Chapter 8 #2
"From Colorado. The list." He almost smiled. "Things Jake is not allowed to say to the guide."
And Laura laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it — a real one, one syllable and then a second one, the kind that surprises you into showing your teeth.
She had written that list in a rental car outside of Buena Vista, nine years ago, when he was twenty-seven and physically incapable of being on a river without trying to be the best person on the river, and it had been very funny, and he had folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket and kept it.
For a second they were two people who had been somewhere together.
And then it turned over — the way it always did now, the way she had learned to brace for and never managed to — and she thought: Aspen.
Gary Stern had said it on a sidewalk in Sawyer's Bend.
You look better than you did at the thing in Aspen.
July — three months before the sidewalk, four months into being watched, and six weeks before the twenty-ninth of August. She had stood on a balcony in the mountains beside her husband being photographed by strangers, in a dress somebody else had chosen, hating every hour of it.
And back home a man in a fleece vest had been un-sharing her calendar so that on Thursday he would have a reason to stand in her kitchen.
The laugh went out of her all at once. She felt it go.
Jake saw it. He didn't say anything for a moment, and then, quietly: "There it is."
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm just — I watch it happen." He was looking at the floor. "You'll be fine for a minute and then something comes over your face, and I know exactly what it is, because it's me. That's what I am now. I'm the thing that comes over your face."
Laura looked at the progress bar.
"Yes," she said.
At seventy percent he said, "Can I ask you one thing that isn't about us."
"Depends what it is."
"The clinic." He was watching the bar. "Barnes said you've got — what is it, a dozen people a week?"
"Nineteen."
He looked up. "Nineteen."
"There's a waiting list for the seven a.m." She heard how it came out of her — flat, factual, and underneath it something she could not keep out of her voice at all.
"I've got a boy who's going to play this fall who was going to be walking with a cane at forty.
I've got a woman who was told for two years that her shoulder was arthritis and it is not arthritis. "
"What is it?"
"It's her neck," Laura said. "It was always her neck."
And Jake laughed — one breath, head down — and said, "Course it was."
She did not smile at him. But she felt the thing happen in the room anyway, the small collapse of the distance, and she went and looked at the fan.
"You want to know the thing that gets me?" he said.
"No."
"Okay."
Silence for a minute. The fan ticking.
"Say it," she said.
"I never once asked you." He was still looking at the progress bar.
"Ten years. I don't think I ever asked you a single real question about the work.
I knew you were good, I told people you were good, I've said it in interviews.
I never asked you what you did all day." He rubbed his mouth.
"Barnes drives out there and asks you about a kid's knee and I hear about it thirdhand and I want to put my hand through a wall, and it's not because it's him.
It's that it never occurred to me. In ten years. "
Laura looked at the side of his face.
She thought about telling him what she had come for. It went through her whole body, the wanting to — to put the green folder on this counter and say seven months, and watch what it did to him, and be, for one minute, the one holding the thing the other person did not know.
That was all it would have been. She was honest enough at half past one in the morning to see it.
"No," she said. "It didn't."
The transfer finished at a quarter to two.
She packed the drive and the folder and the legal pad into her bag in the kitchen, and he stood on the other side of the island with his hands flat on it, and neither of them had anything to say that was any use.
"Laura."
"Don't ask me anything."
"I'm not going to." He took a breath. "Susan's got the schedule. The last of it's the twenty-ninth of March and then it's done, and you won't have to see me for that, I've signed everything ahead."
"Okay."
"That's all."
She got her keys.
He walked her out because he was walking out anyway, and they stood on the flagstones in the cold sun, and Laura had her hand on the car door when he said it.
"I don't want the divorce."
She stopped.
"That's it. That's the whole thing." His voice was perfectly steady and his hands were not.
"I'm not asking you to do anything about it.
I'm not going to fight it, I'm not going to slow it down by one day, and my lawyers have got their instructions and I'm not changing them.
You'll have it in six weeks and I'll sign it the hour it comes. "
"Then why say it."
"Because I've said everything to you through a lawyer for four months," Jake said, "and it turns out you can hand a person a house and a trust and every dollar you have and still never once have said the true thing to their face.
And I'd rather you had it. That's all. You can do whatever you want with it, including nothing. "
The exact words Kevin Barnes had used, in her mother's kitchen, in February.
She stood there with the drive in her bag — forty-one gigabytes of a decade, and somewhere in it a photograph of her own kitchen taken from the step — and looked at her husband on a driveway in Belle Meade.
There were four or five things she could have said.
Laura got in the car.
He did not follow. He did not knock on the glass. In the mirror, backing out, she saw him standing exactly where she had left him with his hands down at his sides, and then the gate, and then the boulevard.
She made it about three miles.
Then she pulled into the lot of a Presbyterian church on West End and put the car in park and sat there a long while with the engine running and her hands in her lap, not crying, not doing anything at all.
Then she drove east.