14. Gracie #2
He helps me into the tub, one hand on my elbow, one on my back, and when I sink into the hot water, the moan that escapes me is embarrassing.
“Good?”
“God, yes.”
He smiles. Just barely, just a flicker at the corner of his mouth, but it’s there. Then he kneels beside the tub, rolls his sleeves to his elbows, and reaches for the lavender soap.
“What are you-”
“Lean back.”
“Mal.”
“Lean back, Gracie,” he says, gentler.
I lean back.
He washes my hair.
His hands are huge and gentle, working the soap through the strands with a concentration I recognize. It’s the same focus he used to bring to his canvases, total, absolute, like nothing else in the world exists.
He cups water in his palms and pours it over my head, careful to keep the soap out of my eyes. He works his fingers against my scalp, and I have to bite my lip to keep from groaning.
“Too hard?”
“No.” My voice is rough. “It’s good.”
He keeps going, rinses, adds conditioner, works it through with the same patient attention.
“I used to watch you paint,” I say, and I don’t know why I’m talking, except that the warmth is making me loose, making me stupid. “For hours. You’d get this look on your face. Like nothing else existed.”
His hands still for a moment. Then they start moving again.
“I remember.”
“You never looked at me like that.”
“I did.” His voice is quiet. “You just didn’t see it.”
“When?”
“Every morning. When you were still asleep.” His hands move to my shoulders, working out knots I didn’t know I had. “Every night, when you didn’t know I was watching. Every time you laughed, or yelled at me, or looked at me like you wanted to murder me with a fork.”
“That was most of the time, toward the end.”
“I know.” He rinses the conditioner out, gentle, thorough. “I earned it.”
The water’s starting to cool. Mal drains some of it, adds more hot. Then he reaches for a washcloth and starts on my arms, slow, methodical strokes, cleaning days of farm grime away.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say.
“I know that.”
“Then why?”
He goes quiet, his hands still moving, down my arm, across my palm, between my fingers.
“Because I should have been doing it for years,” he finally says. “Because you shouldn’t have had to ask. Because I was so busy painting you that I forgot to love you, and I don’t know how to fix it except to try.”
My throat is tight. “This doesn’t fix it.”
“I know.” He lifts my other arm, starts the same slow strokes. “But it’s a start.”
When the bath is done, he helps me out. Wraps me in the biggest towel, the fluffy one I save for special occasions. Dries me off with the same careful attention, and when he kneels to dry my feet, my throat goes tight and aches.
“Mal.”
“Almost done.”
And that’s when it happens, the thing I’ve been holding at bay since he carried me in here. A sound comes out of me that isn’t a word. Half a sob, ugly and wet, and I clap my hand over my mouth to stop the rest of it, but he’s already looking up from my feet, already seeing it.
“Don’t,” I say, muffled behind my hand. “Don’t look at me like that. You don’t get to look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m breaking your heart.” The tears come now, hot and furious and completely beyond my control, running down over my knuckles.
“You don’t get to have your heart broken by this.
This is what I wanted. For years. You on your knees taking care of me like I matter, and now that I have it I can’t even-” My voice splinters.
“It’s years too late and it’s everything I asked for and I hate you for making me want it again. I hate you.”
He doesn’t defend himself or move toward me, doesn’t try to gather me up and make it better, which is the only thing that keeps me from coming apart entirely. He just kneels there on my bathroom floor and takes it, eyes wet, and says the only thing he can.
“Okay,” he says softly. “Hate me. I can work with hate. Hate means you still feel.”
I press both hands over my face and breathe until the shaking stops, until I can pretend I’m a woman who has herself together, and when I lower them he’s looking somewhere else on purpose, giving me the dignity of not having watched the whole thing.
He finds my softest pajamas, the ones with the little cows on them, the ones I’d die before letting anyone else see, and helps me into them without comment. Then he sits me on the edge of the bed and picks up my hairbrush.
“I can-”
“Let me.”
He brushes my hair until it’s smooth. Then he tries to braid it.
He’s terrible at it. His fingers are too big, too clumsy, and the braid is lopsided and loose and already falling apart. But he finishes it anyway, ties it off with the elastic from my nightstand, and looks at his handiwork with a frown.
“The braid’s crooked,” he says.
“Leave it. I like knowing you tried.”
He raises an eyebrow, unconvinced. Then he helps me under the covers, pulls them up to my chin, and stands there for a moment, looking down at me like he’s memorizing the sight.
“I’ll be right outside,” he says. “The porch step’s been squeaking. Figured I’d fix it.”
“It’s dark.”
“I have a headlamp.”
“Mal.”
“Sleep, Gracie.” He brushes a strand of hair from my face, just barely, just a whisper of touch. “I’ll be here.”
He goes.
I lie in the dark, clean and warm and cared for, and press my hand to the secret curve of my stomach.
The guilt has teeth now.
He still thinks I’m sick, and he’s terrified, and he’s being perfect about it, patient and gentle and everything I begged him to be for years. And I’m letting him believe it, letting him suffer in the wrong direction, because the truth hands him a piece of me I’m not ready to give.
I hear the squeak of the porch step. Then hammering, quiet, careful, the kind that’s trying not to wake anyone. He’s fixing my porch step at ten o’clock at night because he can’t fix me and he needs to fix what he can.
God, how easily I fall asleep.
I hate it more that I dream about him.