Chapter 2 #2
That surprised her, sitting there with her thumb over his name. But blocking him would be a message, and a message was a conversation, and she had spent five years learning that the only unanswerable move in that family is to simply not be available.
So she left the line open and decided she would never pick it up. Which is harder. Which was the point.
She called Bev at four, because Bev did not take calls before four, and because after four she took them from anywhere.
"Tell me it's the book."
"It isn't the book."
"Then tell me fast, I've got a man on the other line who thinks he's a poet." A door shut somewhere in New York. When Bev came back her voice had changed. "Erin."
"I left him this morning."
Bev Kaplan had represented her for six years and had never once met a Lockwood, never been to the Point house, never been introduced to a single person in that world.
She was on the phone from an office on Twenty-Sixth Street with a window that didn't open.
She had also been, for six years, the only person alive who knew what Erin actually did with her nights.
"Are you safe," Bev said. Not a question. A box being checked.
"Completely. He's not like that."
"Where's the boy?"
"Asleep in the next room. In a bed I bought two years ago."
There was a silence on the line that went on long enough for Erin to hear the traffic under it.
"Two years," Bev said.
"Yes."
"You bought a bed for your son in an apartment your husband doesn't know exists, two years ago, and you called me every month in between about jacket copy."
"Yes."
"Well." Bev exhaled. "I've been representing the wrong genre."
Erin laughed. It came out of her badly, cracked in the middle, and it was the first sound she'd made all day that wasn't managed.
"All right," Bev said, brisk again, because she knew exactly how much of that to allow.
"Money. You have eight figures, you have it in Ninebark, and he has no claim on any of it, but I want you to hear me say the next part.
The minute a lawyer files anything, that stops being a secret.
Financial disclosure is not optional and it is not private. "
"I know."
"He is going to find out. Not from you, not on your schedule, and not gently. On a piece of paper across a table, with his own attorney sitting next to him."
"I know."
"And you're all right with that."
Erin looked at the window. Four o'clock in September, the light already going gold and low over the roofs across the street.
"I've thought about that moment for four years," she said. "I've written it, actually. Twice. Cut it both times."
"Why'd you cut it?"
"Because it read like revenge."
"And now?"
"Now I think it just reads like Thursday."
Bev made a small satisfied noise, the kind she made when a book turned a corner. "Then here's mine, and then I'll let you go. The proposal's been sitting in my drawer since May. You told me to hold it because the fall was bad for you."
"The fall was bad for me."
"The fall was always going to be bad for you, that's what I'm saying." A pause. "Let me take it out."
"Bev—"
"Under whatever name you like. I'll fight you on that later and we both know how it ends. Just let me take it out."
Erin didn't answer. Down on Main Street a car door shut. In the next room her son turned over.
"Not today," she said.
"That's not a no."
"It's not a no."
"Good enough. Go to bed, sweetheart. Call me Thursday."
There was one more thing and she did it last, after she hung up.
The one time she had tried to tell him.
It was the January after the wedding. Late, in the kitchen at the Point house, and she was tired enough to be careless. She'd said she'd been doing some writing. She'd said it lightly, the way you set a plate down where somebody might pick it up.
He'd been reading something on his phone. He hadn't been unkind. That's the thing she has never been able to get anyone to understand.
He'd said, "Good — you should, you're always up anyway." And then, a beat later, half a laugh, still looking at the phone: "What is it, one of those airport things?"
That was it — one throwaway line from a tired man at midnight who was not trying to hurt her and who would not remember saying it by Thursday.
She'd said, "Something like that."
And then she had gone upstairs and finished a book.
Four novels. Two of them out in a language he didn't know they'd been translated into. A company in her name that Bev set up the year before the wedding, and an accountant in Portland, and a number in it now that she had stopped looking at because looking at it had started to feel like a symptom.
He had never asked again. Not once in five years.
Not how's the writing, not did anything come of that.
He had built a marriage on the understanding that she did not do anything, and she had let him, because the alternative was correcting him, and she had learned in that first January exactly what correcting him cost.
That was hers. She owned that part. She'd tell any woman who asked.
But she was thirty-six years old and she had not said one true sentence about herself in five years, and this morning she had carried a sleeping child down sixteen stairs and out a door, and now there was a bed with his name on it in a room she'd paid for with a book nobody knew she wrote.
He had been calling since a quarter past eight that morning.
She knew the count without looking, the way she used to know the hours. Fourteen by noon. Then a gap in the afternoon that she understood perfectly — that was Vanessa, telling him to stop, telling him it would be used. Then the gap ended, which told her something too.
The last one came at seven minutes past nine at night.
She was standing at the sink. The phone lit and buzzed against the counter and turned the whole kitchen a pale blue, and his name came up, and under it the picture — the two of them at somebody's fortieth, four summers ago, his arm around her, both of them laughing at something offstage.
Erin dried her hands.
Five years of this. Five years of a phone lighting up and her stomach going with it. She used to be able to tell from the length of the buzz whether he was calling from the car.
She watched it ring out.
It started again immediately, which he had never done in the whole marriage. Not once, for anything.
She watched that one ring out too.
Then she turned the phone face down on the counter, the way he always had, and stood there a second longer to see whether she felt anything.
The refrigerator hummed. Down in the shop somebody laughed at something.
Nothing. Not triumph, not grief. Just the quiet of a woman who has finally put a thing down and is waiting to find out how much her arms hurt.
She went in and checked on Wyatt. He'd kicked the blanket off. She put it back.
Then she came out, sat down at the table with the blue ledger and a pen, and opened it to the next clean line.
She wrote the date. She wrote: Left 5:52am. W. asleep, no incident. Ring in the hall dish. C.H. retained 8:40am, filing Thursday.
She looked at that for a while.
Then, for the first time in five years, she wrote something in it that wasn't a fact.
This is the last page of this one.