CHAPTER TEN
Leaving
POV: Jackson ? The present
He got to the house at half past one in the morning, and the porch light was on, which meant she was awake, because she never left it on for herself.
He sat in the car in the driveway for a minute with the engine ticking.
He'd rehearsed things on the drive, three and a half hours of things, and every one of them had curdled somewhere around Kankakee, and by the time he cut the engine he had nothing left but the truth, which he'd spent six years proving he couldn't be trusted to say when it counted.
She was at the kitchen table when he came in.
Not waiting up in the dramatic sense, not sitting in the dark with a drink.
She had a legal pad in front of her and a pen and a cup of tea gone cold, and she was making a list, and she didn't stop making it when he came in, and that, more than anything, was how he knew.
"You made good time," she said, not looking up.
"Sharon."
"Sit down, Jack. You're swaying." She was right, he was swaying, he'd been driving for hours on no food and a hollowed-out chest, and he sat, across from her, at the wobbly-no-longer chair.
She wrote another line on the pad. He couldn't read it upside down and didn't try.
"I was going to do this tomorrow. I had a whole plan.
I was going to be very calm and very clear and say it all in the right order.
" She set the pen down. "But you're here, and I'm too tired to hold it till morning, so we'll do it now, and it won't be as clean as I wanted.
That's okay. Nothing about us was ever as clean as I wanted. "
"Let me say"
"No. Not yet. You'll get to talk. I promise you'll get to talk, I'm not going to do to you what got done to me, you'll get your whole turn.
" She folded her hands on the pad. "But I've listened to you for six years, Jack.
I've listened to you explain and mean and promise and almost. So tonight I go first. You can have every word after that you want.
But I go first, and you don't interrupt, because if you interrupt I'll lose my nerve, and I've spent too long finding it. "
He nodded. He'd never seen her like this. Not angry. Assembled. Every piece of her in its place and facing him.
"I'm taking Ethan to my mother's," she said.
"In the morning. It's two hours the other direction, you have the address, I'm not hiding him from you, this isn't that.
You'll see him. We'll figure out how, and I'll be fair about it, because he loves you and you love him and that's not the part that broke.
" She took a breath. "I'm not leaving because you don't love me.
I want to be so clear about that, because I need you to not spend the next year telling yourself a story where you didn't love me enough.
You loved me plenty. You loved me more than almost anybody gets loved.
That was never the problem, and if you make it the problem you'll learn the wrong thing from this and do it to someone else. "
"Then why," Jackson said, and it came out cracked, and he'd promised not to interrupt but it wasn't really an interruption, it was just the sound a man makes.
"Because loving me was never the thing I needed from you.
" She said it simply. "I needed you to choose me out loud.
Once. In front of the people it cost you something to say it to.
And you couldn't. Not wouldn't, I used to think wouldn't, I stayed years on wouldn't because wouldn't means someday.
It's couldn't, Jack. I watched you not be able to tonight with a whole nation watching and your own plan in your hand.
That's not a man who hasn't gotten around to it.
That's a man who can't. And I can love a man who can't. I do.
I just can't raise a son inside it, because he's already learning to read the sad under my voice, and in ten years he'll either be a boy who thinks that's what love looks like or a boy who's furious at both of us, and I won't hand him either one. "
The kitchen was very quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs their son slept through the end of the only life he'd known.
"Okay," Jackson said, after a while, because she'd stopped, because it was his turn, and he found that his whole turn, the thing he'd driven three and a half hours to say, had shrunk down to one word, and it was the wrong word, and it was the only true one he had. "Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"You said I couldn't. You're right. I've known for a while and I kept it where I used to keep soon.
" He looked at his hands on the table. "I keep waiting to feel the part of me that's going to fight you on this, and it's not there, and that's the worst thing I've learned tonight.
Not that you're leaving. That some part of me is relieved, because now I don't have to be the one brave enough to blow it up.
You're doing it for me. You're even brave for me on the way out.
" His voice went. "I'm so sorry, Sharon.
I know sorry's bankrupt. I'm saying it anyway because there isn't a bigger word and you deserve the bigger word and I don't have it. "
Sharon looked at him for a long moment, and something crossed her face, grief maybe, or just tiredness, and she reached across the table and put her hand over his, the involuntary kindness, the doughnut on the highway, the thing she couldn't switch off even now, even here, even doing this.
"I know," she said. "I know you are."
And they sat like that, her hand on his, at the kitchen table where he'd proposed with burnt eggs, two people who loved each other ending it gently because neither of them had it in them to end it any other way, and it was, Jackson thought, the most married moment of his whole marriage, and it was the last one.
POV: Sharon
Leaving, it turned out, was mostly boxes.
That was the thing nobody put in the songs about it.
She'd imagined leaving as a moment, a door, a suitcase in the rain.
What it actually was, was six years of a life that had to be sorted into keep and store and let-go, and every object was a small negotiation with the past. The mug he'd bought her at a gas station because it said WORLD'S OKAYEST MOM as a joke.
The good scissors her mother still called about.
Ethan's height marked in pencil on the doorframe, which you couldn't box, which she stood and looked at for a long time and then photographed with her phone, because you take what you can carry and you photograph the rest.
She did it in three days. She wasn't dramatic about the timeline; three days was just how long it took, and staying longer would have made it a deathwatch.
Jackson stayed in the city those three days, which was the right call, they'd agreed on it in the gray light after the kitchen, that him hovering would only make it worse, that some things you have to let a person do without you standing there feeling bad in the doorway.
Telling Ethan was the hard part. She'd known it would be.
She'd rehearsed it with the same care she'd once rehearsed nothing, because she'd always just talked, and now here she was scripting a sentence for a five-year-old like it was the most important speech of her life, which it was, it was more important than any speech in any ballroom.
"We're going to stay at Grandma's for a while," she told him, on the floor of his half-packed room, both of them sitting in the mess of it. "You and me. It's got a big yard and a dog named Biscuit who's very old and very lazy and you're going to love him."
"Is Daddy coming?"
"Daddy's going to visit. A lot. But Daddy's going to live in the city, and we're going to live at Grandma's, and that's the new way things are."
Ethan considered this with the seriousness he brought to everything. She watched him work it, watched him check it against the world, and she braced for the crying, and it didn't come. What came was worse.
"Is it because he didn't say us on the TV?"
And Sharon understood that her son had been carrying that for three days, turning it over, a five-year-old doing math with the only numbers he had, and had arrived at the correct answer, which was somehow more heartbreaking than a wrong one would have been.
"That's part of it, bug. You're not wrong.
" She wasn't going to lie to him. She'd decided that on the diner floor and she wasn't going back on it.
"But it's a grown-up-sized thing, and none of it is a you-sized thing, and I need you to hear the difference.
You didn't do anything. Daddy didn't stop loving anybody.
Some grown-up things just don't fit in the house anymore, and when that happens you need two houses.
That's all this is. Two houses. You're getting a dog out of it. "
"Biscuit."
"Biscuit."
Ethan leaned into her, and she held him, and over the top of his head she looked at the pencil marks on the doorframe she was leaving behind, all the heights he'd been, and she let herself cry, finally, quietly, into her son's hair where he couldn't see it, because she'd promised him a dry face for the hard parts and this was hers to carry, not his.
POV: Sharon
Dolores didn't say I told you so, which was the only truly surprising thing that happened all week.
"I've been practicing not saying it," Dolores admitted, in the diner after close, the two of them in the window booth. "Three days. It's the hardest thing I've ever not said."
"You can say it."
"I don't want to say it. That's the thing I figured out.
I thought I'd want to and I don't." Dolores turned her coffee cup.
"I wanted to be wrong, Sharon. I found the cloud every time because I wanted the sky to prove me a liar.
It didn't. I hate that it didn't. I'd rather have been the fool who worried for nothing. "