Chapter 16
sixteen
LYDIA
I opened the bedroom door and my husband was asleep on the floor in the hall with his coat still on.
I stood and looked at him for a while. He’d put his phone face down on the boards beside him. There was a crease down one side of his face from the baseboard.
I stepped over him and went down and made coffee.
He came into the kitchen with his hair flat on one side and his eyes wrecked, and he didn’t come near me, which was the first correct thing he did.
“I have something to say, so if you’d please listen…” he began.
He put a folder on the island.
I looked at it but I didn’t touch it.
“Head of interiors,” he said. “Sourcing and interiors, across all of it. Title, contract, a salary, a budget you don’t have to ask anybody for. Romina’s got it ready. You can start today, you can start whenever. It’s yours.”
“No.”
“It should have been done two years ago. I know that. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I didn’t?—”
“Zach, listen to me.” I put my cup down. “Do you think I’m upset about a job?”
He stopped.
And I watched my husband’s whole face come apart, because he had driven down a mountain in the dark with a plan, and it had taken me about four seconds to stamp my disapproval.
“I’ll call Dan,” he said. “Today. I’ll tell him I’ve changed my mind about her.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Baby, please I?—”
“You are not taking a job off a woman so that I’ll feel better.
I would have to live with that.” I picked my cup back up because my hands wanted something to do.
“And it wouldn’t fix anything, because you’d be doing it for the same reason you gave it to her in the first place.
Because it was easier than talking to me. ”
He came around the island. He put both hands flat on the counter, took them off again, picked the folder up and set it back down further away from himself.
“Then tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know.” And I didn’t.
“Lydia, please.”
“You told me you ended it.”
“I did end it.”
“Really? When?”
He opened his mouth.
I watched him not find anything deep down that would constitute as the truth.
“That’s what I thought,” I said, and went to put the coffee pot in the sink so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at him.
Magda drove down after lunch with the back of the car full.
She called from the road to say she was already past the reservoir, which is how that woman asks permission.
The office had been cleared out for the handover, and everything of Zach’s had been sitting in the bottom of it since he was at school, and none of it could stay in a building that belongs to a company now.
So she put it all in the car and drove it down to the man it belongs to.
“Where do you want it, sweetheart? It’s all his junk. School things. He can throw every bit of it out and I promise you I won’t hear about it.”
We carried it in between us and she wouldn’t let me take the heavy end.
She is not a young woman and she took the end with the deed box in it.
Then she sat at my table with a coffee and told me about the guest wing. About a woman at the bakery and how lovely she was.
“You look tired,” she said, sitting back in the chair she’d slid into.
“I am tired.”
“Well. It was a great deal of house and a great many people.” She patted my hand. “And you did every bit of it, and I said so to Dan.”
“Thank you, Magda.”
“You’ll want your rest before the design meetings start.
Shayna will run you off your feet, that girl works like a horse.
” She said it fondly. She meant it as a kindness.
“It’s going to be lovely, the two of you together.
She was always the one with the eye, that girl.
” She was comfortable, going on about Shayna.
“Zachary’s grandfather used to say she’d run this place one day, you know. ”
I said, “Mmhm.”
I got up and put the pot back on so that my body would have something to do.
And she squeezed my hand and asked whether I’d ever thought about doing something with the hall.
I went through the boxes that evening because I could not sit still.
There was a school tie. There was a watch with a dead battery. There were photographs of a boy on a horse, of a boy with a terrible haircut, of a boy holding up a fish and looking desperate about it. I sat on my own floor and loved him so much I couldn’t breathe right.
There was a folder of paperwork out of the office. Insurance things. A warranty for a water heater that is no longer in that building. A card from somebody’s funeral.
And an envelope.
Cream, heavy, the good sort. Addressed to him at the lodge in handwriting that slopes hard to the right. Opened, not torn. Somebody had gone at it neatly with something blunt.
I sat with it on my knees a long time before I took it out.
Zach,
I heard. My mother saw it in the paper and called me before I was out of bed to tell me about it, which was kind of her.
I’m not going to do this more than once, so I’m going to do it plainly. I need you to say it. Tell me it’s her and not me. Not to my father, not to your grandmother, not by getting in a car. To me. In words, out loud, so that I have it.
Because you have never once said it, and I have spent all this time telling myself that means something, and if I’m wrong then I would rather know now than find it out slowly over the next twenty years.
If you don’t answer this, I’ll take that as the answer.
S.
It was dated the spring after our wedding.
I don’t remember standing up. I was standing up. I had the letter in one hand, my other hand flat on the windowsill. My ears were doing something high and far away.
I read it again. I read it a third time, and by the third time I wasn’t reading the part about the paper, or about her mother. I was reading the last line.
He didn’t answer it.
And she was right. She read him exactly right, because between those two, silence had always meant he was coming back.
So she waited. She waited four years, in a house full of people who kept being sorry to her about the whole thing, and she waited because my husband could not make himself put six words in an envelope. And every year on her birthday, he sent her a message that said he was still there.
And every time I said her name in this house for four years, and he told me kindly that I was making a great deal out of nothing, he knew that envelope was in a drawer at the lodge.
I have apologized to my husband for being jealous. More than once. I have done it in the dark, quietly, feeling small about myself, and he has been lovely to me about it every single time.
I put it back in the folder. I put the folder back in the box. I put the box under the window where the light comes in, because that is apparently what I do when the floor goes out from under me. I put things where they look right.
Then I went downstairs.
He was at the stove doing something to an onion with far too much confidence.
“I’m making dinner,” he said. “Don’t look at it.”
“Zach.”
“It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be edible.”
“I found the letter. From Shayna.”
He turned around with the spoon still in his hand, his lips parted.
“The letter?”
“Stop repeating me like it’s going to change the answer. The letter she wrote you? The one where she asked you to tell her it was over so she could move on and you didn’t? You just left it unanswered.”
My husband’s gaze dropped to the floor, and I knew.
He did remember. He knew it all this time.