Chapter 9
She’d lined the papers up in a neat row on the kitchen table. I followed her there from the living room in a daze.
“Sign these, and it’ll be over,” she said.
She moved to the opposite side of the table.
She crossed her arms and stared at me without smiling, her jaw set.
Her hair was longer than I remembered. She wore neatly pressed slacks and a button-down shirt.
The outfit felt formal and far removed from when she had worn my shirt a few days earlier.
So much was new and different. Three years. Three years for her. Days for me. Days where I’d existed to them in twenty-four-hour segments.
What had we done in the three years before all this had begun?
All the little things that made up day-to-day life.
Lyle when he was four, already reading books too advanced for his age.
Amy cooking dinner with Lyle, their ritual of making meat loaf at least once every two weeks.
My meager cooking contributions—Sunday night spaghetti, a meat sauce and store-bought garlic bread.
Lyle in preschool. His first day of kindergarten.
The first parent-teacher conference, where his teacher told us Lyle was already beyond the curriculum of that year, and she wasn’t sure what to do with him.
Now Lyle was ten. How many parent-teacher conferences had I missed? Did Amy cook spaghetti on Sunday nights, now, in an echo of our life when I’d still been there?
These were small things, but they were everything. The day-to-day vicissitudes of existence that built a life.
I tried to bring my muddled thoughts into focus. “Over for who, Amy?”
“Just sign the papers, Scott.” I could see the years on her. Not so much in the lines of her face, although there were a few more crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, more worry lines on her forehead. It was in how she held herself, in the rigid lines of her shoulders, in the set of her jaw.
“Where’s Lyle?”
She shook her head.
“I have a right to see my son.”
“You don’t have anything, Scott.” Her voice was hard and cutting, but I could hear a tremble at the edges. “You’re an empty chair, now. An empty place next to me in the bed. I can’t do this anymore.”
“I never asked for this, Amy.” My voice went up and my hands shook at my sides as the reality of what she was saying penetrated. What she was doing. I felt chilled and hot at the same time. My heart sped up. I had to work to control my breathing.
“You didn’t,” Amy said. “But it’s still happening.
To you. And through you, to me and to Lyle.
I can’t take it anymore. I can’t pine away like some princess in a fairy tale, waiting for you to come back to me once every few years.
I will not put Lyle through it, not anymore.
It’s not fair to him, not at all. We have to move on with our lives. And that means without you.”
“Amy, Jesus Christ. Think about this. Think about what you’re doing.”
“You think I’m not? You think I haven’t?
I’ve had years to think about this. You haven’t lived any of the last three years with us, Scott.
You haven’t been here, through any of it.
Birthdays and Christmases and Thanksgiving dinners.
School and—and life, Scott. You’re not there.
It’s not stopping and you’re not going to be there, not ever.
” She took a breath, and for the first time looked away from me.
Tears ran down her cheeks. “Sometimes, Scott—sometimes I wish you’d died. It would’ve been easier.”
The world retracted. I felt a horrible tightness across my chest and throat. I sagged against the doorframe. “You mean that.”
She looked at the ceiling, her eyes glistening.
“Just … just sign the goddamn papers, Scott. Please. It’ll make it easier.
I can get the divorce anyway. Schedule the court date and you won’t show up.
I can say you disappeared, left me and Lyle, and that’s all you’ll ever be, just another—another deadbeat dad.
This way at least you put your name on things.
You help us move on. You at least get that much. ”
I almost screamed at her. I pressed my hands against my thighs, trying to stop them from shaking. I was not my father. Christ, I was not my father. “Where … is … Lyle?”
“Far away and safe. We moved, Scott. Close to a year ago. We couldn’t take it here anymore, not after everything—”
“You couldn’t take it.” Something brittle inside me broke, and I snapped out the words. “You couldn’t. Don’t include him. Don’t pretend you asked for Lyle’s opinion or would’ve listened to him if you had.”
She rocked, taking a step back.
I felt a stab of satisfaction, then regretted it.
“Fuck you, Scott,” she whispered. “You have no idea how this has been for me. For us. Months alone just to see you for a day. Years alone. Holding Lyle each time you leave as he cries his eyes out for hours. Breaking my heart over and over. You have no idea. I did what I had to do. I’m protecting Lyle, even if you can’t see it.
Even if he can’t see it yet. Or doesn’t want to see it.
This doesn’t work—it cannot work. And if you opened your eyes, you would realize it.
” She took a steadying breath. “And you would let us go. You have to let us go.”
I could only stare at her. I was shivering. The muscles in my arms vibrated. It felt surreal, impossible, standing there in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, having this conversation, this way.
She straightened, her jaw tightening. “Now, are you going to sign the papers or not?”
“No.” I said it in a soft voice, just enough to carry to her.
She stared back at me without blinking, then broke eye contact. “Fine.” She stalked forward and gathered the papers together with quick, jerking movements of her hands.
“Where’s Lyle?”
With her eyes on the papers, she shook her head again.
I moved away from the door. I am not a huge man, but I am not small, either, and as I moved toward the kitchen table, I was aware of the shift between us, a change in the balance.
I felt the boiling anger returning. That old, familiar, unwanted family legacy.
It rose from deep in my chest, and I loomed over her.
“Where is my son?” My voice was shaking now.
Amy gathered the last of the papers in her arms and straightened. She looked at me with blazing eyes. “Stay away from us, Scott. You’re as good as dead.”
With that, she brushed by me. It felt like she was challenging me, daring me to reach out and grab her.
I saw myself in that moment. I saw my father doing it.
It’s what he’d have done. He’d have grabbed her, shaken her.
Shouted. Been equally as impotent even as he was consumed by his fury.
I slumped back. I listened to her footsteps retreat down the hallway, toward the front door.
I thought about running after her, imagined flinging open the front door and chasing her car down the street.
Running, screaming her name. Something out of the rom-coms we’d watched together before Lyle had been born, curled up together on our couch in the first apartment we’d shared after college.
Instead, I stood there, rooted in place, barely able to breathe, and listened to the car roar away.
With a shaking hand, I pulled one of the chairs from the kitchen table. Then I sat, in my mother-in-law’s house in Minnetonka, and I cried.
Beth found me a short time later. She came in the back way, through the pantry behind the kitchen, as though she’d been waiting in the cold and snow outside.
She stomped and coughed in the pantry, letting anyone left in the house know she was there.
When she walked into the kitchen, I’d wiped the tears off my cheeks and stood. She stopped in the doorway. “Scott.”
“Beth.”
“So.” She raised her chin. “Did you sign the papers?”
“No.”
“Good for you.”
I frowned.
“You didn’t mean to start hopping through time, did you?”
“No. No, I didn’t.”
“My daughter’s having a hard time of it.
She still loves you, you know. That’s why it’s been so hard for her.
Really. It isn’t her dad, her memory of that old fool and what he did.
” I had to smile a little at her brisk, no-nonsense tone.
“She loves you. She wants you back, and right now it doesn’t much look like you’re coming back.
This is how she’s coping. I can’t say I blame her, but I can’t blame you, either. ”
I pressed my lips together. Beth was older, now, with more gray hair and more wrinkles across her face, but she’d lost none of her bearing, her presence.
“She left?” Beth asked.
“Yes. Beth?”
“Yes?”
“Where’s Lyle? Where’d she take my son?”
She froze, and a dozen thoughts and emotions flickered across her face—a twitch at the edges of her eyes, a tightening of her lips. “I don’t know if I can go that far, Scott. I may not agree fully with what Amy’s doing, but I can’t turn around and betray her trust.”
“He’s my son, Beth. My son.” I let out a shuddering breath. “And … And he’s all I have left. In the entire world, he’s it. He’s everything.”
She closed her eyes.
“This is it for me, Beth. He’s it. And if I can’t stop this, this fu—” I gritted my teeth. “If I can’t stop this, then I may only get to see him a few more times in his entire life. You must have done the math, Beth, or else Amy or Lyle told you. If this keeps up—”
“I know, Scott. So help me, I know.”
“Where is he?” I held my breath and waited. Seconds ticked by. Outside, cars passed, the slop of tires pushing through wet snow.
“Portland,” she said, sighing the word out. “They moved to Portland. About ten months ago. This is the first time I’ve seen her since the move.”
“Oregon or Maine?”
“Oregon.”
“Do you have an address?”
Another sigh. “Yes.”
“Thank you, Beth.” I stood there, logistics rolling through my mind. “I’ll—I’ll have to fly.”
Beth gestured with one hand toward the hallway, in the direction of one of the bedrooms. “You can check on the Internet in there. But Scott … I think Amy canceled all your credit cards.”
She was right. None of my credit cards worked, and my phone no longer had service.
A flight out today, from Minneapolis to Portland, was far too expensive for me to ask Beth to cover it, especially when we both knew how tight her finances were and how unlikely it was that I’d be able to pay her back.
Amy had sold my car. Beth sprung that little tidbit on me when I muttered that I might have to drive the whole way.
My anger threatened to boil over again, but I fought it down.
I rummaged through my wallet. I had one hundred and ninety-four dollars in cash.
Less than two hundred dollars to my name.
It was more than I expected, until I remembered I’d sold one of my Blu-ray players to a guy at work a few months earlier—months for me, years gone now for everyone else—and I’d never gotten around to depositing the cash in the bank.
I’d earmarked that money for more books for Lyle.
More than I’d thought, but it wasn’t enough.
Not nearly enough. The cheapest Greyhound bus ticket from Minneapolis to Oregon was over two hundred dollars with three stops.
Thirty-six hours total on the road. I’d jump again before I could get to Portland, almost three years.
Lyle would be thirteen years old before I could see him again.
Beth gave me two hundred dollars from her minuscule rainy-day fund, despite my half-hearted protests. She drove me through the snow to the bus stop with a scant five minutes to spare before it departed.
We hugged under the awning next to the bus station; our breath puffed wisps in the cold February air.
“Thank you,” I said when we parted.
“You’re welcome.” She hesitated a moment, then patted my shoulder, now covered in the overcoat she’d insisted on giving to me.
I hadn’t asked about the previous owner, but I suspected it was Amy’s father’s coat, now decades old and stored in a closet all those years.
“You’re a good father, Scott. A good dad to Lyle.
That’s why I’m doing this. For him, for my grandson. ”
“Thank you, Beth.”
“Good luck, Scott. Wherever this takes you.”
With that she turned and started back toward her car. By the time I boarded and found my seat, she was gone.