21. Killian
— ? —
Killian
I put my phone in the nightstand drawer and left it there, and for three days my own hand betrayed me.
It kept going to my empty pocket, kept twitching toward the drawer, kept insisting there was something in there I needed.
There wasn’t. There was Sabrina on the couch with a book and the specifically-researched pregnancy snacks I’d stocked, and there was our child growing inside her, and there was nothing on any screen worth more than that.
I told myself so roughly forty times a day until some part of me started to believe it.
I channeled the restlessness into things I could build.
A symptom tracker she called a spreadsheet and I called an integrated tracking system with visualization capabilities, which made her laugh for the first time in weeks.
A pantry reorganized by nutrient density, every box labeled with folate content until she stood in the middle of the kitchen and said, gently, that it was a lot.
A pregnancy pillow I prototyped in the garage over a weekend, a U-shaped monstrosity with a salvaged heating element that Ivy immediately claimed, threw herself onto, and named Sir Cuddles, because he was cuddly and fancy and therefore a Sir.
Sabrina slept through the night wrapped around it, the first full night she’d had in weeks, and I lay awake beside her and watched her breathe and understood that I was doing the wrong thing correctly.
I was pouring the whole force of my attention into pregnancy the way I’d once poured it into work. Same engine. Different obsession.
Dr. Okafor said as much on Thursday.
I’d set the laptop on a paint can in the studio, closed the door, and met my therapist for the first time as a face in a window, silver-haired and unhurried and entirely unimpressed by my resume.
“Your hyperfocus has served you well professionally,” she said. “It’s cost you everything else.”
“I’m aware.”
“Tell me what you’ve done this week to repair things at home.”
“I made a pregnancy spreadsheet. And a custom pillow with adjustable firmness zones. And I reorganized the entire pantry by nutritional density, cross-referenced against common first-trimester medication interactions.”
She let a silence sit there, and I heard how it sounded.
“So you’re hyperfocusing on the pregnancy,” she said.
“When you say it like that it sounds bad.”
“It isn’t bad. It’s revealing. You’ve found a new thing to disappear into, and it happens to be a thing that looks like devotion, so no one’s going to stop you.
Including you.” She leaned toward the camera.
“Killian, the goal was never to point the same laser at a nicer target. Your wife doesn’t need a project manager for her cervix.
She needs a husband whose attention she can interrupt.
Those are opposite skills. One of them you’ve spent twenty years perfecting.
The other one you’ve spent twenty years avoiding, because it requires you to be bad at something in front of the people you love and not fix it by working harder. ”
I didn’t say anything. She’d walked straight into the room I kept locked.
“Here’s your homework,” she said. “A timer on your desk. A card taped where you’ll see it.
When that timer goes off, you stop, mid-thought, mid-sentence, mid-equation, and you get up and you go find your family.
Not when you reach a stopping point. There is no stopping point.
That’s the whole disorder. You stop when the timer says stop, whether your brain is ready or not.
That discomfort is the actual work. Everything else is avoidance with a spreadsheet. ”
I wrote the card that night. WHEN THE TIMER GOES OFF, GET UP. I taped it to the studio wall at eye level and set the timer and told myself this would be easy, because I was disciplined, because I was good at hard things.
It took four days to find out how wrong that was.
I’d promised Sabrina I’d take Ivy to the beach at four so she could rest. At three I opened a problem I’d been circling for months, an elegant, vicious little flaw in a control system that had nothing to do with anything that mattered, and my brain closed around it and wouldn’t open.
The timer went off. I heard it. I registered it the way you register a phone ringing in another room, a fact happening to someone else.
I’ll get up in a second, I thought, once I lock this piece down.
I looked at the card on the wall. WHEN THE TIMER GOES OFF, GET UP.
I thought, one more line, and I bent back over the screen, and the light in the studio windows went from gold to gray without my permission.
When I finally surfaced it was past six.
My neck ached. The beach was gone, the afternoon was gone, and when I came into the house Sabrina was standing at the kitchen sink with her back to me and Ivy was watching cartoons with the particular flatness of a kid who’d been told to wait and had waited and had stopped expecting.
“Daddy forgot,” Ivy said, not even accusing. Just reporting the weather.
“I didn’t forget.” The words were out before I understood how bad they were. “I lost track of-”
“That is the same thing, and you know it.”
The bottom fell out of me.
“I know how it looks-”
“It doesn’t look like anything.” Now she turned, and her face wasn’t angry, it was worse than angry, it was resigned, the exact expression I’d spent two years teaching her and had sworn I’d never earn again.
“It looks like Tuesday. It looks like every day of our marriage. You disappear into something more interesting than us and you come back out hours later surprised the world moved on without you. And I stand here and I think, right. There he is. That’s who he actually is, and the last few weeks were just a very good performance. ”
“That’s not-”
“Don’t tell me what it’s not.” Her voice cracked, and she pressed her lips together hard, and I watched her decide not to cry in front of Ivy. “I let myself start believing you. That was the mistake. That was my mistake, and I knew better.”
She walked past me down the hall, and the click of our bedroom door was soft and final.
I stood in the kitchen and didn’t chase her, because chasing her was for me, and this wasn’t about me. Ivy looked up from the couch.
“Are you sad, Daddy?”
“Yeah, ladybug. I messed up.”
“You could say sorry.”
“I’m going to. But sorry isn’t going to be enough this time, so I have to think about the part that comes after sorry.”
She considered this with total seriousness. “Then you should think really hard. You’re good at thinking really hard.”
I sat down on the floor of the hallway outside our closed bedroom door, and I didn’t open my laptop, and I didn’t build anything, and I didn’t optimize a single variable.
I just sat in the discomfort Okafor had promised me, the raw useless ache of having hurt someone and not being able to engineer my way out of it, and I stayed in it.
It was the hardest thing I’d done in weeks. It was, I understood, the actual work.
After a while I heard her moving. The door opened. She looked down at me sitting on the floor, a grown man folded up against the baseboard, and the resignation cracked open just far enough for me to get a hand in.
“I don’t have a fix,” I said. “I want you to know that’s on purpose.
I sat here for an hour and I didn’t let myself come up with a system or a gadget or a clever plan, because every time I’ve hurt you I’ve handed you a solution instead of just sitting in what I did, and I think the solution was always partly for me.
So. No solution. Just: I broke a promise to you and to Ivy today, and there’s no version where that’s okay, and I’m not going to make it smaller by explaining my brain to you again. ”
It took her a while to answer.
“You forgot the beach,” she said finally.
“I forgot the beach. There’s no better word for it than that one.”
“And instead of coming out here to tell me you’d sat on the floor for an hour thinking about it.”
“Yes.”
“That’s new.” She said it slowly, testing whether it would hold her weight. “The old you would’ve come out here with a color-coded apology and a plan to install a second alarm.”
“The old me made a really good second alarm,” I admitted. “This one syncs to three devices.”
A sound escaped her, half a laugh, entirely unwilling, and she put her hand over her mouth to stuff it back in. “Don’t. Don’t make me laugh, I’m furious with you.”
“I know. You’re allowed to be. I’m going to reset the timer tomorrow and I’m going to blow it again eventually, because Okafor says I will, and when I do you get to be furious again.
I’m just asking you to notice the part where I come out and sit in it instead of running.
That part’s real, even when the beach isn’t. ”
She looked at me for a long time. Then she stepped over my legs, held out her hand, and pulled me up off the floor.
“Take her tomorrow,” she said. “9 a.m. Before you open anything.”
“9 a.m. Before I open anything.”
***
My father came by on the Saturday with a bag of hardware and no explanation.
“The porch swing,” he said, when I opened the door. “You’ve had it four summers.”
“It’s fixed. I fixed it in June.”
“You fixed the bracket. The chain’s original.”
So we fixed the chain. He handed me lengths of it and I held things while he swore at them under his breath, and neither of us said a word for most of an hour, which is how the two of us have always gotten along best.
Sabrina was asleep upstairs. Ivy was at the main house being ruined by her grandmother.
The afternoon had gone the flat gold it goes in the last part of August, and my father worked with his sleeves rolled and his chinos somehow still uncreased, which I have never once managed and have privately investigated.
“Your mother says you’re seeing somebody,” he said, to the chain.
“A therapist, Dad.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said it like I’d joined a cult.”