Chapter 17
Callum
The Sentinel piece ran on Thursday. The line about the parking lot was the eleventh paragraph, and nobody cared.
That was the joke of it. Four thousand words on rural water policy and a legislative reversal. The sentence that had taken his marriage apart went by in nine words on a Thursday and got no traction anywhere. Two people mentioned it to him in a week. One of them thought it was fine.
Two people mentioned it to him. One of them thought it was fine.
The first was a delegate from Chesterfield who caught him in a corridor.
His wife had cried at the profile in the spring and made him read it.
Wasn't it something, a man talking about his marriage in public these days.
Callum said yes, it was something. The second was Hobson.
"Saw you had a former staffer in the piece," he said, and then nothing else.
He looked at Callum about two seconds past comfortable and walked off.
Dara came into his office at ten with a folder and shut the door with her heel.
"Okay," she said. "Here's where we are. It's a nothing line and I can keep it a nothing line, but I want a statement in the drawer in case somebody at the Post decides it's a story in September.
I've drafted three. The first is a flat no-comment, the second acknowledges the meeting as routine constituent-adjacent staff transition business—"
"No."
"—and the third is the one I'd run. You, on the record, two sentences, saying you met with a former colleague about a press inquiry and you'd do it again. Then we never speak of it. Callum, that one polls. That one disappears by Tuesday."
"No statement."
Dara put the folder down.
"Can I ask you why."
"The only reason I'd put out a statement is so that a version of it exists where I look reasonable," Callum said. "There's a version of it where I look reasonable. I could write it in about four minutes. My wife is at a lake right now specifically on account of my ability to do that."
Dara stood there a while.
"You know I have to say this," she said. "As your comms director. Silence is a choice too and it's not automatically the honest one."
"I know."
"Sometimes it's just a different kind of managing."
"I know that too." He rubbed his eyes. "I'm going to do it anyway and I want you to hate it in writing, so it's on the record that you told me."
"Consider it hated."
"Dara."
"Senator."
"You're going to have to work for somebody someday who's worse at this than I am," he said, "and I want to apologize in advance for having taught you that a person in my chair listens."
Dara stood in the door with her hand on the frame.
"That's the first thing you've said in a month I'd have put on the record," she said. "And you're not going to let me."
"No."
She left the folder on his desk. He did not open it. He did not throw it away either, and it sat there eleven days.
His father called Sunday and did not mention the piece.
"The man came about the pool house," Graham said.
"And?"
"There was water in it."
"Dad."
"There was a great deal of water in it. Your mother has said nothing, which is worse than anything she could say, and I've agreed to have the tile up." He cleared his throat. "That's my whole news."
"That's a fine piece of news."
"How are you."
"I'm not good."
There was a pause on the line about three seconds long, which for Graham Fairbanks was a monologue.
"All right," his father said. "Then you're where you ought to be. Don't fix your face about it for anybody.
He went to work. That was the part nobody would ever put in a profile.
He went to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday he sat four hours in a hearing about culvert specifications. He took eleven meetings he could not afterward remember. Every night he came home to a house with one lamp on that a woman was paid to leave on.
On the Tuesday he opened the door of the room at the end of the hall, the one he'd kept shut since 2019. He stood in the doorway a while. It had a window on the side and a radiator under it, and it was, as he had told her in a dark kitchen in April, the warmest room in the house.
He left it open. Nadine shut it on Friday without being asked, and he opened it again on Saturday, and neither of them mentioned it for the rest of the year.
Blaire called on Saturday and did not say hello.
"You absolute idiot."
"Blaire."
"Six weeks. Six weeks, Callum, and you sat in that woman's kitchen every one of them—"
"I know."
"Do you know? Because I've watched you know things before and it doesn't take." Her baby was going in the background and she was talking over him. "Here's the thing you're not going to like. This isn't about Senna and it isn't even about the six weeks. Do you know what Mom did for eleven years?"
"Yes."
"No, you know the story." Blaire's voice cracked on it.
"You know the driveway. I was nine. I know what that house was, and you were away at school.
Marlowe Fairbanks used to stand in a kitchen doing the crossword at nine at night with her whole face gone, and I'd come in and it'd come back on like a lamp.
That's what I know. And I have watched you do the lamp to your wife at Christmas dinner for four years and told myself it was the job. "
He sat down on his own stairs.
"What do I do," he said.
"God, no. No. You don't get to ask me that."
"Blaire—"
"That's the question you ask when you want somebody to hand you an assignment." She said it more gently. "Mom said you'd ask it. She told me to say no."
***
Adair called from New York on the fourth day.
"I'm going to ask you one question and I want a real answer."
"Go on."
"Do you want me to call her?"
Callum sat down on the arm of a chair in an empty front room.
"No."
"I'm asking for her sake. In this family the women who leave stop getting phone calls. I've watched that happen twice and been ashamed of myself both times."
"Adair, call her whenever you want. Call her every week." He got his hand over his eyes. "Just don't do it for me. If you do it for me she'll hear it in the first sentence, and then she'll have lost you too, and that's about the last thing I've got left to take from her."
There was a silence on the line.
"All right," Adair said. "That was a real answer."
He lasted nine days.
On the tenth he got in the car at six in the morning without a plan, which was itself a thing he had not done since he was twenty-four, and drove ninety minutes east with nothing in his head at all.
He had thought about it, obviously. He was not going to pretend to himself he hadn't.
He'd woken at four the last three nights with sentences arriving fully formed, and he had lain there and refused every one of them.
By the ninth night they had started arriving as questions instead, which was progress of some kind.
By six that morning he had nothing but a body in a car.
He came up the last mile with the sun still low and the light going through the trees in bars.
There was a second car at the top of the gravel. Silver, Pennsylvania plates, a Kestrel parking hangtag on the mirror and a hard case in the back seat.
Callum stopped forty feet short of it.
The engine ran. Down the hill through the trees the kitchen light was on. The porch light was on too, which meant it had burned all night, or it meant somebody had put it on at five. There was no way on this earth to know which, and he was going to have to live with that.
He sat there.
Ninety feet of gravel. He had walked it eleven hundred times with groceries, with a cooler, with a woman on his back in 2018 who had turned her ankle on the second step and would not admit it.
He did the arithmetic, which took about four seconds. It was seven-twenty in the morning. There was one bed in that house and four bedrooms.
Then he made himself stop doing the arithmetic, and that was the hardest thing he had ever done sitting still.
Here was the thing. He had no standing. That was the whole and entire fact of it.
He had spent four years handing his wife a schedule and six weeks deciding what she could survive hearing.
She had gotten in a car and driven to the one place on earth that was hers.
A man had come down from Philadelphia to talk to her about a jar of water.
If he went down that hill he would be going down it to find out. Not to say anything. To find out. She would see that on him in about a second and a half, and she would be right.
Callum put his hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way a boy does at a driving test, and sat at the top of a gravel road for eleven minutes.
Then he backed down the road, badly, the whole distance to the county line turnout, since he could not make himself turn around in front of that house. He drove ninety minutes back to Roanoke, let himself into an empty kitchen, and stood in it.
He got to Roanoke at half past nine and stood in the kitchen for a while, and then he did a thing he had not done since he was twenty-two, which was drive to his parents' house without calling first.
His mother was in the garden with a bucket. She saw the car, put the bucket down, and did not come toward him.
"I don't want to talk about it," Callum said, from about fifteen feet away.
"All right."
"I want to sit on your porch."
"Then sit on my porch."
He sat on the porch for two hours. At some point she brought out a plate of something and put it beside him and went back to the garden. At some point his father came out, said nothing whatsoever, sat in the other chair, and read a magazine about boats he had no intention of buying.
At four Callum stood up.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what," Graham said, not looking up.
"That's exactly right," Callum said, and drove home.
He did not call her. He did not text her. He did not put out a statement.
He went into work on Monday and did the job poorly. On Wednesday he lost a procedural vote he should have won, off a two-page memo he had not read. Dara said nothing about it at all, which was worse than anything she could have said.
On Thursday, Dara put the folder with the three statements in it back on his desk with a note on top that said still hate it. He wrote noted on the note and put the whole thing in a drawer, and that was the last either of them ever said about it.
That was the bottom. Not the parking lot, not the hall, not the stairs.
A man of forty sitting in an idling car at the top of a road, wanting to go down it, and understanding for the first time in his life that wanting something very badly was not, and had never been, a form of deserving it.