Chapter Nine
They weren’t asleep.
Of course they weren’t asleep. I don’t know why I thought there was any chance of it.
Ruby was sitting up against the headboard with the rabbit under her chin, the one with the ear that came off in the spring and got sewn back on crooked because I did it at eleven at night and I’m not good at it.
Her face was blotched. She’d been crying quietly, which is a thing she learned somewhere before she got to me and which I have never gotten her to stop doing.
Jonah was at the window. Dressed. Jeans, sweatshirt, both shoes on and tied.
He’d done that in the eleven minutes I was in the kitchen.
“Are we leaving,” he said.
Not are we leaving? No question in it. He’d already worked it out and he was confirming.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
That was all. That was the whole reaction I got out of a nine-year-old at one fifteen in the morning, and it told me more about the last three years than anything else that happened that week.
“Here’s how we’re going to do it.” I got my voice into the register I use at work, the one that makes everything sound like a manageable task, because that voice has gotten children through worse rooms than that one.
“Quiet and quick. Like a drill. Each of you take one thing you want. Just one, and make it a good one. I’ll handle everything else. ”
“Are they going to split us up?”
Ruby said it into the rabbit’s head.
“Jonah said they might, if—”
“Jonah did not say that.” I got down on the floor in front of her so we were level.
“Look at me. You’re going with me. Both of you.
In the same car, to the same place, tonight and tomorrow and after that.
Nobody is separating you from your brother.
That is not on the table. That has never been on the table. ”
She looked at me for a long moment with those brown eyes she wanted to color over.
“Okay,” she said.
Then I went and got my house.
I have thought about those next twenty minutes a great deal, because I moved like a woman who had rehearsed it, and the truth is that I never had. Not in my head, not in the shower, not at a red light. It had genuinely never occurred to me.
Something else took over. I have talked to two other women since who described the same thing and neither of them could name it either.
Bottom drawer of the file cabinet in the den, hanging folder, blue tab.
The final decrees of adoption, both of them, with both our names printed on them.
The new birth certificates the state issues after, the ones with us listed as the parents.
Their Social Security cards. Their immunization records and the pediatrician’s printouts.
The insurance cards, which were his plan, through the department, and which I looked at for one extra second in the dark of that room with a flashlight in my teeth and did not yet understand were about to become the scariest object in my life.
My driver’s license, which was in my purse. My own birth certificate. The title to my car.
And then, second drawer, in a manila envelope: my master’s diploma and my Ohio license and my ASHA Certificate of Clinical Competence, all three of which had been sitting in the dark for three years doing nothing for anybody.
I took those. I could not have told you why at the time.
Then their room. The medicine bag off the top shelf of the linen closet, the whole thing, fever reducer and the dosing syringe and the bandages, because a child gets a fever at two in the morning and you do not get to run to a pharmacy in a town where you have no address.
Clothes into two duffels. Not folded. Chargers. My laptop.
And on my way back through the hall I stopped at the closet by the furnace and took down a brown accordion folder that had been on that shelf for seven and a half years.
His.
The report. The referral letters. The two operative summaries from the surgeries after the shooting.
I do not have a good explanation for that one either.
Nobody made me. It wasn’t part of anything.
I stood in a dark hallway with two bags on my shoulder and took a folder that had nothing to do with a custody case and pushed it down the side of a duffel, the way you pick up a thing off a table on your way out of a house because someday it might be worth something.
Wade watched all of it from the bedroom doorway.
He never once tried to stop me. That’s the part people always want to know and the answer is no, he didn’t, not for a second.
He leaned on the frame with a hand up on it and he watched me pack my children’s clothes into bags at one thirty in the morning, and there was something on his face I’d call interest. Like a man at a window watching somebody try to parallel park.
Then he took his phone out and tapped at it. Deliberately, where I could see.
“Card’s closed,” he said.
He said it pleasantly.
“The one you carry. That’s my account, you’re an authorized user, I just took you off it. Curious how far you get.”
“Not far,” I said. I was zipping the second duffel and I didn’t look up. “I don’t need much.”
Here is what my husband did not know, and it is a short list, and it was enough.
He didn’t know about the account at Larkin County Savings that had been open since before I met him, with two thousand three hundred and forty dollars in it, built up ten and twenty at a time over four years out of per-diem work I picked up twice a year and never mentioned because mentioning it would have started a conversation.
He didn’t know his own words were sitting in my hip pocket in a file with a time stamp on it.
He didn’t know I had photographed his phone.
Three things. He had the house, the money, the name, the department, and every building in the county, and I had three things.
It would make a better story if I said that standing in that hallway I understood they were enough.
I didn’t. I was so frightened that my jaw had locked and I couldn’t get it to open enough to yawn for about two days afterward.
I had no plan past the end of the street.
I did not know where we were sleeping. I had never in my adult life rented anything, opened a lease, or paid a utility bill in my own name, because he handled all of it, which had always been presented to me and accepted by me as a kindness.
But I had them. And a woman with three things and a car is a different woman from one with none, and it took me about six weeks to find that out.
“One thing each,” I said in their doorway. “Time to go.”
Ruby had the rabbit.
Jonah walked over to the dresser, and he took the county certificate down off the wall.
It’s a plastic frame. Eight and a half by eleven. Both our names on it, his father’s and mine, and both of theirs, and the date, and the seal. He’d asked me to hang it at that exact height so he could see it from his bed.
He unhooked it, and he put it in his backpack flat against his math folder, and he zipped the bag and put it on both shoulders.
He didn’t look at me while he did it. He knew what he was doing. He was taking the paper that said he belonged to somebody, out of a house he was leaving in the dark, because at nine years old he had already learned that you keep your documents on your person.
I got Ruby’s coat on her over her nightgown and her boots on her bare feet.
And on my last pass through their room I saw the cardboard patch on the nightstand where it had been drying since dinner.
He hadn’t taken it. He’d taken the certificate instead and left that.
I picked it up and put it in my coat pocket and didn’t say anything about it to anybody, and it stayed in that pocket for a long time.
We went out through the kitchen.
Wade had gone back to the table. He was sitting there with his forearms on the wood and he did not get up.
He was certain. That’s the thing I keep. He was so completely certain we’d be back by nine in the morning, cold and embarrassed, that he didn’t consider it worth standing for.
“Nora,” he said to my back. Almost lazy. “You’re making a mistake.”
I didn’t answer him.
I’d run out of answers in that kitchen an hour before, and I have not spoken one unnecessary word to that man since.
The porch, three steps, the driveway. October at half past one, and the grass had that first crunch in it.
I got Ruby in and buckled her and put the bags in the back of the CR-V that used to be my mother’s, and Jonah got in the front, which he is not allowed to do, and I let him, and he put his backpack on his lap and both arms around it.
I backed down my own driveway.
At the bottom I stopped to shift, and I looked up into the rearview mirror, and I got all three of us at once.
A woman with her hair still in the elastic from six o’clock that morning and no color in her face at all.
A little girl in a winter coat over a nightgown, asleep already, thirty seconds, out cold, the way children do.
And a boy sitting up straight with a plastic frame inside a backpack, watching the house get smaller.
Nobody was crying. There wasn’t time for it and there wasn’t anything left to do it with.
We got two blocks before Jonah said anything.
“Do I go to school tomorrow?”
I looked over. He was still holding the backpack against his chest with both arms.
“Do you want to?”
“It’s not about wanting to.” He said it patiently, like I was the child. “If I don’t go, they call. And then it’s on the record that I missed. And then somebody has to explain why.”
Nine years old.
Somewhere in a group home or a car or a waiting room, my son had picked up the understanding that attendance is a document, and that documents are what adults use to decide what happens to you.
“You’ll go,” I said. “Both of you. Every day. That’s the first rule.”
“Okay.” He looked out the windshield. “Good.”
He relaxed maybe a quarter of an inch. It was the only thing I said that whole night that helped him, and it wasn’t comfort. It was procedure.
I got to the end of Larkspur and my phone went off in the cup holder.
Have them home by eight.
Then, eleven seconds later, a second one.
After that I start acting like their father.
I read it twice, sitting at a stop sign in my own neighborhood with my foot on the brake.
He wasn’t threatening to come get us.
He was telling me the hour.