CHAPTER 12
JONAS
She’s been gone four days when I finally go to the house.
The lake house — Layne’s, mine-less, hers in a way that no document of mine touches.
Margot’s office sent papers Friday: paternity acknowledgment, a proposed visitation framework, a trust structure for the baby with my name already on it, drafted so fairly that my lawyers called it “unusually constructive,” which is lawyers for we can’t find anything to fight.
That should have been a relief. It wasn’t. It read like a door being closed neatly, by a professional, from the other side.
I come to Riverside because the house is mine and I’ve never seen it — my house, our house, the one I apparently bought with a blindfold and a grand gesture.
Mrs. Doyle lets me in. She’s civil. That’s the word for it.
She serves me coffee in the kitchen and stands between me and the rest of the house like a border.
“I’ll be upstairs if you need anything, Mr. Palmer.”
Not Jonas. She’s called me Jonas for three years.
I have the footage to prove it. Today it’s Mr. Palmer, and the coffee is the guest coffee, and I drink it alone at a counter where someone has left the faintest ring-shaped ghost on the granite, a place where a mug has sat so many mornings it wore the finish.
Her mug. It’s gone. Mine is here.
I make coffee in it. The machine is Italian and bossy and I fight it for ten minutes before Marcus texts from the car asking if I need anything, and I text back a photo of the machine with a question mark, and he replies with a single thumbs-down, which is Marcus for you’re on your own, sir.
When I finally get a cup out of it, it’s terrible.
Burnt, too strong. I drink all of it, standing up, out of a mug that says DAD LOADING, and it’s the first thing in this house that feels like mine.
I find it in the cupboard, third shelf, and I stand there holding it like an artifact, which is what it is. Black, chipped, white letters: DAD LOADING… PLEASE WAIT. I brought it to the hospital myself, apparently. She brought it. I called it cute.
I don’t remember it. That’s the thing I keep expecting to change and it doesn’t.
The doctors said familiarity might do it — the house, the objects, the smell of the life — and so I walk the rooms one by one like a buyer, and the rooms are warm and beautiful and hers, every inch of them hers, and nothing in them is mine except the traces she couldn’t pack.
A man’s coat in the hall closet, my size, my taste, worn soft at the cuffs.
A pair of my running shoes under the bench, muddy.
In the study, a green glass lamp on a desk covered in her drawings, and I stand there longer than I should, because I’ve seen this lamp before — in my head, at three in the morning, weeks ago, with her hand marking up a plan in the light of it.
It’s real. The fragment was real. It’s this desk, this lamp, this house.
I sit down at the desk slowly.
There’s a calendar on the wall, an actual paper calendar, her handwriting in the squares, scans and site visits and something every Sunday that just says PANCAKES in block letters with a slash through it, and in the first week of April, the week the baby is due, there’s a note across the whole week in my handwriting.
My handwriting. I recognize it instantly, alien and intimate at once.
NOTHING AFTER FIVE ONCE PEANUT ARRIVES. YOU PROMISED.
Under it, in hers: Witnessed. Notarized. Engraved on your tombstone if you break it.
I read it a dozen times. The man who wrote that scheduled his whole empire around a baby he called Peanut. He wrote it in capital letters, on paper, like a vow. And I sit in his chair, in his house, at her desk, and I cannot find him anywhere.
I check the bedroom last before the nursery, and I make it quick.
Her closet is empty and mine is full, which tells the whole story of the marriage in one glance — she left me everything that was mine and took everything that was hers, down to the shirts.
One of my shirts is gone. I know this only because the space between hangers is wider than the rest, a gap with her fingerprints all over it.
I hope it’s soft. I hope she sleeps in it.
I stand in my own closet hoping a woman I can’t remember is wearing my shirt to bed, knowing exactly how pathetic that is, hoping it anyway.
The fridge is worse. The fridge is a desolation of bare stainless, every magnet stripped, and the only thing left is one oblong magnet shaped like a bagel, holding nothing.
I remember — no. I don’t remember. I know, from the hospital album, that the fridge used to carry the ultrasound pictures.
They’re at the lake now, on her fridge. The baby went from my refrigerator door to hers, and the distance between those two doors is the distance I put there myself, one decision at a time, while telling myself I was being reasonable.
In the drawer, because drawers are where the truth lives, I find the lists.
Baby names. Dozens of them, on the backs of receipts, on hotel stationery, on the margin of a board agenda, mine and hers alternating, and they get progressively stupider in a way that tells me everything about how happy we were — Agamemnon Palmer.
Rutherford. She’ll be a CEO with a name like Rutherford.
Hers: You’re not allowed to pick anymore.
Mine: SWORD. Palmer, Sword. Hers: Divorcing you.
Mine, under it, smaller: Elodie. Still Elodie. It was always Elodie.
I have to put the list down. I look out the window at the lake for a while until my eyes behave.
The nursery is half-stripped. The crib is gone — I knew that, Tomás signed the van paperwork at the office, crib travels in pieces like a criminal, I signed it without understanding and now I understand — but the walls are still there, and the walls are what get me.
Someone painted them badly. A mural, half-finished: a tree, some kind of fox under it, hills going crooked toward the window, and the brushwork is enthusiastic and terrible and obviously mine.
There’s a drop cloth still taped down. There’s paint on the window latch.
Whoever painted this was not a man who paints.
He was a man who wanted his daughter’s room to be made by him.
On the windowsill, in pencil, small: He insists the fox looks fine. It does not look fine. — L
I laugh. It comes out of me rusted, and it turns into something else halfway, and I sit down on the drop cloth in my three-thousand-dollar suit in the half-stripped nursery, and that’s where Mrs. Doyle finds me twenty minutes later.
She doesn’t say anything kind, God bless her.
She brings me tea and sets it down and says, “There’s footage.
She kept everything. The study, the drive on the left.
Before you ask.” She pauses in the doorway, and for a moment the border softens.
“She watched that one every few days, near the end. With tea. Same chair you’re dripping on.
” A beat. “Don’t you dare break anything in this house. ”
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with the fox that does not look fine.
The footage is on a hard drive in the study, labeled in her hand: NURSERY CAM (BAD PAINTING). I watch it on the desk under the green lamp, in the dark, and here’s what it shows:
Me. In old sweats and a t-shirt with paint in my hair, painting a mural with the doomed confidence of a man who’s never painted anything, and Layne behind the camera, laughing.
Not the careful laugh I’ve heard for six weeks.
The real one, the one from the Asheville clip, the one with the whole room in it.
On the video I step back from the wall, satisfied, and say, “It’s a fox. ”
“It’s a potato with ears.”
“She’ll love it. She has my taste.”
“She has my eyesight, poor thing, she’s going to be asking for glasses at three.”
And then, on the video, she comes into frame and stands behind me and puts her hand on the back of my neck, easy, absent, the touch of a woman who touches this man a hundred times a day, and I lean back into it without looking, and I say — I hear my own voice say it, quiet, private, not meant for any camera:
“We’re really doing this.”
And the smell hits me. Paint. I’m sitting in the dark in my study and I smell fresh paint, sharp and chemical and there, and under it cinnamon, and I feel her hand on the back of my neck, my neck, now, not the video, and for one second — one whole second — the wall between me and the missing years isn’t a wall at all, it’s a door, and I’m standing in it.
Then it’s gone.
I come back to myself with my face wet and the video still playing, and the man on the screen has started on the hills, humming, and the woman behind the camera says, “You’re a disaster,” in a voice so full that the word lands as its opposite.
I don’t turn off the drive. I watch all of it. The bad painting, the arguments about the fox’s tail, the dance she makes me do when the second coat goes on. Two hours of a man I don’t remember being, happy in a way I don’t remember how to be.
Renn warned me: fragments aren’t recovery, and grief isn’t memory.
Fine. Whatever this is, then. I sit in the dark and let it take me apart, because the alternative — the version where I keep not feeling it — is the thing that emptied my kitchen and drove my wife to a lake with my ring in her history and her own ring in my fist.
When it’s over I call Renn’s service and leave a message, and then I sit there and do something I haven’t done in all my missing years, on any tape, in any photo.
I text her.
I write: I saw the fox. I delete it. I write: The calendar says I promised. I delete it. I write and delete six versions, every one of them an attempt to open a door I locked myself, and what I finally send, at one in the morning, to a woman at a lake who owes me nothing, is:
You were right about the curb cut. I found the drawings.
It’s the only true sentence I can send that isn’t a demand. Three dots appear, then vanish, then appear, and my whole chest is in my throat waiting, and then the dots vanish for good.
No answer comes. I put the phone down and sit in the kitchen until the sky starts to thin, and I don’t begrudge her the silence.
I earned the silence.
I gave the ring to Marcus for the hospital safe. I couldn’t hold it. It weighed more than the company.
I water the herbs on the kitchen windowsill before I go. They’re hers, half-dead, stubbornly green in the middle. I have no idea what they need. I give them water anyway and wipe the ring-shaped ghost on the granite with my thumb. It doesn’t come off. I’m glad.
I lock up the house myself, after midnight.
Mrs. Doyle has gone home. I stand in the hall with my coat on and I look back at the kitchen, the mug, the calendar, the ghost of her coffee ring on the granite, and I say it out loud to the empty house, because an empty house is the only thing I can say it to.
“I don’t know how to be him.”
The house doesn’t answer. It’s her house. It’s still waiting for her.
So, apparently, am I.