Chapter Twenty-Six
Jonah asked me to iron his shirt on the tenth.
We do not iron anything in that apartment. I do not own an iron. He asked me at eight o’clock at night, standing in the doorway of the kids’ room in his pajamas with the button-down over his arm.
“Can you make it flat.”
“I can steam it in the bathroom.”
“Is that the same?”
“It’s close.”
He thought about it.
“Okay,” he said, and handed it over.
Then he stayed in the doorway.
“Should I tuck it in?”
“You can do either one.”
“Which one is better.”
There it was again. Which one is better.
Same as the poetry night, same as the hands at his sides or in front of him, and I stood in my bathroom with a shirt on a hanger and the shower running hot and understood that my son was going to spend forty-five minutes tomorrow trying to figure out what shape to be.
“Jonah,” I said. “Come here a second.”
He came and sat on the edge of the tub with his feet flat.
“Tomorrow that lady’s going to ask you a lot of things. Here’s the whole strategy. Are you ready? It’s one sentence.”
“Okay.”
“Say what’s true.”
He looked at the tile.
“What if what’s true is bad.”
“Then say the bad true thing.”
“For who?”
I did not understand the question for a second and then I did, and it took the legs out from under me, because he was not asking me whether the truth would be bad for him.
“Not for me,” I said. “Not for Ruby. Not for anybody. You are not in charge of what happens to any of us. That is not your job and it has never been your job and I have let you think it was for three years and that was my mistake.”
He absorbed that the way he absorbs things, which is silently and with no visible effect and completely.
“Should I say I like it there?”
“At his house?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you like it there?”
“No.”
“Then no,” I said.
Dr. Nadine Pruitt has an office in a converted farmhouse out past the county line with a gravel drive and a wood stove going, and a waiting room with a rug and a basket of blocks that are the good wooden kind.
She’s sixty-something with a gray braid and reading glasses and slow speech, and she talks to children in exactly the same register she talks to adults, which is why she’s good at it.
Ruby went on the eleventh. Thirty-five minutes. She came out and reported that Dr. Pruitt had a cat named Sandwich and that they had done a drawing and also a game with cards where you say which face is which feeling.
Jonah went on the twelfth. Fifty minutes, which is five more than she’d said.
And I went in on both days, ahead of them, for an hour each.
I had thought the children were the hard part. The children were not the hard part.
“Tell me why you stopped working.”
“My husband suggested it and I agreed.”
“That’s a description of a decision. I asked why.”
I sat in a chair in a farmhouse with a wood stove ticking and gave that woman the honest answer, which took me about six minutes and which I had never assembled out loud before, and which I am not going to reproduce here.
“Tell me what you thought would happen when you walked out of that house on the twenty-third of October.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“At all?”
“Not one minute. I had a plan that ended at the end of my street.”
She wrote.
“You told the guardian ad litem on the sixth of November that if the court gave the children to their father, you would be in the school parking lot at three ten every afternoon whether or not you were allowed to speak to them.”
“I did say that.”
“Did you mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand how that sentence reads in a custody evaluation, Mrs. Kessler?”
And there it was.
The single most honest thing I had said to anybody in the whole eight weeks, the sentence I had been quietly proud of, sitting in a file with my name on it, waiting.
“Yes,” I said. “It reads like a woman who won’t accept a court order.”
“It can. Would you like to say anything else about it?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“Ma’am, I meant it when I said it and I’d mean it if you asked me tomorrow, and I’m not going to sit here and dress it up for you, because the whole reason I’m not frightened of this room is that I’ve stopped doing that.” I put my hands flat on my knees. “Write it down however it goes.”
Dr. Pruitt looked at me over the glasses for a second.
Then she wrote something that was longer than one line, which I have never stopped wondering about.
She asked me about the recording on the second day.
“Did you tell your son you had made it?”
“No.”
“Does he know it exists?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s nine, and because the first thing he’d do with that information is decide it was his to protect.”
She wrote that one down too.
Jonah came out at 3:20 on the twelfth with his shirt untucked, which it had not been going in.
He got in the car and put his seatbelt on and we got about a mile down that gravel road and out onto the county highway before he said anything.
“Mom.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know I do it on purpose?”
“Do what on purpose, honey.”
“Be easy.”
I kept driving. There is a straight stretch out there with nothing on either side of it and I have never been so grateful for a road.
“Tell me what you mean.”
“Like.” He was looking out the window. “I don’t ask for stuff. I don’t have big feelings out loud. I do my homework before you say it. I do Ruby’s backpack.” He said the whole list evenly, like a kid reciting the states. “So it’s not hard to keep us.”
“Since when.”
“Since we came.”
Three years.
“Because if it got hard you might send us back,” he said. “And if you sent us back they’d have to find two places, and Ruby’s the little one, so she’d go first, and then there’d just be me.”
The road went on for a while.
“Jonah.”
“It’s okay. I know you wouldn’t.” He shrugged one shoulder, exactly the way his sister does, and neither of them got it from me. “I just didn’t want to find out.”
I got over onto the shoulder and put the flashers on, because I was not going to do this at fifty-five miles an hour, and I turned around in my seat.
“Did you tell her that?”
“Yeah.”
“All of it?”
“She kept asking.” He picked at the seatbelt. “She said it’s not my job.”
“She’s right.”
“She said it in a way like she’d said it before.” He looked up at me for the first time since the parking lot. “Like other kids do it too.”
“They do.”
“Oh,” he said.
And something went out of his shoulders that I had been looking at for three years and had come to think of as simply the shape of him.
A woman he had known for fifty minutes told my son that on a Thursday afternoon in a farmhouse.
I had three years.
I never once said it, because I never once saw it, because for three years I was looking at a boy who was no trouble at all and being quietly grateful about it.
I have gone back through those three years since, the way you go back through a house looking for a smell.
It’s all there. He never asked for anything at a store.
Not once, not a candy bar, in three years.
He put himself to bed the first four months.
When he was seven he had strep for two days before he mentioned it, and when I asked him why he hadn’t said anything he told me he was waiting to see if it went away on its own.
I told that story at a cookout as an example of what a tough kid he was.
There were probably forty of those. Forty places where a boy handed me the evidence and I looked directly at it and thought, well, isn’t he doing well.
I drove us home on the county highway with the flashers still going for about two miles before I noticed.
That night I did a thing I had not done in three years, which is that I went in at ten to check on him and did not leave when I saw he was asleep. I stood in that doorway for a while.
He was on the top bunk on his back with one arm off the side. Not on top of the blanket. Under it.
I don’t know when that started. That is the whole problem with children and it is the whole problem with three years. You do not get a notification. Things start and stop and nobody tells you, and you find out in a car on a county highway in December, or you don’t find out at all.
Roz called at 5:40 that evening while I was scraping the sensory gym mats.
“Pruitt’s preliminary went to the court and to Tate this morning.”
“Already?”
“She’s fast. It’s forty pages and I’ve read eleven of them twice.” Paper. “I’m not going to characterize it for you on a phone call in December because I’ve been wrong before and you’ll hold it against me. What I’ll say is that I have read a great many of these and this is not a close one.”
I put the sponge down.
“And Calloway called me twenty minutes ago,” Roz said.
“And?”
“He’s objecting to the report and moving for a second evaluation. Independent examiner, his client’s expense.”
“Can he do that?”
“He can do it, he’ll probably get it, and it’ll take eight weeks.” A drawer shut. “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Kessler. We’re going to be here in March.”