Chapter 23
CARTER
When the bottom dropped out — when I was on the floor of my apartment with my back against the couch and couldn’t remember how to breathe — I did the only thing I’d ever known how to do in a moment like that.
I called Mark. He’d been picking up the phone for me since I was fifteen years old, and he picked up now, on the second ring.
“Carter?”
Three seconds. That was all it took, and I could already hear Ames in his voice — the whole flat gray-sky quiet of it, the kitchen with the yellow light and the coffee that had been on the burner since five a.m. and Barbara’s crossword folded on the table.
Mark answered a phone the way he did everything, without hurry, like whatever it was would keep until he got there.
“Mark,” I said.
And then nothing. My throat closed like a fist, and I sat there with the Arch burning white through the window, and I could not make a single word come out.
He waited. He’s good at that. He is the only man I have ever known who is better at silence than Sloane Bennett, and he never charged me two hundred dollars an hour for it either.
“Take your time, son,” he said.
Son. He’d been calling me that from the very beginning, and I had never once let myself think about what it cost a man to say it to a kid who wasn’t his — how much easier it would have been to say Carter, to keep the word for his own, to not hand a piece of himself to a foster placement who’d been in four homes in three years and was statistically likely to be in a fifth by spring. He’d handed it over anyway.
First week. Pass the salt, son. Like it was nothing. Like I’d always been there.
I put the heel of my hand against my eyes.
“I did something,” I said. “I did something really bad, Mark.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a woman.”
“I know there’s a woman.” A creak — him lowering himself into the chair by the phone, the old one, the one Barbara kept threatening to reupholster.
“Barbara and I met her. And that boy. We drove four hours to a hockey game to meet them, if you’ll recall, and Barbara hasn’t shut up about the kid since.
She’s already knitting him something. Don’t tell him, it’s a surprise. ”
A sound came out of me that was trying to be a laugh and didn’t make it.
“I blew it up,” I said. “On purpose. She asked me —” My voice went and I dragged it back.
“Justin’s school sent a form. An emergency form.
And she asked me to be on it — to be one of the people who can pick him up, that’s all, that’s the whole thing — and I stood in her kitchen and I said the cruelest thing I have ever said to another human being in my life, and I did it to get her to throw me out.
And it worked. She threw me out. I made her do it with him asleep down the hall. ”
The line was quiet.
“What did you say to her?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me,” Mark said. “But you don’t have to.”
So I told him. All of it — the donor, the thing I’d said about her building a family with no door in it, the way I’d taken the bravest thing she’d ever done and called it hiding, because if it was her fear then it wasn’t mine.
I told him about the four days on the couch after the boy’s meltdown, and the five calls I let ring, and the way she’d driven downtown and stood in my living room and told me she came for an answer and I’d handed her that instead.
I told him about the form sitting open for eleven days and the thing that had come up out of me when she finally asked, which wasn’t fear, which was rage, which I still did not fully understand.
I told him I was seeing somebody. A psychologist. That I’d been going since late October and hadn’t told Jess what happened in the sessions, not once, because —
I stopped.
“Because what,” Mark said.
“Because she’d have been supportive.”
I heard him take that in. He’s quick, Mark. He always has been. He got there before I could explain it, the same way Sloane had, the same way I keep not being able to keep ahead of the people who actually see me.
“Ronnie Ferris,” he said quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Michaels is easy. You never hear a peep out of that one.” He exhaled through his nose. “I hated that man. You know that?
Sixteen years I’ve been sitting on it. The one time I met him, pickup at the regional tournament, he shook my hand and told me you were ‘no trouble,’ and I wanted to put him through a wall.
A grown man, proud of a boy for disappearing.
Proud that a fourteen-year-old had figured out how to take up no space.
A pause. “I never told you that because I didn’t want to put it on you. But every time I think of you as that boy — every time I hear that man’s words in my head — it still gets under my skin.”
I didn’t say anything. Outside, a barge moved down the black river, slow, its lights sliding across the water.
“Can I tell you something,” Mark said, “that I probably should’ve told you a long time ago?”
“Yeah.”
“That parking lot in Des Moines. When you were seventeen.”
Everything in me went still.
“I knew,” he said. “I knew you never went in. I sat in that truck and I watched you sit in that lobby for forty-five minutes through the glass and then come out and tell me it went fine, and I knew you were lying, and I let you, because I thought —” His voice, for the first time in the whole call, was not steady. “I thought if I pushed, you’d run.
“You were seventeen and you had one foot out the door of my house every single day for three years, son, and I made a decision that I would rather have you lying to me in my truck than telling the truth to somebody in another state.
“And I have wondered ever since if I got that wrong. If I should’ve said, Carter, I know, and I’m not going anywhere, get back in there.”
I was crying now. Openly. The way I had not let myself do since I was a small boy in a house whose address I don’t remember, and it did not feel like weakness and it did not feel like drowning. It felt like something breaking that had needed to break for a very long time.
“You didn’t get it wrong,” I said.
“I don’t know that.”
“You didn’t leave, Mark. That’s —” I wiped my face. “That’s the whole thing. Everybody left, and you didn’t, and I spent thirteen years waiting for it and you just — didn’t. You’re still picking up the phone at three in the morning.”
“It’s two, our time,” Mark said. “But yes.”
That laugh made it out, that time.
We talked for an hour. Maybe more.
Barbara got up at some point — I heard her come into the kitchen, heard Mark’s hand go over the receiver and the low murmur of him telling her it was me, heard her say is he all right, and Mark say he’s getting there, and I had to put the phone down on my knee for a second at that, because you can be a grown man and there is still no sound in the world like two people in a kitchen deciding to stay up because of you.
Then Mark came back, and he said the thing.
“You told me once,” he said, “that you didn’t want to walk back into that boy’s life until you’d gotten your soul right. Barbara said you called it that. She liked it. She said it sounded like me.”
“It is you,” I said. “You used to say it. On the tailgate. When I’d get in it with somebody at school.”
There was a long pause on the line.
“I did, didn’t I,” Mark said softly. “Get your soul right before you go back in the house.” Another pause. “You want to know what I meant by it? Because I don’t think you ever knew, and I think it matters now.”
“Tell me.”
“I never meant fix yourself first. I never meant get all the way better and then you’re allowed to come back.
” His voice was low and certain, the tailgate voice, the one that had walked me down off more ledges than I could count before I was old enough to shave.
“I meant don’t carry the fight into the house. That’s all.
Don’t take the thing that happened out there and swing it at the people in here who love you. Getting your soul right isn’t a thing you go off and finish alone, Carter. You can’t. Nobody can.
You get your soul right in the house. With the people. That’s the only place it’s ever gotten done, in the whole history of the world.”
I sat on my floor and I held the phone and I understood, finally, what I had done — not just to Jess, but with the whole architecture of my life. I’d taken the one piece of Mark I carried everywhere, the phrase I reached for like a compass, and I had gotten it exactly backwards.
I’d used get your soul right first as the most sophisticated leaving I’d ever engineered. A way to walk out the door that sounded, even to me, like growth.
Get your soul right first. Before I walk back in.
He’d never said first. I’d added that. A lifetime of practice at leaving, and I’d smuggled the whole thing into four words the best man I know had given me for the exact opposite purpose.
“I have to fix this,” I said.
“Probably,” Mark agreed. “How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Good,” Mark said. “That’s the right answer.
A man who knows exactly how he’s going to fix it usually hasn’t understood yet what he broke.
” A creak, him standing. “Go to your appointment Monday. Tell that psychologist everything you just told me — the whole thing, the part about me and the truck too. And then, when you actually know what you did, and not before, you go find that woman and you don’t hand her a speech.
You hand her the truth and you let her do whatever she wants with it.
She’s earned that. She sounds like she earned that a while ago. ”
“She did.”
“Then that’s the debt,” he said. “Now go to sleep, son. It’s late in two time zones.”
I didn’t go to sleep. But I lay down on my own bed for the first time in four days instead of the couch, which Sloane would later tell me was, in its own small way, a kind of coming home — choosing the bed, choosing the room where a person is supposed to rest instead of the one where he keeps watch.
I lay there in the dark and I did not plan the grand gesture, because I didn’t have one yet, and for once I did not try to manufacture one.
I just lay there and let it be true: that I loved her, that I loved the boy, that I had burned it down, and that the man in Ames who had never once left had just told me the fire was survivable if I was willing to walk back into the house and help put it out.
In the house. With the people.
I fell asleep before I meant to, and I did not dream about packing a bag.