Chapter 26 What If It Happens Again?
Lesley
He knocked at seven o’clock.
I’d been sitting on the sofa since six forty-five, and I heard him on the stairs a minute before, his tread slower than usual, as though he’d waited in the car until it was time.
When I opened the door, he was standing there in jeans and a gray sweater, freshly shaved, holding nothing.
His hair was damp. He’d come straight from the shower, I thought, and then I stopped myself from thinking anything else about it.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi. Come in.”
My mother was staying in Heather and Jo’s guest room, fifteen minutes away.
I’d told her I needed the condo to myself on Tuesday night, and she had looked at me over her reading glasses for a long moment and said only, “Call me after, if you want to.” I’d told Courtney that afternoon what I was going to do.
She’d asked me what I was hoping to hear.
I’d said I didn’t know. She’d said that was probably the most honest place to start.
I’d made a pot of decaf. I poured two cups without asking, because I knew how he took it, and set one in front of him at the dining table. He wrapped his hands around it and actually drank some, which was new. For months he’d let every cup I made him go cold.
I lowered myself into the chair across from him. At thirty-seven weeks, sitting down was a negotiation with my own body. I put a cushion behind my back and folded my hands on top of my stomach, where our daughter was doing something slow and rolling, as though she’d settled in to listen.
Hank waited. He didn’t ask what I wanted to talk about. He didn’t fill the silence with small talk about the shower or the weather. He sat across from me in the lamplight and waited for me to begin.
“I want to ask you something,” I said. “It’s going to take a while to get to it. I need you to let me get there.”
“Okay.”
I’d thought about how to say this for three days. I’d written it on a legal pad and crossed most of it out. In the end I decided to start with the truth.
“I’ve been watching you,” I said. “Since November. I didn’t want to.
I told myself I wasn’t. But I have been, and I’ve seen all of it.
Every appointment. The phone always away.
Coming when I ask and not coming when I don’t.
The furnace, and letting me pay for it without an argument. Your mother told me about Thursday.”
He looked down at his coffee. A faint color rose along his jaw.
“She told me what you said to her,” I went on. “That I would understand, and that was exactly why you weren’t going to ask me to.”
“I didn’t tell you so you’d know,” he said quietly.
“I know you didn’t. That’s part of why it matters.” I took a breath. “So I’m not asking whether you’ve changed. You have. I’m not blind. And I’m not here to ask how you feel about me. I saw your face in that hospital room in Aspen. I don’t need to ask.”
He lifted his eyes.
“What I need to ask you is harder than either of those,” I said. “And I need you to think about it before you answer. I don’t want the answer you think I want.”
“All right.”
I looked at him across my little table, in the condo I’d bought before I ever met him, with the lights of downtown coming on beyond the windows.
“What happens when it gets hard again?”
He didn’t answer right away. I’d asked him to think, and he was thinking. I watched it on his face.
“Not this,” I said. “Not now, when you’re scared of losing me and everybody’s watching and it’s all still close.
I mean later. In a month, when she’s here and neither of us has slept in three weeks and she won’t stop crying and I’m snapping at you over nothing.
In six months, when a pipe bursts in Montana again, or a fire starts somewhere else, or Warren Pike’s chairman wants you on a plane to London.
When your dad’s eyes aren’t the problem anymore, his heart is, and your mom calls at midnight.
When somebody new needs you. Not Priscilla.
Somebody else. Somebody who’s hurt and scared and makes you feel like you’re the only person on the mountain who can help.
” I kept my voice steady. “In five years, Hank. When the fire’s something we mention at parties.
When nobody’s watching anymore, including you. What happens then?”
He was very still.
“Because here’s what I can’t get past,” I said.
“You’ve changed before. Really changed. I’m not rewriting history.
After my promotion dinner, you took me to Santa Barbara and locked your phone in the hotel safe, and you came home at seven every night for months.
That was real. After our fifth anniversary, Tuscany was real.
You were present every single day for weeks.
After I told you in the kitchen how I felt, you had Cheryl block Tuesday and Thursday nights, and you kept them.
We cooked. We walked around the park. I remember being so happy I was scared of it.
” I pressed my hands flat against the table.
“Counseling was real too. Those three sessions were the most honest I’d ever heard you.
None of it was fake. I believed every bit of it while it was happening. ”
“I know.”
“It just didn’t last. Every time, it faded.
Not all at once. So slowly I couldn’t point to the week it went.
And every time, I’d been so sure.” I felt my throat tighten and pushed through it.
“So when I watch you now, doing everything right, it doesn’t reassure me the way you’d think it would.
It scares me. Because I’ve seen this part before.
The good part. I know exactly what it looks like.
What I’ve never seen is what comes after it. ”
The baby shifted. I put a hand on the spot without looking.
“So that’s my question,” I said. “I’m not asking you to promise it’ll never happen again. I’ll know you’re lying if you do. I’m asking what’s different this time. Specifically. Not how you feel. What’s different.”
He sat back in his chair. For a long moment he didn’t say anything at all. I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen and a siren somewhere far off toward Federal Boulevard, fading.
“I’m not going to promise you it’ll never happen again,” he said finally. “You’re right. You’d know. I’d know. It would be exactly the kind of thing I used to say.”
“Okay.”
“It’s going to get hard. You’re right about all of it.
She’s going to scream for three hours some night and I’m going to be so tired I can’t see.
Something’s going to catch fire, or flood, or fall apart, at one of the properties.
My parents are going to get older, and there are going to be hospitals.
And I’m going to get it wrong sometimes.
I’m going to feel that pull toward the emergency and I’m going to follow it before I’ve thought. I’d be an idiot to tell you otherwise.”
“Then what’s different?”
He was quiet for another moment, putting it in order the way he did.
“The first thing is where the work lives,” he said.
“Every other time I changed, the change lived in me. In how bad I felt. I’d feel guilty, and the guilt would make me show up, and when the guilt wore off, so did I.
Santa Barbara, Tuscany, the Tuesday nights.
All of it ran on feeling terrible. And feeling terrible doesn’t last. Nobody can feel that way forever. ”
I didn’t say anything. He went on.
“So this time I’ve been trying to put it somewhere outside me.
Somewhere it doesn’t depend on how I feel on a given Thursday.
” He counted it off on his fingers, without drama, like a man going through a construction checklist. “Diane runs the emergency rotation now. Every GM in the company calls her first. Not me. That’s written into the operating procedures, and it’s been working since January.
Neil owns the deals. I sit in on the big ones, but he runs them.
Cheryl can’t move anything with your name or the baby’s on it without my personal sign-off, and if I sign off, I call you myself.
That’s been the rule since December. It’s in writing. It’s not a mood.”
“Diane could get sick. Neil could leave.”
“Then I build it again,” he said. “That’s the job now.
The structure isn’t a favor I did for you.
It’s how the company runs, and it runs better.
Neil closed Montana on his own and it went better than it would have if I’d been there.
Diane’s handled four emergencies since February that used to be mine, and handled them well.
I should have let them do this years ago.
I didn’t because I liked being the one everyone called. ”
“And me?” I asked. “What happens when I’m the most capable person in the room again?
Because I will be. I’ll have a newborn and I’ll still be the one who knows where the pediatrician’s number is and when the daycare deposit’s due.
I’ll be handling it. What stops you from looking at me handling it and deciding I’m fine? ”
He didn’t answer right away. He looked at me across the table for a long moment.
“You being capable isn’t the same as you not needing anything,” he said slowly.
“I used to think it was. I watched you handle everything for seven years and took it as proof. I know better now. So when I see you handling it, I’m going to ask.
Not assume. Ask. And if I don’t, you tell me.
” He paused. “You shouldn’t have to make a case for it. You say it once, and I hear it.”
“And therapy?”
“Every Wednesday. Since November. I’ve missed one, when Dad was in the ER in February, and I called to cancel myself.” He looked at me. “I’m not going to stop when this is settled, whichever way it goes. That’s part of what’s different. It isn’t a phase I’m doing until I get you back. I need it.”
“What have you learned there?” I asked. “Not all of it. You told me in January it wasn’t my job to listen to your therapy. But I need to know you understand why you did it. Or I’ll never trust that you’ll see it coming.”