24. Imogen
Imogen
Imove into Bex’s spare room with a duffel and a tote, the same two bags I hauled off the coast, so my whole life apparently fits in luggage now, and that’s a fun thing to learn about myself.
She doesn’t ask how long I’m staying. She clears a drawer, throws me a towel that predates most of my friendships, and points me at the spare room like I’ve slept there every night of my life.
By the second morning she’s got an operation running.
Ginger tea that stays down, saltines on the nightstand for when my stomach turns on me at six in the morning, my thesis notes spread across her kitchen table because she decided my apartment was too quiet to fall apart in alone, and she’s annoyingly right about that.
“You’re staring at the wall again,” she says, setting the tea by my elbow.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re brooding. They look alike, but the spine gives it away. Thinkers sit up. You’re folded like a deck chair.” She drops onto the far end of the couch and puts her feet up next to mine. “Eat a cracker. Thinking burns calories, allegedly.”
I eat the cracker. She doesn’t make me talk, which is the actual reason I’m here and not at my own place. Bex knows the difference between a silence that needs filling and one that’s holding a person together, and she leaves mine alone.
On the third night, with a documentary running that neither of us could summarize at gunpoint, she says the thing I’ve been circling for two weeks and couldn’t catch.
“Here’s how I see it.” She mutes the TV. “Love’s supposed to make your life bigger. More room, more air, more of you in it. If you come out the other side with less of your own life than you brought in, then whatever you were in, it wasn’t love. It was a cage with nicer lighting.”
“That’s heavy for a Friday.”
“You asked.”
“I didn’t ask. I’ve never once in my life asked.”
“You were working up to it. I just got there first.” She lifts a cracker off my stack without looking.
“He hid who he was to you for weeks, Genny. We’re not talking about a bad haircut he was embarrassed about or a surprise party.
He was hiding himself and you, and he was hiding who he was and how he connected to your dad.
That’s not a man making your world bigger.
That’s a man holding the only key, letting you believe the door was open the whole time. ”
And that’s the splinter, finally pulled out where I can see it.
It was never the sex. It wasn’t the rulebook, or even the leaving.
It’s that he knew. Every locked door, every hour after midnight I gave him thinking it was the two of us against that big cold house, he was holding the one piece I didn’t have, and he just kept holding it.
I lied too. I’ll carry that one to the grave, the job, the address, the whole story I fed my father.
But I lied blind. I had no idea I was teaching his protégé’s kid, no idea whose grandchild I’d be hauling around on a rush-hour train.
But he was the one who lied with the whole map open in front of him.
Two men, deciding what I’m allowed to know, for my own good. I spent my entire adult life clawing out from under that, ran so far from my father’s version of it that I landed right in the lap of the man he built. If it were anyone else’s life I’d find it hilarious.
The phone lights up on the arm of the couch. It’s Dad.
I look at it ringing, but I don’t send it down to voicemail, which surprises me more than it’ll surprise him. I answer.
“Imogen,” he greets warmly as if nothing happened. “I’ve been calling for days. I want you home for a while. Let me put you somewhere proper, away from all this mess. I’ll take care of the details. You won’t have to think about a single thing.”
And there it is. It’s being handled. My concern, not yours.
The same song Ashton sang me over a parked car at the coast, dressed up warmer.
Two men, two voices, one cage in different wallpaper, and for the first time I can hear it’s the same cage, because one of them learned the trade from the other.
“No, Dad.”
“Be reasonable, sweetheart”
“You kept me away from your whole world to protect me, and I spent years keeping my life from you so I’d have something that was mine.
Between the two of us, we did such a good job that I walked straight into the one house you’d have burned down first. Nobody even had to try.
” I keep my voice from raising. “I’m not coming home to be handled, Dad.
I love you. I’m hanging up before one of us says the thing we can’t take back. ”
I end it. Bex says nothing. She tops up my tea and lets me sit in the quiet, which is the whole reason I’m on her couch and not staring down my own brick wall six blocks east.
“That,” she says after a minute, “was deeply attractive. You hanging up on a man with a building named after him. Genuinely. Do more of that.”
I chuckle. “I’ll see what I can do.”
The buzzer goes about an hour later.
Bex crosses to the intercom, listens, and comes back to lean in the doorway of the spare room with her arms folded and her brows set in an angry line.
“It’s him. Downstairs.” She tips her head at the intercom. “Looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. Want me to tell him to leave?”
I should say the word. Every smart thing I’ve got lines up neatly to say the word.
“Let him up.”
Bex breathes out through her nose and shakes her head. “You’re lucky you’re carrying my future godchild. If he makes you cry, the lamp goes into his head.”
“You can throw the lamp either way. It’s hideous.”
“It’s a beautiful lamp, but your taste is a tragedy.” She buzzes him up, then drifts to the kitchen, near enough to hear everything, but far enough to pretend she’s busy.
Ashton fills the doorway, and I make myself look at him head-on instead of away, because looking away would tell him too much.
He’s got two days of stubble and a rumpled coat and shadows under his eyes, like sleep gave up on him around the same time it gave up on me.
And here’s what my body does anyway, after the slap, after three nights of crackers and grief, it lights up the second I see him, that low pull in my stomach that’s never once checked with my brain before going off. I’d cut the wire if I could find it.
He stops just inside the door. There’s none of the usual control on him tonight.
“I can’t take the lies back.” It comes out scraped down to nothing, no greeting, nothing before it.
“I went to your apartment first. You weren’t there.
A neighbor of yours threatened to call the police on me, and then took pity and told me you’d been staying here, so if anyone asks, I was never on your floor for the second time at two a.m. looking deranged.
” He doesn’t smile. “I drove over with the words that were supposed to fix this, and somewhere on the way I worked out there aren’t any.
So I’m not going to stand here and pretend to search for them.
I lied, Imogen. I knew exactly who you were from the first night, and I didn’t tell you.
I’m sorry. That’s the whole of it. I don’t have better words, and you shouldn’t trust me if I did. ”
I don’t say anything. I learned that one from him, what the quiet does to a man, and I let it work on him for a change.
His jaw tightens. “I’m a hard man to be around. You know that better than anyone in this city does now.”
“I’d picked up on it,” I tell him, because I can’t hold his eyes that long without my mouth getting involved. “There were clues. The laminating, mostly.”
His mouth moves at the corner, the first ghost of the one, but then he puts it away, because the situation is too serious for smiling.
“I don’t know how to be a man who doesn’t manage the people he loves.
” He says loves like it’s a normal word, not a grenade, and it gets under my ribs before I can stop it.
“It’s the only way I was ever taught to hold onto anything.
I control things because the other option is trusting someone to stay without me setting it up first, and that scares the hell out of me.
So I did it to you. I knew I was doing it the whole time, too.
That’s the part I can’t make smaller than it is. ”
He pulls a breath, and it catches on the way in.
“But I want to learn how to stop. I mean that more than I’ve meant anything in a long time.” His eyes stay on me. “And if you let me in, even a little, even just enough to keep standing in this doorway, I want to start with the truth. All of it.”
Behind me, very quietly, I hear Bex put the lamp back down.