Chapter 12 #2
“And the last night,” Jason said, “I said the worst thing I have ever said about anybody. And I’ve stopped trying to explain it to myself, because every explanation I come up with is a defense, and I’m not entitled to one.
“But here’s what it actually was, and this is the part I’d like you to have, because you’re the only person I can say it to.
“It wasn’t true. It has never been true, not for one hour.
I said it because they were bringing her up in the morning and I was going to have to look at her, and I had been sitting in that chair for six weeks knowing exactly what I’d done to our marriage before she ever got on that horse — and if I could get out of my mouth that I’d never loved her, then all of it was just a sad thing that happens to people.
“And if it wasn’t true, then I’d looked straight at a woman who loved me for eight years and let her go quiet.
“So I said the unforgivable thing,” he said, “because the true thing was worse.”
* * *
The intercom hissed.
“She knows, by the way,” Jason said. “She heard all of it. She was in there the whole time and she heard every word, and she told me in a hospital room in November, sitting up, and then she left.”
A chair shifted.
“You knew that already. I know you did. I’ve watched her in here with you and I’ve watched your face.” His voice had gone rough. “So I’ll say the last of it and then I’ll go.
“She’s not coming back. I’ve stopped — this is what I actually came in here to tell you, and it’s going to sound like self-pity and it isn’t.
I’ve stopped working toward it. Around February I noticed I was doing everything like a man building a case, and I thought, if she ever does come back and finds out the last year was a campaign, that’s the same crime again. So I stopped.
“I sold Norfolk because it was the last thing in that company that was you and me and not her, and because it needed to be gone whether she ever hears about it or not. I got rid of Mitch because he said that sentence to me and I did not throw him through a window. I do the barn because it’s four stalls and she loves that place and somebody has to do the water.
“And I am not going to tell her about any of it. Not one. If she asks me a direct question I’ll answer her, because I’m not lying to her ever again about anything, but I am not walking up that lane with a list.”
Silence.
“Because the last thing on earth that woman needs,” he said, “is one more man handing her something and waiting to see what she does with it.”
* * *
She heard him cry.
Not much of it, and not for long, and not the way men in her experience did it. It was a few breaths going wrong and then a hard, ugly effort at getting control back, and then his voice again, steady, saying, “Sorry. Sorry, Dad.”
Then a long pause.
Then: “Yeah,” Jason said, quietly. “I know. Me too.”
And then, from the box, in a voice Mila had not heard in two months, dragged up out of a man with one word to his name, cracked and enormous in that small room:
“No.”
And Jason laughed — a wrecked, startled, entirely genuine laugh — and said, “Yeah, all right. Fair enough.”
* * *
She got out of that house without making a sound, which she could do, because she was a woman who had spent six years learning to be in rooms nobody knew she was in.
She did not remember the drive.
She sat in the truck in the yard at the farm for a long time with the engine off and her hands in her lap, and the whole of it went around and around: the parking garage, the sentence, she was there and it was easy, the true thing being worse, the four hundred stories about the dredger.
I am not walking up that lane with a list.
She had spent five months certain of one thing above all others — that every single thing that man did was a move in a game he was playing about her.
And tonight she had stood in his kitchen and heard him hand the whole of it to the one person on earth who could not repeat a word of it.
* * *
Roger called her at twenty past eight the next morning.
“Have you heard,” he said, without hello, which for Roger Dunham was a scream.
“Heard what?”
“He’s sold Norfolk. Overnight, to the Abernathys, at a number I do not want to say on a telephone.
And he has put Mitch Sully out on the street with an hour’s notice after thirty-one years, and the entire company is standing in the hall asking each other what on earth is going on, and nobody can get a straight sentence out of him. ”
Mila stood in the cottage with the kettle going and did the hardest thing she had done in five months.
“That’s a shame about Mitch,” she said.
“A shame —”
“Roger, I don’t work at that company and neither do you.”
“Mila.” He stopped. She could hear him deciding how far to go. “Larry built that terminal with his hands. His son sold it in an afternoon at a loss, and then fired the last man alive who remembers him doing it. Whatever that is, it is not business.”
“No,” Mila said. “It isn’t.”
“Then what is it?”
She looked out the window at the yard, where somebody was leading a horse in from the top field.
“I have no idea,” she said. “You’d have to ask him.”
And she put the phone down and stood there with her hand still on it, and felt precisely what she had done — that she had just lied, competently and without effort, to a man she liked, to protect something a man she was not speaking to had said to his father at midnight.
She had been holding one secret since November. Now she was holding two, and the second one was his.
The shape of what that meant was coming toward her from a long way off, and she went out and rode Tansy for an hour instead.
* * *
Nikki’s light was still on that night. Mila did not go in.
She went down to the cottage and sat on the end of the bed in her coat, exactly as she had sat on her first night there, and she understood that she was now holding something she had not asked for and could not give back.
He did not know she had heard him.
He would never know unless she said so. He had stood in that room believing himself alone with a man who could not speak, and he had told the truth for twenty minutes, and it belonged to him, and she had taken it the way she had taken everything else in this story: by being somewhere nobody knew she was.
She sat with that until nearly three.
Then she got up and went to the drawer by the bed, and took out the manual for the woodstove, and underneath it the letter in his handwriting that had come in November and had been in that drawer for four months and ten days.
She turned it over twice.
Then she put it back, and shut the drawer, and lay down on top of the covers with her coat still on.
Not yet, she thought.
And then, because she had promised herself in a hospital bed that she would never again be a woman who did not say the true thing to herself in the dark:
But you’re going to.