4. Zelda
ZELDA
Iwake with the apology already in my mouth.
I don’t know whether I’ve said it in my sleep. Jeremiah is beside me, breathing through his nose. One of his hands rests on the sheet between us. He held mine when we got into bed, and I lay awake waiting for him to ask what happened.
He’d been too tired to talk in the car. Too tired when I tried again by the bathroom door.
This morning there is no party to get through. Candace is in her own home. I get up quietly and put the kettle on.
At breakfast he calls it a confession.
My knife goes through the pear and hits the board. The piece I’ve cut is too thick. I’d been trying to make them all the same size so I would have something to do while he finished reading the news.
“It wasn’t a confession.”
“You said you slapped her.”
“You told me to apologize so we could go home and talk.” I take a deep breath. “You refused to listen to me until I said those words.”
He puts down his phone. I had wanted that. Now I’m frightened of his whole attention.
“I didn’t supply the words, Zelda.”
“You told me what to apologize for.”
“And you chose to say it in front of everyone.”
I remember stopping after I’m sorry. Waiting to see whether that would be enough. I hadn’t wanted to say the rest. He had stood there until I did.
“Look at me.”
“I am looking.”
“I need you to hear why.”
He glances at the clock. “This is what happens when you make every conversation a trial. Even Candace is afraid to tell you when you’ve hurt her.”
I put the knife down. Last night I had worried that I’d frightened him into believing something terrible about me. This morning he has brought another thing she thinks of me to breakfast.
“Did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. I saw her.”
“You saw her crying.” My hands have begun to shake again. I hide them under the table, furious that they make me look guilty even when he can’t see them. “I was crying too, in her car last week. Did she tell you that part?”
“Candace told me you make tea as an excuse to get a few minutes of my attention. Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted my company?
“I did.” The evening is sliding from beneath me, like sand.
I asked for an evening. One evening, just for us.”
“And when work gets in the way, you decide I don’t want you.”
He says it so easily. The thing I could barely tell Candace in the dark is sitting between the toast and the fruit.
“Do you?”
His expression changes. I think he will say yes. I lean toward him before he answers.
“I came home with you, didn’t I?”
I look at his cup. He has made it the way he always does. Milk first. The handle turned outward. He knows where everything is because he lives here.
“You promised to listen.”
“I have a meeting.”
His chair moves back.
“Wait.” I reach for my phone. “One thing. Please.”
If I can put both of them here, perhaps she won’t be able to keep giving him a version I don’t recognize. He can hear her answer me. I’m so desperate for it to work that I choose her name before I’ve decided what to ask.
Candace answers brightly. The sound almost brings me to tears.
“I’ve got Jeremiah here,” I say. “You’re on speaker.”
“All right.”
“Why did you tell him the things I said in your car?”
“Because you were lonely. I thought he should know.”
“That was for you.”
“He’s your husband. I was trying to help.”
Jeremiah’s arms are folded. I can’t tell whether he has heard what I heard.
“Please stop talking about our marriage when I’m not there.”
Candace is quiet for a moment.
“After last night, you’re calling to tell me I can’t speak to him?”
“I’m asking you as my friend.” I turn toward Jeremiah. “And I’m asking my friend not to talk to my husband about my marriage.”
He reaches across the table. For one wild second I think he is going to take my hand.
He ends the call.
The screen goes dark beneath his finger.
“We should have discussed this without her.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to?—”
“We’ll talk when you’re less upset. I’ll be home for dinner.”
He takes his coat. I follow him as far as the kitchen door, still holding the phone with the call ended. I have another sentence ready. I can feel how it will come out, too loud, chasing him down the hall.
The front door shuts before I say it.
I go back to the table and try a piece of pear. I chew until it has no taste. Then I spit it into a napkin and fold the napkin out of sight, although no one is there to see.
The group chat has forty-one new messages.
We use it for birthdays, airport rides, photographs nobody wants badly enough to ask for. Dax posted a video at eleven last night. My face fills the still image. My mouth is open.
Glad that’s settled. Merry Christmas, everyone.
I turn the volume all the way down before my thumb gets anywhere near it. Six hearts sit under the video. Candace’s is one of them.
People who weren’t there can watch me now. Somebody may be watching while I stand at my kitchen counter in my nightshirt.
I turn the phone facedown. It vibrates against the wood.
Suri has written privately. I’m sorry I didn’t get you out of the room Friday. Are you okay?
I type I’m fine. Wait. Delete it. My thumb keeps slipping when I try to press call.
“I never hit her,” I say before Suri can ask how I slept.
“Zelda.”
I want her to say she knows.
“I wasn’t in the study.”
“I know you weren’t.” I sit in Jeremiah’s empty chair because it’s the nearest one. “I’m not asking you to say you saw it. I’m telling you.”
“Then why did you apologize?”
I close my eyes. Of course she has to ask. I still wish she hadn’t.
“I wanted him to take me home. He said he would listen if I did.”
Saying it in the quiet kitchen is worse. At the party I could hear Candace crying, see Jeremiah refusing to move. Here it sounds like a choice made by a woman I would tell to get her own coat.
“I kept thinking he would hear me afterward,” I say.
Suri lets out a breath. “I should have stopped him making a show of it in my house.”
“You asked us to speak privately.”
“Once. Then I let him decide.”
I rub the side of my hand where his thumb rested in bed. He held on when I shifted toward him. I had taken that as a promise too.
“Don’t call Candace for me,” I say.
“I won’t. Would you like me to tell the others what you’ve said?”
The video is still on my phone. I want all six hearts gone. I want everybody to hear my voice saying something else.
Then I picture Jeremiah coming home to tell me I have made another scene while he was at work.
“Not yet.”
Suri offers dinner. I refuse before I know why, then spend the afternoon at the library wishing I had said yes.
Every time my phone lights up beside the returns cart, I turn it over. A delivery driver hands me a form to sign, and for an instant I can’t make myself write my name under words I haven’t read.
“Just here,” he says.
“I know. Sorry.”
I read all four lines while he waits. Then I write my name so slowly he shifts the box to his other arm.
At home I wait to heat the soup. Jeremiah said dinner. His footsteps cross the room above the kitchen, his voice rising and falling through the ceiling. At eight I put one bowl in the microwave.
He comes down while I’m washing it. His mouth brushes the side of my head.
“Taken your vitamin?”
I nod. I want to turn into him, tuck my face under his chin, make him stop talking to whoever has him on the phone.
“Another hour, probably,” he says.
“All right.”
He goes upstairs. I stand with my hands in the warm water until I remember the empty sink.
Later I open Candace’s message thread. My fingers know where to find her. There are eleven years of photographs and complaints and stupid questions: does this dress need a necklace; can you believe what he said; look at Jeremiah asleep with a magazine on his chest.
I don’t know how we got here, I type.
I wait as though she can answer words I haven’t sent. She would call. Before this week, she would call, and I could make the ugly noise that is gathering in my throat without worrying whether I sounded reasonable.
I put a hand over my mouth. Delete the sentence.
Upstairs Jeremiah laughs. I take my phone to bed, leaving the lamp on so he will know I’m still awake.