Chapter Thirty-Two
The supplemental session was his idea.
Calloway moved for it in March, four days after Reiss’s report came in saying the same thing Pruitt’s had said, and the motion argued that both evaluations had been conducted during a period of acute conflict and that the court would benefit from an updated observation of the father with the children.
Kearns granted it. Ninety minutes, Dr. Pruitt’s office, both children, observed.
“He asked for this,” Roz said on the phone. “Remember that when you’re sitting in there. Whatever happens in that room, he chose to have it happen in front of an evaluator.”
“Am I allowed to be in there?”
“Pruitt wants you there. Non-participating. You sit where she puts you, you do not speak, you do not react, and you do not answer any question anybody in that room asks you, including your own children.”
“Ninety minutes.”
“Ninety minutes.”
The wood stove was going even though it was April.
Dr. Pruitt put a chair for me against the wall by the bookcase, at an angle, out of the middle of things.
She put a low table in the center with paper and the smelly markers and a box of animals, and she sat in the corner with a clipboard, and she said, to all four of us, in her ordinary slow voice:
“I’m going to be over here. Mrs. Kessler is going to be over there and she isn’t part of this. Everybody else, do whatever you’d do.”
Wade came in at ten.
He was in the quarter-zip. He had the folio. And he had a small flat paper bag from the department gift shop, the kind they put challenge coins in.
He sat down on the floor.
I had never in my life seen that man sit on a floor.
“Hey,” he said. “Both of you. Come here a second, I’ve got something.”
Ruby went right over, because she is six and there was a bag.
Jonah came and sat down about four feet back, cross-legged, hands in his lap.
Wade took a tissue-paper packet out of the bag and unfolded it on his knee.
It was the patch.
Five months. He had cut it off a sleeve in December with the boy sitting right there, and shown it to him, and taken it back, and said when things settle down, and then he had kept it in a drawer for a hundred and thirty-nine days and brought it into a room with a court-appointed psychologist in it.
Navy and gold, the star, the stitching around the edge slightly puckered where it had been cut off a sleeve with a knife in a truck in December.
“That’s the real one,” Wade said. “Off my own uniform. Not one from the box at the front desk. Mine.”
He held it out.
I sat in a chair against a bookcase with my hands in my lap and did not move.
Jonah looked at it.
He looked at it for four or five seconds, and I could see him weighing something, and I have never been able to decide whether what he was weighing was whether to take it or how to say no in a room with a lady with a clipboard.
Then he reached out and took it, and turned it over once, and looked at the stiff backing on the underside.
And handed it back.
“Thank you,” he said. “No thank you.”
Wade’s hand stayed out for about two seconds after there was nothing to give.
Then he closed it and put the patch on his knee.
He was fine for the next twenty minutes. This is one of the few places in this whole account where I am going to be fair to him, so here it is: he did try, and trying was not something that man had done in front of me in years.
He built a barn out of the wooden blocks with Ruby, and he was good at it, and he asked her which animal went where and let her be wrong about a giraffe.
He asked Jonah about school and got an answer.
He asked about the science fair and got two sentences.
He asked whether he was still doing the thing with the running club at Fenwick, which Jonah has never done, and Jonah said no, and Wade said “okay, well” and moved on, and I watched my son register that his father did not know what he did after school and decide not to make it a thing.
At about the thirty-five minute mark it went.
I don’t know exactly what started it. Ruby asked him something about the baby, and he answered, and then Jonah said something quiet that I did not hear from where I was sitting, and Wade’s face did the thing.
“Say that again.”
“I said I don’t want to.”
“Don’t want to what.”
“Come in July.” Jonah was building something with two blocks and not looking up. “You said in the truck about July. I don’t want to go for a week.”
“Okay.” Wade sat back on his hands. “Can I ask why?”
“You know why.”
“I’d like you to say it in front of Dr. Pruitt.”
That is a sentence a man says when he is certain a child will not.
“Because I’m scared of you,” Jonah said.
Wade turned his head and looked at me.
Not at Pruitt. At me, against the wall, with my hands in my lap.
“This is what I’ve been trying to explain,” he said, to the room, to the clipboard. “This is exactly it. That’s not a nine-year-old. Those are somebody’s words in a nine-year-old’s mouth.”
I did not speak.
I had spent four months learning how to sit still in rooms and that is the only reason I was able to do it, and I want somebody to understand that not speaking in that chair was the single hardest physical act of my adult life.
I didn’t have to.
“She never said anything,” Jonah said.
Wade looked back at him.
“Buddy—”
“She never did. Not one time.” He put the blocks down.
He was not shouting. His voice had gone very flat and very level and I had never heard it do that before.
“Not in the car, not at dinner, not ever. She doesn’t even say your name.
I asked her one time in November if you were a bad person and she said that’s not for me to answer and it’s not my job to decide. ”
He looked at his father.
“Nobody told me to be scared of you. You did that.”
The wood stove ticked.
I have gone over that speech probably two hundred times since, and there is one thing in it that I did not catch until about the sixth or seventh time.
She doesn’t even say your name.
He had been keeping track. For six months, at a table with a bad leg and in a car on Route 8 and at the edge of a bathtub, my son had been running a tally on what his mother said about his father, the way you’d keep score in a game, and he’d had the number ready the whole time in case anybody ever asked him.
“You did it in the front hall when you took Ruby’s picture. You did it in the kitchen. You did it in the truck in December when you told me about the patch and then asked me what I said to the first lady.”
Wade did not move.
“And you did it just now,” Jonah said, “when you asked me to say it out loud in front of her, because you thought I wouldn’t.”
Nobody in that room said anything for a while.
Dr. Pruitt wrote, unhurriedly, the way she does.
Wade stood up.
He did it slowly and he did not slam anything and he did not raise his voice one decibel, and he put the patch in his folio and picked up his jacket and said, “I think that’s enough for today,” and Dr. Pruitt said, “That’s your decision, Mr. Kessler,” and wrote that down too.
Ruby had been at the low table the whole time with the markers.
She got up and went over to him with a piece of paper.
“Daddy. I made you one.”
He took it, because a man takes a piece of paper from a six-year-old in front of a court-appointed psychologist.
I could see it from where I was sitting.
She’d drawn a door. Right down the middle of the page, big, with a knob and everything, and hinges she’d put on the wrong side.
On the left of the door there was a man in navy, by himself, standing on a line of green.
On the right there were three people holding hands, and a yellow sun with lines coming off it in the top corner, and the sun was on their side.
She had not put any words on it.
Wade looked at that drawing for about six seconds.
Then he opened the folio and put it inside, flat, and shut it, and said, “Thanks, Roo,” and went out.
I have never been able to say cleanly what I felt about that.
He took it. In October he closed his fist on one of those and dropped it on the floor, and in April he put one in a leather folder and carried it out to his truck, and I do not know to this day which of those two things is worse and I have stopped trying to decide.
He was waiting in the gravel by my car.
I had Ruby by the hand and Jonah’s backpack over my shoulder and I saw him and I kept walking, because there is a rule about that and Roz drilled it into me in November: you do not have conversations in parking lots.
“Nora.”
“I’m not doing this here.”
“Kelsey’s at the hospital.”
I stopped.
He had his keys in his hand and he was looking at the gravel.
“Since four this morning. It’s early. They’re saying seven weeks.”
He looked up.
“I’m not telling you for any reason,” he said. “I just needed to tell somebody who’s had a bad month.”
And he got in his truck and pulled out onto the county road, and I stood in a gravel lot in April holding my daughter’s hand.
Seven weeks early.
It was the twenty-second of April.