Chapter 18
Winslow
She'd been sick for six days and had a whole architecture built for it.
Grief did this. She'd read that somewhere.
It was the driving, plus the not eating, plus the fact that she'd had four hours of sleep a night since the twenty-ninth of July, and the water was doing something at the lake in August that always got into her sinuses.
She had four explanations and she rotated them.
On the fourth day Gideon called about a distributor and she had to put the phone down twice.
"Are you all right?"
"It's a bug."
"Winslow, you've said it's a bug four times in four days and you're a woman who doesn't repeat herself."
"It's August at a lake. There's a thing that gets in the water."
"All right," Gideon said, in a voice that meant it was not all right, and let it go, and went back to the distributor.
On the seventh morning she got up, made coffee, smelled the coffee, and went down on one knee on the kitchen floor.
X
Then she got up, got in the car, and drove into town. She bought a test at the drugstore on the corner, along with a bag of oranges and a spiral notebook, since at forty she was apparently still a woman who buys two other things.
The drugstore had a pharmacy counter with two people waiting at it and a rack of reading glasses by the door, and she stood in an aisle in Bland County at nine in the morning looking at a shelf she had walked past every year of her adult life.
There were eleven kinds. She took the second cheapest, on the theory that the cheapest would be a thing she'd doubt.
The girl at the register was maybe nineteen. She scanned it and put it in the bag and said, "Good luck," in a voice with nothing in it at all. Winslow said thank you, got in the car, and sat in the lot four minutes before she could turn the key.
She did it at the lake house at eleven in the morning with the door open. There was nobody in the house, and shutting a door seemed insane.
Then she sat on the bathroom floor with her back against the tub and the thing balanced on the edge of the sink where she couldn't see it. She did not look at her phone. She counted the tiles across the floor twice and got a different number.
It took three minutes. It had probably taken forty seconds.
Two lines.
She looked at it for a while from about three feet away without picking it up, which she would remember later as the last minute of a particular life.
Winslow sat on a bathroom floor in a house they had bought eight years ago in June, with four bedrooms in it and two of them empty, and she made a sound she did not recognize.
She was forty years old. She had stopped hoping in the third year and had never told a soul, including the man, including herself in any way that would have counted.
She had said it out loud in a dark kitchen in April with the power out and the candles going.
He had put his hand over his face and said he'd wanted them since he was thirty-one.
June the fourteenth. She did the counting on her fingers on the bathroom floor, which was ridiculous. She did it three times. It came out the same.
Twelve years of a body doing nothing, and then a gravel road in June with a screen door that had a bad spring on it.
She got up eventually. She washed her face and looked at it in the mirror over the sink for about a second, which was as long as she could manage.
She went down and made toast and could not eat it. She stood at the window over the sink and looked at the water, and here is what she thought, in order.
I am going to have this baby.
I am not telling him yet.
And I have to be very careful now. If I go back this week I will never know, for the rest of my life, whether I went back for him or for this. Neither will he. It will be in every room of that house forever.
She put the toast down.
She did the sums that afternoon on a legal pad, which was a thing she had watched her mother do at a kitchen table on Wharton Street a hundred times, and which she had not needed to do once in ten years.
Due in March. Forty-one in November. She would be doing a nine-month cut with a newborn if she took Gideon's page, and she would be doing it in Philadelphia, and there was no version of any of it that was not going to be hard in a way she could not talk herself around.
At the bottom of the page she wrote tell nobody and underlined it, and then sat there hating the fact that she'd had to write it down.
***
She told no one for eleven days.
She worked. That was the astonishing part and she'd think about it for the rest of her life. She drove to Dickenson County twice, and got the jar man's wife on camera for the first time, and cut for six hours on a Tuesday with saltines in a bowl beside the laptop.
Twice she picked up the phone to call Marlowe, and both times put it down, because Marlowe would have known inside of four words.
Eleanor Fairbanks came out on the last Sunday in August in a car driven by a woman named Pauline who stayed in it.
She was ninety-one. She got herself up the porch steps in her own time with a hand on the rail and would not be helped. She was wearing driving gloves in August. She sat down in the good chair in the front room and looked around it once.
"You've got the wrong lamp in here," Eleanor said.
"It's a rental lamp."
"It's a hotel lamp. Sit down, I can't crane."
Winslow sat.
"I want to be clear that nobody sent me," Eleanor said. "Marlowe would have a stroke. Graham doesn't know I've left the house. I told Pauline we were going to look at a bridge."
"Mrs. Fairbanks—"
"Eleanor. You've been in this family ten years and I'm ninety-one and one of us is running out of road." She put her hands on top of her purse. "I'm going to say a hard thing. Then I'm going to drink one cup of coffee and go. Make it weak."
Winslow got up and made it weak.
"How's the film."
"It's a film."
"That's an answer for a man." Eleanor took the cup. "How's the film."
"It's the best thing I've ever done and I don't know whether anybody's ever going to see it."
"There." Eleanor tried the coffee and set it down. "That's a sentence. Augustus never made one that good in fifty-eight years and he made a great many."
"In 2001 my son's marriage was in a ditch," Eleanor said, when it was in front of her. "You know that. Everybody knows that now, they tell it at weddings. What nobody tells you is that his mother knew about it in 1999, and did nothing, for two years."
Winslow's hands had gone still around her cup.
"I told myself it was respect," Eleanor said.
"It was not respect. I was afraid of my son.
I'd raised a man who could make a case, and I did not want to be out-argued in my own kitchen.
So I let Marlowe stand at a window for two years.
I brought her a casserole every third Sunday and asked after the children. "
"She's never said that."
"She's never said it. She loves me and she's kind, and that's her business." Eleanor's chin came up. "It's mine that I did it. I'm ninety-one and it's the thing I'd take back over everything else in my life, and I've had a great many things to choose from."
The room was quiet.
"Now," Eleanor said. "Here's the hard thing."
"All right."
"Everybody's going to ask you whether you can trust him. It's the wrong question and it will eat two years of your life."
"It seems a reasonable question."
"It's an unanswerable one, which is why people love it so." Eleanor tapped one finger on the purse. "You cannot know that. Not this year, not in ten. You will be seventy years old still not knowing it, and you'd be a fool to wait, and I would know."
"Then what's the question?"
"Whether you can be a whole person in a room with him."
Winslow set her cup down.
"That's it," Eleanor said. "That's all of it.
Not whether he'll do it again. Whether, when he does the next thing, whatever it is, you will be a woman who says so out loud in the room, on the day, in her own voice.
Marlowe wasn't. I wasn't. My mother-in-law was a mouse for fifty-one years and buried in a hat. "
"And if I can't?"
"Then don't go back, and God bless you, and I'll pay for the lawyer myself." Eleanor said it briskly. "I'm not sentimental about my grandson. I'm sentimental about women in this family going quiet, and I've watched three generations of it."
"Can I ask you one," Winslow said.
"You may."
"Why didn't you leave? You had your own money. Your father's money, not his. Everybody knows that."
Eleanor's hands went still on the purse.
"In 1968 a woman with her own money and no husband was a scandal. A woman with a husband and no money was a wife. I had been raised to prefer the second," she said. "That was the true reason. There's a nicer one I've told at four funerals and I won't insult you with it."
"That's the first straight answer anybody in this family has given me about money in ten years."
"Well, I'm ninety-one," Eleanor said. "There's nothing left to spend it on but candor."
She drank about a third of the coffee and put it down.
"You've gone very pale, by the way," she said.
"It's the driving."
"Mm." Eleanor picked up her purse and looked at her for one long moment with a pair of eyes that had been in the world since 1935. "It's not the driving."
Winslow did not say anything.
"I'm not going to ask. I'm not going to tell anybody, including Marlowe, and especially not the men," Eleanor said.
She got herself up out of the chair in her own time.
"I'll tell you one thing about it and then I'm leaving.
Don't let that be the reason. Whatever you decide, decide it Tuesday, on a day when it's only about him, and then let the other thing be news. "
She got down the porch steps with a hand on the rail. At the bottom she stopped and put her glove back on.
"For what it's worth," Eleanor said, "and it isn't worth much at my age. I like you better than I like him, and I've known him since he came out."
Winslow got the door of the car for her. Pauline started the engine. Eleanor got herself into the seat in her own time and then put a hand on the frame before Winslow could close it.
"One more thing. Whichever way it goes, you'll want to tell somebody inside the hour. Don't. Sit on it a day." The glove tapped the frame twice. "Everything I ever regretted, I said in the first hour."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And come to Easter. I've got one or two left in me and I'd like the table full."
Winslow stood in the gravel until the car was out on the road, and then a good while after that.
Whether you can be a whole person in a room with him.
She said it out loud on the porch, once, to nobody, to hear it in her own voice.
Then she went inside, got a pencil, and wrote it on the back of a call sheet. She put the call sheet in the Pelican case, under the foam, where the second lens went.