21. Tess
Tess
He looks at me the way you look at something you’ve hallucinated on a long drive.
“How long have you been there?”
“All of it.”
“How did you even?”
“Janelle.”
“I’m going to fire her.”
“You already fired her. She quit, then she came back, and she doesn’t take your money anymore, which she says makes her a friend and not an employee. She was extremely clear that I should tell you that.”
He laughs. It comes out with a crack in it and he has to stop it with his hand. There are people everywhere. A woman with a clipboard hovering nearby who wants him for something, two crew guys doing an unconvincing job with a cable, and somebody’s phone is up, because somebody’s phone is always up.
“Is there anywhere.”
He takes me down a hallway and through a door into a room with a mirror and a rack of empty hangers and a bowl of oranges nobody’s touched, and shuts it. Dressing room. Of course it’s a dressing room.
“Say it. Whatever it is, say it, because I am not sure how much longer I can stand here.”
“That didn’t fix anything.”
“I know.”
“I want to be clear before anybody else gets to you, because every person in that building is about to tell you what it meant.” My voice isn’t cooperating.
“It doesn’t erase April. Nothing does. Someday somebody is going to bring it up at a dinner party in front of me and I’m going to need a face ready.
That’s mine now. You gave me that permanently. ”
“Yes.”
“And it wasn’t the guitar.”
He looks up.
“I’ve watched about four people tell me tonight was the proof.
It wasn’t. Tonight was the last one.” I have to stop and get my breath.
“It was June, when you went out to that garage and stood there and let them photograph your face so nobody would find out which hospital she was in, and then never mentioned it to me. It was the two nights in Los Angeles when you texted a picture of a window at the hour you should have been at my door and I never once wrote back. It was every single morning you came back when there was nobody there to notice whether you did.”
“Tess.”
“Let me finish, this is hard.”
He shuts up.
“When we were together, you loved me. I never doubted that part. That was never the problem.” I press the heel of my hand under my eye.
“The problem was you thought loving me meant you got to decide what happened to me. Where I stood. Who knew. What my life looked like. And you called it protection and I believed you, and I disappeared for a year and a half.”
“I know.”
“So I’ve spent five months waiting to catch you at it again. That’s what I’ve been doing in my kitchen with my arms crossed. Waiting for the angle, because there was an angle in every kind thing you ever did for me, and I was so sure I’d find it.”
“And?”
“And tonight a woman handed you a guitar in front of a hundred and fifty people and offered you your whole career back in exchange for something private, and you didn’t even look at it.
” My voice goes. “You didn’t glance, Shane.
And I stood in the dark and thought, oh.
There is no angle left for me to catch. He is simply done using me. ”
He puts his back against the door and slides down it and sits on the floor of a dressing room with his forearms on his knees.
“I wanted to look at it,” he says, to the floor. “I want you to know that. I wanted to look at it so badly my neck hurt.”
“That’s the only reason it counts.”
“I’m not asking you for anything.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here.”
He looks up.
“Come home.”
He doesn’t move.
“I’m not offering forever,” I say. “I want to be honest about the size of it, because you’ve turned down five good things this year and I’m not going to be the sixth one that’s smaller than it looked.
So here it is. Come home. Help me put her down.
She’s had two bad nights with the tooth and she’ll want the circles. And then come back tomorrow.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s what I’ve got. Tomorrow, and then the one after.”
He gets up off that floor a great deal faster than he sat down on it.
“Can I ask you one thing,” he says at the door, with his hand already on it.
“Yeah.”
“When did you decide?”
“Tonight.”
“Tess.”
“Fine.” I get my bag off the counter so I don’t have to look at him. “June. In the hall outside the nursery, when you were sitting in that chair with your boots on.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“I’ve spent three months finding reasons it didn’t count,” I say. “I got pretty good at it.”
We drive back separately because we drove there separately, and he follows me the whole way home like a man afraid of losing a taillight.
My mother meets us at the door with her coat already on.
She takes one look at the two of us and says absolutely nothing, which is the single greatest thing my mother has ever done for me. Sadie’s up. Of course she’s up.
She’s standing in the crib holding the rail, which she started doing three weeks ago and which still does something to me every time, and she’s damp and outraged and there’s a white line on her bottom gum where the tooth is coming through.
She sees him and both arms go up. Not for me.
Her mother is standing right there and she puts her arms up for him.
I hand her over.
He does the whole thing. The frozen washcloth, the circles, the tuneless hum, and he walks her up and down the dark hall past my mother’s print, which is back on its nail with a new hook.
Eventually she goes down. And then he does something he has never done in five months of doing this.
He goes back out to the truck and comes in with the Gibson, and sits on the floor of the nursery with his back against the wall, and plays the song.
Quiet. Barely anything. Just enough to move the air in the room.
I sit down next to him, close enough that our arms touch, and listen to a man play a confession he wrote on my couch in January to a sleeping baby who has no idea what any of it is.
When it’s over neither of us says anything for a while.
The monitor hisses on the dresser even though we’re both in the room with her, which strikes me as funny and I don’t laugh.
I take his hand off the neck of the guitar and hold it in both of mine and look at it, because I can’t look at him.
“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“What would you do if I told you I still love you?”