18. Cali
CALI
I wake up alone. It's exactly how I wrote the rules, so I don't know why my chest feels like somebody scooped it out with an excavator.
The other side of the bed is cold. He must've gotten up hours ago.
Even more likely is that he probably didn't sleep at all, just lay there one door down with his eyes open, waiting for the world to try something.
I lie there for a while making pleasant conversation with the aches in my thighs and boobs and the ache somewhere less locatable, the one that can't stop asking that silly schoolgirl question that women of all eras have asked themselves again and again after sleeping with a man they swore they'd never even look at again:
What does it all mean?
I get dressed fast, like I can outrun the thought. Jeans, a T-shirt, hair in a knot that says nothing happened here. By the time I get downstairs, Ronan's at the stove.
He's in the reading glasses, too, just to test my patience.
The slutty ones. His sleeves are rolled, spatula in hand, and there are pancakes coming off the griddle with those crispy lace edges I have never once in my life managed to produce.
Isabella is at the table in her nightgown, chin on her fists, watching him happily.
Hayden is drawing something with a lot of legs.
"Morning," Ronan says. He doesn't turn around. "Coffee's by the pot. Yours is the mug with the mantis on it."
Two things happen at once. First, the smell of coffee-made-right hits me, and my whole nervous system sighs dreamily.
Second, I remember the mantis mug is the one Paula drank out of, the one with the ghost of a mauve lipstick crescent I scrubbed off a lifetime ago, and I decide, irrationally, viciously, that he shouldn't have picked that one.
"Thanks," I mutter.
He clocks the underlying attitude, but doesn’t deign to respond.
I take the coffee to the far end of the table, as far from the stove as the room allows, and I sit down next to Isabella. "Sleep okay, sweetie?"
"I had a dream about a whale," she reports. "It was very polite. It said excuse me before it ate the boat."
"That's a very well-mannered whale."
"Mr. Ronan says whales are the biggest animals ever, even bigger than the dinosaurs."
Ronan sets a plate in front of Isabella.
Enormous, with Minnie Mouse ears. He sets one in front of Hayden, small ones, three of them, the way Hayden likes.
He sets one in front of me, just a normal pancake, but there's exactly the right amount of butter melting into exactly the right pattern.
I look at it and think, He knows how I take my pancakes, and I want to put my face in it and scream.
"Rules stand," I say. Quiet. Just for him.
He straightens. Behind the glasses, his eyes are very calm. "I know."
"I mean it. Everything's back to normal. Last night was—"
"Night stuff," he says. "In the dark. Gone by morning." He recites it back to me perfectly. "I remember, Ms. Meadows."
"Good."
And that's when the melon-baller feeling in my chest curdles into something meaner, because I came down here braced for a fight.
I had my whole list ready, all my grievances lined up, and he just took it.
Nodded. Poured me the right coffee and made me the right pancake and agreed to keep on keeping on.
I hate it.
I hate that I can't hate him properly, because he won't give me anything to grab onto.
The morning goes on like that. Which is to say it goes on being pleasant and civilized and completely intolerable.
Ronan does the dishes. I take the kids up to get dressed.
When I come back down, he's on one of his phones by the window, conversing in Russian with his back to the room.
He glances over his shoulder when I come in and gives me a nod, the exact nod you'd give a colleague you respect but don't know especially well.
I have to resist the urge to throw the mantis mug at his head.
Instead, I clean the counter he already cleaned.
Then I wipe down the table Isabella already smeared with syrup, and then, because there's nothing left to wipe, I stand at the sink with my hands in dishwater that's gone cold, staring out at his patrolling men in their dark coats, and wondering how I'm making such a mess of my life over and over.
He finishes his call. I hear him set the phone on the counter behind me.
"You reorganized the mugs," he observes.
"So what?"
"So the mantis one used to be in the back. Now, it's in the front."
"I moved it. It's my kitchen."
"It is." He pauses. "You put it where you'd have to reach past it to get any other one. On purpose, I think. So you'd see it every time." He's choosing his words very carefully. "It's a strange thing to keep front and center. A mug your husband's mistress drank out of."
I turn around so fast the dishwater sloshes.
"I didn't ask for your opinion."
"No opinions here," he says, raising his hands. "Merely an observation."
"I didn't ask for that, either."
He tucks those hands behind his back. "Then I'll keep them to myself. No opinions, no observations, no tricks or treats.”
"Bullshit," I say flatly. "You're always doing a trick.
" My voice is climbing, but I can't bring myself to stop it.
"You noticed I couldn't sleep, so you let me stand out there in the hall like an idiot.
You noticed I take my coffee like a lunatic, so there it is, every morning, perfect, so I can't even be mad at the coffee.
You put the right pancake in front of me.
You picked the right mug, or the wrong mug, or whatever mug I secretly wanted so I'd have to reach past my own grief every single morning, and you did it without asking, and you're standing there being nice about it, and I just want it to stop. "
"Would you rather I be cruel about it?"
A fierce "Yes!" bursts out of me. "God, yes! Fight back! Just—fight back, goddammit!" I throw the dishrag down. It lands in the sink with a wet slap. "Stop being so goddamn reasonable. Stop agreeing with everything I say. Stop looking at me like—like—"
"Like what?"
"Like you're waiting for me to figure out what to do with all these stupid feelings!"
He nods, as if I've just given him the exact answer he was waiting for. "Put them on me, Calista."
"That's what I'm trying to do and you won't take the bait!"
"Wrong. I'm taking all of it." He hasn't moved. He stands in front of me, tall and beautiful, waiting. "Every last word. I'm standing right here. Say all of it. I'm not going anywhere."
"Stop gaslighting me with this fucking patience!"
Gaslighting. It's an ugly word. And the second it's out of my mouth, I know it's not fair, because whatever Ronan is doing, this isn't that.
This is the opposite of that. He's told me the truth about every ugly thing when he could have lied, laid it all out on my kitchen table one receipt at a time, and here I am being an ungrateful bitch.
Ronan nods again, eyes glowing. "It's not gaslighting to let you feel the things you need to feel, in the order and time in which you need to feel them."
I stare at him through eyes that are suddenly teary.
"I keep waiting for you to be him," I whisper.
"I keep waiting for you to tell me I'm crazy.
To tell me I'm too much. To make me feel like I'm the problem.
Todd did that for ten years, and I keep bracing for it, and it never comes, and I don't know what to do with that. "
He takes one slow step toward me. Just one. "You're not too much. You never were. You're exactly the right amount of everything, and any man who told you otherwise was a coward and a fool."
My eyes sting. I look down at the cold dishwater on the floor.
"I don't know how to do this," I whisper. "I don't know how to want something and not wait for it to be taken."
"Then we'll figure it out," he says. "Slowly. In whatever order you need."
That, I learn, is the tipping point. It's too much and too soon, so I pull away and go sit at the kitchen table. Ronan lets me go, but he doesn't retreat too far. I feel his presence in the den. In theory, he's reading his papers again, but I know better than that.
I don't want to cry. It feels useless and misplaced. But the tears are knocking on the door anyway, so I sit at the kitchen table with my face in my hands and just try to keep a lid on things. I've almost got it handled, too, when suddenly—
"Mommy?"
I whip around. Isabella is in the kitchen doorway. I don't know how long she's been there. She's got Doctor Fuzz's shoebox clutched to her chest, and the chrysalis inside has gone dark and papery, close to whatever phase comes next.
"Hey, Bells." I wipe my face fast, though I don't think I was leaking quite yet. "What's up?"
She looks at me. Then she looks at Ronan, who's visible in the next room over. Then back at me. "Why aren't you and Mr. Ronan talking to each other?"
The kitchen goes quiet in a whole new way.
The easiest thing to do would be to distract her. But I promised myself, the morning after a man died on my stairs, that I would not pass my trauma down to my daughter wrapped up as a bedtime story. I told her the truth about the loud noise. I have to tell her the truth about this.
I crouch down so I'm at her level. Ronan doesn't move from the couch in the den, but I feel him watching.
"We are talking," I say. "Just—not our best talking. Grown-ups do that sometimes. We get our feelings all tangled up and we have a hard time saying them, so we go quiet instead. It's not a good way to do it. But it happens."
Isabella considers this. "Are you having a fight?"
"Sort of. A quiet one."
"Hayden says when you have a fight, you're supposed to make up. He says you always make him say sorry to me even when it's my fault." She frowns. "It's usually his fault, though."
"It usually is," I agree with a wobbly laugh. "The thing is, darling, some tangles take longer than a sorry to untangle. Mr. Ronan and I—" I stop. I don't have the second half of that sentence quite yet.
Isabella waits. She's a patient interrogator. She learned it from him, probably.
"We're figuring it out," I finish. Weakly. Even Isabella can hear how weak it is.
She looks past me, at Ronan. "Did you do something bad?"
Without looking, I brace for him to give her a soft version, a grown-up dodge, a no no, sweetheart, the way you'd protect a kid from the truth. Instead, he joins us and crouches down, too, slow, so all three of us are down at Isabella-level with a caterpillar between us.
"Yes," he says. "I did some things I shouldn't have. I wasn't honest with her about some very important things, and it hurt her, and it's made it hard for her to trust me."
Isabella's mouth pulls down. "That's really bad."
"It is. It's very bad."
"Did you say sorry?"
"I did. But sometimes, sorry isn't enough.
Sometimes when you break something, you can say sorry a hundred times, and the person you hurt still has to decide, all on their own, whether they want to keep the broken thing or not.
" He glances at me, one flick, then back to her.
"And it's not fair for me to rush her. It's her decision. It has to be. Do you understand?"
Isabella nods slowly, though I don't think she does, not fully, and I don't think she has to. She just knows something's wrong and she wants to fix it, because she's six and she thinks the world is fixable, and I would give anything to leave her in that particular state of mind for a little longer.
"Doctor Fuzz says," she announces, holding the box up between us, "that when things get all wrapped up and dark and squished, that's when they turn into something better. So maybe you're just squished right now."
I laugh. "Maybe we are."
"You should hug it out," she declares, because that's what I taught her, hug it out and say sorry and it's over. She stands there expectantly, looking between the two grown-ups she loves, waiting for us to follow the rules.
Ronan looks at me, but he waits. He'll stand there being decent until I'm the one who breaks, same as last night, same as always, and the unsaid thing is still stuck behind both our teeth.
If I were braver, I'd do it, but I can't do this in front of her.
I can't be squished in front of her. She deserves a mother who's already turned into something better.
"How about this," I say, standing up, brisk, mom-voice engaged. "Doctor Fuzz needs a nice quiet spot to finish getting un-squished. Why don't you take him up to your room, on the windowsill, so he gets good light?"
"But you didn't hug it out."
"We will," I say. "We'll do it the grown-up way. I promise."
She's not satisfied. But she takes the box, gives Ronan one last measuring look, and then gives me one that's worse, because she got it from me, that look, that skepticism, the worst thing I ever passed down.
Then she pads out.
Ronan straightens. We're alone with the cold dishwater dripping in the sink.
"You didn't have to tell her all that," I say.
"Yes, I did." He picks up the phone off the counter. "She asked me a direct question. She's your daughter. She'd have known if I lied. They always do." A pause. "You would have, too."
And there it is again, the patience, the awful, gentle rightness of him, with neither of us reaching across the gap between us.