Chapter 7
The box is taller than I am and Danny gets it up the last four stairs mostly by himself, walking it corner to corner while I hold the door with my hip. We get the box down the hall. Then we’re sitting on the floor of the second bedroom with countless pieces of Danish hardware between us.
“There’s a diagram,” I say.
“There’s always a diagram.”
“You’re not going to look at it?”
“Real men don’t need diagrams,” he says with a grin.
“Oh, really?”
“Yep. Knowing how to build things just comes naturally.”
“Oh, so I should toss this then?” I ask and take the paper over to the trashcan.
“Now, now… Don’t be hasty. I might need to glance at it eventually. You know… If they messed up a piece or something and I have to figure out what they thought they were doing.”
“Sure,” I say with a smirk.
It takes most of the morning. He does the parts that need two hands.
I do the parts that need small ones. At some point I stop bracing for him to say something meaningful.
He asks me whether the wall color is staying.
He tells me a long, unnecessary story about a man he used to work for who kept a parrot in the shop.
He does not once mention my husband, my divorce, my body, or my future.
By noon there’s a crib in the room.
It’s white. It has a rail that lowers, and a mattress still in plastic. I stand and look at it. Something goes through me sideways.
“Hey,” Danny says.
“I’m fine.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I know.” I press the back of my wrist under my eye. “It’s just a thing in a room. I don’t know why it’s doing that.”
“It’s not just a thing in a room.” He’s gathering up the packaging, not looking at me, giving me the whole space to have my face in. “It’s the first thing that really makes it all real, isn’t it?”
Which is exactly right. He says it like it’s the most common-sense thing anyone has ever said. Then he takes the cardboard down to the dumpster.
The phone goes at four-twenty and it’s Diane, which is wrong twice over. Not Thursday. Not the hour she ever calls.
“Diane?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“No.”
“Sit down, sweetheart.”
I sit down on the floor because it’s nearer than the mattress.
She’s not crying. That’s the first thing I notice. Diane cries at commercials, at graduations, in vitamin aisles. Her voice right now is the flattest I have ever heard it.
“Mallory had some complications a few days ago, so they did an ultrasound at her OBGYN appointment,” she says.
“Standard one, really, to measure the baby and make sure everything was okay, but they got a shocker… The baby is measuring three weeks further along… You know what that means, right?” I don’t answer but my breathing goes very still.
“Her baby is not Mason’s… There is no way it belongs to him…
She would have still been in Colorado when that baby was made. ”
“Maybe they made a mistake,” I say. My mouth is dry. “Maybe the baby is just big.”
“They’re sure.” She exhales. “The doctor even moved her due date up. Mason said it didn’t work, that he’d counted it six ways.
He asked her. She told him first estimates are always wrong.
Then she got angry when he pushed back that it wouldn’t be off that much.
Then she got so angry defending herself that he stopped believing her.
Then she finally admitted there was a man before she came back here.
” Diane’s voice goes thin for the first time.
“That she wasn’t sure. That she has never been sure, not once, not for a single day of this.
She let my son buy a house in Oakmont while she wasn’t sure. ”
I close my eyes, and I can’t stop myself from wondering if that’s why she came back when she did. She didn’t want the baby’s real father involved so she needed to find a way to make Mason the baby’s father.
“She told him she picked him because he was the safer bet.” Diane makes a small, wrecked sound. “That’s the phrase she used. The safer bet. As though she were choosing between two men to hand a baby to.”
I don’t say anything.
“She’s gone,” Diane says. “She took the car he bought her, which I have opinions about, and she went to her sister’s.
The one she said was a nightmare. Apparently the nightmare will do when you don’t have anywhere else to go.
” There’s a long silence on the line before she finally says, “He wants to see you.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I can’t give him what he’ll ask me for.”
“I know. I told him no while he was here this morning. I told him absolutely not. He said he wasn’t going to. Then when I looked out, and his car was gone.”
He knocks shortly after the call with Diane ends.
I look at the door for a while before I open it. Long enough that he knocks again, twice, softer, and then says my name against the wood like he doesn’t have the strength to raise his voice through it.
I open it.
He looks like something left out in the weather. Unshaven, coat wrong, and his eyes have that scraped-out look of a man who has been crying for six hours in someone’s kitchen.
“It isn’t mine,” he says.
“I know. Your mother called.”
“It isn’t mine,” he says again more desperately, like I’m supposed to understand that this is where he’s supposed to be. Not with her, with me.
“Mason.”
He comes in past me. I don’t invite him. He goes three steps into the room and stops in the middle of the floor, in the exact spot where he sat down with his back to my wall not long ago. He stands there with his hands hanging.
“She was never sure,” he says. “Not one day. She let me tell my mother. She let me tell my father. She stood next to me in that kitchen and listened while I told my family this was proof that I hadn’t made the biggest mistake of my life.”
“I know.”
“I gave up everything. I gave up you. For a woman who was…”
And there it is, arriving on my floor. The thing I have been waiting weeks for. The scene I have played in my head on a mattress in the dark, where he finally, finally understands the size of what he did.
I wait to feel the weight of it slam into me.
But it doesn’t come.
There’s no heat in my chest, no cold satisfaction, not even the small mean sweetness I have privately braced for and half looked forward to.
There’s a man standing in the middle of my living room in a coat that cost more than my mattress.
He is in genuine agony. I feel about it roughly what I’d feel watching a stranger take a hard fall in a parking lot.
Sorry for him. Not moved.
“Natalie, you never…” He gets hold of himself. “You never betrayed me. Not once. Not one time in all those years. And I stood there and looked at you in that garage while you were carrying my?—”
“Stop.”
“I’m trying to say?—”
“I know what you’re trying to say.” I stay where I am, by the door, which I have not closed. “And you don’t get to say it here.”
He blinks at me.
“What?”
“You’re not doing this in my living room.” My voice is level, which by now is the only way it seems to come out around him. “Not because I’m cruel. Because it isn’t mine to hold.”
“Natalie, I have nobody.”
“You have your mother. You have your father, who will be difficult about it all and then won’t be.” I fold my arms under the shelf of my stomach. “You can find yourself a therapist if you don’t want to lean on them. What you don’t have is me. That’s not a punishment. It’s just true.”
“I’m not asking you to…”
“You are.” I say it gently. “You’re not lying about it, you just don’t hear yourself.
You drove here because I’m the person you bring things to.
That was the arrangement for a long time.
It was a good arrangement. But you chose to end that when you acted on the connection you two had while destroying the one we had. ”
He puts his hands over his face. Stands there in the middle of my floor breathing.
“I keep thinking about the socks,” he says, into his palms.
I don’t answer that.
“I keep thinking about you in the doorway holding that bag and me saying…” He drops his hands. “I would give anything. Anything. To go back to that day and not do what I did.”
“I believe you… Believing you and wanting you are not the same thing.” I open the door a little wider. “You need to go now.”
And he does something that surprises me. He nods. He wipes his face on his sleeve like a boy. He nods. He goes toward the door, and he stops when he’s level with me because he can’t help it.
“Are you all right?” he asks. “You. Not the baby. You.”
“I’m all right,” I say. And then, because it’s true, and because there’s no version of the next twenty years where we don’t have to speak to one another, I say, “I’m sorry about your baby. I mean that.”
His face breaks all over again.
“Thank you,” he says.
He goes down the stairs. I hear him stop somewhere around the landing, for maybe a minute, and then keep going.
I don’t cry when he leaves. I make eggs, because I’m suddenly, stupidly hungry, and I eat them standing at the counter with the light off.
Here’s the thing I keep turning over.
For weeks I have been carrying something that felt like a weapon.
I told myself it wasn’t. I told Josh it wasn’t, I told Diane it wasn’t, and I meant it every time.
But underneath, some part of me has been waiting for today.
For the moment the arrangement he chose fell apart in his hands, and he finally understood what he’d traded.
I got it. The whole thing. Delivered to my door in a good coat.
And it turns out the shape of the hole he left is not the shape of him being sorry. Him being sorry doesn’t fit in it. Nothing fits in it. It’s just a hole. It’s mine. I get to fill it with whatever I want for the rest of my life.
Which is, I think, the actual thing I’ve been trying to say to everybody since that day I walked in on the two of them, and I’ve only just now got the words in the right order.
I put the plate in the sink.
Then I go into the second bedroom and stand in the doorway, looking at the white crib against the wall in the last of the light.
“Just us,” I say.
She kicks. First time. Small and unmistakable, low down on the left, like a knuckle rapping twice on the inside of a door.
I put both hands on her, and I laugh out loud in an empty apartment.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I heard you.”
Later, much later, I take out my phone, and I text Danny a picture of the crib with the mattress finally out of its plastic and the new sheets on it.
He writes back in under a minute.
Looks good. You did the hard part.
I read it four times before I put the phone down, and I don’t examine why.