Chapter Sixteen – Lila.103
Chapter Sixteen – Lila
The afternoon light came in at that particular winter angle that turned everything gold before it disappeared, the last generosity of a January sun that had never quite committed to warmth but at least offered this, a slow amber wash across the worn surface of the card table that made the scratches in the wood look like something intentional.
The fire had been burning since noon and had settled into its working state, the low orange core of it, the occasional muffled shift of a log finding a new position.
The room smelled of woodsmoke and old coffee and the particular close-lived smell of a house in its winter months, wool and woodwork and the specific warmth of people who had been spending their evenings in the same rooms.
Rhett had been talking for the better part of twenty minutes.
This was not unusual. Rhett talked during cards the way he talked during most things that required some portion of his attention, freely and with great investment in whatever angle he’d decided was funniest. Currently the angle was Cole’s face, specifically the quality of stillness it achieved when Cole was holding a strong hand, which Rhett had apparently decided was his most interesting tell.
“It’s not that you go blank,” Rhett was saying, with the considered air of a man delivering a diagnosis.
“It’s that you go too still. Like a dog that’s spotted a squirrel and hasn’t committed yet.
There’s a quality of suspended decision to it.
” He tapped two fingers on the table. “I’m just saying. I can see the squirrel, Cole.”
Cole did not look up from his cards.
“You’ve been saying that for three hands,” he said, “and you’ve lost two of them.”
“I’m building a case,” Rhett said.
I was looking at my own cards and not reading them.
I knew what was in them. I had looked when Wade dealt, had registered the values without doing anything with the information, and then my eyes had drifted down to the table surface and stayed there while Rhett laid out his squirrel theory and Cole responded to it with the particular economy of a man who had learned to say a great deal with very few syllables.
The jack of hearts had been looking up at me for the past four minutes.
I had not considered what to do about it.
My thumb was moving along the edge of the cards.
I noticed this without meaning to notice it, the repetitive movement of it, back and forth, paper edge against the pad of my thumb, the small tactile loop I’d been running without deciding to.
My belly rested against the edge of the table in the way everything rested against everything now, present and requiring its usual small adjustments, and the fire was warm on the right side of my face and Rhett was saying something about pot odds that I caught the end of and not the beginning.
Rhett’s joke landed across the table.
I heard it. There was a half-second where I might have laughed, might have given him the dry response he was angling for, and then the window passed and Cole made the sound instead and I looked down at my jack of hearts and said nothing.
I had been doing this since lunch. Not visibly, or not visibly enough that anyone had said something, but I could feel it, the half-second lag on everything, the way the room kept going at its ordinary pace while something in me sat back and watched it from slightly outside.
I knew what it was. I had known since I woke up that morning with the grey pre-dawn light coming through the curtain gap and Hope already awake and moving under my hands, turning in her slow deliberate way, and the weight of the previous days sitting in my chest without having gone anywhere.
The guilt had a texture now that it hadn’t had a name for before yesterday morning. It was specific. It had specific objects.
Wade set his cards face-down on the table.
Not a fold, not a check, just set them down, and when I glanced up he was looking at me.
His dark eyes were level and unhurried, reading my face the way he read faces, which was to say: accurately and without making a performance of it.
He had both forearms on the table and his body was still in the way that meant he had already made a decision about something.
“What’s on your mind, Lila?”
His voice was low. Shaped for me and not the room.
Rhett glanced up from his cards. Something moved across his face, the quick, perceptive read he ran on rooms when he stopped talking long enough to perform it, and he leaned back in his chair without a word.
Cole went still at the far end of the table, his mug halfway to his mouth and then not moving.
The fire popped once. The log shifted. The amber light moved on the table surface.
My jaw tightened.
I looked down at my cards. Then at Wade.
“I don’t know how to say it without it sounding wrong,” I said.
Wade did not tell me it wasn’t wrong. He did not fill the space with reassurance or offer the easy, smoothing response that would have let me decide not to say it at all. He just looked at me, steady and patient, and he said, “Try anyway.”
The pause that followed was long enough that Rhett shifted slightly in his chair. I felt it more than saw it, the small controlled movement of a man resisting the urge to do something with the quiet.
“I care about you,” I said. The words came out flat and careful, which was the only way I knew how to say things that cost me. “All three of you. In ways I didn’t expect.” I looked at the table. “And it feels wrong.”
Nobody moved.
“Ethan is dead.” I said his name the way I had been learning to say it, directly and without softening, because softening it had started to feel like a kind of untruth.
“He’s been dead for five months. And I’m sitting here laughing at dinner and sleeping through the night and,“ My knuckles had found the edge of the table and I felt them there, the pressure of them white against the wood. “I’m letting myself feel things I don’t have any right to feel yet. Maybe ever.”
Rhett opened his mouth.
Cole’s hand came down on his arm. Not hard. Just there. Rhett closed his mouth.
Wade didn’t move closer. He didn’t reach across the table. He held my gaze with the same quality of attention he had held it with through the whole of it, dark eyes steady on my face, and he said, “Wrong by whose measure?”
I didn’t answer right away. The question sat in the warm air of the room and the fire kept doing what it did and I looked at Wade and felt the specific helpless sensation of a person who has been handed a question they don’t want to look at directly.
“Mine,” I said finally. “I don’t know. Mine.
” I pressed my thumb flat against the edge of the card.
“I’ll be in the middle of something ordinary, I’ll be washing a dish, or I’ll be in the nursery doing something to the shelf, and something will be funny, and I’ll laugh.
Actually laugh. And then about three seconds later I’ll remember that he’s gone and I haven’t thought about him in an hour, and that feels,” I stopped.
My throat was not going to close on me. I decided this and my throat agreed, barely.
“It feels like a betrayal. Like the laughing is taking something away from him. Like if I’m laughing then I must not have loved him as much as I thought I did. ”
Wade was watching me. Not moving, not preparing a response with the visible urgency of a person who was waiting for a gap to speak into. Just listening, his hands flat on the table, his face open and completely present.
So I kept going.
“And the sleeping. That’s,“ I let out a breath through my nose. “I slept nine hours two nights ago. I don’t think I’ve slept nine hours since before he died.
And I woke up and for about thirty seconds I felt good.
Rested. And then I felt like the worst person alive for having been unconscious for nine hours while he’s,” I stopped.
“While he’s been gone. Like I should be doing something.
Like sleeping means I’ve stopped fighting for something, except I don’t know what I’m supposed to be fighting for or against.”
I glanced at Rhett. He was looking at his cards. The angle of his jaw was tight.
“And then there’s the rest of it,” I said, and I did not specify what the rest of it was, because we were all in the same room and we had all been in that room four nights ago, and nobody required clarification.
“Wanting things again. Wanting,” I pressed my lips together.
“I didn’t think I was going to want things again.
I had sort of made peace with that, with the idea that I was going to just be the person who took care of the ranch and took care of Hope and that was enough, that was the whole of it.
And then.” I set my cards face-down on the table.
My hands came together in my lap. “And then it turns out I’m not that person. ”
The fire settled. The room was very quiet.
Wade’s hands were still flat on the table in front of him, and he looked at me for a moment after I finished, and I could see him deciding something, not about whether to speak but about how to say what he was going to say.
The difference was visible. He was not a man who said things before they were ready.
“I’ve lost people,” he said.
His voice was the same as it always was: low and even, without ornamentation. He said it the way he said things that had weight, without announcing the weight, just setting it down.
“People I loved. My grandmother, when I was twelve. A man I considered a brother, six years ago, different circumstances, but the same absence afterward.” His thumbs rested on the table, unmoving.
“There’s a period of time where you measure everything against them.
Whether you’re being faithful enough to what they were.
Whether being okay means you’ve stopped knowing how much they mattered.
” He paused. “I used to think that if I was happy, it meant I had come to terms with them being gone. And coming to terms with them being gone felt like agreeing to it. Like deciding it was acceptable.”
The fire breathed behind him.
“So I stayed sad,” he said. “For a long time, I just stayed sad, because it felt like the only honest position. Like sadness was the correct response to a real thing, and anything else was a lie I was telling myself.” His jaw moved once, a small compression and release. “It wasn’t. It just kept me alone.”
He let that sit.
Then he looked at me with the directness that was simply part of how he occupied rooms, the straightforward quality of a man who had decided something was worth saying clearly.
“You’ve told us about him,” Wade said. “Not all at once. Over dinners. Over evenings.” He glanced down at the table for a moment and then back up at my face.
“I know he laughed at a livestock auction when you caught him looking. I know he had opinions about yearling heifers that weren’t always correct.
I know he named your daughter before she was a fact yet.
” His voice stayed level throughout, but there was something in it, something that sat beneath the evenness of it like warmth beneath still water.
“I know what kind of man you’ve described. ”
I was looking at him. My eyes had gone wet and I was aware of this and not doing anything about it yet.
“All he would want,” Wade said, “is for you and Hope to be happy. That’s it.” He held my gaze. “That’s the whole thing.”
The simple directness of it landed somewhere I had not been sufficiently braced for.
I sat with it. The tears didn’t fall all at once, they built at the corners of my eyes and sat there while I blinked, while I looked at the worn surface of the card table and the jack of hearts lying face-down and the amber light going slowly warmer as the afternoon leaned toward its close.
My jaw was not going to hold if I said anything.
I held my own jaw and I breathed and I let the words be in the room.
Across from me, Rhett was looking at his cards with his jaw working in the way it worked when he had decided not to say what he was thinking.
He had not moved for the last two minutes, which was the longest I had ever seen Rhett go without movement.
Cole’s arms were folded across his chest, his eyes somewhere in the middle distance, a fixed point that was not the table and not any of us but the private internal space he went to when something had gotten through and he was not going to make an event of it.
Wade picked his cards up.
He did it without announcement, his fingers finding the edges and lifting them in the single clean motion of a man resuming something he had set aside.
He arranged them without looking at them first, straightening the hand, and then he looked across the table at me with the expression he wore when he had finished saying what he had to say and had no interest in pressing further.
“We still playing?” he said.
The breath that came out of me was not one thing.
It was laugh and grief and something that lived in the space between the two, a long unsteady exhale that I let out through my nose and then through my mouth, and I dragged the back of my wrist across my eyes in a single quick stroke and reached for my cards.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, the edges of it still carrying what the last ten minutes had put there. I picked up the jack of hearts and looked at it. “You’re still going to lose, though.”
The corner of Wade’s mouth curved.
“Probably,” he said.
Rhett let out a breath that was also partly a laugh, a low, private sound, and uncrossed his arms and leaned forward over his cards.
Cole unfolded his arms and picked up his mug and found that it was empty and set it back down with the small, unsurprised patience of a man who had known it was empty before he checked.
The fire had burned lower while we were all somewhere else, the logs settling to a deeper ember, and the gold of the afternoon light had shifted in the way it shifted when the sun had made its final decision about the horizon and was beginning to follow through.
The room was warmer toward dusk than it had been at midday, the accumulated heat of the fire pressing into the cold that pressed in from the windows and arriving at some agreement.
I held my cards and looked at them this time.
The jack of hearts, three of Aces, a seven that was doing nothing for anyone.
I considered the hand, and from across the table Rhett said something about the pot odds that was almost certainly wrong, and Cole made the sound he made when something was wrong in a way that did not surprise him, and I looked at my Aces and thought, I might win this yet.