Chapter 12
Two days after the gala, Larry Shepard got a word back.
It was not a good word. It was no, which the therapist said was extremely common and which Larry deployed immediately, constantly, and with enormous satisfaction, at the television, at the physical therapist, at a plate of pureed chicken, and once, memorably, at Roger Dunham.
Mila laughed so hard in that room on the Sunday that she had to go out into the hall.
“He’s going to be unbearable,” Christina said.
“He was always unbearable. Now he’s got a word for it.”
They were in the kitchen. Christina had moved into the blue room a few weeks earlier and had a wineglass in her hand in the middle of the afternoon and the general look of a woman who had stopped pretending about several things at once.
“Where’s Jason?” Mila said, before she could stop herself.
“Baltimore. He’s been down there every day this week.” Christina pulled a face. “He’s doing something. I don’t know what. Something at the company.”
“He stepped back from the company.”
“I know.”
“In a press release.”
“I know.” Christina drank. “Ask me what Dad thinks. Go on.”
“What does Dad think?”
“No,” said Christina.
Mila laughed, and then did not, because Christina was looking at the wineglass the way people look at something they are about to say.
“You’ve been in the blue room three weeks,” Mila said.
“For Dad.”
“Verity does the days. Wally does the nights, except Tuesdays. You live forty minutes away.”
Christina turned the glass on the table.
“Neal’s a perfectly nice man,” she said.
“I want that on the record first. He’s kind and he’s decent and he’s never done a single thing to me in twenty-four years that I could put in a sentence.
” She drank. “And we have not said one true thing to each other since about the second Bush administration.”
Mila sat down.
“There’s no other woman. There’s no other anything.
I keep waiting for there to be something, because then at least I’d have a reason, and there isn’t.
There’s a man who asks how my day was and a woman who says fine, and we’ve been doing that twice a day since our daughter left for college, and one evening in February I was loading the dishwasher and I thought, if I died tonight, the last thing I’d have said to my husband is fine.
” She put the glass down. “So I came here. For Dad.”
“Christina.”
“I know.” She rubbed her face. “And I’ve been sitting in this house for three weeks watching you and my brother.
You barely speak to each other. You’ve got rules about what room you’re allowed to be in.
And every time you do speak, it’s so much more than anything I’ve said to Neal in a decade that I have to go and sit in the car. ”
The clock in the hall ticked.
“How do you know,” Christina said. “If it’s worth it. How do you tell.”
And Mila, who had been asking herself exactly that since November, found she did not have an answer, and said so.
“Well,” Christina said, and picked up the glass again. “That’s two of us, then.”
* * *
She came on the Tuesday night as usual, because the rules had not changed and would not change, and because Wally had Tuesdays off.
The house was empty when she got there at eight.
Christina had gone down to Washington for two days.
Jason’s car was not on the gravel. She let herself in the kitchen door and did Larry’s evening and told him it was Tuesday the first and that Nikki’s second field had finally dried out, and he looked at her and said, “No,” in a tone that clearly meant something else entirely, and she said, “Yes it has, you’re thinking of the top one,” and he blinked slowly at her like a man declining to argue with a fool.
She got him settled at ten.
Then she did what she always did on the Tuesday nights, which was take the intercom handset into the kitchen and sit at the table with her laptop and the headphones and work, because a house with a hiss in it is the best editing room in the world and she had stopped pretending otherwise in February.
She had all of Noelle Vinson’s tape on the drive.
She had been circling it for days and had not been able to open the file, and at about half past ten she finally did, and put the headphones on, and started laying the two hours before the terrible part into a shape.
She was deep in it when the front door went.
* * *
It was half past eleven. She heard the car on the gravel and the door and the coat, and her heart did something ridiculous, and she took the headphones off and sat still at her own kitchen table in the dark of a house where she was not supposed to be at midnight.
The rules said she left rooms he came into. She had made the rules and kept them for two weeks and she was not going to be found sitting in his kitchen.
She got as far as standing up.
Then she heard him go the other way — not toward the kitchen, down the back hall — and she heard the door of Larry’s room, and she stopped with her hand on the back of the chair.
On the table, a few feet away, the intercom handset was on and hissing the way it had hissed all evening.
* * *
“Hey,” Jason said. “It’s me. It’s — Christ, it’s nearly midnight, sorry. It’s still Tuesday the first.”
The plastic box on the table was tinny and close and slightly too loud, the way those boxes are. Mila stood with her hand on a chair.
“Don’t wake up,” he said. “I’m not going to put the light on.”
The chair in that room made a sound. He had sat down.
She could have turned it off. She would think about that afterward for years — that the button was under her thumb, and that she had been standing over that box with her whole training telling her exactly what was about to happen in that room, and that she did not touch it.
“So I did it,” Jason said.
* * *
“I did it this afternoon. All of it. I’m going to tell you and then I’m going to go up, because I can’t do this in the morning with Christina in the house.”
A long breath.
“I sold Norfolk. Today. To the Abernathy people, who you hate, for about fifteen percent less than it’s worth, and it’s done and it’s signed and I’m not going to be able to undo it.
” He laughed once, with nothing in it. “You built that terminal. I know. I know exactly what it is. I sat in the room while you told the story about the dredger about four hundred times.”
Mila did not move.
“And I let Mitch Sully go,” Jason said.
She knew that name. Everybody knew that name. Mitch Sully had been at Shepard Maritime since before Jason, had been at their wedding, had made a toast.
“He’s been with us thirty-one years and I gave him an hour to clear his office, which is not how it’s done and I know it’s not how it’s done, and I did it that way on purpose so that everyone would see it.” A pause. “You want to know why. Okay.
“In October, in the hospital, Mitch came down to the wing and took me out to the parking garage and gave me a talk. About how a man in my position needs somebody. About how nobody was keeping score, and it’s not the same as the other thing, and my father would say the same, and — I’m quoting this part, Dad, I want you to have the exact words — you’re allowed to survive this. ”
The intercom hissed.
“And I let him say it,” Jason said. “That’s the bit. He said it to me in a parking garage nine days after my wife’s accident and I stood there and let a man tell me I was allowed, and then I went back upstairs.”
Mila’s hand had gone white on the chair.
“So he’s gone. And I know what you think of that, and I know what it’ll cost me with the board, and Roger’s going to be on the phone at seven. And I did it anyway because Mitch Sully did not invent that sentence. He got it from somewhere, and we both know where he got it, and I can’t fire you.”
Silence in that room. Real silence, for a good five seconds.
“I’m not going to do this the polite way,” Jason said. “You can hear me and you can’t stop me and that’s not fair and I’m doing it anyway, because it’s the only version of this conversation I’ll ever get, and you’d never have given me the other one.”
* * *
“You taught me that what a man does with his own inside is his own business,” he said.
“That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s what you taught me and you taught it well, you were extremely consistent, and I don’t think you ever said one word of it out loud. You just never once told anybody anything, for fifty years, and you married a woman who wanted you to and you outlasted her.
“And I did the same thing. I married the best person I have ever met in my life, and I gave her the house and the money and the whole — everything, everything except the thing she actually wanted, which was about four sentences a year, and I could not do it. I genuinely could not. I’d get to the edge of it and I’d think, this is weak, and I’d go to bed.
“For two years, Dad. Two years of her asking me what was wrong and me saying long week.”
He stopped for a while.
“And then she was lying there,” he said, “and there was a woman who asked me a question, and I answered it. That’s all it was. First time in my life somebody asked and I was too tired not to answer.
“And I want to be very clear, because I’ve had five months to get this straight and I’m not going to be a coward about it at this hour: I didn’t fall in love with her, I don’t think about her, and it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to stand here and tell you it was nothing.
“It was not nothing. It was everything. It was every single thing my wife spent eight years asking for and I handed it over the top of her body to somebody I’d known nine months, because she was there and it was easy and Mila couldn’t —”
His voice went.
“Because Mila couldn’t answer back,” he said. “That’s why it was easy. I’ve known that since about February and I have not said it out loud until right now.”
* * *
Mila stood in a dark kitchen and found she had put her hand over her mouth.