Chapter 22
JESS
The door clicked shut behind him and I came apart against it.
I had held it together through the whole thing — through the cruel words and the folded dish towel and get out of my apartment — I had held my voice flat and my hands still and my chin exactly level, because that is what I do, that is the entire skill, I can stand at the foot of any bed on the worst night of anyone’s life and be the steady one.
And then the latch caught, and he was gone, and the steady one left with him.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth and I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor of the entryway, and I cried the way I have not cried since I was a girl — silently, viciously, into my own palm, my whole body shaking with the effort of keeping it quiet.
Because Justin was thirty feet away. That was the only thought I could hold. Not a sound. He cannot hear this. He has already lost too much tonight without hearing his mother on the floor.
God, I hated him. I hated Carter Michaels with an intensity that frightened me, sitting there on the cold floor — hated his beautiful stupid face and his whole troubled childhood and the relief I’d seen underneath the cruelty, the awful relief of a man who’d finally gotten the exit he’d been circling since October.
He had taken the single bravest thing I had ever done and called it hiding. He had made me throw him out of my home with my son asleep down the hall. He had walked into the one life I’d built carefully enough to let him into, and he had burned it down on purpose, and he had looked relieved.
And I loved him. That was the unbearable part. That was the part that had me on the floor with my hand jammed against my teeth.
I loved him so much it had no bottom, and it hadn’t gone anywhere, it hadn’t so much as flickered — it was just sitting there in my chest next to the hatred, the two of them side by side, refusing to cancel out. You cannot reason your way out of loving someone.
I have wished, many times, that you could. It would have made most of my life considerably easier.
Maddening. That was the word my mother would have used, back in Kansas City, in the kitchen, about my father.
That man is maddening. I had never understood it as a child — how you could be furious at someone and undone by them in the same breath, how the two could live in one body without tearing it apart.
I understood it now. I understood it perfectly, a grown woman on the floor of an apartment I had never meant to still be living in, crying into my own hand so my little boy wouldn’t wake.
I stayed down there until it passed. Then I got up, and I washed my face in the kitchen sink, and I checked on Justin — asleep, fine, Carter Junior jammed under his chin — and I went to bed.
And then I did not sleep.
I lay in the dark and listened to the radiators tick and the occasional car go by four floors down, and I ran the conversation again and again the way you run your tongue over a broken tooth — not because it helps, but because you can’t stop.
I kept arriving at the same place. Not the cruel thing he’d said.
I could survive the cruel thing he’d said; I have been called worse by patients’ husbands in the worst hour of their lives, and I know the difference between a thing a person believes and a thing a person reaches for because it’s sharp and it’s close.
What I couldn’t get past was the look on his face when he said it. Because it wasn’t hatred. It was almost relief. Like a man who has been holding his breath for four months and has finally, finally been allowed to let it out.
He had wanted the door slammed. I had told him that in his own kitchen three weeks ago and I had watched him make sure of it.
At some point the sky went from black to the flat gray that isn’t morning yet but has given up on being night, and I got up, because there is no version of me that can lie still and lose at the same time.
I made coffee I didn’t drink. I stood at the window.
The Blaze had a home game in two days and I found myself working through it before I caught myself — whether I’d have to explain why we weren’t going, whether Justin would ask, whether Barbara would call — and I made myself stop, because that was the old reflex, the one that solved everybody’s logistics so it didn’t have to feel anything.
I let myself feel it instead. It was worse. It’s always worse. That is why I had spent thirty years avoiding it.
Then I heard Justin’s door open down the hall, and the soft slap of bare feet, and I put my face back on.
“Is it a school day?”
He appeared in the kitchen doorway in his dinosaur pajamas with his hair sticking up and Carter Junior hanging from one hand by a wing, and he asked it the way he asked it every morning, and I said, “It’s Saturday, bug. No school,” and he nodded, satisfied, and climbed onto a stool.
I made him the eggs the way he liked them, which is to say destroyed. I watched him eat. He told me a long and structurally complicated story about a dream he’d had involving Andy Martino, a slide, and a dog that could talk but only about weather. I laughed in the right places.
He was fine. He was completely, ordinarily fine, and I understood that in about ninety seconds I was going to take that away from him, and that there was no version of the morning where I didn’t.
Because he was going to ask. Maybe not today.
But there was a home game in two days, and a man who called every single night, and a standing arrangement to wait for that man in the family hallway after, and the absence of all of that was going to arrive whether I narrated it or not.
And I had learned something, watching him fold that jersey onto a shelf back in October — I had learned exactly how fast my son could teach himself that a person was gone, and exactly how quietly, and I was not going to make him do that math alone in the dark the way somebody had once made Carter do it.
If it was going to hurt, I was going to be in the room.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I talk to you about something?”
Justin looked up from his eggs with immediate suspicion, because “can I talk to you about something” is a phrase that has never once preceded good news in the entire history of childhood.
“Am I in trouble?”
“No. No, baby. Nobody’s in trouble.” I came around the counter and sat on the stool next to him, so we were side by side instead of across, because I have sat across a lot of tables from a lot of people and I know which side of the table bad news comes from. “It’s about Carter.”
Something moved in his face. He put down his fork.
“Is he coming to the game?”
“No, bug. He’s not.”
“Is he sick?”
“No.” I took a breath. Here it was. “Carter and I had a grown-up disagreement. A big one. And because of it, he’s not going to be coming around for a while. Maybe not at all. I don’t know yet, and I’m not going to tell you I know, because you’re too smart for that and you’d catch me.”
Justin was very still.
“Did I do something?”
And there it was — the exact question, the one I had lain awake bracing for, delivered in the small flat voice of a kid who had already, in the half-second since I’d said the word disagreement, gone looking through his own conduct for the reason.
Six years old and his first instinct was to check whether it was his fault.
I wanted to find every adult who had ever taught a child to do that and set them on fire.
“No,” I said, and I said it with my whole chest, and I took his face in my hands so he had to look at me. “Justin. Listen to me. This is the most important part, so I need your eyes. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“You did nothing wrong. Nothing. Not one thing. This is between me and Carter, and it is about grown-up stuff that started a long, long time before he ever met you — before you were even born. Do you understand me? This is not because of you. This could never be because of you.”
His chin was doing the thing. The wobble.
“But he likes me,” he said, and it cracked right down the middle. “He likes me. He said I was his favorite guy.”
“You are his favorite guy.” My voice held.
I don’t know how. “That part is completely true. That part didn’t change and it isn’t going to change.
Sometimes two grown-ups can’t figure out how to be together even when there’s a kid in the middle they both think is the best kid there is.
It isn’t fair. It’s one of the most unfair things there is.
And you’re allowed to be really, really mad about it. ”
“I don’t want to be mad.” The tears came now, fat and silent, the terrible dignified way he cried when he was trying not to. “I want him to come back.”
“I know you do.”
“Can you make him?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t. That’s the hardest part of being the mom. There are some things I would give absolutely anything to be able to fix for you, and I can’t fix this one, and I’m not going to pretend I can.”
He climbed into my lap. He was too big for it and he did it anyway, folding himself down into me the way he hadn’t since he was three, and I wrapped both arms around all of him and Carter Junior too and I held on, and over the top of his head I looked out the window at the gray morning and I did not cry, because one of us had to not.
We sat like that for a while. The radiators ticked.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, bug.”
“Is Carter sad too?”
I closed my eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “I think Carter is very sad. I think Carter might be the saddest of all of us, actually, and I think it’s for reasons that are very old and very hard, and none of them are your fault either.”
“Good,” Justin said, with the pure uncomplicated savagery of a small child, and then, immediately, horrified at himself: “Not good. I didn’t mean good. I meant —” He screwed his face up, working at it. “I meant I don’t want to be the only one.”
And that — not the cruel thing in the kitchen, not the look of relief on Carter’s face, not the four unanswered days or the eleven-minute drive home over the bridge — that was the thing that finally got me.
My six-year-old, gutted, reaching in the middle of his own heartbreak for the comfort of knowing the person who hurt him was hurting too.
Not out of spite. Out of loneliness. Because being the only one who misses somebody is the worst feeling there is, and he already knew it, he had already learned it somewhere in his short life, and I hadn’t been able to protect him from learning it after all.
“You’re not the only one,” I managed. “I promise you that. You are not even a little bit the only one.”
We had a quiet day.
I did not turn on the game. I did not check my phone in front of him.
I called Anne and told her, in about six words, and she said oh, Jess in a way that told me Liam already knew something, which meant the whole team probably did, which meant Carter had gone to morning skate and stood in that locker room wearing the same face I’d seen in the penalty box in Pittsburgh, and I put that thought in a box and closed it because it was not mine to feel sorry about today.
We built a fort. We watched a movie about a panda. Justin narrated most of it. In the afternoon we walked to Forest Park because he asked to, and it was cold and bright and the paths were mostly empty, and we went to the pond, and Gerald was there.
Gerald, with his bent feather, presiding. And Barry, smaller, no feather, swimming in the good spot beside him.
Justin watched them a while. He didn’t say anything. He was thinking something six years old and enormous, and I let him think it, because I have learned, finally, when to shut up and let it come.
“Barry gets to stay,” Justin said finally.
“Yeah,” I said. “He does.”
“Even though he doesn’t have a bent feather. Gerald just… lets him.”
“That’s right.”
Justin nodded slowly, putting it away somewhere I couldn’t follow, working out some private arithmetic about who stays and who lets them and what makes a person the leader instead of a jerk.
Then he took my hand — he initiated it, which he almost never did anymore, he was at the age where I had to sneak my affection past his defenses — and he held it the whole way home, and we rode the rest of it in silence, and it was, against all odds, one of the better afternoons of that entire terrible year.
That night he let me read him three books instead of the usual two, and he didn’t ask about Carter again, and I sat on the edge of his bed after he’d gone under and I watched him sleep with Carter Junior jammed under his chin, and I thought:
Okay. We survived the telling. Whatever else happens, I did that part right. I was in the room.
I did not know, sitting there, that eight hundred miles away — or rather, twenty minutes across the river, in an apartment with a view of the Arch — a man was sitting on his own floor in the dark with his phone in his hand, having just heard his own foster father say the words get your soul right, son, and having finally, as a grown man, started to cry in a way he had refused to allow himself since he was a child.
I didn’t know that yet.
All I knew, that night, was that my son was asleep and safe and had been told the truth, and that I had done the one thing I had promised myself that fall I would never fail to do: I had not let him learn, alone and in silence, that the people you love can simply stop coming.
Whatever it cost me. And it was going to cost me.
I turned off his light.
I went to bed, and this time, finally, I slept.