11. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
I haven’t slept.
I’ve been lying here for hours, staring at the ceiling, running my fingers over the empty space beside me where Jacob should be.
The sheets are cold. They’ve been cold all night because he didn’t come to bed.
I heard him come inside around midnight, heard his boots on the hardwood, heard him climb the stairs and stop outside the door.
I held my breath and waited for the knock, waited for him to come in and talk to me, waited.
He walked away.
I heard the couch creak in the living room. I heard him settle in, heard the house go quiet, and I’ve been lying here ever since, staring at the ceiling and thinking about what I said on the porch and the look on his face when nothing came out of his mouth.
Around one I got up and stood at the bedroom door with my hand on the knob.
I could hear him breathing down there, slow and heavy, the way he breathes when he’s not really asleep, just lying still with his eyes shut waiting for morning.
I could have gone down. I could have sat on the edge of the couch and put my hand on his chest and we could have had it out in the dark where it’s easier.
I stood there until my feet got cold on the floorboards and then I got back in bed, on my side, and I put my hand flat on his side of the sheet the way I used to when he was at the far shed, and it was cold, and it stayed cold.
The porch keeps replaying in my head. The way he looked when he got out of the truck, all that tension in his shoulders, all that anger in his eyes.
The way the anger turned into what came after when I said he’d notice Daphne leaving a room before he’d notice me.
The way his mouth opened and nothing came out.
He didn’t deny it. He couldn’t deny it.
I’ve been married to this man for almost a year and I’ve known him my whole life, and I know what his silences mean.
There’s the one where he’s working it out and he’ll get to it.
There’s the one at the sale barn that makes grown men back up.
There’s the one in bed after, with his hand on my back, that means more than most men’s talking.
And there’s the one from the porch, where his mouth opens and shuts and nothing comes, and I’ve only heard that one a handful of times. When I asked him about kids. Tonight.
The wind is picking up outside. I can hear it pushing at the windows, a low moan that rises and falls.
The weather has been threatening all week, that heavy feeling in the air that comes before a storm.
Sometime after five I heard a door down at the far end of the house, and I lay there and hated that I could tell whose it was.
I should have gone to bed angry. I should have slept it off and woken up with a clearer head.
Instead I’ve been lying here for six hours, watching the shadows on the ceiling, listening to the wind and the creak of the couch downstairs.
Somewhere around three the wind found the loose shutter on the west side and started banging it, and I lay there and counted the bangs the way I count the days between his Fridays, and I got to a number I didn’t like and quit counting.
I hear him get up. The couch springs groan, his feet hit the floor, and then his boots on the hardwood, moving through the house.
I track his movements by sound: the kitchen, the coffee maker, the back door opening and closing.
The same routine he does every morning, the sounds that used to be comforting because they meant he was here, he was home, he was mine.
Now they just mean he’s leaving.
I know how long he takes. Four minutes from the coffee maker to the back door on a normal morning, and this morning it’s been longer than that, and I lie there and listen to him not leave, the coffee maker done and the back door not opened, his boots going to the front of the house and back, and I think he’s checking the windows for weather, and I think he’s checking whether my light is on.
He stops outside the bedroom door. I can hear him breathing, can feel him standing there on the other side of the wood. The floorboards creak as he shifts his weight. I lie very still and I wait.
The door opens.
He’s standing there with his jeans half-buttoned and his boots in his hand, and he’s holding a coffee cup, steam rising from it in the dim light.
He looks like he hasn’t slept either, dark circles under his eyes and his jaw tight.
He crosses to the nightstand and sets the cup down, careful not to spill it, and then he just stands there, looking at me.
“I thought you were asleep,” he says.
“I haven’t been asleep.”
He stands beside the bed, not sitting, not leaving. Just standing there with his boots in his hand and his eyes on me, and I can see him trying to figure out what to say.
“We need to talk,” I say.
“Ellie, I’ve got to get to the far shed. The hands are waiting.”
“The hands can wait.”
He doesn’t move. I can see him trying to decide, trying to figure out if he can get out of this, and I’m so tired. I’m so tired of watching him figure out how to avoid me.
“One thing,” I say. “I need you to do one thing for me, and then you can go.”
“What.”
“Daphne out of the house by the end of the month.”
He goes still. His whole body freezes.
“I know what Jackson is to you,” I say. “I know what you think you owe him. I’m asking anyway.”
“Ellie, his condition isn’t getting better. He’s worse, not better. I can’t just put her out.”
“There are hotels. There’s her father’s house. There’s the whole state of Texas.” I sit up in bed and pull my knees to my chest and I watch his face while I say it. “I’m not asking you to abandon her. I’m asking you to put her somewhere that isn’t my home. I’m asking you to choose me.”
His jaw works. I watch it go side to side, the way it went on the front walk the morning she got here, the way it goes when he’s doing math on a bad price, and I know before he opens his mouth that I’m the bad price.
“It’s not that simple.”
I told him in the study, the day she came, that he could tell Jackson no. He said he couldn’t. I let it go, because I didn’t want to be the woman who made him choose. I’ve had two months to think about that. Somebody was always going to make him choose. I’d rather it was me.
“It is that simple. You just don’t want it to be.”
He stands there, boots in hand, his face a mask I can’t read, and the silence stretches between us.
I can hear the wind getting louder outside, can hear the windows rattling in their frames.
The coffee cup on the nightstand is still steaming, still warm, and I think about how he brought it in here meaning to stay a minute, meaning to talk to me, and how he’s standing there now trying to figure out how to leave.
“If you can’t do that,” I say, and my voice is steady even though my hands are shaking under the blanket, “then I need to think seriously about what I’m doing here.”
The silence goes on so long I can count my own heartbeats. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
“You’re my wife,” he says finally. “That’s what you’re doing here.”
“That’s an address, Jacob. It’s not an answer.”
He stands at the door. He’s kissed me goodbye every morning he’s slept in this bed.
Every one of them, even the ones I’m barely awake for, he crosses the room and kisses my forehead or my cheek or my mouth and tells me to have a good day.
It’s the one thing I can count on, the one part of him I get every day no matter how busy he is, no matter how distracted.
He puts on his boots. Slowly, one and then the other, bent over with his hand on the doorframe.
He picks up his hat from the hook by the door and turns it in his hands, and then he just stands there, looking at me across the room.
His thumb runs along the brim the way it does when he’s about to say what he’s been holding, and I’ve seen that thumb a hundred times, at the sale barn, at Jackson’s table, at our wedding when the preacher asked him if he did.
I know what it looks like when the words are right there.
I wait. I give him the space to say anything. To cross the room and kiss me. To tell me he’s sorry. To tell me he loves me. To tell me he’s choosing me.
He opens the door.
He stops with his hand on it. His back is to me and his shoulders come up, and I think this is it, this is where he turns around, and I’ve got my hand out of the blanket already reaching for him before I know I’ve moved it.
He walks out without kissing me goodbye.
I hear his boots on the stairs. I hear the front door open and close. I hear his truck start up and drive away, the sound of the engine fading until there’s nothing left but the wind.
I sit in bed with my knees pulled up and I don’t cry. I’ve cried enough over this man.
The phone on the nightstand rings at seven and I know who it is before I pick it up, because there’s one man in this county who calls at seven on the dot.
“Stay home today,” Mr. Bellinger says. He doesn’t say good morning. “It’s going to be an ugly one.”
“I’ve got the filing.”
“The filing’s been there thirty years. It’ll keep.” He’s quiet a second. “You all right out there?”
“I’m fine.”
I’m not fine. I’m sitting in an empty bed in a house with a woman in the west wing who wants my husband, and my husband is at the far shed, and the sky outside is the wrong color.
“Mmhmm,” he says, which is the sound his wife makes, and I wonder when he caught it from her. “Stay home, Ellie. Keep the radio on.”
I get up after he hangs up and I go to the window.
The hands’ trucks are already gone from the lot by the bunkhouse.
The yard is empty and the flag on the barn is standing straight out from the pole, and the light is wrong, too yellow for this early, and I stand there in Jacob’s T-shirt with my arms wrapped around myself and I watch it.
His side of the bed is still made. The pillow’s still got the crease in it from where he punched it down two nights ago, and I reach over and smooth it flat with my hand, and then I put it back the way it was, because I don’t know which one of those I mean.
The coffee cup is still on the nightstand, still warm, and I pick it up and hold it in my hands and drink it, black, the way he takes it, because he didn’t put the cream in and I’m not going downstairs for it and I look out the window at the sky over the far sheds.
It’s a color I’ve never seen. Gray-green and bruised, the clouds piling up on the horizon in a way that makes my stomach clench.