CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I turned it over.
Door County. Wet T-shirt. Ivy on his shoulders with both hands in his hair.
I let it ring.
I want to be clear that this was not a decision either. I looked at that picture and my hand would not go to the screen, and the phone went on buzzing in my hand, and I counted the rings the way my daughter had counted the calls.
One. Two. Three. Four.
On the sixth one I answered it and put it to my ear and did not say anything.
“Ren.” Loud. Half a breath behind it. There was road noise under him and something rattling on his dash. “Ren, what the hell is going on.”
I didn’t answer.
“I’ve got fifty-two missed calls. Fifty-two. I turned my phone on and it wouldn’t stop, I thought somebody died. What happened.”
That was one.
“Which hospital are you at?”
Two.
“Was it the building or was it us?”
Three.
“Ren. Talk to me. Is Danny okay?”
Four.
I have been told since, by people who mean well, that this proves nothing. That a man wakes up to a wall of notifications and his mouth just goes. That the order of the questions in the first eleven seconds of the worst phone call of his life is not evidence of anything.
Maybe.
I counted them anyway, sitting in a recliner with the blinds shut, and I have never been able to un-count them.
“Lakeside Children’s,” I said. “Ask at the desk for the hyperbaric unit.”
“Hyper—” His voice did something. “What is that. What does that mean.”
“It’s for the carbon monoxide. He’s at thirty-four percent.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” There was a long piece of road. “Is he. Ren, is he going to—”
“They said he’s stable.”
“Okay.” Breathing. “Okay. Okay. And Ivy?”
“She’s asleep on a couch.”
“And you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay.” I heard him take a turn hard, and something slid across his dashboard and hit the door. “Okay. I’m twenty minutes out. Fifteen. Ren, listen to me, I’m coming, don’t—”
“Where were you.”
The road noise kept going.
I have listened to that stretch of silence more times than I can account for. It is not long. Two seconds, maybe three. And in it I could hear his tires and his blinker and a truck going the other way, and I could hear a man decide.
“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“That isn’t what I asked you.”
“Ren.”
“Where were you tonight.”
“Are we doing this right now? Right now? Our son is—”
“Where were you.”
“I’m coming,” he said. “I’ll be there. We’ll talk when I get there.”
And there it was. The whole thing, in nine words, at four in the morning, on a highway.
We’ll talk when I get there.
He was going to handle it. He was going to arrive and take the situation in hand and give it a shape, and my job was going to be to wait in a hallway until he got there and told me what this was.
I hung up on him.
I have never done that before or since. I took the phone away from my ear and pressed the red circle and put it down on the arm of the chair, and my hands were not shaking at all, and I sat there and understood that something in me had gotten up and started working while the rest of me was still in the chair.
Jess came back with two coffees.
She looked at my face and then at the phone on the chair arm.
“Him?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
She sat down and handed me a cup and said nothing for a while.
“Where was he?”
“He didn’t say.”
Jess drank her coffee and looked at the blinds.
“Okay,” she said.
Then I stood up.
“I need a bathroom.”
She came with me, and she did not ask why, and that is the second time that night I was glad I met that woman at nineteen years old in the parking lot of a grocery store where we both worked.
I want to explain this next part carefully, because it is the part people find strange.
I stood at a sink in a hospital bathroom at ten to five in the morning and I got ready.
I washed my face. Properly, with the pink soap out of the wall, twice, and I got the soot out of the lines around my mouth and out of the crease under my jaw where it had run down my neck.
I brushed my teeth with the toothbrush Jess had bought and then I did it again, because the first time did nothing.
There was a black smudge in my hairline. It took a wet paper towel and about four minutes.
Jess got a comb from the nurses’ station and I dragged my hair back and put it up with a band from her wrist. She had a tube of concealer in her purse and I used it, under both eyes, and it was two shades wrong for me and I used it anyway.
She took off her cardigan without being asked and handed it to me and I put it on over the T-shirt.
Then I stood back and looked at myself in a hospital mirror.
I was not beautiful. That was not what it was for. I want to say that plainly because I know how it sounds, a woman fixing her face at five in the morning while her son is in a pressure chamber, and I know exactly what a certain kind of person would make of that.
It was not for him to want me.
It was so that he could not put his arm around me.
I had spent an hour in a warehouse blanket in a parking lot being led by the elbow. I had been handed off and sat down and talked to in the special voice. And I knew, with total certainty, the way you know weather, exactly what was going to walk down that hallway in ten minutes.
He was going to come in and see a woman who had been pulled out of a fire, and he was going to be very, very good at it.
That is the thing about my husband. Whatever else is true about him, and a lot is, he is superb in a hallway like that one.
He knows where to stand. He knows what to say to a nurse.
He would have gotten me a chair and a blanket and a coffee and he would have crouched down in front of me with his hands on my knees and said hey.
Hey. Look at me. I’ve got you, and every single person in that corridor would have watched him do it and thought, God, look at that.
And I would have let him.
That is the part I could not survive. Standing at that sink I knew, all the way down, that if I met him looking the way I had looked in that parking lot, I would have let him hold me.
Not because I forgave anything. Because I had been awake for twenty-two hours and my body wanted somebody to take it.
So I took that option away from myself with a comb and a stranger’s concealer.
“You look good,” Jess said, from the doorway, and then, because she is not sentimental, “You look like a woman about to fire somebody.”
We went back out.
I did not sit where I had been sitting. I moved down two chairs, to the one facing the double doors at the end of the hallway, and I sat with my back straight and both feet on the floor and Jess’s cardigan buttoned, and I put my hands in my lap, and my ring was on my left hand and it was clean.
“He’s going to come in here clean,” I said.
Jess looked at me.
“What?”
“He’s going to come in here clean, Jess. Showered. He’s coming from her.”
She didn’t say anything for a second.
“You want me to leave?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
At six minutes past five, the doors at the end of the hallway opened.