate.
I don’t say anything, but I nod and lean over, pressing my face to Noel’s. For just a moment.