Chapter 2 #2
“You were in there the whole time —”
“Don’t,” she said, “make it about how that must have felt for you.”
He shut his mouth.
She was shaking now, the right hand and then the rest of her, and she hated it, and there was nothing to be done about it. She put the hand under the blanket. It was the only concession she made.
“I’m not coming home,” she said.
* * *
“How much,” he said. His voice had gone strange. “How much of it.”
“All of it.”
“Mila, six weeks —”
“All of it.”
He put his hand over his mouth and took it away again. “It wasn’t — you have to let me tell you what that was. It wasn’t what it sounds like, she’s not —”
“I know she’s not,” Mila said, and watched that land, and watched him realize it was worse.
Because that was the thing he had not worked out yet, standing there at the end of the bed with his mouth open.
He had spent the last minute getting ready to defend himself against a charge she had not made.
She did not think he had slept with that woman.
She had never thought it. And it had still taken her marriage apart at the joints, and now he would have to go home and sit with the fact that his best defense was worth nothing.
“Don’t finish that sentence,” she said. “Ever. I mean it. Not today and not in a year.”
* * *
He argued for a while. She had expected that and had decided in advance not to argue back, because there was no version of the conversation she could win with a whisper and no legs.
So she said the same four things in the same flat voice however he came at it. Not coming home. Not going to Philadelphia. Not discussing it. Not now.
He said it was the medication. He said no one thinks straight after something like this. He said the house was set up for her, the room was ready, Sandy was starting Monday. He said, “Where would you even go,” and heard it land wrong, and said, “That’s not what I meant.”
He got down on his knees beside the bed at one point, which she had not expected at all, and put his forehead against the blanket by her hip, and stayed there.
“Tell me what to do,” he said, into the bed. “I’ll do it. Anything. Tell me what to do.”
And she looked down at the back of her husband’s head and understood, with complete calm, that this was what it would be like from now on — that he would keep asking her to tell him what to do, and that every time she told him, he would do it, and it would cost him nothing at all, because it was the one thing in the world he was genuinely good at.
“Call Nikki for me,” she said.
* * *
Nikki came in under an hour, which meant she had come in the truck and driven the way she drives.
She stood in the doorway in a barn coat with hay on it and took in the room — the bag, the folded clothes, Jason standing with his hands at his sides, Mila upright in the chair by the bed with her jaw set.
“Right,” Nikki said.
“The cottage,” Mila said. “Is it empty.”
“It’s full of jump standards.” Nikki did not blink. “It’ll be empty by four.”
“Nikki,” Jason said. “Come on. It’s November.”
“There’s a woodstove.” Nikki was already picking up the bag. “And a shower she can sit down in, which is more than your back hall’s got, unless Christina’s done that too.”
They got her down in a wheelchair because there was no arguing about that part.
The lobby of the Shepard Wing was warm and enormous and full of afternoon light, and they went past the elevators where the family name was cut into the granite, and Mila read it going by the way you read a sign in a country you are leaving.
Jason came all the way out to the truck.
“This is my fault,” he said. “I know that. I’m not — I know.”
“I know you know.”
“Can I call you?”
“No.”
He stood there in the cold with his hands empty. Nikki got the door.
Getting into a truck is nothing. It is the single easiest physical act in the world. It took Mila a long time, and the whole time her husband stood behind her wanting to lift her and not daring, and she got in by herself, and shut the door herself, and did not look at him through the glass.
* * *
The cottage smelled like woodsmoke and cold stone. Nikki had lit the stove and thrown a horse blanket over the couch and carried the bag in and set it down by the door, and then she stood there with her hands in her coat pockets.
“You going to tell me?” she said.
“Not tonight.”
“Okay.” Nikki looked around the little room. “There’s soup. There’s a landline, which is hilarious. The water takes about a year to run hot, so start it and go do something else.” A beat. “Mila.”
“Mm.”
“Did he hit you?”
Mila turned her head. “No. God. No.”
“Had to ask. You come out of a hospital and won’t go home, that’s the first question, and if I don’t ask it I’m just another person being polite at you.” Nikki nodded once, satisfied, and pulled her gloves out. “Fine. Then I’ll ask the other one. How long do you want the lane watched?”
“What?”
“He’ll come up the lane. Tonight or tomorrow. He’s not going to sit in that house.” Nikki said it without heat, the way she’d say a horse would come up lame. “So do I turn him around, or do I let him sit out there, or do I let him in?”
Mila looked at the stove.
“Turn him around,” she said.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Good answer.” Nikki pulled the door. “Cold’s coming in. Eat the soup.”
Then she was gone out to evening feed, because there were eleven horses on that place and grief does not feed them.
Mila sat in the wheelchair in the middle of the little room and listened.
Wind in the gutter. A gate, far off. The stove ticking. A truck on the lane, going away.
No vent. No cart in a hallway. No machine breathing on her behalf.
She had one bag, no car, a body that could not cross a room, and a husband twenty-five minutes down the valley road in a house with her name on nothing.
She put her hands on the arms of the chair and pushed.
She got up onto her feet for about three seconds. Then the floor swung, and her legs folded, and she went down hard on the boards between the chair and the couch.
She lay there for a minute on the cold floor of a house she did not own, in the dark, and found she was not crying.
She was thinking about how long it would take.