Chapter Eight
Evan
I’VE BEEN WORKING AT Sam’s house for three weeks.
The gutter led to the porch railing, which led to a broken step on the back staircase, which led to repainting the garden shed.
Sam never asks me to do these things. He mentions them offhandedly, the same tone he’d use for a recommended reading, without making it an assignment.
“The shed has been peeling since spring,” he said last Saturday.
I drove to the hardware store in Annapolis, came back with primer and exterior paint in a color Amy told me Jean had chosen twenty years ago.
Sam won’t listen to apologies. He will let me fix what’s broken around his house, so I keep showing up with tools.
Penelope watches from inside the house sometimes.
I catch her in the kitchen window, or on the second-floor landing, and she doesn’t look away when I see her.
She doesn’t wave either. She watches. I don’t think she’s decided yet whether I’m a lost cause.
Today, she brings me water.
I’m on the porch step, sanding the new wood I cut to replace the broken tread.
She comes through the screen door with a glass of water and sets it on the railing.
She sits on the top step. Dave follows her out and settles at her feet.
Oscar appears from somewhere and claims a position between us, which is where Oscar always positions himself, at the center of any situation where authority might need asserting.
“Thank you,” I say, picking up the water.
She nods. She doesn’t leave.
The silence between us is different today. It isn’t the silence of the waiting room, where we sat with a magazine rack and everything we hadn’t said between us. It isn’t the silence of the driveway, where she looked at me with caulk on my shirt and decided I wasn’t worth speaking to yet.
This silence has room in it. I can tell because she sat down, which she hasn’t done before. Every other time she’s been near me at this house, she’s been standing, walking, or leaving. Sitting is a choice.
“Evan,” she says. “I want to hear about the cancer.”
I set down the sandpaper. “You know about the cancer.”
“I know the medical summary. You had osteosarcoma at eleven, surgery, and chemotherapy. The doctors told your parents you’d probably be infertile.
You told me those things before we got married.
I accepted them.” She picks up a piece of sawdust from the step and rolls it between her fingers. “I don’t know what it was like.”
Nobody has asked me that. Not directly, not like this.
My mother talks around it. My father talks around it by not talking at all other than his recent advice to open up to her.
The doctors talked about it in the vocabulary of survival rates and follow-up protocols.
Penelope is the first person to sit in front of me and ask what it was like.
I don’t have an answer prepared, because I’ve spent twenty-five years making sure I’d never need one.
“I was in the hospital for seven months,” I say. The words come sound wrong. They come out in the detached tone I use for every discussion of my medical history, the tone that keeps the information at arm’s length. I can hear it, and it’s not enough.
I try again. “I lost my hair in the third week. It came out on the pillow. My mom found it when she came in the morning. She tried to pick it up before I woke up, and I pretended to be asleep so she wouldn’t have to explain it.
” I stop. I have to force out the next words because I haven’t spoken them in twenty-five years.
“There was a kid in the room next to mine. Tyler. He was nine. He had a poster of the Orioles on his wall, and he’d quiz me on batting averages through the curtain when neither of us could sleep.
Cal Ripken was his favorite. He talked about going to Camden Yards when he got out. He didn’t make it.”
Penelope doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t touch me. She sits on the step with sawdust on her fingers and lets me find my way through it.
“The doctor told my parents about the effects of chemotherapy in the hallway. I could hear them through the door. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could hear the tone, and the tone said ‘unlikely’ in a way that meant ‘never.’ My mom was crying.
My dad was too. When they came back in the room, nobody told me what the doctor said. I was eleven. They were protecting me.”
“What did they tell you later?”
“My mom said the treatment might make it hard to have children. She said ‘might’ and ‘hard,’ but I could hear the words she wasn’t using.
By the time I was thirteen, I’d translated ‘might be hard’ into ‘impossible,’ and nobody corrected me, because nobody thought a thirteen-year-old needed a fertility intervention.
By the time I was old enough for the conversation to matter, I’d already decided I was broken.
My body was the reason my parents couldn’t look at each other anymore.
My body was the reason my mother cried in the hallway.
The infertility was just the most visible part of everything the cancer had ruined. ”
I stop and pick up the sandpaper. Then I put it down again. Oscar watches me from his position on the step. He tilts his head, studies me for two seconds, and apparently decides I remain irrelevant.
“I decided I caused their divorce,” I say. “I was eleven, and nobody told me otherwise in a way I could believe.”
“Evan...”
“When you told me you were pregnant, I didn’t hear good news.
I heard that everything I’d believed about myself since I was eleven was wrong.
If I could father a child, then I wasn’t broken.
If I wasn’t broken, then I’d spent twenty-five years building a life around a lie I told myself.
Every time I avoided the adoption conversation, every time I said ‘no rush,’ and every time I deflected, it was because the alternative was sitting in a room and admitting that my body was the problem I’d never dealt with. ”
She’s quiet for a long time. Dave sighs at her feet. Oscar has lost interest and is chewing on a piece of sandpaper he stole when I wasn’t looking.
“I didn’t know who I was if that thing wasn’t true,” I say. “You told me the truth, and I couldn’t hear it because hearing it meant rebuilding everything I’d ever believed about who I am.”
She frowns. “That’s rough but doesn’t make it okay.”
“I know.”
“You accused me of cheating., with our dog at your feet.” She looks at Dave like she’s worried that moment traumatized him.
“I know.”
She looks at me. I hold her gaze because looking away would be easier and I’m done choosing easier.
She’s searching for something, and I don’t know whether she finds it, because she doesn’t tell me.
She nods once. It doesn’t signal forgiveness or acceptance, just acknowledgment that I’ve said the thing I should have said months ago.
The thing I should have said before I asked, “Who?”
I want to tell her the rest, about the attorney call with Paul Ridley. The paternity petition sitting in my email, unfiled, a document I commissioned the morning after she left, before I’d eaten, called my doctor, or I’d done anything except convert my terror into legal paperwork. I open my mouth.
“The morning after you left, I called—”
I stop. The word hangs there. Called who, it asks. Called what.
“Called who?” she says.
“I should have told you all of this sooner,” I say.
The answer gives her part of the truth and hides the part that could cost me everything. She watches me for a long moment, then nods, but the nod is cooler than it was five minutes ago. She knows I’m not telling her everything.
She picks up the water glass and takes it inside. The screen door closes. I sit on the porch step with the sandpaper, the replaced tread, the sawdust, and a secret I’m still too afraid to admit.
I finish the step and clean up. The tools go in Sam’s garage and the sawdust in the trash. I drive home through Annapolis at dusk. In the rearview mirror, Penelope is on the porch with Oscar in her lap and Dave beside her. Sam opens the screen door, looks at her, and goes back inside.
She stays on the porch as I drive away.
Paul’s petition remains in my email, and the confession remains unspoken.