Chapter 14 #2
“I heard all of it,” she said. “Norfolk. Mitch. The parking garage. Your father and what he taught you. Two years of long week.” She kept her eyes on the table. “And the last night, and why you said it.”
Jason had gone entirely still.
“You were in the kitchen,” he said.
“I was in the kitchen.”
“For all of it.”
“For all of it. I could have turned it off after the first four seconds and I didn’t, and I’ve had a month to work out why not, and the answer is that I wanted it.” She made herself look up. “So now you know. It happened to you twice, and both times it was me.”
He did not say anything for a while.
She had braced for about six things, and not one of them was what happened, which was that her husband put both hands over his face and laughed — a wrecked, exhausted, entirely helpless laugh, the kind that comes out of a man who has been holding something for five weeks.
“What,” she said. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s not funny.” He took his hands down and his eyes were wet.
“It’s only — Mila, I have spent a month sick about it.
Sick. Because I said all of that to a man who can’t repeat it, and about two days later it occurred to me that the one person on this earth who ought to have heard it was never going to, and that I’d arranged it that way on purpose, and that I’d been so pleased with myself about it. ”
“Jason.”
“And you were four feet away,” he said. “With your thumb on the button.”
* * *
She asked him, sometime after eleven, the question she had been carrying since the second week of the coma.
“Why her?”
Jason turned his cup on the table.
“I’ve tried to give you a better answer than the one I’ve got,” he said. “There isn’t one. She was there and she asked. That’s it. There’s no version where she’s remarkable, and I know that makes it worse rather than better, and it’s still the truth.”
“That is worse.”
“Yes.”
“Because if she’d been extraordinary,” Mila said, “then at least I’d have lost to something.”
“You didn’t lose to anything,” he said. “That’s what I can’t get you to —” He stopped, and started again, more carefully.
“It wasn’t a competition you were in. It was a room I went into because it was easier than the one you were in.
And the room you were in was easier than the room I’d have had to go into to actually say anything to you, and I’ve been going the easy way around since I was about twenty-two, and by October I’d been doing it so long I’d stopped being able to see the other road at all. ”
Mila sat with that.
“Do you know what the worst part of it is,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“It’s that I’d have loved it.” Her eyes were stinging and she let them. “If you’d come to me. Any of it — the terminal, your father, the nine nights, the throwing up in the parking lot. I’d have been so glad. I’d have been so glad to be asked.”
“I know,” Jason said.
“You don’t. You genuinely do not know, because you’ve never been on the other side of it.
” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
“I would have gotten out of bed at three in the morning for the rest of my life to hear any of that. That’s all I ever wanted from you.
That’s the whole thing. And it was free. ”
He put his hands over his mouth and sat there, and the hiss of the intercom went on and on in the middle of the table.
* * *
They sat at that table until nearly one in the morning.
It was not a reconciliation. She said so twice and he agreed both times, and neither of them believed the second one as much as the first.
It was one honest conversation — the first one they had ever had in ten years, which was a sentence she could hardly stand to think and which was true.
Nobody raised their voice. Nobody accused anybody of anything.
She asked him questions she had never asked in eight years of marriage and he answered every single one of them without softening, and twice he said I don’t know, which he had never said to her before October and which turned out to be the answer she trusted most.
There was a moment at about half past eleven that she would go back over for weeks afterward.
He had gotten up to put the kettle on again, and she had gotten up to put her cup in the sink, and the kitchen at Greenspring is a big room with a great deal of space in it and the two of them arrived at the same three feet of counter anyway.
Neither of them moved for a second.
She could have stepped back. He absolutely could have, and did not, and she watched him decide not to and then watched him understand that she had seen him decide it.
“Sorry,” Jason said, and did not move.
“You’re not.”
“No.”
His sleeve was rolled and his forearm was a hand’s width from hers on the counter and she looked at it, deliberately, for long enough that there could be no mistaking what she was doing, and then she looked up at him.
“I’m not going to,” she said.
“I know.”
“Tonight, I mean. I’m not saying anything about ever.”
“Mila.” His voice had gone somewhere low. “I have not asked you for one thing since November and I’m not going to start at a sink. You can stand there as long as you like.”
So she stood there a while longer, entirely on purpose, and then she put her cup down and went back to the table with her heart going like a bird in a box, and he made the tea with his back to her and took a good deal longer over it than tea requires.
At about midnight she said, “I’m not coming home.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. That isn’t what this is.”
“Mila,” he said, “I have not asked you to come home since the ninth of November, and I’m not going to, and if you turned up here with a bag tomorrow I’d ask you whether you’d thought about it properly.”
She laughed. She was so tired.
At the door, at one, he said, “The second of May still on?”
“Yes.”
“Do I still get the subject in advance?”
“Your subject is my work,” she said, “and I’d like you to come knowing that it’s about the worst thing that has ever happened to either of us, and that I’m going to ask you for something, and that you’re not going to like it.”
“Okay,” he said.
And then, because there was no version of this where she did not: “I’ll be there at eleven.”
* * *
She drove home along the valley road with the windows down and got to the cottage at half past one and did not go to bed.
She sat on the end of it with her coat on and her hands shaking, the way they always shook when she was tired, and she looked at the drawer with the letter in it and did not open the drawer.
She was frightened.
That was the honest word and she used it on herself sitting there, out loud, in the old voice, the way she had made a rule of doing. Not frightened of him. She had stopped being frightened of him somewhere between a barn aisle in April and a strange yard in Pennsylvania.
She was frightened of her own hand.
Because she had driven a hundred miles on a Tuesday without telling anybody, and she had called him from a pull-off, and she had gone to that house instead of waiting two days, and she had sat at that table until one in the morning — and every single one of those was a decision she had made herself, freely, with nobody pushing her.
There was nobody left to blame if this went wrong.
She was standing at her own gate with her hand on the bolt, and the terrible thing, the thing she sat with until it got light, was that she already knew she was going to draw it.