17. Tess
Tess
He puts the guitar down like it’s gone hot in his hands.
“I’m not going to defend it.”
“I’m not asking you to defend it. I’m asking how a person does both.”
“I don’t know.” He stands up. “That’s the real answer and I know how useless it is. I don’t know how I did both. I’ve been sitting in a therapist’s office since June trying to find out.”
Sadie has had enough of the two of us. She’s fussing and grinding a fist into her eye and it’s past seven and the whole evening has an edge on it.
“I’ll go.”
“Put her down first.”
He does the routine, and I stand in the hall outside the nursery listening to a man hum tunelessly to my daughter with my hand over my mouth again, which is apparently my entire personality now. He comes out and quietly shuts the door behind him.
I follow him to the living room, quiet as I contemplate what I’m feeling and then decide none of it matters. Life it what matters, and life is what is happening right in front of you at any given moment on any given day.
“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, moving to get his shoes.
And I kiss him. The truth is, he is already walking toward the door when I stop him. He has his keys out. He has done nothing, said nothing, made no move at all, and I take two steps and get a fistful of his shirt and pull him down. He makes a sound like he’s been hit in the stomach.
Then his hands are on me and my back is against the hallway wall, and one of my mother’s framed prints comes off its nail and hits the floor and neither of us so much as looks at it. He tears his mouth away.
“Tess.”
“Don’t.”
“I have to.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.” He’s breathing like he’s run up a flight. His hand is flat on the wall beside my head and he still hasn’t put it on me. “Because if we do this and tomorrow you decide it was the song, then I’ve taken something from you again.”
“Don’t tell me what I want.”
“I’m not. I’m asking.”
“You want me to say it out loud.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, but yeah.”
So I say it out loud, right up against his mouth, and his hand comes off the wall. We don’t make it to my room.
He gets my shirt off in the hallway and then just stops, holding it, looking at me, and I have to say his name twice before he moves.
His mouth goes to my collarbone and then lower and he goes down onto his knees on my hallway floor with his hands at the backs of my thighs, and my head goes back against the wall so hard I see something.
I get a hand into his hair. He looks up.
“Don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
He’s slower than he used to be, and it isn’t showmanship.
There used to be a route and a confidence about it, a man who knew where this was going and enjoyed the trip.
Now he stops constantly. When I go quiet, when my hand tightens, twice when I say something he can’t parse.
He pulls back far enough to see my face and stays there until I nod, and the second time I nearly hit him.
“You’re allowed.”
“I know.”
“Then stop asking.”
“I’m going to keep asking.”
Then he’s got me up off the floor and against the wall properly, my legs around him, and it takes both of us a second to get past the shaking.
“Look at me.”
“I am.”
“No. Stay.”
He stays.
He remembers everything, which is the insulting part.
The pressure I like, the pace that makes my legs lock, the place at the base of my spine where his hand ends up without either of us having discussed it.
Five months I’ve spent building an architecture of anger, brick by brick, in the dark, and my body does not care at all.
My body hears his hands and goes straight there like a dog hearing a car in the drive.
Somewhere in the middle of it I start talking.
I don’t plan it. It comes out of me between breaths, in pieces.
I tell him about the bathroom stall in Wimberley.
I tell him about the wall of the hospital and twenty thousand people, close, with my mouth against his ear.
I tell him what strangers wrote to me about what should be done to me, and I tell him what it was like to stand in my living room holding our daughter while he said the sentence.
“You made me sound like a crazy woman on television.”
“I know.”
“You made me looks like a liar in front of my mother.”
“I know.”
I hit his shoulder with the side of my fist, twice, hard, and he takes it and doesn’t stop and doesn’t tell me to calm down and doesn’t say shh.
That’s what finishes me. Not the tenderness.
That he lets me be that ugly and doesn’t try to make it prettier.
I come apart with my forehead against his and his name coming out of me like something torn, and he follows with his eyes open, watching me, which he has never once done.
We end up on the floor. Nobody plans that either. My mother’s print is face-down two feet away and his arm is under my head and the monitor is doing its low static from the other room, and I can hear my own heart in my ears. I sit up.
“This isn’t a reconciliation.”
Fast, before I lose my nerve, before either of us gets soft about it. He doesn’t say anything for a second.
“Okay.”
“I mean it. I’m not being cute. I’m not doing the thing where I say no and mean ask me again in an hour.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Because I know exactly what this looks like.” My hands have started shaking and I sit on them.
“It looks like the end of a story. Man grovels, woman takes him back, credits. And I need you to understand that my body forgiving you is not me forgiving you, and if you go home and let yourself believe you’re through the worst of it we’re going to end up somewhere terrible. ”
“Tess.”
“Say you understand it.”
“I understand it,” he says. “It hurts, and I understand it.”
I’m glad it’s dark. He doesn’t try to hide that it hurts, and if I’d had to look at his face while he said that I’d have taken it back.
He stays because it is the middle of the night and I am not sending him back to his truck, and I put him in my bed because the alternative is a couch conversation I don’t have the strength for.
I lie next to him not sleeping until it starts getting light.
Before dawn I wake up and he is gone. That’s the first thing I feel, and what I feel about it isn’t relief.
Then I hear it. The nursery door is open a few inches with a strip of gray on the hall floor, and he’s in the chair.
Fully dressed. Boots on. Jacket over the arm.
She’s on his shoulder in her sleep sack and he’s got his hand going in slow circles between her shoulder blades and he’s looking out the window at nothing.
He heard her on the monitor and got up and got dressed, all the way dressed, boots and everything, and came in here.
It didn’t occur to him to use any of it.
I stand in the hall in the dark a while.
Then my phone goes off in the bedroom before the sun is fully up, and the name on it is Janelle Price, who has never called me in her life.