Chapter 8
COLLEEN
Iread them in that church parking lot for twenty-five minutes.
The bottom of the thread was from August, four days before we drove Owen up to school.
Single digits, baby
It took me a second. I thought it was about a game.
Then I moved my thumb up an inch, which was all it took.
The countdown wasn't one message. It was two years of them, dropped in between fishing pictures, in between his mother's hip, a truck axle, the price of subfloor.
18 months left. Can you taste it
Coll's doing the college tour thing this weekend. 3 states. Pray for me
14 months. 14, brother.
Under a year now. Under a year
Owen got in. Kid's going. So that's that
Single digits, baby
I read them in order, top to bottom. Each one was small. Together they were a wall.
My husband had been serving a sentence.
Everything I loved was in those months. The banquet in the hot gym.
Two-hour drives with a boy who wouldn't talk for the first forty minutes and then wouldn't stop.
Meg calling at eleven at night to ask how long you cook a chicken.
The years when the house was so loud I had to shout up the stairs twice.
That was my life — not a phase of it, the whole thing, the best part, the part I'd take back if anybody offered.
And he'd been counting the days off a wall.
It wasn't rage. I checked my hands on the wheel and they were steady as a table.
I nearly stopped there. If I'd put that phone back in the console right then, I'd have gone home and said something I couldn't take back. I'd have been justified. I'd have been wrong.
My thumb kept going up.
The numbers got bigger. Twenty-six months.
Thirty-one. Thirty-eight. Then a long dead stretch — eighteen months of nothing but a boat trailer and a birthday — then more numbers, four years back, five.
Five years, give or take. Six. Seven. Past the year Meg got her license.
Past the summer we redid the bathroom. Photographs that wouldn't load anymore, just gray squares with a broken corner in the middle.
One message from my husband to his brother that said only, she fell asleep at the table again.
Then I hit the top of it, in 2008, on a phone he's upgraded four times since, the whole thread dragged forward from device to device the way we drag everything.
October of 2008. Owen would have been eight months old. Meg was six. That's the fall I got mastitis twice, the fall Hank was running the Wexler job across three towns, the fall we had one car for two months.
Ottis had written: You alright? You sounded off.
Under it, from my husband, at 10:51 at night, three in a row.
im fine. long week
i miss her man. thats all it is
ill get her back someday
No capitals. No apostrophes. A tired man with a bad phone and his thumbs.
I read those three lines maybe nine times.
Nothing in them is about our children. He didn't write that they took her. He didn't write one word against a six-year-old girl or a baby.
He wrote someday.
Not tonight. Not I'll go up and say something. Someday, like a boat he'd buy when the business was better. And then, three years down the thread, someday started having a number attached to it.
I put the phone down on the seat, screen up, and looked out through the windshield at the church van.
He hadn't been counting down to the end of our children. He'd been counting down to me. Eighteen years outside a door with his hand up, never knocking. Then the door opened, and he threw a party on the lawn.
That didn't make it hurt less. I sat there three or four minutes putting it together into the version that would let us both have dinner tonight, which is the oldest habit I've got, and then I made myself stop.
He still wrote a sentence about my career in a box on a dealer's form. He still stood up on a picnic bench.
I drove to the school and didn't go in. I sat in the truck in the empty lot for ten minutes looking at the building, at the paper suns the kindergarten team had already taped up inside the glass doors. Then I drove home.
The garage light was on. He had the shop vac out, sweeping the back corner where the fabric bins were, because he'd said he'd bring them up out of the crawl space, because he can't be in a bad hour without carrying something.
I set his phone on the workbench.
He looked at it. He looked at me. He shut off the vac with his foot, and the garage got very loud with quiet.
"You left it in the console," I said.
"I know where I left it."
"Ottis texted you. I saw his name come up." I made myself say the rest of it in the same voice. "Then I sat in the church lot on Route 9 for twenty-five minutes and read two years of your messages. I unlocked your phone to do it. You didn't leave it open. I opened it."
He wiped his hands on his jeans, slow, one and then the other. Something went through his face, not much of it — the thing that happens when a man puts his hand on a rail he expected to be there.
"How far back," he said.
"All the way. 2008."
He looked at the floor.
"I'd have told you," he said. "If you'd asked me tonight, I'd have told you."
"Would you."
"I don't know." He said it fast, before I could take it off him. "No. Probably not tonight. Sometime."
"Someday," I said.
He flinched. He didn't ask me what I meant.
"You had no right to read my phone," he said.
"No."
I waited. There was a whole road available to him right there, wide open, no traffic on it. He could have stood in that garage and made the next hour about my thumb on his screen. I've watched my own father do it.
He put a hand on the edge of the bench, then leaned on it, and I watched a man take his own weight off his legs.
"That's not the biggest thing standing in here," he said. "Ask me your question."
"Eighteen years, Hank."
"Yeah."
"Eighteen years, and you told your brother."
He didn't look up.
I had a whole speech. I'd built most of it on Route 9. I didn't use any of it, because standing in that garage I could see he'd already gotten there ahead of me, somewhere between his kitchen table Saturday night and his brother's voice on the phone at two o'clock.
"Say something," I said.
"I don't have a defense. I keep going looking for one, and there's nothing there. I'd tell you if there was."
"Okay."
"It wasn't Meg. It wasn't Owen." His voice went strange on the names. "I need you to know that, but I'm not going to stand here and say it twice, because you shouldn't have to fix my sentence for me."
"No," I said. "I shouldn't."
He picked the phone up off the bench, looked at it a second, put it back down face first.
"I'm calling Devin in the morning," he said. "The camper's done."
"You said you'd cancel it Saturday."
"I said I'd move the dates Saturday." He met my eyes.
"This is different. I'm not moving it. I'm not putting the deposit on a smaller one.
I'm not asking them to hold it for spring, I'm not carrying it over, I'm not keeping it as a credit for someday.
It's four thousand dollars, and it's gone.
I want it gone, because as long as it exists anywhere it's a thing I planned without you. "
"That's a lot of money."
"Yes it is."
I didn't tell him not to, which surprised me. Six months earlier I'd have talked him into keeping the credit. I'm the one in this family who protects money.
"All right," I said.
He nodded, standing there with both hands on the bench.
"Colleen." He used my whole name, which he doesn't do. "What do you want me to do tonight? Tell me one thing. I'll do it wrong, but I'd rather do the thing you actually want than pick one myself. I haven't got a great record on picking."
I thought about it, and what came wasn't the trip or the party or the sentence in the box on that form.
"Come upstairs," I said.
He followed me in, up the stairs, down the hall, past the bathroom.
I stopped at Owen's door with my hand on the knob and couldn't turn it. Ten days of walking past that door. My hand had gone to that knob maybe four times, and every time it came back down.
Hank didn't say anything. He didn't reach around me. He stood at my shoulder, close enough that I could feel him, with his hands at his sides.
I opened it.
The air in there was different. Closed up, warm, faintly like a boy.
The blinds were still shut so the light came in orange, in slats.
The bed was down to the bare mattress, the two hangers where they'd been since Friday, the charger still in the wall.
By the closet, the pile of shoes he'd decided against — the good sneakers with the split sole, which he wouldn't let me throw out.
Over the desk, four gray rectangles where the tape had held his posters.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress. Hank sat next to me, and the frame made the noise it's made since 2011.
He didn't tell me the light was good in here. He didn't say a floating floor would look good over the carpet, or that we could paint, or the words bright side, or the words chapter two. He put his hand on the mattress between us, palm up, and I put mine in it.
We sat in our son's empty room in the last of the daylight. My husband breathed next to me. Neither of us said a word for a long time.
At some point he pressed the heel of his other hand against his eyes.
"He used to come down at ten o'clock every night," he said, "and eat an entire loaf of bread."
"He did."
"An entire loaf, Coll."
I laughed, and it came out wet. He put his arm around me. I put my head on his shoulder, in the sawdust smell, in the dark room.
That was the first silence in our marriage that belonged to both of us at once.