12. Adrian #2
And here’s where the old me would make the speech. The one about how she’s wrong, how the baby is a sign, how we’re meant to be. I can feel it, right there, loaded, the way she said. And I don’t make it.
“Okay,” I say. “For the baby. I hear you. I agree.”
Her eyes narrow, because that was too easy, and she’s braced for the catch.
“But I’m going to be honest with you, because I owe you at least that, after two years of not being,” I say, slowly, choosing every word.
“I’m not going to pretend the other door doesn’t exist just because you closed it.
I’m not going to walk in here and be a polite co-parent and act like I don’t want the whole thing back.
I do. I want you back. I wanted you back before there was a baby, I’ve wanted you back since the second I opened that sketchbook, and now there’s a child, and it doesn’t make me want the marriage more because a baby fixes things.
It makes me want it more because that’s my family in that bed, both of you, and I spent two years too stupid to notice I already had the only thing I’ll ever actually want, and I am not going to be that stupid twice. ”
“Adrian…”
“I’m not promising you anything. I know what my promises are worth to you now.
I watched it cost me everything.” My voice is rough and I let it be.
“So I’m not going to promise. I’m just going to show up.
For the baby, on your terms, exactly like you said.
And for you, on no terms at all, because you don’t owe me a thing and I know it.
And you can spend the whole rest of the divorce telling me it’s closed, and I’ll believe that it might be, I will, and I’ll keep showing up anyway, because a man who finally understands what he had does not get to just hand it back and walk away because it got hard. Not this time. Not you.”
The room is very quiet as the machine beeps.
Brooke looks at me with an expression I can’t read, which is new, because for two years I could always read her and lately I’ve realized that was only because she let me, and now she doesn’t, and I have to earn even that back.
“You’re impossible,” she says finally, and it isn’t warm, but it isn’t ice either, and I’ll take the ground in between.
“So I’ve been told. Recently. By several people. In detail.”
A thing that is almost, almost the ghost of a real reaction crosses her face, and then Laura is pushing back through the curtain with two cups of coffee and the moment closes, and I stand up to give her the chair, and I don’t push my luck, and I count it, quietly, as the first thing I’ve done right in a very long time.
***
Gemma is waiting for me in the hallway when I step out to let Laura help Brooke get dressed.
She’s leaning against the wall across from the curtain with her arms crossed and an expression that could strip paint, and she pushes off it when she sees me and plants herself directly in my path, and she is a foot shorter than me and I have never been more aware of being physically in danger.
“So.” She looks up at me. “Here we are.”
“Gemma…”
“I want to say a thing to you, and I want you to not do the Adrian thing where you agree with everything so fast it doesn’t count.”
She jabs a finger into my chest, once. “For two years I called that woman and asked where her husband was. Two years. And every time she covered for you, made a joke, told me it was a busy stretch, defended you to me when you weren’t in the room.
Do you know how many times I watched her make herself smaller so there’d be enough space in her life for a man who kept forgetting she was in it?
I did. From a distance. And I said nothing, because she asked me not to, and I will regret that as long as I live. ”
“Gemma, I…”
“I’m not finished.” Her voice doesn’t rise.
It gets quieter, which is worse. “The night she left you, I couldn’t even get to her fast enough.
All I could do was call her mother and tell her to open the door, because I knew what kind of shape my cousin was going to be in when she got there, and I was right, and you did that.
You. So no, I don’t care how sorry you are. Sorry is easy. Sorry is free.”
“You’re right,” I say. “About all of it.”
“I’m not done being right.” She takes a breath.
“There’s a baby now. Which means you don’t get to disappear, and it also means you get a thousand new ways to hurt her that you didn’t have before.
So hear me. If you show up for a month and get bored the way you get bored.
If you make her pregnancy about your guilt instead of her.
If you promise that child one single thing you don’t keep, one, I will make what the internet did to her look like a warm bath.
I have thought about it. I have a list. Do you understand me? ”
“I understand you.”
“Say it. If you hurt her again, there is no third chance. Not from her, and not from me.”
“There’s no third chance,” I say. “I understand. And Gemma, for whatever it’s worth, which I know is nothing right now, you should have gotten to say something two years ago, and I should have been a man people could tell the truth to.
You weren’t wrong to stay quiet. I built the house where the truth wasn’t safe. That one’s mine.”
That lands somewhere she wasn’t expecting, and for a second the fury flickers, and then she rebuilds it, because she doesn’t trust it any more than Brooke does.
“Just watch what I do,” I say. “That’s all I’m asking. Don’t take my word for anything. I’ve spent all my word. Just watch.”
Gemma stares at me for a long, hard moment, searching for the lie, and I let her look, because for once there isn’t one.
“I’m watching,” she says finally, stepping back. “Every single day. Don’t forget it.”
I drive them to Laura’s because Brooke is too shaky to take the bus and too proud to say so, and Laura sits in the back with her, and nobody talks the whole way, and it is the least uncomfortable silence I’ve been in for weeks, which tells you what my weeks have been.
At the house I park and I come around and I take Brooke’s bag before she can, the small duffel with her interview clothes in it, and Laura goes ahead to get the door and the porch light, and Brooke and I walk up the path slowly, her a step behind me, and at the door I hand her the bag.
Our hands touch.
Just for a second, just the brush of her fingers against mine as the strap changes hands, and she doesn’t pull away.
It’s nothing. It’s a bag strap. It’s the kind of accidental contact that means nothing between two people who are getting divorced, and I know that, I know it the way I know all the things I keep telling myself not to make mean too much.
But for a month she has flinched from me.
Stepped back. Kept a careful clean foot of air between us at all times, the way you do with a thing that burned you.
And just now, on her mother’s porch, with our child between us and a hospital bracelet still on her wrist, her fingers brushed mine and she didn’t move her hand away.
She looks up and catches me noticing, and her face closes over fast, and she takes the bag and says a flat “goodnight, Adrian” and goes inside, and the door shuts, and I stand on the porch in the dark like an idiot with my heart going like I’m sixteen.
One inch.
Brooke gave me one inch tonight, probably without meaning to, probably already regretting it.
I’ll take it.
I’ll take the inch, and I’ll earn the next one, and I will spend as long as it takes, because I have finally learned the only thing worth knowing, which is exactly what it costs to lose her, and I am never going to be able to afford it again.