Chapter Three
For eleven years my job was cleaning up after him so that nobody would ever have to know.
It started with mud on the entry tile. Then it was the smell in the truck cab, which I learned you handle with the vents and an open window and about nine minutes.
Now it was this: getting a kitchen back to neutral before seven in the morning so two children could come down and eat cereal in a house where nothing had happened.
I ran the glass under hot water first even though it was already in the dishwasher, because the dishwasher wouldn’t run until after they were asleep and a glass sitting out is a question.
The bottle went behind the rice and the box of steel-cut oats on the bottom shelf of the pantry, at the back, where nothing at eye level for a nine-year-old is ever going to be.
There is a board in front of the refrigerator that pops if you put weight on the middle of it. It has popped for three years. I have never once fixed it and I have never once stepped on it, and if you want to know what living in that house did to me, that’s it, right there.
The kids’ door was still open a hand’s width. No sound out of it. Ruby down hard, Jonah doing whatever Jonah does at eleven at night, which I have never been able to establish.
I thought Wade had gone down for the night.
He was back at the table.
He must have come out again while I was in the pantry, and he’d sat back down in the same chair with the phone up in front of his face, and he was reading something on it and doing that thing through his nose again. Twice. Whatever was on that screen was funny to him in installments.
He saw me in the doorway and turned it face down on the table. Fast, this time. Palm on top.
“What are you celebrating?” I said.
“Good news.”
“What news?”
“Got something straightened out.” He put his head back against the chair. “Should have straightened it out a long time ago.”
He wasn’t looking at me when he said it. He was looking at his own hand on the phone.
And whatever that satisfaction was, it wasn’t about the department. I’d seen the department version. That one comes with a phone call to his mother and a story he tells three times. This was private. This was a man who’d been given something and hadn’t decided yet who he was going to show it to.
“Tomorrow you’re going to apologize to them,” I said.
“For what.”
“You know for what.”
“I told her the truth.”
“You said it to a six-year-old. In her nightgown. Holding a piece of paper she made you.”
“She’s going to have to understand who she is at some point.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Better it comes from me than from some kid at school.”
“You are not going to say another word to either of them about blood.”
He finally looked up.
And he smiled. Not a mean one. Worse than a mean one. Patient. The way you’d smile at somebody’s kid explaining the rules of a game they made up.
“You really think you get to tell me what I can say,” he said. “In my house.”
He took hold of my wrist.
He did it slowly, which is the thing about him. Nothing he does is fast. He got his hand around it and closed and kept closing, watching my face the whole time, not to see if it hurt but to make sure I understood the demonstration. Then he held it there. Two seconds. Three.
Then he opened his hand.
There were white marks where his fingers had been and they went red while I stood there looking at them.
I didn’t answer him.
Not because I’d been put in my place. Because I’d figured something out about eight seconds before, and I was busy with it.
He wanted a fight about the children. He had been steering me toward one since the front hall. Because as long as I was fighting about the children I was not asking about the thing sitting under his palm on that table.
“Why did you drink like that if you’re on at seven,” I said.
“Because there’s something to drink to.”
“What is there to drink to, Wade.”
“I found out the truth.”
He said it and then he said it again, slower, like a man tasting something he’d been holding in his mouth.
“I finally found out the truth.”
“About what?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at me, and there was something old in the way he was doing it, and it took me a second to place it, and when I placed it my arms went cold.
He was looking at me the way he looked at the paper on the desk that afternoon in the specialist’s office.
Eight years since the shooting. Seven and a half since that office.
I remember it in pieces, the way you do.
The blinds were the plastic kind and one of them was bent.
There was a model on the desk. The doctor talked evenly and used all the real words and did not once make his voice go soft, and I was angry about that at the time and grateful for it for years afterward.
Severe male factor. Two surgeries and a lot of scar tissue in the wrong places. Natural conception highly unlikely. Effectively excluded.
Wade did not ask a single question. Not one. He sat with his forearms on his knees and looked at that desk and he was so still that at one point the doctor stopped and asked if he wanted a minute, and Wade said no.
I held his hand the whole time. He let me.
It was in the parking garage, at the elevator, that he took hold of my elbow and turned me around and said it quietly, close, with his eyes going over my shoulder to see who was around.
Nobody. Not your father, not your friends, nobody. Not my mother. Especially not my mother.
“Nobody,” I said.
We drove home from that appointment with the radio on. Forty minutes. He put it on the AM station and left it there, and at some point a man was talking about a highway project, and neither of us reached over.
At a light on Delmar he said one thing.
If it comes up, it’s you.
Not a question. He was assigning it, the way you assign a shift.
And I said okay. I said okay at a red light on Delmar Street when I was twenty-six years old, and I have gone back to that intersection in my head more times than I can count, and every time I am still sitting there saying okay.
I kept that for seven and a half years.
“You’ve spent all these years looking at me like I’m defective,” he said.
It took me a second to come back into the kitchen.
“What?”
“You heard me. Feeling sorry for me. The whole time.”
“I was standing next to you.”
“Same thing.”
“No,” I said. “It is not the same thing.”
“You came to every appointment. Held my hand in every room. Signed off on every procedure they wanted to run.” He was going down it in order, calm, the way you read a charge sheet. “You think I couldn’t see your face?”
“What face, Wade.”
“The one you make at a guy who got unlucky. Like I’m a cripple. Like I’m a broken piece of equipment you’d feel bad about throwing out.”
I was standing there with a wet rag in my hand and I could not find one sentence to put in front of that. Everything true I had was too long, and everything short I had sounded like a defense, and he was saying it the way you say a thing you have been sure of for years.
“I never looked at you like that.”
“No. Of course not. You’re a saint.”
“I kept my mouth shut,” I said. My voice came out lower than I wanted and I got it back.
“I sat at your mother’s table on Sunday and listened to her tell your aunt that some women just can’t, and that it was a shame, and that she’d hoped for a grandson while she was still young enough to enjoy one.
She said it while I was handing her the beans.
And I never once told her the truth. Because you asked me not to. ”
He leaned back in the chair.
And then he did the thing that has stayed with me longer than any word he said that night.
He laughed. One breath of it, out the nose.
“I never asked you to take it on yourself.”
“You asked me to be quiet.”
“Quiet.” He nodded, agreeing with me, generous about it. “Not to turn it into a performance. You picked that. The good wife standing by the unlucky husband. You liked it, Nora. Being the one who carried it. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
And that is when I understood what he was actually doing, and it was not an argument. He had taken the silence I’d covered him with for seven and a half years, and he had turned it around, and he was handing it back to me as the evidence against me.
It’s a clean piece of work if you look at it flat.
Everything I did for him becomes something I did to him.
I came to the appointments, so I was watching him fail.
I held his hand, so I was pitying him. I kept his secret, so I was collecting on it.
There is no move I could have made in seven and a half years that couldn’t be turned this way, including the move of not making any move at all.
He’d been building it a long time. You don’t produce something like that at eleven thirty on a Tuesday with a third of a bottle in you.
“You believe that,” I said.
It wasn’t a question. I said it out loud because I needed to hear how it sounded in a room.
He picked up the water glass I’d filled for him earlier and drank and looked at me over the top of it. And there was no guilt in his face and there wasn’t any drunk meanness in it either.
There was satisfaction. The face of a man who has finally been handed proof that he was right the whole time and can now do whatever he likes.
“It isn’t me that’s defective, Nora.”
He let it sit. Not long. Just the length of time a man leaves before he sets something down.
“It’s you.”
The rag closed up in my fist without my asking it to.
Water came out between my fingers and went down onto the floor, one drop and then another, and I stood there and watched it land, because looking at the floor was the only thing available to me right then.
Through the wall Ruby said something in her sleep, three or four syllables of nothing, and stopped.
I did not make a sound. Whatever else happened in that kitchen, those two were not going to wake up in it.
“What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
“We both read the report,” I said. “We were both in that room. You know what’s in it.”
“Doctors get it wrong.”
He said it easily. Not one flicker of anything under it.
And that was worse than the word. The word you could put down to whiskey and a bad night. You can’t put down a calm man’s certainty.
“Why would you think that.”
“Because now I know.”
“Know what? Did you go somewhere? Did somebody run something? Wade, did somebody tell you something?”
“I’ve got proof.”
“What proof?”
He didn’t answer. He just kept looking at me with the corner of his mouth up, and that corner scared me more than his hand on my wrist had, because a man’s hand is a thing that happens and then it’s over.
I made myself go over there. I put both palms flat on the table across from him.
“If somebody told you something,” I said. “If there’s a treatment, if there’s a new procedure, if there is anything at all. Tell me. I will go anywhere with you. I’ll take the days. I’ll drive.”
He winced. Actually winced, like I’d scraped something.
“There it is,” he said. “You’ll come with me. You’ll hold my hand.”
He got up. He swayed and put a hand on the chair back and got it under control.
He took the phone off the table.
“Turn the light off,” he said. “And quit standing over me.”
He went down the hall. The bed took his weight and the frame said what it says.
Then footsteps again.
He came back. He didn’t look at me. He went to the sink, ran the tap, filled a glass halfway, drank it down in one go with his head back. Set the glass on the table.
Set the phone next to it.
Then he went back down the hall for good, and inside of a minute I could hear the breathing.
I stood in the middle of my kitchen with a wet rag in one hand.
He’d left it on the table.