21. Connor
CONNOR
She doesn’t ask me up and I don’t expect her to. She sits down on the second step from the bottom in that green dress, coat pulled around her, heels together, and looks up at me, and with me standing on the pavement we’re about level.
“Go,” she says.
“I’m putting my mother and Walter in a room together, with my grandfather there, and I’m playing the whole take.”
Her chin comes up.
“Say that again.”
“All three of them. One room, at the house. The full footage, not the piece that went on the screen. The take, from the top, all the way to the end of what you said.” My breath’s going white and my heart is going like I’m the one who’ll be on trial in that room.
I had this in an order, in the car, and the order’s gone.
“Connor—”
“I know. It’s yours.” That comes out fast, because it’s the part I’ve been most afraid of getting wrong. “I’m not doing it without you telling me I can. If you say no, I say the words myself with nothing behind them and take what that costs. Worse plan. I’ll take the worse plan.”
She sits very still on that step.
“Keep going,” she says.
“Then Walter. Out loud, by name, in front of my mother. Both calls to the property manager, what he said, what he asked for. The reporters he lined up in the first week, and the—” And I lose it.
It’s gone, the next piece, the one that makes me angriest, and I stand there in the cold with my mouth open like a man who’s forgotten his own name.
“The foundation,” she says quietly.
“The committee. Yes.” My jaw’s so tight the words barely clear it. “That one’s the worst for me. I found out he’d done it from him, days after, while he was pleased with himself.”
“And then what? He apologizes?”
“No. He won’t. He’s already refused once, to my face, and I’ve stopped wanting it.
” I shake my head, and the truth of that lands even as I say it.
“I’m not doing it to get anything out of Walter.
I’m doing it so it’s said in front of my mother and my grandfather and it can’t be walked back into being nothing. ”
A car alarm goes off two streets over and neither of us reacts.
“And your mother?” Lena says.
“She’ll admit it.”
“You’re that sure.”
“She’s not a liar. That’s the thing nobody outside understands about her.
” My jaw aches saying it. “She’s careful and she’s cold, and she’ll arrange a room so the truth never comes up.
But put it in front of her flat, and she’ll look at you and tell you she did it, and tell you why.
She won’t be ashamed either. She’ll explain it like a decision about a roof. ”
Lena’s quiet for a moment.
“That’s worse,” she says.
“Yes.”
She asks me how, then. Not whether. How. She goes at it the way she’d go at a building. Who’s in the room. Who else is in the house. What happens if my mother simply stands up and walks out, because she can, any time, and nobody alive can stop her.
“Then she leaves,” I say. “And she’ll have left in front of her own father, and I’ll have said it anyway. Part of this only works if I stop needing her to sit still for it.”
“Where’s Ambrose?”
“Downstairs. He’s insisting on coming down for it. Nobody’s happy about that, and nobody’s going to win against him either.”
Her mouth goes soft and hurt at the same time, and she looks away up the street.
“He’s dying, Connor.”
“I know.”
“He’s dying and you’re going to sit him in front of that.”
“He told me to. I tried to tell him privately last week and he shut me down before I got the name out. He wants to watch whoever it is answer him to his face.”
She takes that in.
“That sounds like him,” she says.
The cold’s properly into me now. She’s got her hands pushed up into her sleeves and her ankles crossed, and I’ve got no gloves, and neither of us moves.
“There’s one more thing,” I say. “You’d find it out anyway. I’d rather you had it from me.”
“Go on.”
“My mother’s had papers drawn up. If I do this—if I embarrass the family again—” I can’t make myself walk through the terms out loud, so I don’t. “The house, the money, all of it.”
Lena doesn’t move. Then she pulls her coat tighter around her, and when she speaks her voice has gone careful, the voice of a woman testing a floor that might not hold.
“When did she tell you that?”
“Last week. In a corridor. She was holding samples for the invitations.”
“Of course she was.” Dry as a bone. “And you’re doing it anyway.”
“Yes.”
“What would you have left?”
“My salary. My clothes. A watch.” I look at the streetlight because it’s easier than looking at her. “There’s one account that’s genuinely mine, and most of what was in it is already gone, and I’m not talking about that tonight. It isn’t part of this.”
She lets it go. I watch her decide to let it go, and I don’t know what she does with it.
“What happens to you after?” she says.
“Practically? Something small. I keep working. They can’t take the job, and if they ever do, I’m employable. Hotels are hotels.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” I make myself look at her. “Leave it out of anything you decide. Please. If any part of what you do about me comes out of feeling sorry for a man who lost a house, I’d rather have the house.”
“Does she know you’re telling me?”
“No.”
“Does anybody?”
“Nobody knows any of it. You’re first.”
And there’s the rest of it, sitting behind my teeth, and my heart’s going so hard I can hear it over the street.
“That’s why I’m on your friend’s steps in the dark like a lunatic,” I say, and my voice comes out wrong, too loud.
“Not for a decision. Things happened to you in rooms you weren’t in.
For years. I was in most of those rooms, and I never once came out and told you what got said.
” My throat closes and I push the rest through it.
“I can’t undo it. I’ve tried to find a way and there isn’t one.
What I can do is—you get told first. From now on.
Everything, before anyone. Whatever you decide about me. ”
Lena looks at me.
The window above us has a television flickering in it. Some man in a parked car is arguing with somebody on speakerphone. The whole street’s going about its business, and I stand there with my ears burning in the cold and wait.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay?”
“Play it.” Her chin’s up. “In that room, to those three people. Not to a newspaper, not to anybody’s lawyer. That room, and then we talk about anything else.”
The breath goes out of me all at once. My knees loosen and I put a hand on the cold iron rail like an old man, and I don’t care that she sees it. Relief, that plain, and that big.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for that.” She stands up off the step, a stair above me now, and pulls her coat tight. “It’s my voice. You asked, and I said yes, and that’s the first time anybody in your family has asked me anything since I signed a coverage release I didn’t read.”
“And the Jubilee?” she says.
I knew it was coming and I still have to take a second.
“That’s separate. That room is for my family.
The Jubilee is for everybody who sat in that ballroom.
” I make myself go slowly. “There’s a version of that night where the whole take plays in front of all of them, on the same screen my mother used.
I’ve thought about it constantly. I’m not asking you tonight. ”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ve said yes to one thing already, and I’m not stacking a second one on top of it while you’re sitting on a step in the cold.” My hands have gone numb in my pockets and I can’t feel my own fingers. “When I ask you that one, I want you to have had a week to hate the idea first.”
She studies me for a moment.
“All right,” she says.
We walk to the end of the block and back, because she can’t feel her feet and neither can I.
She asks about Ambrose. How he looks, whether he’s eating, whether the nurse is any good. I tell her about the physiotherapist and the resistance band and the bus-stop face, and she laughs, properly, out loud on a dark street, and the sound of it goes through me like heat through a wall.
And while she’s laughing I get a proper look at her under the streetlight, and I see it.
Her eyes are still a little swollen. It’s faint, and her makeup’s been fixed at some point in the evening, and if I hadn’t spent years watching that face I wouldn’t catch it.
There’s a tightness at the corner of her mouth she gets when she’s holding a hurt down where nobody can reach it.
Something happened tonight in that room.
I have the question ready. What happened at the mixer. It’s right there behind my teeth, and the old version of me would’ve asked, and asked kindly, and she’d have had to hand it over and then look after me while I got angry on her behalf.
She said it was fine. She’s chosen not to give it to me. That’s allowed to be a thing she gets to keep.
So I don’t ask. I say, “Do you want the rest of the Dennis story or not,” because she’s asked me twice about the Saugatuck night man, and she says yes, and we walk another half block, and I watch the tightness come out of her mouth all on its own.
All I did was shut up and stay next to her. Nobody ever taught me that one. There’s a raw ache under my sternum watching her come back to herself. Glad, and ashamed that it took me this long to learn something this small.
Back at the steps she stops and turns around.
“Connor.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the first plan you’ve ever told me before your family heard it.” She says it quietly, evenly. She’s not being cruel. That’s what takes the floor out from under me. There’s no blade in it anywhere. It’s just the truth, held out where I can see it. “Six years. That’s the first one.”
I open my mouth and there’s nothing in it. Nothing at all.
“I know,” I manage.
“I don’t think you do, actually. I think you’re just now finding out.” She goes up the steps and turns again with her hand on the rail. “Every single thing I ever learned about my own life, I learned in a car afterward. Or from Walter. Or from a woman at a party who assumed I already knew.”
“Lena—”
“That’s not me asking you for anything. It’s just true, and I’m tired of not saying true things.” A breath goes up white past the streetlight. “Do the room. Then come and tell me what happened, before you tell anybody else.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.” She gets the door open. “That part I actually believe.”
And then she’s inside, and the vestibule light comes on, and I watch her go up past the frosted glass on the stair, and a minute later a light comes on in a front window and her shadow crosses it.
I stand on the pavement and look at that window like an idiot.
I could go home. There’s a house with nobody in it, a letter coming this week, a bed I’ve stopped using. It’s twenty minutes away and the keys are in my hand.
She’s up there taking those shoes off. She’ll put her earrings in the little dish. She’ll tell Marisol about tonight, the real version, the one I don’t get, and Marisol will say something filthy about my entire family, and my wife will laugh, and it’ll help.
And I don’t get to be in the room for it. I keep walking into that fact from new directions, and every direction hurts.
So I stay a while, in the cold, on a public sidewalk, watching a lit window on the second floor of a building I don’t live in.
Apparently this is what I do now.