14. Tess
Tess
By June his evening visits have become part of the shape of the house.
I was braced for a grand gesture. The helicopter, the surprise nursery, the thing I’d get to refuse in front of witnesses.
What I got was a man who shows up on time five days a week and learns which cabinet the bibs live in, and I had nothing prepared for that at all.
He misses two evenings. Both times he tells me a week ahead, both times it’s a legal thing in Los Angeles, and both times he sends a photograph of a hotel window when he would normally arrive, like a man punching a clock.
I don’t answer those. He keeps sending them.
The eight-month appointment is supposed to be nothing. Shots and a weight check.
He asks to come and I say yes, because she’s getting stuck three times and because I’m tired, and those are two separate reasons and I only admit to the first. The guy is at the corner of the lot and I don’t see him until he’s on us.
He’s shooting low, angling up, and I know exactly what that angle is for. He wants her face clear of the canopy.
Shane’s already turning. He’s got the carrier because he asked to carry it and I let him, and he swings his whole body between the lens and the seat and puts his back to the man.
“Come on, man. Shane. One clean one and I’m gone.”
“Get in the car,” Shane says to me.
“That’s a real offer, brother, you know how this works. One and I don’t have to chase you around town for a month.”
He lunges around the far side and raises the camera inches from the canopy. Shane pivots again, too fast this time, trying to keep his body between the lens and Sadie. The diaper-bag strap tears loose. Shane’s heel catches the curb.
He goes down hard on his side and the whole way down he does not let go of that seat.
He takes it on his shoulder and his face, and there’s a flat crack of the frame hitting at an angle, and Sadie starts screaming, and I’m on my knees next to it before I know I’ve moved.
She’s fine. She’s frightened and she is completely fine. The harness did what harnesses do.
Shane’s on his back a foot away with blood coming out of his eyebrow and the top of his cheek, and the guy is standing over both of us, still shooting, twelve frames a second of a man bleeding next to a screaming baby.
Shane doesn’t get up. He’s got a hundred pounds on that photographer and he stays down.
He puts one forearm up across his own face and says into his sleeve, “Tess. Take her. Go.”
Because if he stands up, that’s the picture. That’s the one that runs for a week. I get her out and get us both to the car, and by the time I have the door open the guy is gone, jogging away with his elbows out like a man leaving a store. Shane’s up on one knee.
“Get in.”
“I’ll get blood on your”
“Get in the car.”
He has a show in Dallas that night. I know because it’s on the whiteboard in my own kitchen now, in his handwriting, under DALLAS, because I made him write down where he’d be so I’d stop having to ask.
She won’t settle. Not at the house, not for me.
She screams until the hiccups start, which is new, and eventually he takes his phone into my backyard.
I catch only a few words through the window. He comes back in.
“That’s done.”
“What’s done?”
“Dallas.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Already did it.”
“That’s twelve thousand people.”
“Yeah.” He puts the phone face-down on the counter. “And I’m not going to be a guy who gets on a plane while she’s like this so I can tell you later that I would have stayed.”
I sit her in the bouncer and get the kit out of the bathroom, because his eyebrow keeps opening every time his face moves.
He sits on a kitchen chair. I stand between his knees because there’s no other way to reach.
It’s fine for the first minute. It’s a cut on a face and I’ve cleaned worse on myself.
Then I have to tip his chin up with two fingers, and he lets me, and his eyes come up.
Fourteen months, and my body has apparently been keeping a file the entire time.
His hand comes off his knee and lands on the side of my thigh.
Not high. Not doing anything. Just there, warm through the denim, the whole weight of it, the way it used to sit when I’d stand next to him at a party and he’d anchor me without looking up from a conversation. Neither of us moves.
I’m aware that neither of us is breathing normally and that his mouth is close enough to remind me distance has never survived between us. I put my hand flat on his chest. Then I push, gently, and step back, and set the gauze on the table.
“No.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t get to turn guilt into”
“I know.”
“Let me finish the sentence.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t get to turn guilt into chemistry.”
He takes his hand back and puts it on his knee where it started.
“Can I say one thing and then never say it again?”
“Say it.”
“The chemistry was never our problem.” He looks at me straight on. “We had that in a hallway in the rain and it didn’t save either of us. So if you’re sitting there worried I’m going to use it, I already know exactly what it’s worth on its own. It’s worth nothing. I was the problem.”
I turn around and put things back in the kit that don’t need to go back in the kit.
“Finish your own face.”
“Yes ma’am.”
He leaves after Sadie settles. He doesn’t look back at the house, which he usually does, and I stand at the window like an idiot noticing it.
Later I check the site the photographer files to, because I’m not strong enough not to.
They’ve run four. Shane on the asphalt with his arm across his face.
Shane on one knee. Shane getting into the passenger side of my car with blood on his jaw.
The fourth one is the carrier, canopy up, my hand on the handle.
You can see three of my knuckles and nothing else.
He didn’t get her. He stood over a bleeding man with the light in his favor and still did not get one frame of my daughter’s face, because Shane kept his body in the way.
I wake in the night because the room is wrong.
She isn’t making noise. That’s what wakes me.
Nothing on the monitor but breathing, and it’s too fast, and I’m across the hall before I’ve decided anything.
She’s burning. Her hair is stuck to her forehead and her cheeks have gone that dry terrible red, and when I pick her up she doesn’t grab me.
She flops. Her head goes back over my arm.
The thermometer says a hundred and four. Then it says it again.