Chapter 15
A penalty is a thing a man serves, and then it is over.
That was the trap, and it took her two days to get out of it.
Every version she wrote down in that time sounded like a punishment.
It would be so easy. You don’t get to know.
You don’t get to see it. You don’t get a say.
She could stand in that barn aisle and hand her husband a sentence of that shape and he would take it, gratefully, the way he had taken everything since November, and it would feel enormous and it would be worth nothing at all.
What she wanted was not a penalty. What she wanted was a description of a marriage.
She got there at about two in the morning on the first of May, sitting on the floor of the cottage with her back against the couch, and when she had it she said it out loud to the empty room twice to hear how it sounded, and then she went to bed and slept for nine hours, which she had not done since October.
* * *
He came at five to eleven and waited at the gate until the hour, as he had every time.
It was warm. The doors at both ends of the barn were open and there was that particular May light going through, the dust in it, and the swallows were back in the rafters making their appalling racket.
“Your subject,” Mila said.
“Your work.”
“Right.” She had her back against the stall wall. “I’m making a six-part series for the network. Nate Halloran’s commissioned it, it delivers on the twenty-third of May, and it goes out the Friday after.”
“Christina said. I didn’t ask her, she volunteered it.”
“I know she did.” Mila took a breath. “It’s about what gets said over people who can’t answer. Nurses, aides, porters, families. Six months of tape. It’s the best work I have ever done in my life and I say that as somebody who does not say things like that.”
Jason nodded slowly.
“And I’m in it,” she said.
* * *
She had decided that on the Sunday, and she told him standing in that aisle before she told Nate, which she had not planned and did not regret.
“I fought it for four months. Nate’s been at me since January and I kept telling him it was a professional judgment and it was not a professional judgment, it was that I did not want to be the woman it happened to.
” Her voice was steady. “But there’s no piece without it.
Everybody in that tape is describing a room from the outside. I’m the only one who was in the bed.”
“Okay,” Jason said.
“So there’s an episode that’s mine. Six weeks, in order. What I heard.” She held his eye. “Which means you’re in it.”
The swallows went on.
“Not your name,” she said. “Not the company, not the wing, not the house. No identifying detail at all, because that’s not what it’s for — I’m not making a piece about the Shepards, I’m making a piece about a room, and the minute it’s got a name in it people stop hearing the room and start reading a story about rich people.
” She paused. “But everyone who knows us will know. Roger will know inside four minutes. Ardith Fairbanks will know. Your board will know, and your father’s friends will know, and about nine hundred people in this valley will work it out by June. ”
“Yes,” he said. “They will.”
“And what’s in it is the worst thing you have ever done, in your own words, as I heard them.”
* * *
He asked one question, and it was not the one she expected.
“Are you all right doing it?”
Mila stopped.
“That’s not —” She started again. “That’s your question?”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Mila, you’ve just told me you’re going to sit in a room by yourself for three weeks and take that apart frame by frame. I’ve watched you do four hours of that tape and come out the other side gray. So yes. That’s my question.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Okay.”
“That’s an honest answer, not a brave one. I don’t know if I can do it and I’m going to find out by the twenty-third.”
“Okay,” Jason said again, and did not offer to help, and did not tell her she was strong, and did not say a single one of the six things she had braced against.
* * *
“Here’s what I’m asking for,” Mila said.
She pushed off the stall wall and stood in the middle of the aisle in the May light, and she said it as she had said it to the empty room at two in the morning, all the way through, without stopping.
“You will not read it. You will not hear it. Not a minute of it, not a rough cut, not a transcript, not a summary from Christina. You will not know when it airs until the day it airs, and you will find that out the way the rest of the country finds it out.
“You will not call Roger. You will not call the network. You will not have a statement ready. If a journalist calls you, you will say my wife made it, ask her, and nothing else, ever, in your life.
“You will not protect me from any of it — not from your board, not from the valley, not from your father’s friends, not from anybody who is unkind about it at a dinner.
If somebody says something to you about me in a room, you will not fix it.
You will come and tell me it happened and let me decide what I want to do.
“And you will not ask me how it’s going. Not once. Not gently, not at the end of a phone call, not in a way you think is casual.”
She stopped.
“That’s the whole of it,” she said.
* * *
He was quiet for a moment.
“Can I say something,” he said, “or is it a yes-or-no.”
“Say it.”
“It’s a yes,” Jason said. “First. Before anything else, in case any part of you is sitting there doing arithmetic about it — it’s a yes, all of it, and I’m not going to ask you for one adjustment.”
“Thank you.”
“But I’d like to say the other thing, because I’ve had five months to think about it and I think you should have it.” He looked at the floor of the aisle, and then up. “You’ve written that like it’s about the piece. It isn’t. It’s about the next forty years.”
Mila did not move.
“It’s a description of a marriage where I don’t get to decide what you’re protected from,” he said. “That’s it, isn’t it. That’s the whole thing. And I’ve done every item on it since October.” His voice was perfectly level. “I’ve been hearing that list all winter. I just hadn’t heard it in one go.”
“Yes,” Mila said.
“Then here’s mine, and then I’ll go.” He straightened up. “I want it too.”
“Jason—”
“No, I need to be clear, because you could take that as a man agreeing to conditions and it isn’t.
” His jaw was working. “I have spent my entire adult life managing what the people I love get told, and I have been so tired, Mila. I’ve been tired since I was about twenty-four and I did not know that’s what it was until I sat in a hospital corridor in November and worked out that I had nobody to tell anything to.
“So it isn’t a sentence I’m serving. I’d like to be married to somebody I don’t have to handle. That’s the actual thing I want, and I have wanted it for years and I could not have told you that in October because I did not have the words.”
The swallows went over. Somewhere down the row a horse kicked a wall.
“Say it plainly,” Mila said.
“I want the version where you tell me things and I tell you things and neither of us decides in advance what the other one can take,” Jason said. “That’s it. That’s what I want. And I’d want it if you’d never been in that bed and I’d want it if there were no piece.”
* * *
He went at a quarter to twelve and she stood in the doorway of the barn and watched the truck all the way down the lane, which she had not done before and did not examine.
It was seventy degrees. He had come in a shirt with the sleeves already up and there had been a smear of something on his forearm that she had spent a genuinely humiliating proportion of that hour not looking at.
She went and did three stalls she did not need to do, and then a fourth, and then she stood in the middle of the aisle with a fork in her hand and no idea how long she had been standing there.
The swallows went over.
“Three weeks,” she said, to a wheelbarrow, in the old voice, out loud.
It came out sounding less like a deadline than she had intended.
* * *
She sent the file to Nate that night and did not copy anybody.
Then she sat in the barn office with the index card on the wall and worked out, on the back of an entry form, that her own money ran out in the first week of June, and that the network paid thirty days after delivery, and that the gap was three weeks long and there was nothing to be done about it.
She called her mother in Delaware and asked, for the first time in her adult life, to borrow money.
Lorraine Kovacs said, “How much,” and then, “Is that all,” and then, “It’ll be there Thursday,” and then, because she was who she was, “Do you want to tell me what it’s for or shall I sit here and make it up?”
“It’s for three weeks,” Mila said.
“Good,” said her mother. “Your father borrowed off his brother for a roof once and he never got over it. Don’t be like that. It’s money, it’s not a diagnosis.”
* * *
Everybody else had an opinion.
Roger came out to the farm on the eighth and sat in the barn office for an hour and did not once use the phrase think of the family, which she respected enormously, and which she knew had cost him.
“I’m going to ask you one thing and then I’ll drop it forever,” he said. “Is there anything in this that hurts the beds?”
“No.”
“You’re certain.”
“Roger, it’s an argument for exactly what your unit does.” She turned in the chair. “If it does anything at all it makes it harder for a hospital in this state to hand that finding to one person and never check it landed.”
He sat with that.
“Ah,” he said. “Yes. All right.” And then, after a moment, with real difficulty: “I was in that corridor twice a week. I never once asked a nurse a question. It did not occur to me that there was anything to ask.”
“I know.”
“Will that be in it?”
“Not you,” Mila said. “But yes.”
“Good,” said Roger Dunham, and picked up his hat.
* * *
Christina was harder, because Christina was frightened.