Chapter 15
CADE
I make it back to my car before I stop pretending I am going home.
The rain has eased enough that I can see through the windshield again, but my hands stay on the wheel and the engine stays off. Water runs from my hair into my collar and down my back, my shoes are full of it, and every time I move, something cold shifts against my skin.
Because I loved you and I didn’t know what else to do.
I close my eyes.
Loved.
Not love.
I heard everything else she said. I heard you broke my heart. I heard haven’t I suffered enough. I heard her ask me what was left of her that I would still like a chance at. But that one word followed me up the hill.
She had loved me. I knew it before tonight — I knew it the night Lauren refused me her address and sent me home to learn my own wife, when I found the albums and saw Sienna turned toward me in every photograph while I faced the room.
I knew it when I started remembering all the notes she left on the counter.
I knew it when I finally let myself look at our wedding night and understood what I had done to the woman standing in front of me that night in cream silk.
But knowing it is not the same as hearing her say it.
She loved me, and I made loving me cost her so much that she learned to say it in the past tense.
Haven’t I suffered enough?
I went to her door to give her an answer, and halfway through I asked her for a chance. She looked at me as if I had come asking for one more thing after taking everything she knew how to give.
I lean forward until my forehead touches the wheel.
I can still see her face when I told her I never meant to hurt her, and I can hear the laugh that came out of her.
Never meaning to hurt me would require caring about me at all.
I did care. I cared about her and still did all of it.
I kept telling myself she was safe, provided for, that I had never lied to her or cheated on her or raised my voice — I took everything I had not done to her and made a marriage out of it, while she loved me enough to accept whatever I did give.
And now she thinks I did not care. She thinks I broke her heart because mine was never in the marriage at all.
And she loved me.
Loved.
The clock on the dash is moving toward ten when I finally lift my head. Home is ninety minutes of coast road away, and I am too wet and too tired to trust myself with the drive, but that is not the reason I put the car in gear and turn toward town.
I cannot be that far from her tonight.
The first place still open is a liquor store with a red OPEN sign buzzing in the window. I walk in looking like I came through the door from underwater, and the kid behind the counter looks at my clothes, then my face, and decides against whatever question was about to come out of his mouth.
“What’s the strongest thing you have?”
He points me toward the back. I pick up the bottle and look at him again.
“What’s the most expensive?”
That one is behind the counter. I buy both.
The motel is farther down the same road, one story wrapped around a parking lot with doors opening straight onto the asphalt.
The woman at the desk takes my card without conversation and gives me a key attached to a diamond of orange plastic.
Room nine. The heater under the window comes on with a smell like burnt dust. I put both bottles on the dresser, crack the seal on the strong one, and drink before I take off my wet shirt.
It burns all the way down, but it does nothing for the hollow ache in my chest.
My wallet is swollen from the rain, the leather dark and soft with water. I spread one of the motel towels across the bed and empty everything onto it — license, cards, cash gone limp, a couple of receipts.
Then the note slides out.
It is folded in quarters, worn soft from being carried. When I changed wallets last spring, I moved it into this one with everything else and never stopped to ask myself why. I unfold it carefully.
Soup’s in the blue container. Eat it, don’t just look at it. — Sienna
And beside her name, the duck.
The stupid little duck. I remember standing in my kitchen with this note in my hand, wondering why my wife had drawn a duck beside her name. Then my phone rang, or somebody came in, or I had somewhere else to be. I never asked. I kept it.
Her ink is bleeding now. The rain has soaked through the paper and the lines are beginning to spread — the duck losing its shape, the bottom of her name feathering into the towel.
“No.”
I lift it immediately. There is a Bible in the nightstand, and I open it somewhere in the middle, lay the note flat between two dry pages, and close it. Then I pour more whiskey and stand at the window with it.
Because I loved you.
She fed me. She left me notes. She knew how I took my coffee and when a bad meeting meant I would come home quiet. She remembered the names I mentioned once, the things I liked without asking for them twice, the stories I had forgotten telling her.
I did not know why she drew a duck.
Tonight she finally told me she loved me, and she had to tell me while explaining how badly I had hurt her.
Across the parking lot, pink neon glows in a dark storefront. TATTOO. I look at the Bible on the nightstand. I pull my shirt back on, take the note from the Bible, and slip it into my pants pocket. I take my card from the towel, pick up the bottle, and cross the road.
Half the lights in the shop are already off. A man with ink down both arms is standing behind the counter counting bills into an open register, and the door buzzes when I push through it.
“We’re closed.”
“How long would something small take?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I need it tonight.”
He keeps counting. “Everybody needs it tonight.”
I put my black card on the glass counter. “Name your price.”
That gets his attention. His eyes move from the card to me, then to the bottle in my hand.
“How much have you had?”
I lift the bottle slightly. “Not enough. Just got started.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the one I have.”
“You drunk?”
“No.”
“Planning to be?”
“Not until this is done.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “That’s what every drunk man says.”
I take the note from my pocket and put it on the counter. “Her name,” I say. “Exactly the way she wrote it. And the duck.”
He looks down, and the irritation goes out of his face. He studies the note, then me.
“She die?”
“No.”
His eyes come back to mine.
“Our marriage did.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then he looks at the note again. “Where?”
I show him — low on my hip, below the waistband, somewhere no one sees unless I am naked.
His eyebrows move. “That’s not exactly a casual placement.”
“That’s the point.”
He closes the register drawer. I do not ask what changes his mind. Maybe it is the card, maybe it is the note, maybe I look as bad as I feel. He locks the door.
He takes the note to the worktable and photographs it before the ink spreads any farther, then cleans up the image only enough to recover what the water has started taking, and prints a stencil with her name in her own hand and the duck beside it. When he comes back, he gestures at my clothes.
“Pants have to come down.”
I undo my belt. He looks at where I pointed. “Lower.” I push my pants down over my hips. “Underwear too.”
For half a second, every instinct I have spent my adult life building rises against it.
Then Sienna is standing in her doorway again, crying because of me, and I hook my thumbs into the waistband and pull that down as well.
It leaves me exposed enough that under any other circumstances I would have stopped the entire thing — standing in a cold room with my clothes shoved down and a bottle in one hand while a stranger marks a place on my hip.
But there is nothing left in me tonight that is interested in dignity.
He points at the chair. “Sit.”
I sit. He cleans the skin and presses the stencil low on my hip, and when he peels the paper away, Sienna’s name is there in purple, the duck beside it.
My throat tightens.
“You want to check the placement?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“I did.”
He reaches for the machine. “This spot hurts.”
“It won’t hurt enough.”
His eyes lift to mine and stay there for a beat. Then he lowers his head and starts.
The first line burns. A needle is moving through my skin and it fucking hurts. He wipes blood and ink away and starts again, following the curve of the S, and I drink when he pauses. The whiskey is warming me from the inside without doing much for the needle.
You already broke my heart. The machine moves. Haven’t I suffered enough? My hand tightens around the bottle.
The artist wipes my hip. “Hold still.”
“I am.”
“You’re tightening up.”
I force my body to loosen, and the needle starts again.
“Go deeper,” I say.
He glances up. “What?”
“I don’t want it to fade.”
“That’s not how ink works. Too deep and I scar you.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“Then scar it.”
“No.”
He bends over my hip again and starts the machine before I can argue, and I stare at the ceiling while the pain keeps coming in the same narrow strip, controlled and exact, and Sienna’s voice keeps coming with it.
Because I loved you.
Loved.
I spent years believing Ashley was the worst thing anyone had ever done to me. Some part of me built a whole life around making sure nobody ever got to make that choice about me again. And while I was doing it, Sienna loved me. She loved me anyway.
Past tense.
My eyes sting. I blink hard and keep looking at the ceiling.
“Still with me?” the artist asks.
“Keep going.”
He does. By the time he reaches the duck, the whiskey has settled behind my eyes and loosened something in my chest, but I am nowhere near numb. He works quietly for a while, then says, “Names are usually the ones I try to talk people out of.”
“I’m not changing my mind.”
“You’d be surprised how many people say that.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Marriage ends, somebody new comes along, then you’re standing in a bedroom explaining why another woman’s name is on your?—“
“There will be no other woman.”
The machine stops. I have not raised my voice. I do not need to.
He looks at me.
“I love my wife.”
The words are out, and for a second I cannot breathe around them.
Love.
Not loved. Not maybe. Not I don’t know.
“She is the first woman I have ever loved.” My voice is rough enough that I barely recognize it. “She will be the last. I don’t give a good goddamn what anybody else thinks about what’s written on me, because there will not be anybody else.”
He watches me for another second. Then he nods.
“Okay.”
The machine starts again, and I sit there with my pants down and a bottle in my hand while a stranger puts my wife’s name into my skin.
She loved me. I love her. And she is divorcing me.
My eyes burn again. This time I do not blink it away immediately. I look at the ceiling until I can see clearly enough to look down.
He finishes the duck last. When he is done, he cleans the skin and holds a mirror where I can see it — her name in her handwriting, the stupid duck beside it, low enough that my underwear will cover both.
No one will see them unless I’m naked.
I don’t expect anyone ever will.
The thought sits there. It does not change anything.
He covers the tattoo with a clear dressing and gives me instructions.
For once, I don’t assume I already know enough.
I let him finish. At the counter he tells me the price, and I hand him the card and add enough to the receipt that his eyes pause on the number before he hands it back.
Then he gives me Sienna’s note, pressed flat between two pieces of clean cardboard.
Her name is blurred now. The duck is nearly gone.
I carried that stupid note for years without knowing why, and the first night I finally understand what it meant to me, I ruin it.
Back in room nine, the heater is still running. I leave the note on the nightstand. The strong bottle goes on the dresser beside the expensive one. The expensive one is still sealed.
I take off what is left of my wet clothes and sit on the edge of the bed for a long time with the dressing pulling low on my hip.
Because I loved you.
I press the heel of my hand over my mouth.
Loved.
Her name burns low on my hip.