Chapter 14
fourteen
LYDIA
The house takes a long time to go quiet.
I finished setting up the great room anyway.
I did all of it, glass by glass, because I said I would and because I could not think of one other thing to do with my hands.
Then I stood at the bottom of the stairs with the lights off behind me and looked up at our door, and I didn’t want to go through it.
I went through it anyway.
He’d left the lamp on my side on. He has done that since the first weekend I ever stayed at his place, the night I got up in the dark and walked straight into a doorframe. He has never once mentioned it.
“Hey.” He was half in the pillow, mumbling. “Did you finish downstairs?”
“I finished setting up, yes.”
“Come here.”
So I got in, made the decision to put my hand on him, right where he wanted, and I did not want to be talked to.
He came all the way awake under me with a groan. “Lyd, are you?—”
I put my mouth on my husband’s mouth so that he would stop saying my name, and he took it for what it looked like, because why on earth wouldn’t he? Of course he did.
He tried to slow it all down as always, with his hand in my hair, pulling back to look at me. I reached over and turned the lamp off. He laughed low in his chest and took that for a game. It was more of a choice than a game to me.
Then I turned over.
He was good to me, with his hand flat and pressing on my stomach and his mouth on the back of my shoulder, saying the things I have loved hearing for four years, low, into my hair, meaning every word. He coaxed my thighs apart, and I felt him against me, ready.
I wanted to be there, I wanted to be in the moment with him and I let all of it happen. But I gave him nothing back. He didn’t notice. He would’ve stopped if he had.
My body did what my body does, and despite the feeling in my brain, my body still managed to come apart under his touch. It has never once been on my side about him. Maybe that was for the best.
Afterward he pulled me into him and put his face in my hair and was asleep almost at once.
I lay there under his arm and I did not put the pillow under my hips.
That was another choice. I lay in the dark, in the room I essentially built, with my husband’s arm across my waist, and I made a decision about my own body without telling him. I have never done anything like that in my life.
Part of me was furious with myself for letting it all get to me. The other, larger but quieter part of myself wanted me to say it out loud.
Then I said it to the ceiling.
“Do you text her on her birthday?”
He didn’t move for a second. Then, thick with sleep, “What?”
“Shayna. Do you text her on her birthday?”
“Yeah?”
Not defensive. Not caught out. He said it the way you’d answer a question about the weather.
“Every year?”
“I don’t… yeah. I guess.” He shifted, got his arm more comfortable around me. “It’s her birthday. It’s like two or three words. Don’t you text Gran on her birthday?”
“Shayna is not your grandmother,” I mumbled. “And lunch? In Denver? What about that?”
“Once in a while.” And then, and I could hear him coming up out of the sleep and into it, “Baby, I’m telling you that it’s nothing. Her father is my business partner. I’ve known her since we were kids.”
And then his hand cupped my shoulder lightly.
“Do you want me to stop?”
The dark around us spread until I couldn’t see anything but the soft moonlight under the curtains.
I understood, all at once, that he had never in four years thought about it hard enough to decide on his own whether he ought to be doing it.
He was handing it to me. He was making it mine.
If it stopped, it would be because Zach Wright’s wife had a problem, and every person in that house would know it, and it would go in the drawer with all the rest of me.
Filed away as another thing no one saw coming but politely averted their gaze from to keep appearances.
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“No. I’m not asking you to stop.”
“Are you sure?—”
“It’s barely two or three words. Go to sleep.”
And he did.
I packed while he was out at the second building with Dan.
It took no time, because I fold as I go. My mother put a whole apartment into a car in an afternoon once, and I have never been the kind of woman who has to sit on a suitcase to get it shut.
I stripped our bed, because that’s what you do. I put the towels in the hamper. I straightened the room I made out of a barn ceiling and a snowstorm and a lot of driving, so that other people could be happy in it.
There was a hair tie of mine on the nightstand and one of his shirts over the back of the chair. I left both of them exactly where they were. It felt like the only true thing I did all morning.
Then I stood in the doorway and let myself look at it, and then I went down.
Magda was at the long table with her list.
“There she is. Sit down, I want you on the guest wing.”
“I have to go down to Denver, Magda.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
She put the pen down and looked at me over the top of her glasses in the way she has, and for a second I thought, I honestly thought, that she was going to ask me something.
“You’ve done far too much this week,” she said. “Take the good car.”
And she reached up and put her hand on my cheek, the same way she did the day we arrived, and said, “You’re one of mine now, sweetheart. Whatever anybody says.”
I told her thank you. She has never once been anything but lovely to me, and she has no idea what she is, so I meant it when I said it.
Simon was in the kitchen with a coffee and somebody’s dog.
“You look like you’re going somewhere.”
“I am. Going to Denver for a couple of days.”
“Wait, what?”
“Mm,” I said, swinging my purse back over my shoulder. The keys jingled from the keychain clip hanging off one of the straps.
To my best friend’s credit, he at least had the instinct to frown, but he ended whatever thought was going through his mind when he said, “Okay,” and reached past me for the milk, and asked whether I thought Shayna would hate the tile in the Telluride bathrooms.
I said I thought she’d hate it.
He laughed. He is my favorite person alive, and he laughed because he thought it was a joke. I picked up my bag and went out to the trucks.
Zach was up by the second building with his coat sleeves pushed back, doing something with a tape measure and Dan’s shoulder. He came down when he saw the bag.
“What’s this?”
“I’m going to drive home.”
“Home as in… home-home?”
“Our house.”
He looked at the bag. He looked at me. I could see in his face that he was sizing it all up in his head, determining whether he should be as concerned as he looked.
“Okay,” he said, careful now. “Is this the announcement? Because I told you in the hall, that was Dan’s doing, all of it.”
“It isn’t the announcement.”
“Then what is it?”
And I said, “Last night you asked me if I wanted you to stop.”
He had nothing. He stood there in the cold with a tape in his hand and nothing at all on his face. Dan shouted something down the slope about the grade, and my husband didn’t turn around. Which was about four years too late to be worth anything to either of us.
“You actually asked me that. I brought it up, I know you know how I feel about it. And you put it on me anyway.”
“Lydia.”
“Come down when you’re finished up here,” I said. “Or don’t. I’d like the house to myself for a while either way.”
Then I got in the car, thinking about how Zach’s usually singing in the car.
I got down that mountain with the radio off and both hands on the wheel. Past the cattle gates. Around the last bend, where the whole valley opens up underneath you, where I have put my hand flat on the glass like a child every single time I have ever come down it.
Nobody sang. Nobody reached over without looking and put a hand on my knee.
I made it as far as the interstate before I cried.