18. Izzy
— ? —
Izzy
The ferry is cold and I hold his hand the whole crossing anyway.
We stand at the rail with the island shrinking behind us, my shoulder against his arm, his thumb moving slow over my knuckles. First time off the island together. First time back toward the city that watched us burn.
“You’re sure about this?” He says it to the water instead of me. “Your mother. The whole day. Me, sitting at that table.”
“She invited you herself.” I turn my face into the wind so he can’t see whatever it’s doing right now. “She doesn’t trust easily anymore, you know. Not after everything you put us through.”
“I know.” His thumb stops moving. “I’m the reason she stopped trusting.”
“Yeah, you are.” I squeeze his hand anyway. “But she invited you. So just try not to screw it up.”
The brownstone smells of roasting turkey and my childhood, and Helena opens the door before we even knock.
Dish towel over her shoulder, silver hair pinned, and for one second she and Wilson just look at each other across the threshold where, she told me later with some pride, she once promised to bury him in her goddamn garden if he ever made me cry again.
“Wilson.” She steps back and holds the door wide. “You’re on potatoes. Apron’s on the hook.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He crosses her threshold like a man entering a church, and she catches my eye behind his back. Whatever passes between us makes her mouth soften for just a second before she kills it with a nod toward the kitchen.
The hallway of photographs is still the hallway of photographs.
Last time he walked it, I watched from the living room, completely wrecked, while he touched the glass over my wedding face. This time I walk it beside him, and when he slows at that same frame, I let my shoulder rest against his arm. Neither of us says anything about it. We just keep walking.
James is in the kitchen stealing crescent rolls, and he goes still when he sees Wilson. Wilson goes still when he sees James.
The whole kitchen holds its breath while my cousin and my husband and the tabloid scandal that almost destroyed both of them stand there in the middle of the floor staring at each other.
“So.” James wipes his hand on his jeans and offers it. “The famous Wilson Carter.”
“The famous mystery man.” Wilson takes it.
“Last time I hugged this woman it trended for two days.” James pulls me in with one arm anyway, kissing the top of my head, eyes on Wilson the whole time. “I’m a married father of three, I coach youth soccer, and my wife got asked for a statement in the school pickup line. A statement, Wilson.”
“I’m sorry.” Wilson winces. “Genuinely. The circus was my fault. All of it was my fault.”
“Yeah, I read the interview.” James releases me and studies him, and the joke drains out of his face, and what’s left is older and harder. “The whole internet read that interview, man. My wife cried. I didn’t cry, because I was holding this family’s coat the day you didn’t show up to a funeral.”
The kitchen goes quiet. The oven ticks.
“You were there.” Wilson doesn’t flinch away from it. “At the graveside. I know you were, because I’ve heard about everyone who was.”
“I was there.” James crosses his arms. “So here’s where I’ve landed. You get the handshake. The hug you earn back like everybody else.”
“That’s fair.” Wilson nods slowly. “That’s more than fair.”
“Good talk.” James steals another roll and points it at him. “Now peel. Aunt Helena doesn’t play about the potatoes.”
Dinner is loud in a way this table hasn’t been since Dad.
James’s kids fight over the wishbone. Sarah, his wife, tells the school-pickup story with her own embellishments, and squeezes my hand under the table when she gets to the part where she said no comment.
Helena runs the table with a general’s calm, and Wilson peels, carries, pours, refills, and never once sits down until she tells him to.
She tells him to.
She points, and the point lands at the head of the table, the chair with the carved arms, the one she told me she set every Thanksgiving of my marriage, good china and all, for a man who never came.
Wilson looks at the chair. Then at her. His hand grips the back of it and doesn’t pull it out.
“Helena.” His voice has gone rough. “That’s not my seat to take.”
“It’s been set for you every year.” She lays the serving spoon down with a click. “Every year, Wilson, and every year I washed the plate and put it away clean. I’m tired of washing clean plates. Sit down and dirty one.”
He sits. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping, and under the table I find his knee. His hand comes down over mine and holds on hard. Helena watches the whole exchange over her glasses and says nothing except “James, the gravy is dying at your elbow.”
There’s a moment in the middle of all the noise, a wishbone cracking, the kids shrieking, James’s wife laughing, when I look down the table and catch Wilson not eating.
Just looking. Taking it all in.
The kids running around, the crowded plates, the steam rising off the turkey, my mother arguing with James about whether oyster stuffing is an abomination or a tradition.
His eyes are shining and he isn’t hiding it, and when he catches me catching him, he doesn’t look away.
This. He’s looking at this the way he used to look at term sheets. He finally figured out what the deal of a lifetime looks like.
The kitchen empties after pie the way kitchens do, everyone drifting toward the couch and the game. Helena hands me the dish towel with a look I’ve known my whole life, and then she leaves us alone in it. Deliberately. Terribly. Her footsteps very loud on her way out.
Wilson washes and I dry.
Elbow to elbow at my mother’s sink, the same choreography as the storm, and I’m hyper aware of every place our arms brush. The wanting sits down at the table behind us and waits, patient, the way it’s learned to.
His sleeves are rolled up past his elbows and his forearms are wet and I keep catching myself staring at his hands in the soapy water.
The way they move.
The care he’s taking with my mother’s good china.
I put down the towel.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. “There’s a thing in my bag for you.”
He glances over, hands still in the water. “Yeah? What is it?”
“I’ve been carrying it around for weeks.” I wipe my palms on my jeans because they’re suddenly sweating. “Trying to figure out the right time to give it to you. But there’s no right time, so I’m just going to do it now before I lose my nerve.”
He turns off the water and dries his hands slowly, watching my face. “Izzy, you’re shaking.”
“I know.” I take a breath. “Just… stay here. Don’t move.”
His hands go still in the water.
I bring the envelope back to the kitchen and set it on the counter between us. Legal-sized. Heavy. His name and mine typed on the front by a stranger who bills by the hour.
The color leaves his face. “Izzy, what is…”
“They’re not signed.” I flatten my palm on the envelope.
“They were never signed, Wilson. All these weeks at the bottom of my bag, through the island and the letters and the storm, and I couldn’t do it.
I told myself I was waiting for the right moment to be free.
That was a lie. I was waiting to see if you’d become someone I didn’t need to be free of. ”
He’s gripping the edge of the sink, dishwater dripping off his hands, absolutely still, a man afraid that moving will change the ending.
“Take the other end.” I slide the envelope toward him.
“Izzy.” His voice comes apart. “Are you…”
“Take the other end, Wilson.”
He dries his hands on his jeans, both of them shaking, and takes the other end of the envelope, and we look at each other over the paper that was supposed to finish us.
“Together,” I say. “On three.”
It doesn’t make much of a sound.
Just paper. Just a little rip down the middle.
But Wilson makes a sound that’s nothing like paper, this shaky exhale like he’s been holding his breath for months, and the two halves fall onto the counter and just lie there between us.
Then his forehead comes down to rest against mine. Careful, even now.
We stand in my mother’s kitchen breathing each other in over the torn ending of us. From the living room James yells at the television about a goddamn field goal. Helena laughs at whatever one of the kids just said. Everything ordinary keeps happening around us like the world didn’t just shift.
“Izzy. God.” He whispers it against my mouth.
“I’m here.” I whisper it back.
“I can’t believe we just did that.”
“I know.” I let out a shaky laugh. “Me neither.”
Neither of us moves. Neither of us needs to. Right here, forehead to forehead, the papers torn in half between us, I finally feel like I can breathe again.
“Come outside,” I whisper. “I need some fresh air. The whole house smells like turkey.”
The stoop is cold under the porch light.
He stands one step down from me, which puts us eye to eye, our breath fogging together in the dark, the street quiet and glittering, and I realize where we’re standing at the exact moment he does.
“Izzy.” He glances at the door behind me, the black paint, the brass knocker. “This is where…”
“I know where it is.” I step closer. “I heard you, that day. Through the door. I sat on the floor of that hallway and listened to you break, and I put my hand on the wood, and I made myself not open it.”
His breath stops. “You never told me that.”
“I’m telling you now.” My hands find the front of his coat. “I’ve been keeping a running list of everything I couldn’t say, and it’s gotten heavy, and I want to put one thing down tonight.”
“Put it down.” He’s barely breathing. “Whatever it is. Put it down on me.”
I kiss him again, and this time nobody says slow.
On the stoop where he cried against the door.
Under the light where I listened to him from the other side of the wood.
My hands in his coat and his arms coming around me slow, then not slow, one hand spread between my shoulder blades and the other cradling the back of my head, careful, like I’m the only thing that matters right now.