16. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
We don’t go home.
Neither of us says it out loud. We walk out of the museum into the gray dawn, side by side, the ribbon still wound around my fingers, and when we reach the parking garage he opens the passenger door of his car and I get in.
No discussion, no negotiation. Just the wordless agreement of two people who spent a night tearing down walls and are not ready to walk back into the world that built them.
Hendrix pulls out of the garage and turns toward the coast, and I don’t ask where we’re going, because part of me already knows.
The Carver coastline is an hour up the coast, past the point where the city finally lets go of the shore and the highway empties out toward Malibu and beyond, a stretch of private beach that belongs to the family trust and has been left deliberately wild because Mabel loved it that way.
No houses, no docks, no sign that money has ever touched it except the narrow access road that cuts through the trees and opens onto gray water and pale sand. I’ve been here a couple of times, both early on, before the cold set in, back when the marriage still felt chosen instead of inherited.
Once in summer, with a blanket and a bottle of wine, until the stars came out.
Once when the water was too cold to swim and we walked the shore for hours without running out of things to say.
That version of us feels ancient and unbearably close at the same time.
The drive is quiet, not strained. Comfortable in a way that scares me, because comfort is the thing I swore I would never let back in.
Comfort is how I ended up here in the first place, lulled by the warmth of a man who was very good at making the gaps between his absences feel like they didn’t count.
But this quiet is a different animal. It’s the quiet of two people who said everything they had to say in a dark museum and are sitting now in the aftermath, testing whether the truth still stands up in daylight.
His hand rests on the gearshift between us. My hand rests on my own knee, three inches away. I am aware of that three inches with a precision that borders on pathological.
“You should sleep,” he says. “It’s an hour.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You’ve been awake for twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty-six. But who’s counting.”
“I am, apparently.”
A smile pulls at my mouth before I can stop it, and I turn my face to the window so he won’t see it win.
The city thins into suburbs, then into green, and the light shifts from urban gray to a soft rural gold, and I let myself feel, finally, the thing I’ve been refusing since I woke up on his chest this morning.
I missed him.
Not the idea of him. Not the Hendrix I built out of nostalgia in the bad weeks, when I was trying to talk myself into staying.
The actual man. The one driving this car with one hand loose on the wheel and the other on the gearshift, jaw stubbled from a night without sleep, collar open, sleeves shoved up to his forearms in a way that has no business being as distracting as it is.
I notice his forearms.
Of course I notice his forearms. I’ve spent three years pretending not to see the way the muscle moves under his skin when he shifts gears, the way his hand wraps the wheel with a casual, unhurried strength that my brain has never once managed to file under uninteresting.
It’s early, and I’m exhausted, and I’m supposed to be deciding whether there is anything left to salvage, and instead I’m looking at my husband’s hands and thinking about where they were four weeks ago on a cold sidewalk, and where they were last night on my back, and the low pull that starts in my stomach and settles lower is not helping my objectivity even slightly.
I hate that my body still keeps a file on him.
I hate that the smell of him in this car, soap and coffee and the last trace of museum air, is sinking into my chest and making itself at home in the exact spot I’ve worked so hard to keep empty.
I hate that my fingers want to close those three inches to the gearshift, and I hate most of all that the wanting is getting harder to argue with the longer I sit here breathing him in.
“Stop looking at me,” I say, because I can feel his eyes flick to me between glances at the road.
“I’m not looking at you. I’m confirming you’re still conscious.”
“I’m conscious. Eyes on the road.”
“My eyes are on the road.”
“Your eyes are on my legs, Hendrix. I can feel it.”
A beat. The corner of his mouth twitches. “Your legs are between me and the road. It’s geography.”
“That is not how geography works.”
“You’re the dancer. I’m just the driver.”
I press my lips together against the laugh that’s fighting to get out, because laughing at his jokes is a concession I am not prepared to make before the sun is fully up.
But the warmth spreads through my chest anyway, uninvited, unwelcome, and I let it sit there, because fighting it is exhausting and I am so tired of fighting.
***
The coastline opens up in front of us, all gray water and cold sand, the kind of beautiful that doesn’t perform for anyone.
Hendrix parks at the end of the access road and kills the engine, and for a moment we just sit there, looking at the ocean through the windshield, listening to the waves throw themselves at the shore and drag back.
“Ready?” he asks.
“For what?”
“For whatever this is.”
I look at him. He looks back, and his face is open in a way I haven’t seen in years, no performance, no arrangement, just a man who drove an hour to give his wife a quiet place to decide what she wants and has already made his peace with getting an answer he won’t like.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m ready.”
We walk.
The sand is cold through my shoes, the museum heels absurd on this terrain, and within ten steps I’ve pulled them off and I’m carrying them by the straps, bare feet pressing into wet sand that gives under my weight and then holds.
The water is twenty feet to our left, a slow gray rhythm that fills the space between us with a sound that makes silence feel like company instead of a standoff.
Our steps fall into sync without either of us trying.
His stride shortens to match mine, automatic, the unconscious accommodation of a man whose body learned my pace years ago and never unlearned it.
I wait for the strangeness to arrive, the awkwardness, the discomfort of walking beside a man I’m supposed to be divorcing.
It doesn’t come.
What comes instead is worse.
Ease. The disarming, terrifying ease of falling into a rhythm my body remembers even while my brain is still shouting at it to forget.
His arm brushing mine every few steps. The occasional knock of his knuckle against the back of my hand. The way the silence between us has stopped being a weapon and gone back to being what it used to be, a room we both live in without effort, furnished with years of shorthand.
I keep waiting for the other man to show up.
The distracted one. The one who’d have his phone out by now, already half-back at the studio, composing sentences in his head while his body walked beside me as an afterthought. The ghost who wore my husband’s face for a year.
He doesn’t come.
The man walking beside me left his phone in the car without a word, and his attention is here, on this beach, on me, with a steadiness I keep testing and keep finding solid under my weight.
“Can I ask you a thing,” I say, “that I should have asked you three years ago?”
“Anything.”
“What did you want to be? Before the writing. When you were a kid, before anyone told you what a Carver was supposed to do with his life.”
He glances at me, surprised, and then his face softens, because he understands what I’m doing. This is the thing we said last night. The meeting we never had. The first conversation we skipped straight past on our way to the altar.
“A marine biologist before the whole writing passion,” he says.
“Genuinely. Until I was about eleven. I wanted to study whales. I had a binder.” A pause.
“My father found it and told me Carvers don’t study fish, they fund the aquarium and put their name on the wing.
I stopped mentioning the binder.” He looks out at the water.
“Your turn. And not ballet, I already know ballet. A thing you never told me.”
“I’m afraid of the ocean.” I say it and it startles a short laugh out of him. “Not the beach, but the ocean, like what’s under it. I did a whole unit on the deep sea in the sixth grade and never recovered. I can put my feet in. I will never, as long as I live, put my head under.”
“Three years,” he says quietly, “and I didn’t know you were afraid of the ocean.”
“Three years, and I didn’t know you wanted to study whales.” I let that sit between us, the enormity of it, the two strangers who married and never once did this. “See. This is what I mean. We had a whole wedding and skipped the entire beginning.”
“So we’re doing the beginning now.”
“We’re doing the beginning now,” I agree, and my feet leave prints in the wet sand that the water erases behind us, and I let the metaphor exist without saying a word about it, because even I have limits.
We walk a while longer. The waves fill the pauses.
Then I stop, because there’s a question I couldn’t ask last night, not really, not with the storm and the ribbon and the adrenaline of a locked room doing half the talking for both of us.
“I need to ask you again,” I say. “And I need you to answer me without the museum. Without the lockdown, without the ribbon, without the adrenaline of a night neither of us planned. In the daylight. On flat ground. With no excuse for saying a thing you don’t mean.”
“Ask me.”
I stop walking. He stops beside me.
The ocean is gray and restless to our left, the sand cold under my feet, and the morning light is doing the thing morning light always does to his face, finding the jaw, the line of his neck, the open collar and the hollow at the base of his throat.
I look away. I make myself look back.
“Why did you marry me?”
He doesn’t answer right away. Not because he’s stalling.