Chapter 13
She sent the message through Nikki, which she was aware was cowardly and did anyway.
“Saturday. Eleven in the morning, at the barn, in the aisle. Forty minutes.” Nikki repeated it back with an expression of great neutrality. “And the subject is Bethany Wilkes, so he’s to come knowing that’s what it is.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You want me to say all that on the phone.”
“I want you to say exactly that on the phone,” Mila said, “and then hang up, because if you let him ask a question he’ll ask four.”
* * *
She had worked something out, lying awake through the first week of April.
She had been running her life since November on a wall. The lane, the rules, the hours, the no. A wall works. It had gotten her through the winter and she was not ashamed of one brick of it.
But a wall has one setting, and she was not going to spend the next twenty years of her life standing behind one.
What she wanted — and it had taken her until two in the morning on a Tuesday to find the word — was a gate.
A gate is worse than a wall, because somebody has to stand at it. Somebody has to decide, every time, and be wrong sometimes, and live with it. A wall you build once. A gate you work.
So: forty minutes, in daylight, in the aisle of a barn that was not his, on a subject she named in advance, on a date she picked.
He would get exactly that much ground and not one inch he took for himself.
* * *
He came at five to eleven and waited by the gate at the bottom until the hour, which she watched from the office window and did not comment on.
They stood in the aisle. Neither of them sat down. Somewhere down the row a horse worked at a hay net and a radio played in the tack room, and Mila kept her back against the wall of a stall and told him what Bethany Wilkes had done.
She did it in order, the way Noelle Vinson had done it.
The assessment in the third week. The consultant handing it to the family’s nominated point of contact.
The nurse at two in the morning hearing him say at least she can’t hear any of this, and thinking it was odd, and being told it had been handed over.
Jason stood absolutely still through all of it.
“She was on the form,” Mila said. “You put her on it.”
“In the first week.” His voice had nothing in it. “She asked if she could take the hospital side because I was — I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember to eat. And I said yes.”
“I know.”
“I signed it. There’s a form and I signed it.”
“I know that too.”
He turned away from her and stood facing down the aisle for a while with his hands laced on the back of his head, and Mila watched him and did not go to him and did not say anything at all, which took a great deal.
Then he said, into the middle distance, “What do you want me to—”
And stopped himself.
Stopped himself dead, mid-sentence, with the whole of it visibly going through him, and closed his mouth, and stood there.
That was the moment. She would put it in the piece eventually, in a way no one would ever be able to identify: a man stopping a sentence in a barn aisle.
It was the single most significant thing her husband did that spring, and it lasted about two seconds, and nobody witnessed it but her and a horse.
“Say it,” she said.
“No.”
“Say it anyway. I want to hear you not do it.”
Jason turned around.
“I was going to ask what you wanted me to do about it,” he said. “And I stopped, because I already know. I’m not to do anything. It’s yours. It happened to you.” His jaw was working. “And I would like to be on record that every single thing in me wants to get in the car.”
“To go where?”
“I don’t know. Her. The hospital. The board. Somewhere.” He laughed once, horribly. “That’s the point, isn’t it. I don’t even have a destination. I just want to be doing it.”
“Yes,” Mila said. “That’s the point.”
* * *
Thirty-one minutes gone. She looked at the clock over the feed bins.
“There’s one more thing and then we’re done,” she said. “I finished her at the gala. On the twenty-eighth, in the sitting room, in front of Roger and Ardith and two of the board. Roger ended her that night.”
He stared at her.
“You did it at the gala.”
“I did it at the gala.”
“While I was standing in the hall.”
“Yes.”
“Mila.” He put his hand over his mouth, took it away. “You did that on your own. In our house. With four hundred people—”
“In my house,” she said, “which is a conversation for another day. Yes.”
And then he did a thing she had not planned for at all, which was laugh — one short, disbelieving, entirely admiring breath of a laugh — and say, “God almighty.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I —” He shook his head. “Eight years. And I had absolutely no idea who I was married to.”
The radio played in the tack room.
“No,” Mila said. “You didn’t.”
* * *
Here is the part she did not write down anywhere.
Forty minutes is not an arbitrary number. She had picked it in the barn office with a clock in front of her, and she had picked it because she had done the arithmetic on herself and forty was the number she could hold.
She had known it the first Saturday, standing a few feet from him in an aisle with the sun coming through.
He had been doing barn work since Christmas and it had changed his hands.
That was the first thing. The nails were wrecked and there was a split across one knuckle that had been there for weeks and a paleness at the wrist where the watch stopped, and Mila had stood there with her back against a stall and thought about those hands with a directness that appalled her.
Then the rest of it, all at once, in no order and entirely without her permission: the particular way he stands with his weight on one hip.
The place where his neck goes into his shoulder.
The fact that he had come up that lane in a barn coat and smelled like her own yard instead of like a man who had been in a car.
Ten years. Her body had a filing system and it had not thrown a single thing out.
She kept her back against the stall for the whole forty minutes and she did not move one step toward him and she did not let one syllable of it into her face, and when he drove off she sat on an overturned bucket and put her head in her hands.
Not shame. She had finished with shame somewhere around January.
It was the arithmetic again. Because a woman who wants her husband that badly at four feet cannot be trusted at two, and she had five months of ground under her and no intention of handing any of it back for the sake of a pair of hands.
So: forty minutes. Daylight. An aisle with a door at each end.
She was not building a fence around him. She was building one around herself, and she knew the difference, and she did not tell a living soul.
* * *
Forty minutes. She said so, and he went.
He did not ask for another one. He did not say when can I see you or thank you for telling me or any of the four things she had braced for. He said, “Okay,” and walked down the lane to the truck, and she stood in the aisle and listened to the engine go until it was gone.
Then she went and sat down on an overturned bucket for a while, because her legs had gone.
* * *
The second one was twelve days later and she set it herself.
That was the part she did not tell anybody about, including Nikki, and possibly including herself: twelve days, not fourteen. She had said to herself on the Saturday that she would leave it two weeks. On the Monday of the second week she picked up the phone.
“Thursday,” she said. “Same time, same place, an hour. The subject is October.”
A pause on the line. “The accident.”
“The accident.”
“Okay,” Jason said.
* * *
He told her about the field.
It took him most of the hour and she made him do all of it, the whole way through, from the fog coming down over the Ridgely place to the corridor at the hospital, because she had lived inside a six-week hole with no edges and she wanted the edges.
He had gone the long way to get her because of the fog.
He had come around the bend by the church and the mare was standing square in the middle of the road with a stirrup swinging, and he had known — he said it plainly, without dressing it — that he had about two minutes to find out whether his wife was alive.
He went over the fence. He went up that field in the fog calling her name, and the ground came up, and he found her on her side about thirty yards short of the hedge with her hat off and her face wrong.
“You were breathing,” he said. “That’s — I want you to have that. You were breathing the whole time I was there. You never stopped.”
“Did I say anything?”
“No.” He looked at the floor of the barn aisle. “You opened your eyes once. About a minute before they got up the field. You looked straight at me.”
Mila stood with her hand on the stall door.
“I don’t remember that,” she said.
“No.”
“Did I—” Her voice did something and she made it stop. “Was I frightened?”
And Jason Shepard, who had been an adequate husband for eight years and had spent five months learning to be something else, did not say no, of course not, and did not say don’t think about it, and did not take one inch of that from her.
“Yes,” he said. “You were very frightened, and then you weren’t, and I don’t know which of those was worse.”
* * *
She asked him why he had never told her.
“Because it’s the best thing I ever did,” he said, “and it’s the only card in the deck, and if I put it on the table then everything after it is a purchase.”
“That’s not why.”
He looked up.
“That’s part of it,” Mila said. “But that’s not why.”
The horse down the row pulled at the hay net. Jason stood in the aisle with his hands in his coat pockets and took about ten seconds to get there.
“No,” he said. “The rest of it is that I had her on the phone that night.”
The barn went quiet.