Chapter 18 #3
“So I’m not going to beg you,” I said. “I’m going to ask you to get help. Not a friend. Not me. A professional — someone who has done this before, with people who came up the way you did.”
He started to speak. I kept going.
“Not because you’re broken. Because what you’re carrying is heavy, and you have been carrying it by yourself since you were four years old.”
My voice was not steady anymore, and I let it not be.
“I can’t take it from you. Justin can’t. And you can’t put it down alone — you’ve been trying your entire life, Carter, and look where you’re standing.”
He didn’t say anything for a while.
Then: “Mark tried. When I was seventeen. He drove me to some guy’s office in Des Moines and I sat in the parking lot for forty-five minutes and told him I’d gone in.”
“Did he know?”
“Mark knows everything,” Carter said. “He never said a word about it. That’s worse.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, roughly, the way men do when they’ve decided to be angry at themselves instead of sad.
“I’ll go,” he said.
“Don’t say it because I’m standing here.”
“I’m not.” He looked up. “I’ll go. Give me —” He exhaled.
“There’s a psychologist the club has on contract this season. She’s not staff — she has her own practice, she just consults for us a few days a month. Performance stuff, mostly. Visualization, focus.” He rubbed his eyes. “Liam says she does the other kind too, if you ask her.
“They handed out her card in camp and I put it in a drawer and never looked at it again. I’ll call her tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“But Jess.” He caught my wrist — the first time he’d touched me, and his hand was warm and not entirely steady. “I need you to give me a little room. Not —” he saw my face and gripped harder, “—not that. Not four days of nothing, I’m not doing that again, I swear to God.
“I mean I don’t want to walk back into that kitchen and pick Justin up and put him on my shoulders and have him think it’s all fine, when I’m still —”
He stopped.
“I want to get my head right first,” he said. “My —”
He stopped again. He was looking at the floor.
“That’s not it,” he said. “That’s not the word.”
“Then what’s the word.”
“Mark had a thing he used to say.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “When I was a kid, and I’d get into it with somebody at school, he’d make me sit on the tailgate of his truck in the parking lot until I could talk without my hands shaking.
“And he’d say —” Carter’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “He’d say, I’m not mad at you, son. I just want you to get your soul right before you go back in that house.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I haven’t thought about that in fifteen years.” He looked up at me. His eyes were terrible.
“That’s what I mean, Jess. Not my head. There’s nothing wrong with my head — my head knew exactly what was happening on Thursday night. It stood in your hallway and told me it was a tantrum, and that he was six, and that he didn’t mean a word of it.
“And I got in my car anyway.”
He shook his head slowly.
“Understanding it has never once stopped me. Not in my entire life. So it isn’t my head that needs the work.”
His voice went.
“I want to get my soul right first. Before I walk back in there and pick him up and put him on my shoulders. He deserves the guy I’m going to be. Not the one who’s been sitting on this couch since Thursday.”
And that, I would think later — driving home over the Poplar Street Bridge with the heat blasting and my hands shaking on the wheel — that was the moment I should have understood what was coming.
Because it was a beautiful thing to say. It was the most honest thing he had ever said to me.
And it was also, I would realize much too late, a man asking permission to keep the door open just a crack.
I got halfway across the bridge before the question caught up with me.
Am I willing to do this?
Not love him. I’d been doing that for months, and it had never once required a decision.
I meant the rest of it. The waiting. The room. The not-asking.
Sitting on my hands in my own kitchen while a man went off to fix a thing I was not allowed to help him fix, on a timeline he hadn’t given me, with a six-year-old in the next room who had already started putting him away once.
I had stood in that apartment and told him he had to choose all of it, out loud.
And then he had asked me for time, and I had said yes — immediately, without hesitating — and I had not stopped for one second to ask myself whether I actually had any to give him.
The heat roared. My hands were shaking on the wheel.
I came off the bridge without an answer.
That should have told me something too.
I stopped at Anne’s at eleven. Justin was asleep on the trundle bed with Carter Junior under one arm and Finn snoring theatrically above him, and Anne stood in her doorway in a robe with her arms crossed and read my whole face in about a second and a half.
“Well?” she said.
“He’s going to get help.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She waited.
“Anne,” I said, “why does it feel like I just talked a man off a ledge by telling him the ledge is fine?”