Chapter 20 #2
“I took her bag during the first attack and put my jacket over her shoulders, and she had it off again before I’d straightened up. I stood in front of her when the shooting crossed the yard. She caught my sleeve twice. I never touched her body.”
“Did you want to.”
“No.” I kept my hands open on the table and let the refusal stand without asking her to trust it.
“Did you ever get hard around her. Did you fantasize about her.”
“No. Neither.” I didn’t add that she was the only woman I wanted. Love spoken here would have sounded like another defense.
“Did you compare us?”
The easy answer was no, because nothing in me ever moved toward Jess. She had asked something else. “I compared how you were reacting to how I’d told her you’d react. I watched to see whether you were doing what I’d predicted. I didn’t compare your bodies and I never wanted hers.”
“Did you use not wanting her to make yourself feel faithful while I believed you were fucking her?”
“Yes. I treated it as something that kept the marriage intact on my side, where you couldn’t see it and it cost me nothing.” My mouth went dry around the answer, but I didn’t reach for the water and make her wait.
“Write the whole thing,” she said to Mia. “No kiss, no sexual contact, no nudity, no arousal, no fantasy, no desire, no sex. Then write that he used those facts to go on believing I was still his.”
Mia read it back. Eden approved it and picked the pencil up again. “The porch. All of it. Where she stood, what she said, what you expected me to do. If you hide behind the words we reviewed the disclosure, I take the recorder and you can explain to Mia why this ended.”
I gave it to her whole. Where to stand once the door opened.
What to say and in what order. Her hand on her stomach before the word, so the claim landed before there was time to argue with it.
Accept the water if it’s offered, because refusing that would look hostile.
The six questions I’d written answers for, every one of which she asked.
“Did you tell her what I’d look like?”
“That you’d look at me before you believed her. That you’d try not to cry in front of a stranger. That the anger would come after.”
“Did you rehearse what happened if I collapsed?”
“I told her to call Leah and get out of the way. I intended to help you without breaking the story.”
Mia’s pen stopped. Eden had both hands flat on the table, her thumb rubbing once over the same strip of wood. “You planned to take care of me as the man leaving me.”
“And you thought that would work.”
“I thought medication would keep the physical part manageable while the rest of the plan went on.”
“You believed my inhaler would make your cruelty safe.”
“Yes.”
Eden looked at Mia and lifted one finger. Mia found the line, read it back into the record once, and then, at Eden’s nod, read it again. Hearing a stranger say it twice in a flat voice took away the last place I had to stand.
The performances went faster, because she had lived those.
She asked what I watched from the doorway on the first day and I said her breathing, her hands, whether she reached for the pouch.
She asked about the jacket and I said I put it over Jess’s shoulders where she would see it, that Jess had it off again almost at once every time, and that I knew she’d recognized the seam she repaired.
“What did you feel.”
“I wanted to take it off her and cross the room. I also wanted the witnesses. I chose the witnesses.”
“Outside, after I threatened you.”
“I wanted you back in the house. I let you walk away so it would look right. Nothing required it. I wanted the lie more than I wanted your pain to stop.”
Her hand came off the table and rested near the knife, and stayed there, and then went back to the page.
She took the appointment apart the same way, and when I called it a proof run she made me say instead that I drove Jess past my wife so men in another state would believe I cared about a child who did not exist.
“What did you feel when Jax held you.”
“That I could break his hold before he could stop me and end the whole thing in the yard.”
“What did you choose.”
“The truck.”
“And when she told you to turn around.”
“I passed the county turn.”
“Was it worth it, when the source confirmed?”
“Part of me thought so. I treated a shifted threat as proof I could explain the cost later.”
“Did you think I’d put the ring back on after you explained?”
“Yes. Not that week. But yes.”
“Before the apology on my porch, had you ever pictured it staying off?”
“Not one time in six days.”
She wrote He expected the ring back under the heading and underlined it twice. She drank some water. Mia stopped writing until the glass went down. Nobody asked her whether she was all right. “Saturday night,” she said. “What did you feel.”
“I wanted you.” The truth was too small for what I had taken, and Eden’s face told me she knew it before she answered.
“Not enough.” She didn’t raise her voice or look away, and there was nothing in the room I could use to argue with her.
“I knew it might be the last time you’d consent to anything with me. I used the fact that you didn’t know, and I took another night.”
“Did you consider telling me while we were in that bed?”
“Three times. When you asked me home early Sunday. When you said you loved me. When you put my hand on your stomach and said we’d finish the chess game.”
Her eyes went bright and her voice stayed exactly where it was. “You had your hand on my stomach while you were eight weeks into somebody else’s.”
“Yes.”
“Did you think about her while you were inside me?”
“I thought about the porch and what time she’d arrive. I didn’t want her and I didn’t picture her. I thought about what I was going to do to you, and I decided not to stop.”
“What future did you have? Not the scheme. Us.”
“I find you after the trail commits, show you there was no affair, put the money back. You hate me, you keep me out of the bedroom, you threaten divorce. I never once pictured you taking me off your medical forms, putting the house in your name, or refusing to call me your husband.”
“Why not.”
“Because I’d been faithful and I loved you, and I believed those two private facts kept part of the marriage alive on my side while I made you believe the opposite.”
“You expected me to stay emotionally yours while you temporarily destroyed my life.”
“Yes.”
“Say it without temporarily.”
“I expected you to stay mine while I destroyed your life and chose when you were allowed to learn it had been a lie.” The plain words left no route back to faithful or temporary.
She sat back. The chair took her weight and the room was quiet except for the fan in the recorder. “How long were you willing to let me hate myself?”
Every deadline I’d set had moved, so there was no number to give her. “Until the route closed. Except I kept extending the route every time the result didn’t feel big enough to cover what it cost. There was no point at which your pain by itself would have made me stop.”
Neither of them said anything. Eden went back through the pages from the first to the last, checking her marks. “Is there any financial fact you haven’t told me?” she said. “Any account, any property, any money, anywhere.”
“One.” The word felt too small for the fact I had kept from her. Mia’s pen came up off the page. Eden didn’t move at all.
“Say it.” Eden kept both hands where they were, but the knife beside her made the order feel like more than a question.
“Eleven acres and a fallen-down barn on the far side of Hadley Creek, off the gravel by the grain elevator. I bought it at twenty-four with pipeline money. My name only, from before I met you. It’s never been on anything we filed because it’s never earned a dollar, and I pay the taxes out of the cash every January. ”
For a moment the heat in that room seemed to press against every inch of me. “Six years,” Eden said. “I have known you six years and been married to you for five, and you own land.”
“Why did I not know that.”
“Because I never had to tell you.”
“That’s not an answer, and you know it isn’t, because you’ve been giving me real ones for two hours.”
I looked at the recorder’s light, which was cowardice, and then made myself look at her. “Because I kept one thing in my own name that I could put you on if I ever had to move you somewhere I owned.”
Eden closed her eyes. When she opened them she wrote for a while, and I couldn’t read it upside down and didn’t try. “What are you going to do with it.”
“It’s listed.”
“Listed for what.”
“I’ll tell Mia when it isn’t something I can hold over you.”
“You don’t get to make it a surprise.”
“I’m going to make it not an offer. If I tell you today, you’ll spend the rest of the summer deciding what it means with me standing in front of you while you do it. Mia gets the paperwork when there’s paperwork.”
“Note it,” Eden said to Mia. “Location, acreage, the date he bought it, and that it came out at the end of the second hour, after a question he could have answered no to.”
Mia wrote it and read it back. “Anything else. Any account, any property, any money, anywhere.”
“That was the last of it.”
“If something surfaces.”
“It goes to Mia before I speak to anybody, and she asks whether you want it.”
“Do you understand I can put every word of this into a divorce filing, a club complaint, a civil claim, or a police report.”
“Do you understand that answering doesn’t buy you another meeting.”
“Yes.”
She signed the bottom of her own list to show the meeting happened, not to say she believed a word of it.
Mia sealed the pages into separate envelopes and the red light went out.
Eden stood and picked up the knife. “You thought the new tires were safe,” she said. “They’re not. Neither is the Harley.”
She went out past my lawyer with Mia behind her and Leah behind Mia, and none of the three of them looked back, and I sat in the heat with a dark recorder and eleven acres I had never once mentioned to my wife.