Chapter 28 #2
They search me. A woman in gloves runs her hands down my sides and the curve of my belly, asking if I'm carrying anything.
I say only the three of them. She doesn't smile, and I don't blame her.
They take my bag. They take everything but the sheet of paper from Dr. Anand, which Sol cleared ahead, every measurement, three small gallops written in a doctor's hand.
The room is rows of stools and a long counter split by glass, a phone on each side on a metal cord. The noise is everybody's forty minutes happening at once.
Then they bring him out.
He's thinner. The jumpsuit is the wrong size the way Lev said it would be, swimming on shoulders that fill a doorway.
There's gray stubble he'd never allow himself, a bruise going yellow along his cheekbone that he didn't have when they took him and that nobody is going to explain to me.
But his eyes find mine through the glass before he's even sat down, fast, over me once, head to the curve and back.
Whatever he sees there changes his whole face.
His eyes come back to my face and whatever they found there is going to last me the next three weeks.
I want to put my hand through the glass.
I want to drag him out of there by the collar.
I want things I can't have through a pane of plexiglass and a contact visit restriction, and I have to sit on all of it and smile at him like that's fine.
We pick up the phones at the same time.
"You're showing," he says. His voice through the handset is thin, far, and his.
"Eighteen weeks." My throat closes. I put my palm flat to the glass, the curve of me too far away for him to see from sitting, so I press the paper up instead, the doctor's writing facing him. "Three heartbeats. She found all three. A stubborn one hides behind the others."
He reads it. I watch him read it, his eyes moving down the page, his free hand coming up to the glass over the words like he could feel the ink through it.
The man Hutchins keeps describing on the news puts his forehead down against the counter for one second, just one, then lifts it back up, because he doesn't get to fall apart in here either.
"Sweet potatoes," I say. "She said picture sweet potatoes."
A sound comes out of him that's almost a laugh. "Of course she did."
"You've got a bruise."
"I walked into something."
"You walked into something."
"The shower's a tight space." He holds my eyes through the glass and lies to me the way I lied to him in the lamplight.
I let him have it the way he let me have mine.
There's a terrible justice in it I'm too tired to feel.
"I'm fine, Nora. I'm handling it. There's a man in here teaching me to stand still.
You'd like him. He doesn't like anybody. "
"Are you eating?"
"Are you?"
"Vera will end me if I don't."
"Then we're both eating." His hand stays on the glass. "You shouldn't be here. The drive. The line. They put their hands on you to let you in, I watched it from the door, I had to stand there and let them. That is going to be its own particular hell I get to feel about all week."
I hear the underneath of that. He means it matters, specifically, who touches me, and that it costs him something when it isn't him.
"I'm coming anyway."
"Nora."
"Every Thursday." I press the paper flatter to the glass so he has to look at it instead of at me, three heartbeats in a doctor's careful hand.
"You don't get a vote on this one. Vera says the going is the whole thing, and Vera's been right about everything else, so.
Every Thursday, until they let you come home. Get used to my face."
He looks at me a long moment through the smudged glass, this man who provides, who solves, who fixes, who has never in the time I've known him let himself need a single thing.
His mouth tightens. His eyes go wet, refusing to spill, holding the same look he wore at the wedding and again the morning the doctor first found the heartbeats, a man caught needing something he can't reach.
"Okay," he says. Quiet, reluctant, the word dragged out of him against everything in him that says he should be the one protecting me, not the other way around. "Every Thursday."
A guard says the time. Forty minutes, gone like nothing.
He stands when I stand. He keeps the phone to his ear even though there's nothing left to say through it, and I keep mine.
We hold the two dead handsets and look at each other through the glass until the guard says it again, harder.
Isaak sets his down first, deliberate, so I don't have to be the one who breaks it.
He flattens his palm on the glass one more time, over the place where the paper was.
Then they take him back through the door, and his shoulders are squared the way he taught himself to square them. He doesn't look back, because not looking back is the only thing he can give me from in there, and I drive home with Lev in a silence that's the loudest thing I've ever sat inside.
I call Tessa that night. Old habit, eighteen years of it, the number my thumb finds without asking.
"Oh my God, Nora, how are you." She's breathless, warm, fast, all the right words in all the right order. "I've been so worried, I've seen the news, it's everywhere, are you okay? Is he okay?"
"He's in jail, Tess."
"I know. I know. God." A pause. Then, lighter, picking her words, a half-beat too soon for how careful it sounds, "Honestly, though, between us?
Maybe it's not the worst thing. Some time apart.
Some space to think about whether this is really the life you want.
I just mean, while he's in there, you're safe, right?
You're somewhere he can't. While he's locked up, nothing can really go wrong for you. "
I stand in the dark kitchen with the dogs at my feet and the phone against my ear. Something goes cool down the back of my neck, the way it did on Las Virgenes before I understood why.
"Right," I say slowly. "Safe."
"You sound tired. Get some sleep, okay? Love you.
Call me." And she's gone, fast, faster than the call needed to end.
I stand there with the dark phone in my hand, the dogs looking up at me, and I can't for the life of me say why my oldest friend sounding relieved that my husband is in a cage has set every hair on my arms standing up, the same as a badge on an empty road, the same as a hand turning my vitamins in the light.
I tell myself it's nothing. Tessa's never liked him.
She's allowed not to like him. It's nothing.
I put the phone face down on the counter and I don't pick it back up. Borscht leans his whole weight into my leg. I stand in my husband's empty house and I count the days to Thursday.