16. Anders
Anders
Diane opens the door. She looks at me the way she's looks at something her cat dragged onto the porch. Then she sighs, realizes I’m still just her son in law, and she lets me in.
Margot's on the couch with Nora. She doesn't get up. She just tips her chin at the armchair, and I sit, and she hands her across.
I hold my daughter for an hour on Diane's couch and I don't say anything that isn't to Nora.
I don't ask Margot how she's sleeping. I don't ask if she got the money I moved back into her account, all of it, the four thousand and the fourteen hundred and the two hundred and the rest, with a note on the transfer that just said hers.
I don't tell her that Vanessa confirmed Becca received the no-contact notice and signed receipt of the registered mail.
Now it was official, she had to leave our family alone.
Those were consequences I owed, not favors Margot has to praise.
I hold Nora tighter, I kiss her soft cheek and whisper how much I love her. I count her fingers. I put my nose in her hair.
At 4:00 I stand up and hand her back, it almost hurts.
"Same time next week?" I say.
"Tuesday. Two."
"Tuesday."
I go.
It gets to be a shape. Tuesday and Thursday. Then Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning. Then a text on a Sunday night at 11:40:
She won't settle. Been crying since nine. I don't know what to do.
I'm in the truck before I've finished reading it.
I'm on the porch in eleven minutes. I know because I looked at the clock when I hit send on coming and again when I knocked.
I don't go in. I stand outside the door.
Margot opens it with Nora screaming on her shoulder and her own face wrecked, and she looks at me standing there on the mat, and she says, "Well, come in. "
I take the baby. I walk her. I don't try anything Margot hasn't tried, I just walk, because sometimes it's not the walking, it's whose arms. Forty minutes of laps around Diane's living room with my mouth against my daughter's ear saying nothing in particular.
Somewhere in the fourth lap she goes limp against my shoulder and I keep walking for ten more minutes because I don't trust it.
Margot's asleep on the couch when I look up.
I put Nora in the bassinet. I put the throw over Margot. I don't touch her. I stand at the door for a second looking at both of them, and then I let myself out and lock it behind me with the key Diane gave me last week without comment.
I never use Nora on her. Not once, not by accident, not in a look. I don't say she smiled at me today. I don't say she needs her father. I don't do a single thing with our daughter that's pointed at her mother. If Margot wants to know, she can ask. She doesn't ask. That's fine.
The bracelet takes six weeks.
Becca didn’t admit where it went, and I don't push her, because I said I wouldn't contact her and I meant it, and she’s legally not allowed to contact us. So I do it the long way.
There are nine pawn shops in the county.
I know that now. I hit four of them the first Saturday, with a photograph of Margot's wrist I found on my phone from the wedding, her hand on my chest with the chain catching the light.
Nobody's seen it. Two of them tell me to check the online listings and I do, every night, on the laptop in the kitchen where the highchair used to be.
Week three, Dev says, "What are you looking for?"
I tell him. He looks at me for a while. Then he says his cousin Aaron runs a shop on the east side of the city, an hour out, and Aaron's the kind of guy who remembers a face.
Aaron remembers a face. Thin blond woman, gray cardigan, baby on her hip, second week of October. She wanted cash and she didn't argue about the number. Gold chain, flat link, some engraving on it that he didn't read.
"Sold it," he says.
I stand at his counter.
"Guy who buys estate stuff. Comes through every couple months. I've got his card somewhere."
It takes another two weeks. The guy's in a different state. I drive there. I don't tell anyone. I take a Friday off, which I haven't done since the wedding, and I drive four hours to a strip mall shop with a bell over the door and a man with a toupe, and I show him the photograph.
He has it.
It's in a tray with forty other chains. He picks it out with tweezers and lays it on a square of black velvet, and I lean over, my hands shaking. It's a little scratched near the clasp. The engraving's clean.
"What do you want for it?"
He tells me. It's more than she paid for it and less than I'd have given.
I don’t haggle, I give him the money quickly. He looks at me like he's seen the type before and puts it in a little cloth bag, and I put the bag in my shirt pocket over my heart like an idiot and drive four hours home with one hand on it.
I bring it Tuesday.
I don't make a speech. I've thought about the speech and there's no speech that isn't about me. I just come up on the porch at two with the little bag in my hand instead of empty, and when she opens the door I hold it out.
She looks at it. She looks at me.
"What is it."
"Open it."
She does. Standing in the doorway with Nora on her hip. She tips the bag and the chain runs out into her palm, and she goes very still.
She turns the link over with her thumb.
She reads the date.
I watch her read it. I watch her read it again.
"Where was it?” she asks.
"Pawn shop. Then another guy. Took a while."
"How much did this cost you?"
"Doesn't matter."
"Anders."
"It mattered to you." I keep my voice level.
"That's what I should have understood the first time.
Not whether the clasp was bad. Not whether it'd turn up.
It was on your arm and it was gone and you told me who took it, and I should have believed you because it mattered to you.
That's what I got wrong. Not the bracelet. That."
She closes her hand around it.
I see it. I've known her face for two years and I see it. Something in the set of her, the wall she's had up since the coffee shop, moves. Not much. A millimeter. A hairline. The kind of thing you'd only catch if you'd been looking for it every day for two months.
I don't step toward it.
Every part of me wants to. I stand on the mat with my hands at my sides and I don't move one inch, because if I move she'll feel it and it'll close, and because it's hers. Whatever just happened in her face is hers. I don't get to reach for it.
"Nora's asleep," she says after a moment. "You can sit with her."
"Thank you."
She steps back. I come in. She's still got her hand closed.
I sit with my daughter for an hour and don't look at her mother once, and when I leave, the bracelet's on Margot's wrist.
She doesn't say anything about it.
Neither do I.