Chapter 21
CARTER
Iknew what the eight o’clock was for before I ever got in the car.
That’s the part I have never been able to explain to anybody.
Not to Bennett, not to Mark, not to the man in the mirror at four in the morning.
I knew. I’d known since the airport, since the text, since come at eight on Friday.
Right at the edge of Justin’s bedtime — long enough for me to see him, short enough that he’d be down soon after, so whatever the adults had to say could be said without him in the room.
The night before a Saturday with no school.
She had picked it on purpose, on the one night that a hard morning after wouldn’t cost him anything.
I knew, and I drove there anyway, with my hands at ten and two and my knuckles still scabbed over from Pittsburgh, and somewhere between Chouteau and Clayton the thing in my chest that had been circling for eleven days stopped circling and settled and got very, very still.
That’s how you know it’s about to happen. Not the noise. The quiet.
Ask any kid who ever heard a car door shut in a driveway at the wrong hour of the day.
Justin met me in the hallway, going about forty miles an hour.
“CARTER.”
I caught him. I got both arms under him and swung him up and he was heavier than he’d been in October, actually heavier, kids do that, they just take on weight and words and opinions when you’re not looking, and he grabbed my face in both cold hands and told me — in one unbroken breath — that Andy Martino had gotten a dog, that Gerald and Barry were fine, that he had watched the fight, and that he had watched it twice because his mom didn’t know about the second time.
“You creamed that guy,” he said, with tremendous respect.
“Bud—”
“Was it a good fight?”
I looked at him. Blaze jersey, gap where a tooth used to be. Somebody’s whole entire life, hanging in my hands.
“No,” I said. “It was a bad fight.”
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t mad at him.”
Justin frowned, working on it. Behind him, at the end of the hallway, Jess had come to stand in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over one shoulder and her arms folded, watching me hold her son.
“Justin,” she said. “Room. Twenty minutes.”
“But—”
“Twenty minutes, bug.”
He went. He went with an editorial sigh and a backward look and Carter Junior under his arm, and his door clicked shut.
“Give me a second,” Jess said, and disappeared down the hall after him.
I heard the low murmur of her voice through his door — the pajama negotiation, the teeth, the one more question he always had — and then a stretch of quiet, and then the soft click of his light going off.
She came back rubbing the heel of her hand against her sternum like something there ached.
And then it was the two of us in her kitchen with the windows going dark.
She’d made coffee. She hadn’t poured it.
“The winter forms are due tonight,” she said.
I want to tell you what happened next the way it actually happened, and not the way I have rearranged it a thousand times since to make myself look better.
She did not corner me. She didn’t raise her voice. She stood on the far side of that counter with her hands flat on it and she said, calmly, the way she probably talks to families in the worst hour of their lives:
“I’m going to ask you a direct question, and I need a direct answer, and whatever it is, we’ll be okay tonight. I promise you that. Nothing you say in the next five minutes ends us.”
“Jess.”
“Do you want to be on that form?”
And I stood there.
I stood there and I felt the whole thing coming up out of me — eleven days of it, four months of it, a whole lifetime of it — and it was not fear, that’s what nobody understands, it was not even close to fear.
It was rage.
“Why does it have to be a form,” I said.
She blinked. “What?”
“Why does it have to be a piece of paper, Jess. Why does it have to be a — a line, and a blank, and relationship to student,” and my voice was getting away from me and I could hear it and I could not stop it, “why does everything with you have to be documented, why does it have to be filed with a school?—”
“Because he’s six,” she said, “and there are rules about who can take him out of a building.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“That is exactly what this is.”
“No it isn’t. I laughed. It came out wrong.”It’s a test.
Come on. Six weeks of listings, and the drive-bys, and rate the porch out of ten — you’ve been building a runway, Jess, and this is where you finally ask me to land the plane, and if I don’t sign the form then you get to know, right?
Then you get your answer and you get to be the reasonable one, and I get to be the guy who?—”
“Stop.”
“—who couldn’t do it,” I said. “Which is what you’ve been waiting for.”
She went white.
“I have never,” she said, very quietly, “waited for you to fail. Not once.”
And she was right. I knew she was right. I knew it standing there, I knew it in my bones, and that’s the thing about the moment before you do something unforgivable — you’re not confused. You can see it perfectly.
There’s a door, and it’s open, and the whole rest of your life is on the other side of it, and you know, and you go the other way anyway, because the other way is the way you’ve always gone and it’s the only road you’ve ever learned how to walk.
“You know what I think?” I said.
“Carter—”
“I don’t think you just chose a donor. I think you chose anonymous. On purpose. Someone who could never show up, never be in the picture — so there’d be nobody who could ever leave you.”
The kitchen went completely silent.
“A number,” I said. “A profile. Height, eye color, college. A man who signed a piece of paper before he ever met you saying he would never, ever have to show up. Safe.” I couldn’t stop.
It was coming out of me like water out of a broken main.
“You built yourself a family with no door in it, Jess. On purpose. Because that way there’s nobody who can walk out of it.
Nobody who can wake up one morning and decide he’s done. You made yourself completely safe.”
She didn’t move.
“And now you want to cut a door,” I said, “and you want to put my name on it. You want the one guy in the world who has never stayed anywhere in his life to sign the line that says he’s the one who has to stay.
” My throat was closing. “Don’t ask me to be that.
Don’t — Jess. Don’t ask me to be the guy who has to stay.
You didn’t want one. You’ve never wanted one.
You just want to find out how bad it hurts when I go, so you can get it over with. ”
Here is what she did.
She reached up, slowly, and took the dish towel off her shoulder. She folded it. She set it on the counter and squared the edges of it, once, with two fingers.
Then she looked at me, and her eyes were completely dry.
“I was thirty-one,” she said. “I had a fellowship and a mortgage and I had wanted a child since I was nineteen years old, and I sat at a table in Chicago with a legal pad and I made the hardest decision of my life, alone, and I did it on purpose, and there has not been one single day in six years that I have regretted it.
Her voice never rose. It never even bent. “I didn’t do it because I was afraid of being left, Carter. I did it because I wanted him.
That’s all. That’s the entire reason. And you have known me for six months, and you just took the bravest thing I have ever done, and you called it hiding.”
“Jess—”
“Because you needed it to be about me,” she said. “Because if it’s my fear, it isn’t yours.”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out of it.
“You want to know the truly astonishing part? And now something did move in her face, finally, and it was so much worse than crying.”I would have said no. If you’d told me you weren’t ready — if you had said Jess, that form scares me, give me till the spring — I’d have said okay.
I’d have said take all the time you need. I would have held the door open for you, you idiot man, and you didn’t even ask.”
She picked up the coffee pot and put it back down without pouring anything.
“But you don’t want the door held,” she said. “You want it slammed. Because a door that’s open is something you have to keep choosing, every single day, and you would rather be thrown out of my house tonight than have to wake up tomorrow and choose it again.”
The refrigerator hummed.
Down the hall, very faintly, Justin was talking to himself, doing two voices, the way he did.
“So here,” Jess said. “Here’s your door.”
She walked past me. She opened it.
“Get out of my apartment.”
“Jess, please?—”
“Do not say my name.” Her hand was steady on the knob.
“You will not do this in front of my son. You will walk out of here quietly, and you will not come back, and tomorrow I am going to sit on his bed and explain to a six-year-old that it isn’t his fault, again, for the second time in six weeks — and I want you to think very hard, Carter, on the drive home, about the fact that I have to explain it to my son twice. ”
I stood in the hallway of that building for eleven minutes.
I know it was eleven because I checked. Once when the door shut in my face, and once when I finally made myself walk to the elevator.
In between, I stood with my hand flat on her door and my forehead against it.
And through two inches of hollow-core wood, I could hear her crying — the way people cry when they’ve already decided not to let you hear it.
She had a hand over her mouth. I know she did.
She was doing it into a dish towel, eight feet away, so her kid wouldn’t wake up.
And I stood there and I understood, with perfect and complete and useless clarity, that I had just walked into the only house I had ever wanted to live in and burned it to the ground on purpose, before anybody could ask me to leave.
Ronnie Ferris used to say I was easy.
You never hear a peep out of that one.
I got in my car. I drove to my apartment with the exposed brick and the view of the Arch that I had paid a great deal of money for, and I sat down on the floor in the dark with my back against the couch, and I did not cry, and I did not drink, and I did not call.
At three in the morning I picked up the phone and I called Ames, Iowa.
He answered on the second ring, the way he has answered every phone call I have made to him since I was fifteen years old.
“Carter?”
And I said, “Mark.”
And then I couldn’t say anything else at all.