Chapter 47
APRIL
AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR, I sign the petition.
It wouldn’t stop anything if I didn’t; it would only make this a contested divorce.
If I wanted to stop this, I would have to do that with Leo.
And I can’t force him to trust me, just like I couldn’t force him to look at me, stay with me, talk to me, spend one godforsaken evening at home with me.
I email my lawyer. I slide my wedding ring off my finger and place it in a ring box. Snap the box shut. Leo and I will both find rentals in Argyle, both raise our kids, and both watch the tan lines on our ring fingers begin to fade. Both, separately.
He trembled when he slid this ring onto my finger as friends and family looked on.
I remember the color in his cheeks, the intimacies he whispered as his hand later moved up my thigh for the garter.
Maybe he will do that all again with someone else.
Maybe his dad will be at his next wedding and our children will be in it.
And I will be across town, a memory of his.
It occurs to me that we never finished Jonathan’s book.
I grab it, compelled by something akin to denial.
I’ll go over there; I really shouldn’t.
I don’t text him in advance; I really should.
In the car, I check my face and put my key into the ignition, my foot on the gas, and I drive down 407 to the empty field where our house once stood. Soon, there will be a For Sale sign. Four acres, ready for an architect.
When Leo wrests open the door of his trailer, I stand before him again with a book in my hand. “I thought maybe…” I look down at Identity, the colorful mask with its black teardrop. He opens the door wider, in shorts and bare feet. The windows are open and the twinkle lights on.
“Are you busy?” I ask.
“Not really.”
I hold up the book. “Want to finish it?”
“Sure.”
We sit in the little living area, where Leo says, “Oh, the Realtor wanted to know whether she should text us together or separately.”
I shrug.
“I’ll tell her separately.”
He texts her, and then we settle in to finish the prisoner’s journey.
After twenty minutes of wondering whether I should still enjoy the flourishes of Leo’s voice, it’s my turn to read when a sex scene jumps out of nowhere.
My lungs grab for air. Leo lowers his copy of the book and studies me, and I feel myself redden.
There’s no divorce handbook that warned me not to read a novel with my almost-ex-husband.
Leo shuts his book. “Popcorn?”
Thank God. “Yes.”
He gets up, stubbing his toe on the leg of the table.
“You okay?”
He grimaces and limps it off. “Yeah.”
The trailer gets quiet as Leo coats a pan with oil, finds the butter and salt.
After a minute at the stove, he says, “I want to know how many times.”
I frown. “What?”
“With Cody.”
I cough in surprise, and kernels start to pop like gunfire.
I look down and say, “Only the time you saw.”
He shakes salt onto the popcorn. There has been a shift in him since Rico, a willingness for questions. I’ve wanted to tell him it was only that once, but I didn’t think it would matter to him. He never seemed to want to know anything about it beyond what he saw.
He looks at me and says, “Bygones.” But his turbulent eyes say anger, and desire, and that all things gone by remain.
“Yeah right.”
“What?”
“You don’t believe in bygones. You’re a historian.”
“Well, we can’t do anything about it now.”
“Can we not?”
“What would you have us do?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “You could forgive me.”
“But I can’t trust you. Think about what it would be like with us, really.
I would always wonder where you are and who you’re with and what you’re doing and if the new underwear in your drawer is for me or someone else.
We can’t live like that. Our kids would pick up on it, and we would all be miserable. ”
“I didn’t even want anything with him.”
Leo dumps the popcorn into a bowl and says, “I saw you, April. You weren’t trying to stop him.”
“You had already given up on us.”
“So it was my job to keep you from running into someone else’s arms?” He scoffs.
I rub my eyes and say, “No. But did we not have something worth fighting for?”
“You tell me. Because you didn’t fight for it. You just used another man to sabotage it.”
Well. We remember two different marriages. And if this is how he feels—if he’s so unwilling to entertain the possibility that anything else went wrong besides the minutes I spent with Cody—then he’s right. We couldn’t live like this.
“I signed the petition today,” I tell him. “We can start our settlement.”
He blinks, the popcorn bowl in his hand.
When he says nothing, I ask, “Did you turn off the stove?”
He looks over at it. “Yes.”
I pick up my copy of the book and stand. “I’ll go.”
But as I step forward to leave, I see Leo’s foot, bright red with blood.
I gasp and rush past him for some wet paper towels.
I kneel down quickly and press a paper towel to the gash on his toe, mumbling, “How did you not feel this?” I apply pressure until the bleeding stops, switching out the paper towel when the first one is soaked with blood.
Leo’s breath catches when I clean the crimson trails from the side of his foot and around the toes. “Sorry,” I say. “I know this hurts.”
“No.”
I look up at him, confused.
“No,” he repeats. “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
His gaze is intense. “You were right,” he says. “In my fear of being abandoned, I abandoned you.”
My hand is still on his foot, the paper towel pink with water and blood. I’ve wanted this acknowledgment for so long, but I assumed it would never come, because I’m a felon to my husband’s misdemeanor. And the question of forgiveness forces us to look at the wound.
Looking back down, I ask, “Do you have bandages?”
He stares at me. “Bathroom cabinet.”
I get them, return with antiseptic, and apply two bandages carefully across his cut.
“Thanks.” His voice is coarse.
I rise to throw away the trash, feeling his gaze follow me, and feeling the chasm between us—between forgiveness and trust, mercy and idiocy.
With some needed distance I ask, “Why then? Why when we were welcoming our second child and I needed you most?”
There is nothing left to lose. This is a postmortem.
Leo stares at his toe and says, “You didn’t need me, though. Not after Sadie’s birth, not during our isolation, and definitely not once Otto arrived. You needed space, you needed to do things yourself, you needed a new job and new friends, you needed me out of the way.”
I balk. “Of course I needed that sometimes. But it wasn’t either-or.”
He runs a hand down his face. “Well, that’s how it felt.”
We couldn’t see the fire from inside it, couldn’t articulate the subtle shifts of structure as they happened. And now we’re here with years of distance and disillusionment, colicky babies and unfaithfulness, divorce papers and wounds made on top of scars.
All of that, and I still don’t want to walk out of this trailer right now.
Leo nods toward Identity. “Should we just go ahead and finish it? We’re almost done. We could write to Jonathan together.” The intensity has not left his face.
So I sit back down, as does he, propping up his bandaged foot.
The bowl of popcorn is untouched on the counter.
I find the page where I left off, and I start to read again.
Leo watches me fumble through that same scene. The character’s skin is aflame. A hand eases below a waistband. Soft lips find their way to—
“We get it already,” I mumble, skipping to the next scene, my ears warming. It was a mistake to keep reading.
It is also a mistake to glance up at Leo now, conflict across his face. I wonder what he would do if I went to him. Crawled on top of him and ran my hands up his chest, filled with need for him.
I look back down at the page and manage to churn out words.
Then, the turn at the end of Jonathan’s book is so well done that it pulls even us away from our little barbed lives.
Our attention shifts as we trace the end of the prisoner’s journey, which lifts us out of this trailer and sets us down on hot pavement where a scarred inmate is standing, fresh out of Beaumont.
After decades of confinement, the prisoner goes straight to his mother’s house.
It’s been years since he has seen grass, and it’s greener than he remembered.
Color hurts him. He arrives home, saying Mama.
Saying I’m sorry. He is a killer; he will always have been a killer.
Safe with his mother at last, he grips his chest in the grief of freedom.
She is old and crippled now, but she holds him in the way only a mother can.
That night, he eats a home-cooked meal and vows to be a new man.
He means it with all his heart. But come sunrise, he opens the front door to the barrel of a gun.
There is a debt to settle, and the collectors don’t care about intentions.
The man’s last lines are spoken from the other side: My greatest enemy was the man I once was, and forgiveness has something in common with vengeance—it remembers everything.
Now the colors no longer hurt me, and the bullets cause no more pain.
But freedom is different than I ever could have dreamed.
Then, blank white pages.
I touch the book. “Oh, Jonathan.”
Leo and I sit in silence, understanding that total loss is a misnomer.
Every loss leaves a residue, and that’s what hurts—our grip on what little remains.
A paper towel damp with blood. Kids for whom our love has outlasted our love.
Memories that stalk us. And elegiac apologies cast through the air like embers, carried by the winds of each person’s need, searching for some place to land.