8. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
“Where were you, Jacob?”
She’s standing there with a cake box on the hall table and Daphne on the couch and a green dress that shows off her legs and her tits and everything I should have been looking at tonight instead of a surgical waiting room, and I knew from her face before she opened her mouth.
I knew it the second I saw her car in the drive and the lights on.
She’s standing in her own hallway in that dress and I’ve fucked this up so badly I don’t know if I can fix it.
The cake box is on the hall table with a blue ribbon on it that somebody tied by hand.
Her heels are still on. She hasn’t sat down since she got home.
I can tell by the way she’s standing, all her weight on one foot and her arms wrapped around herself, and I want to cross the room and put my hands on her and I know if I do she’ll step back.
“One of the boys got crushed against the pen rail at three.” My voice is flat, dead, someone else’s voice.
“Seventeen years old. Hired in March. The pen rail gave and the cattle spooked and he went down and one of them stepped on him. By the time I got there he was gray. I got him in the truck and one of the boys drove while I held the wound closed for an hour because the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and Hollis came and got the boy and took him back to deal with the pen. ”
I can still smell the hospital on my shirt.
Antiseptic and blood and the particular staleness of a waiting room where nobody wants to be.
I sat in that room for six hours because the kid’s got nobody in the county but an aunt in Lubbock.
I sat there because somebody had to, because someone had to be there when the doctor came out, because a kid shouldn’t wake up from surgery alone.
“My phone was in the truck in the lot and I wasn’t leaving that room,” I say. “I know two numbers by heart. The house and the far shed. I called the house from the hospital at five and Daphne answered and I told her to call you at Sue’s and tell you what happened. I told her twice.”
Ellie doesn’t look away from me. “She didn’t. She was on my couch drinking your wine when I got home.”
“I meant to.” Daphne’s voice from the couch, small and wounded. “I must have fallen asleep. I’m so sorry.”
“She probably fell asleep, Ellie.”
I hear it as I say it. I hear how it sounds. I see Ellie’s face change, see her eyes go cold.
“It was my birthday, Jacob.”
“I know what day it was.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out the box.
I’ve had it for a month, a bracelet, silver, with a little sun charm on it because I call her sunshine, because she is sunshine, because she lights up every room she walks into.
I hold it out to her and I watch her look at it and I understand, suddenly and completely, that I’m holding the wrong thing.
She doesn’t take it.
“The worst part isn’t that you weren’t there.
” Her voice is steady, quiet, and that’s worse than yelling.
Ellie yells when she’s angry. Ellie throws things and slams doors and tells you exactly what she thinks.
This quiet is new. This quiet scares me.
“I’d have forgiven the hospital in a second, Jacob.
You know I would. A kid was hurt. You saved his life. I would have understood.”
“Then what?”
“The worst part is you handed my birthday to her.” She points at Daphne without looking at her. “You called the house and you asked her to tell me, and when she didn’t, you’re standing here telling me she probably fell asleep. You’re taking her word over mine. Again. Standing right in front of me.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“I sat in that diner for two hours, Jacob. With the whole town watching an empty chair. Mrs. Bellinger sat in your seat so it wouldn’t look so bad.
Sue moved the cake. And you were at a hospital, which is fine, which I would have understood, except you told her to call me and she didn’t and you’re standing here defending her. ”
“I’m not defending her.”
“You just said she probably fell asleep.”
I don’t have an answer to that.
Daphne stands up from the couch, the wine glass still in her hand, her phone sliding off her lap onto the cushion, the robe slipping off her shoulder. “I feel terrible. I really do. I’ll apologize properly tomorrow, Ellie, I promise. I just didn’t think.”
“Get out,” Ellie says, still not looking at her.
“Excuse me?”
“Get out of my living room. Get out of my spot on my couch. Take your wine and your fake apology and get out.”
Daphne looks at me, her eyes wide and hurt, waiting for me to open my mouth. Waiting for me to defend her. Waiting for me to take her side the way I’ve been taking her side for a month.
I don’t say anything.
She sets the wine glass down on the coffee table with a sharp click and walks out of the room, her robe swishing behind her, her footsteps fading down the hall toward the west wing.
The house is quiet.
Ellie looks at me, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
“I know you are.”
She picks up the cake box and walks past me toward the stairs.
“Ellie. Wait.”
She stops but doesn’t turn around.
“I care about you,” I say. “More than anyone. More than anything.”
“I know you care about me, Jacob.” She still doesn’t turn around. “That’s not the problem.”
She goes up the stairs and I hear our bedroom door close.
I stand in the foyer with the bracelet in my hand and the kid’s blood on my shirt and the empty wine glass on the coffee table.
The hospital smell is still in my nose. I can still see the kid’s face, gray and scared, and I can still feel his blood on my hands, warm and wet, and I can still hear the doctor saying he was going to be okay, he was going to make it, I got him there in time.
I didn’t think about Daphne. I didn’t think about the phone call. I trusted her to do one thing, one simple thing, and I never even considered that she wouldn’t.
On the drive home I thought about Ellie the whole way.
My phone was on the seat beside me the whole hour and I never once turned it over, and I should have.
I thought about her in that diner with the whole town around her, and I told myself she’d have gotten the message by six and she’d be mad and she’d have every right to be mad and I’d walk in and take it.
I thought about the bracelet in my pocket.
I thought about her blowing out her candles without me and I told myself that was fixable.
I had the whole apology worked out by the time I hit the county road.
I didn’t have the one I needed, because I didn’t know I needed it.
I should go after Ellie. I should go upstairs and hold her and tell her I’m sorry until she believes me.
Instead I walk to the west wing.
The hallway is long and quiet and every light is on behind every door.
She runs the lights all night over here, every night since she moved in, and I’ve seen the bill and never said a word about it.
I can hear the hum of the air conditioning and the creak of the old floorboards under my boots.
The hospital smell is fading now, replaced by the smell of the house, cedar and dust and Daphne’s jasmine perfume.
I find her in her room, still in the robe, sitting on the edge of her bed with her phone in her hand. She looks up when I knock on the open door, her eyes going wide and wet, and she turns the phone face down on the quilt.
“Jacob. I’m so sorry. I really did mean to call her. I took some medicine for my headache and I must have dozed off. I feel terrible.”
I stand in the doorway and look at her. I’ve known Daphne fifteen years.
I’ve known her since we were kids running around Jackson’s ranch, since her daddy taught me how to throw a rope and break a horse and be a man.
She’s like a sister to me. She wouldn’t do this on purpose.
She wouldn’t deliberately hurt Ellie, not in my house, not on her birthday.
Would she?
“What time did I call you?” I ask.
“I don’t know, five? Maybe a little after?”
“And what did you do after?”
She blinks at me. “What do you mean?”
“After we hung up. What did you do?”
“I went to take a bath. My head was killing me. And then I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew it was dark and Ellie was home.”
“You took a bath.”
“Yes.”
“And then you fell asleep.”
“Yes.” Her voice is small now. “I’m so sorry, Jacob. I know how it looks. I know you’re angry. But I swear, I didn’t mean for this to happen. I would never hurt Ellie on purpose.”
I want to believe her. I need to believe her, because the alternative, that Jackson’s daughter stood in my house and ruined my wife’s birthday on purpose, won’t fit anywhere in my head.
Jackson asked me to take care of his girl.
Jackson, who taught me everything, who gave me everything.
I can’t throw his daughter out because she took a bath and fell asleep.
“First thing tomorrow,” I say. “You apologize. A real apology.”
“First thing. I promise.”
I nod and turn away and walk back down the hall. The house is quiet. The east wing is dark now, the light under our bedroom door gone out while I was standing in Daphne’s doorway.
I stand at the foot of the stairs for a long time.
Her door at the top of them, Daphne’s down the west hall, and me in the middle with my boots on the runner she picked out, the one she said would hide the mud and doesn’t.
I could go through our door and try to talk to Ellie.
I could go back to Daphne’s room and ask more questions.
I could do anything instead of standing here in the dark with a bracelet in my pocket and blood on my shirt.
I don’t go through either door.
I go out to the truck and sit in the driver’s seat and I don’t start the engine.
There’s blood on the passenger seat, the kid’s blood, dried brown now, and I’ll have to clean it tomorrow before she sees it.
She’s never been squeamish about the work, but she shouldn’t have to look at that on her way to town.
I look at the house, look at the dark window where our bedroom is, and I think about my wife in her green dress with the empty chair beside her.
I think about her buying that dress. I think about her standing in front of a mirror somewhere deciding I’d like it, and she was right, and I never got to tell her.
I made one phone call that worked tonight. The kid’s aunt picked up on the fourth try and said she’d be there by morning. For a stranger’s kid, for a boy I barely know. And the one phone call that mattered, the one that was supposed to reach my wife on her birthday, I handed to Daphne.
I could go in. The door isn’t locked. I could go up those stairs and lie down next to her and put my hand on her hip and she’d move it off, and I’d deserve that, and I’d still have done it. I sit here instead with the windows up and the blood drying on the seat and the house dark in front of me.
I put my head on the steering wheel and I sleep in the truck.