Chapter Nine #2
“Because he asked me to,” she said, “and because I told myself, that first year, that it was temporary — that once the restaurant was stable again he’d tell you himself, in his own time, and I was just holding a door open for a few months until he was ready to walk through it.
And then a few months became a year, and a year became three, and somewhere in there I stopped believing he was ever going to walk through it on his own, and by then I didn’t know how to hand you half of a seven-year-old secret without it looking like I’d been choosing, this whole time, when you got to know the truth about your own life.
I told myself I was protecting you. I understand now — I’ve had seven years to understand this properly — that I was protecting myself from ever having to have this exact conversation, the one we’re having right now, which I dreaded more than almost anything else in my life. ”
That settled over me a long moment, the diner quiet around us, and I felt the double ache of believing someone completely and still being furious at them, a feeling I was starting to think might simply be the permanent texture of this whole year.
“He said something the other night,” I said.
“That I’d have found a way to fix it myself, and he couldn’t stand watching me do it.
Is that what he told you too. Is that the reason he gave you, back then, for why it had to be you and not me. ”
“More or less,” Ivy said. “Though I think the real reason ran deeper than that, even if it’s the reason he actually said out loud.
I think he’s spent so many years being terrified of needing anyone that owing two people a debt neither of us could talk about felt safer to him than owing one person an honest conversation.
You, specifically. I don’t think it was really about protecting you at all, in the end.
I think it was about him never having to watch your face while you found out he wasn’t as solid as everyone, including you, needed him to be. ”
“He said one more thing,” I said, watching her carefully.
“He said something happened to him once, somewhere else, a long time ago — that he’d watched something he built with his own hands start to come apart before, and he wasn’t going to let it happen to us the same way.
He wouldn’t say more than that. Do you know what he meant. ”
Something crossed Ivy’s face, quick and complicated, gone almost before I could read it — recognition, and beneath the recognition, something that looked almost like sympathy for a man she otherwise had every reason to be furious at alongside me.
“I know a little,” she said carefully. “Not everything. He’s mentioned his father to me exactly once, years ago, late at night, half a glass of wine past where he usually stops talking about anything real, and then he closed the door on it so fast I never brought it up again.
I don’t think that’s mine to hand you either, Wren.
I genuinely think it isn’t finished cooking in him yet, if that makes any sense — I don’t think even he understands all of what it’s doing to him.
But I’ll say this much: whatever it is, I don’t think it excuses what he did to you.
I think it might explain it, eventually, once he’s actually ready to look at it instead of just gesturing at it in the dark to get out of finishing a sentence.
Those aren’t the same thing, and I’d hate for you to let him collapse them into one just because the gesture sounded sincere. ”
“That’s what I told him, more or less,” I said, “though I didn’t have your patience about it.
” I meant it half as a joke, and it landed as one, faintly, the first thing all evening that had.
“He does that. Reaches for something old and wounded right when the conversation’s about to cost him something in the present, like it’s a card he’s saving. ”
“He’s done it to me too,” Ivy said. “Once. I didn’t let him finish playing it, and I think that surprised him more than anything else I said that whole conversation.
” She turned her water glass a quarter turn, a gesture I recognized from somewhere and then placed — Coralie had done the same thing, absently, with her coffee cup, decades ago, and watching Ivy’s hand make the identical motion sent a small unexpected ache through me that had nothing to do with Gus at all.
“I think he’s spent so many years believing that needing help once means you were never actually capable to begin with, that he can’t tell the difference anymore between explaining himself and asking to be forgiven for something he hasn’t actually owned yet.
I used to find that almost sympathetic. Lately I mostly just find it exhausting to watch, because it means every hard conversation with him turns into archaeology before it can turn into an actual apology. ”
Something passed between us in that moment — not warmth, not yet, but the first flicker of the old thing, the two of us reading the same problem the same way, a kind of intellectual kinship that had survived even this.
It didn’t feel like ease. It felt like the ghost of ease, visible through a window neither of us could currently open.
“I’m not going to ask you to forgive me today,” Ivy said, into the quiet that followed.
“I don’t think I’ve earned that, and I don’t think you’d believe me if I asked for it anyway.
I just needed you to hear, from my own mouth, in this room, that I’m sorry — not the careful text-message sorry, the actual kind, the kind that knows exactly how much it cost you and isn’t asking you to make that smaller so I can feel better about having caused it.
” She paused, and her composure slipped again, just slightly, just enough that I saw underneath it something I hadn’t let myself look for in her in a very long time.
“I gave things up too, Wren. I’m not telling you that tonight to make you feel sorry for me, and I’m not going to say more about it until I can say all of it, properly, instead of in pieces that just sound like an excuse.
I just need you to know, going forward, that it wasn’t free for me either.
Whatever you end up deciding about any of this. ”
I didn’t have an answer ready for that, so I didn’t manufacture one.
We sat a while longer in the booth under the window, the two of us, not touching, not quite easy, the space between us smaller than it had been on the gravel but nowhere near as small as it used to be, and when she stood to leave, an hour later, neither of us reached for a hug, and neither of us apologized for not reaching.
She paused at the door the way Gus had paused at it the night before, looking back at the dining room, at the counter, at the stripped booth in the corner.
“She’d have loved watching you do this,” Ivy said quietly. “I hope you know that. Whatever else is broken right now, that part isn’t in question.”
“I know,” I said. “I think about her every day I’m in here.”
“I think about her every day I’m not,” Ivy said, and let herself out into the evening, and I stood at the window and watched her taillights follow the same road Gus’s had followed the night before, out past the streetlights, into the dark, and felt, watching them go, the strange particular grief of loving someone completely and still not knowing, yet, whether you were going to find your way back to the ease you used to have with them, or only ever to something adjacent to it, built new, from whatever honesty turned out to survive the telling.
I called Marisol after all, once the taillights were gone, not because anything had gone sideways but because I found I wanted to say the shape of it out loud to someone before it finished settling into whatever it was going to become in memory.
“She came herself,” I said. “No lawyer language, mostly. She apologized like she meant it. She still wouldn’t tell me what’s in the agreement.
” Marisol was quiet on the other end for a second, the particular quiet of someone doing careful math.
“That’s two of them now,” she said, “both driving up here in person, both telling you real things, both stopping at the exact same locked door. You notice that’s not a coincidence, right?
That’s not two separate people being cautious.
That’s one door, with both their names on the same side of it. ”
I hadn’t put it in those terms to myself yet, and hearing Marisol say it straight up landed with a small, cold click of recognition, a fact resolving into a shape I should have seen sooner.
I sat with it a long time after we hung up, in the booth under the window where both conversations had happened, in the same seat, on the same worn cushion, and understood that whatever came next in this — whatever Ivy and Gus eventually decided, between themselves, they were ready to unseal — it was going to arrive as a single truth handed to me from two directions at once, or it was going to keep not arriving at all.
There was no version, I understood now, watching the dead second N glow its faint wrongness through the front glass one more time before I locked up for the night, where one of them told me the whole thing without the other’s permission.
They had built that door together, seven years ago, whatever their separate reasons, and it seemed neither of them yet knew how to open it alone.