Chapter 18
JESS
The first call went unanswered on Friday night.
I told myself he was on the ice. I looked it up — the Blaze were home against Nashville — so of course he hadn’t picked up. I left a message. Something light. Hey. Justin’s asleep. He asked about you. Call me when you’re done.
The second call went unanswered Saturday morning.
The third went unanswered Saturday night, and by then I had stopped telling myself anything.
I have spent my entire adult life in rooms where people fall apart.
I’ve held the hands of women at three in the morning who were losing something they’d waited years for.
I’ve stood at the foot of a bed and said the words that changed a family forever, and then gone to the next room and been steady there too. I am not a person who panics.
I sat on the floor of my temporary kitchen in Clayton on Saturday night with my phone in my hand and my back against the dishwasher, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in six years, since a doctor in Chicago said congratulations and I realized there was nobody in the waiting room to tell.
The fourth call went unanswered Sunday.
The fifth went unanswered Sunday night, and after it went to voicemail I didn’t leave a message, because I had run out of things to say into a void that didn’t answer back.
“Is Carter coming over tonight?”
Justin asked it Saturday morning, over cereal, in exactly the tone he used to ask when dinner was.
“Not tonight, bug.”
“Okay,” he said, and went back to his cereal.
Halloween was that week. Carter had been going to take him around the block — that had been the plan for a month, back when the plan had a different shape — and now it was me and Anne and Finn dressed as a dragon, and Justin went as a hockey player and had the time of his life, blissfully, mercifully oblivious to the fact that the man whose number was on his jersey hadn’t called in four days.
He didn’t notice the missing person in the group. I felt it the whole night, like a phantom limb.
He asked again on Sunday, from the bathtub, shouting it through the door over the sound of the water.
And I stood in the steam in the hallway with a towel over my arm, and I heard myself answer him.
“Carter’s been very busy, sweetheart. I don’t know when he’s coming back. You just keep practicing your hockey moves.”
Justin accepted it completely and without follow-up, the way he accepted most of my explanations, and went back to whatever he was doing to the shampoo bottle.
I stayed where I was.
I don’t know when he’s coming back.
I had said it lightly. I had said it in the bright, easy, competent voice I use on the worst nights of other people’s lives — and it was, I realized, standing in my own hallway with a towel over my arm, the single most honest sentence I had spoken out loud in four days.
I had handed the truth to a six-year-old in a bathtub because I hadn’t had the nerve to go get it from the man it belonged to.
That was when I started thinking about closure.
Not the soft version. Not a careful text he could leave on read, not a slow fade, not a relationship allowed to trail off quietly like a subscription you forget to cancel. I meant the actual thing. An answer.
Out loud, in a room, from him — are you in this or are you gone — because I had spent my entire adult life on the principle that I would rather know than wonder, and I had been sitting in my kitchen for four days doing nothing but wonder.
Whatever this was, or had been, or had stopped being on Thursday night, I was going to get to the bottom of it.
And there was only one way to do that, because Carter Michaels could ignore a phone. He was proving it, five times over.
He could not ignore me standing in his living room.
Monday morning Justin came out for breakfast in his uniform sweater.
“Where’s your jersey?”
He shrugged. “I don’t feel like wearing it today.”
That was all. He said it the way you’d say you didn’t feel like eggs.
Then he got his backpack and zipped Carter Junior into the front pocket and stood by the door with his shoes on the wrong feet, waiting for me, and he did not say Carter’s name, and he did not ask when the next game was, and he ate his cereal.
I went into his room to get his gloves.
The jersey was folded on the shelf where I’d left it after washing it. He had walked right past it. He had chosen the sweater, and he’d done it without any drama at all — the way you stop doing a thing you’ve quietly decided has stopped being true.
That’s how fast it takes. Four days.
Four days, and my six-year-old had already begun the process of putting somebody away.
I stood in my son’s bedroom with a pair of mittens in my hand and I did not cry, because I had a shift in forty minutes and because I am not a woman who cries in bedrooms.
I got up. I went to work.
I dropped Justin at before-care at 7:15, and I worked a twelve-hour shift.
At the end of it, I sat in my car in the parking garage at Barnett and did not drive home.
I could have called again. I could have sent a text and given him the exit he was so clearly asking for — a message he could leave on read, a door he could close politely without either of us having to say out loud what was happening.
In the past, that’s exactly what I would have done. Let the man go his own way, wish him well, move on. I’d done it before. I was good at it.
But Carter and I had more between us than that. Whatever this was, it was worth confronting. It was worth driving downtown and finding out what could be salvaged, and what couldn’t.
So I made a plan, the way I make plans.
I called Anne.
“Can Justin spend the night?”
She knew about the unanswered calls — I’d told her Saturday, in the flat voice I use when I don’t want follow-up questions — and she didn’t make me explain a thing.
“Finn will be thrilled,” she said. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I have no idea.”
“Good,” Anne said. “That’s the right answer. Go.”
Carter lived in a building downtown, one of the converted warehouse ones near the river with the exposed brick and the security desk and the view of the Arch you paid a great deal of money for.
I knew the way. That was the thing I kept turning over as I drove — how easily I knew it. Right on Chouteau, left before the bridge, the parking garage with the low ceiling that made me duck instinctively every single time even though I was five foot six and driving a Volvo.
I knew the code for the residents’ door. I knew which of the two elevators stuck between four and five, and I knew that the man at the security desk on weeknights was named Dale and had a granddaughter starting at Mizzou.
I had all of it. Every detail of how to get to him.
And I had never left a single thing behind in that apartment.
Not a toothbrush. Not a hair tie. Not a phone charger, not a sweater, not one paperback facedown on his nightstand.
Six weeks of coming and going and I had packed myself out clean every time, the way you leave a hotel room, and I had told myself it was because of Justin and school nights and rounds, and standing at that elevator with my keys biting into my palm I finally let myself hear it for what it was.
We had both been so careful.
He’d been protecting himself from being left.
I’d been making sure I never took up any room.
I took the elevator up.
He opened the door in a gray T-shirt and sweats with three days of not-quite-beard on his jaw and the look of a man who had been asleep on his own couch and had stopped being embarrassed about it.
He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.
“Are you going to let me in,” I said, “or are we doing this in the hallway?”
He stepped back.
The apartment was dark except for a lamp, and there was a game on the television with the sound off, and two beer bottles on the coffee table and a third in the sink, which for a professional athlete in late October was practically a confession.
His phone was face-down beside the bottles.
I had a strong suspicion it had been face-down since Thursday.
I put my keys on the counter, which was the closest thing I had to planting a flag.
“Five calls,” I said.
“Jess—”
“Five. And a text on Saturday, which you read.” I turned to face him.
My voice was doing the thing it does in a delivery room when the numbers on the monitor start to slide — level, low, absolutely under control, and about four degrees colder than my actual body temperature.
“I want to be very clear that I’m not here because my feelings are hurt.
My feelings are extremely hurt. But that’s not why I drove down here. ”
“Then why did you.”
“Because I came for an answer, and I’m not leaving without one.”
He blinked.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the whole reason I’m standing in your living room. Four days of nothing is not an answer, Carter, it’s a fade, and I have too much respect for what we’ve been to let it end that way. So you’re going to tell me. Out loud, in this room. Are you in this, or are you done.”
He opened his mouth.
“Wait,” I said. “Before you answer. You should know exactly what it is you’re answering.”
He waited.
“I don’t come by myself. My hands were flat at my sides and I made them stay there.”I have never come by myself. Fortunately or unfortunately, there’s a six-year-old attached to me, and there always will be, and there is no version of this where you get one of us and not the other.
That’s the deal. That has been the deal since the first night you sat on my floor in Chicago and let him explain the rules of a card game to you for forty-five minutes. I made myself keep my voice level. “You don’t have to want it.
But you do have to choose, and you have to choose all of it, and you have to do it out loud.”
“Jess—”
“Because here’s what I will not do. And there it was, coming up out of me, and I let it.”I will not let my son spend one more week wondering why a man he loves stopped coming. He asked about you twice.