17. Emily #2
“You think you’re so much better than everyone now.
” His voice is climbing, the color rising in his face.
“Better than me. Better than Carmen. You walk around with your nose in the air like you’re the only person who ever got hurt.
You’re a scared little girl who can’t admit when she’s wrong, you never could. ”
“Funny,” I say. “You spent two years telling me I was wrong about everything. How I loaded the dishwasher, who I talked to, what I wore. And now I finally agree with you about one thing, that marrying you was the biggest mistake I ever made, and suddenly I’m the one who can’t admit it.
” I tilt my head. “You can’t have it both ways, Henry. ”
“You ungrateful...” He catches himself, jaw working.
“I’m wrong?” I almost laugh. “You had a baby with another woman and I’m the one who’s wrong?”
“I never wanted that baby!”
The room goes dead silent.
His lawyer’s hand freezes mid-air. Henry’s chest is heaving, his face gone blotchy red, and I can see him realize he’s said too much and decide, in real time, that he doesn’t care, that he’s going to say the rest of it too.
“I never wanted kids. Not hers, not anybody’s.
” His lawyer puts a hand on his arm. Henry shakes it off.
“She got pregnant and trapped me, and now I’m stuck, I’m stuck with both of them, a screaming kid and a woman who can’t even be bothered to.
..” He stops, breathing hard, and then he says the last one quiet, and the quiet is so much worse than the shouting.
“I never wanted children with you either. I just didn’t know how to tell you. So I kept saying let’s wait. For two years. Because looking at your face every time you brought it up was easier than saying it.”
There it is. The last cruel thing, the one he’s been holding behind his teeth this whole time, finally out in the open between us.
And the strange thing is, it doesn’t land like he wants it to.
I keep waiting for it to hurt, for the old familiar gut-punch, and instead what rises up is almost the opposite.
Clarity. Cold and clean. Because for two years I told myself a story about why we never had a family, a kind and patient story, and he just tore it up and handed me the real one, and the real one is so much smaller and uglier than I let myself believe, and it has nothing to do with me at all.
I don’t cry. I won’t give him that. I sit very still and I look at him until he can’t hold it, until his eyes drop to the table.
“Sign the papers, Henry.” My voice doesn’t shake. “Sign them today, or I will drag this out for a year, and I will make very sure that everyone we’ve ever known finds out exactly what kind of man you are. The secret baby. The mistress. The whole thing. Your choice.”
His lawyer is whispering at his ear, fast and low, and whatever he’s saying, it works.
Henry snatches the pen. And here’s the part I plan to enjoy for the rest of my life: those papers have alimony in them.
Monthly, for years, every cent my lawyer asked for.
The man who handed me thirty dollars for a three-day trip and called it generous gets to write me a check every single month now, and the only thing he can do about it is sign.
He doesn’t look at me again. He just walks out, his lawyer hurrying after him with the folder, and the door swings shut, and it’s over.
Two years, closed out in the time it takes to sign a name.
***
Richard says nothing as we leave. He just walks close beside me, his hand light at the small of my back, through the lobby and out to the car, and he doesn’t ask if I’m okay, which I’m grateful for, because I don’t know the answer yet.
I make it into the passenger seat before I start shaking.
“Drive,” I say. “Please. Just drive somewhere. Anywhere. I don’t care.”
He drives. He doesn’t fill the silence. He takes us out of the city, up into the hills, and he doesn’t say a word until he pulls into a lookout where the road runs out and the whole city spreads below us, the lights just starting to come on as the sky goes purple.
He cuts the engine. Turns to me.
“He said he never wanted children with me,” I say, staring out at the lights.
“And the thing is, when we were married, when he kept saying let’s wait, not yet, let’s wait, I believed it was for both of us.
I thought he wanted to wait until we were ready.
Together.” My throat goes tight. “I didn’t know I was waiting for a man who didn’t want any of it.
Who didn’t want me. I built two years around a maybe that was never coming. ”
“Emily.”
“I know it’s stupid to be hurt by it. I know he’s garbage. I know I should just be glad to be rid of him...”
“It’s not stupid.” He reaches over and turns me gently by the shoulders to face him.
“Hey. Look at me. He spent years making you feel like you weren’t enough.
Like every single thing that went wrong was a flaw in you.
You don’t shake that off in six weeks just because you found out he was the broken one all along. That’s not how it works.”
“I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”
“I know. It takes time.” His thumbs move slow over my shoulders. “You’ve got it. However long it takes. There’s no clock on this, Em. He doesn’t get to set one more deadline in your life.”
That undoes me a little, the simple fact of it, that there’s no clock, that nobody’s waiting for me to be over it on schedule.
For two years everything I felt was on Henry’s timeline, allowed or disallowed, too much or not enough.
And here’s this man telling me I can take as long as I need, and meaning it, and not asking for anything back.
And I look at him, at this face I’ve been halfway in love with since I was a teenager, and the words rise right up into my throat. I love you. They’re just there, fully formed, so close I have to press my lips together to keep them in.
Because I can’t. Not today. I got divorced an hour ago.
I’m sitting in a car shaking, raw down to the bone, and if I say it now I won’t ever fully trust it, and neither will he.
Is it real, or is it just that he’s the first warm thing after two cold years?
Is it him, or is it relief? I can’t tell yet, sitting here this wrecked, and I refuse to hand him something this big when I can’t swear it’s clean.
He deserves better than a thing I blurted on the worst-best day of my life. I deserve to be sure.
So I don’t say it. I swallow it back down, and it costs me, and I think he sees that it costs me.
“What?” he says quietly, watching my face. “You’ve got a whole speech happening in there.”
“Nothing.” I shake my head, and manage something close to a smile.
“Just... thank you. For being here. For not asking if I’m okay.
For the no-clock thing.” My voice wobbles.
“I’m a mess right now. Everything I’m feeling is all tangled up with today, and I can’t trust a word of it until the dust settles.
So I’m just going to sit here and not try to figure any of it out. Is that okay?”
For a second he just looks at me, and I brace for him to be hurt, or to push, because every man I’ve known would push.
He doesn’t.
“Yeah,” he says simply. “That’s okay. That’s more than okay.” He tucks a loose curl behind my ear. “I told you, Em. There’s no clock. You say things when you mean them and not one second before, and I’ll be right here when you do. I’m not going anywhere.”
And the maddening thing, the thing that nearly undoes my whole resolve, is that he means it, and I can tell he means it, and not pushing is the exact thing that makes me want to say it most.
And then I cry, finally, here where it’s safe, in the dark with the city laid out below us and his arms coming around me and nobody watching.
Just a minute of it, all the leftover poison from that room draining out of me at once.
He doesn’t say anything. He just holds on and lets me, one hand moving slow on my back, until it passes.
“Well,” I say, when I can talk again, wiping my face with my wrist. “That’s not how I pictured today going.”
“No?” He thumbs a tear off my cheek, gentle. “I’d say it went all right, considering. You got your life back. That’s not nothing.”
“I got divorced and cried in a scenic overlook.”
“You got divorced and cried in a scenic overlook with a great view and excellent company.” He shrugs. “Reframe it. It’s a whole skill.”
“I really do hate you.”
“No you don’t.” He says it easy, certain, smiling, and doesn’t make me confirm or deny it, which is its own kind of mercy.
I laugh, wet and surprised, and lean my forehead against his, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, the thing sitting in my chest isn’t dread or grief or bracing for the next blow.
It’s just this. Him. The lights coming on below us, one by one, the whole city waking up into the evening, and nowhere either of us has to be.
We sit there a long while before he starts the car.
He doesn’t rush it. He just keeps one hand wrapped around mine on the console and lets me watch the city, and when he finally turns the key he lifts our joined hands and kisses my knuckles without a word.
The signed papers are folded in my bag. The man who made me feel small for two years is somewhere behind us, getting smaller.
And there’s a thing I almost said tonight, three small words I’m holding onto until I’m sure enough to mean them all the way down, and for once I’m not scared of them.
I’m just waiting for the right day. The whole drive home I can’t stop the stupid smile pulling at my mouth.