Chapter 15 #2
She called on the twelfth and got about ninety seconds in before it came out: “Mila, I’m in it, aren’t I. I’m the sister who got told nothing and never asked.”
“You’re in it the way everybody’s in it. Nobody’s named.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Mila stood at the window of the cottage with the phone against her ear and made herself do the thing she was asking her husband to do.
“Yes,” she said. “You’re in it. Not by name and not unkindly, and I’m not going to pretend you’re not, because you’d hear it in June and know I’d managed you.”
A long silence.
“Right,” Christina said. “Okay. Thank you for not — yes. Okay.” A shaky breath. “I’ll tell you what, though, it’s absolutely vile being on this end of it.”
“I know,” said Mila. “I’ve been on this end of it since October.”
* * *
Christina came up the lane one Tuesday afternoon that month and did not get out of the car for ten minutes.
When she did, she walked straight into the barn office and sat down on the feed bin and said, “I did it.”
Mila put the pen down.
“I sat him down on Sunday night. In the kitchen. And I said it.” Christina’s hands were in her lap and they were not steady. “All of it. Out loud. I said I’d been lonely in the same house as him for about ten years and I didn’t think it was anybody’s fault and I didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“What did he say?”
Christina laughed. It came out wrong and turned into something else halfway through.
“He said, oh, thank God.”
Mila sat very still.
“Twenty-four years,” Christina said. “Both of us. Being so careful with each other. He’d been waiting since about 2015 for me to say it first because he thought it would hurt me, and I’d been waiting because I thought it would hurt him, and we sat at that table on Sunday and laughed until we both cried, and then he made us eggs.
” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
“It’s the best conversation we’ve had in a decade.
It’s the last one we’re going to have as married people.
And I have never liked him more in my life. ”
Outside, somebody dragged a hose across the yard.
“I’m sorry,” Mila said.
“Don’t be. I’m not.” Christina looked out the window.
“That’s the part I wanted to tell you, actually.
That’s why I came. I’ve been watching you all spring and I finally understood the difference, driving up here.
” She turned back. “My marriage went quiet because there was nothing under it. Yours went quiet because there was too much. I didn’t know those were two different things until I did it. ”
Mila found she could not say anything at all.
“And I told Jason,” Christina said. “On the phone, on the way here. I’ve never told Jason anything in my life. And he said Chris, I’m so sorry, and then he said are you all right, and I had to pull over, because nobody in this family has asked anybody that question since about 1987.”
She stood up and got her keys out.
“Anyway. I’m going to be unbearable for about a year and then I think I’m going to be fine.” At the door she stopped. “You did that, you know. Not on purpose. I watched you make my brother say things, and I thought, well. I could at least try it on a man who never did anything wrong.”
* * *
She cut her own episode in nine days and it nearly took her apart.
Jody came out and built her a booth out of two moving blankets and a clothes rail in the corner of the cottage, and Mila sat in it with the headphones on and a script she had written out longhand because her hands did better with a pen than a keyboard, and she talked into a microphone about the sixth of October.
The first two days were fine. The chair, the shoes, the machine breathing for her, the inventory in the third week. She had told herself for four months that the reason she could do this was that she was a professional, and for two days that was even true.
On the third day she got to the nurse in the hallway saying your sister, and had to stop.
Not because she cried. Because her voice went flat — the smooth, warm, pleasant voice, the podium voice, the one she had built out of eight years of things she had decided not to say — and she heard it come out of her own mouth into her own microphone and sat there in a booth made of moving blankets absolutely rigid with fury.
She did the passage nine times. It kept coming out managed.
In the end she took the headphones off and went out and sat on the mounting block in the dark for half an hour, and then came back in and did it once more without the script, and it was ugly and it was slow and there was a nine-second gap in the middle of it where she could not get a word out.
She kept the gap.
That was the single best professional decision of her life, and she made it at half past one in the morning on the ninth of May, alone, in a cottage that was not hers.
* * *
Nate came out on the tenth of May to take the drive.
He listened to the whole of her episode in the cottage with his eyes shut and his hand over his mouth, and when it finished he sat there for a long time without moving.
“Say something,” Mila said.
“Give me a minute.”
“Nate.”
“I’m going to say two things and the first one is a work note, because if I say the other one first I won’t get through it.
” He took his hand down. His eyes were red.
“The nine seconds stay. If anybody at that network so much as looks at the nine seconds you call me and I will burn the building down.”
“And the second thing?”
“The second thing can wait till after delivery.”
“Nate.”
“It can wait.” He put the drive in his bag. “It’s a good thing and it’s a big thing and it has a lot of moving parts, and if I put it in front of you now you’ll spend the next three days thinking about it instead of the mix.”
“You’ve just made that impossible.”
“I know. I’m not sorry.” He stood and got his coat, and then stopped with it half on, and for a second he was not brisk at all.
“I’ll say this much of it. There’s a room in Washington with your name being said in it, and I’ve had two calls I wasn’t expecting, and whatever you think the next year of your life looks like, you’re going to want to have heard me out first.”
Mila sat at her own table with her hands flat on it.
“That sounds like moving,” she said.
“It does rather, doesn’t it.” Nate got the coat the rest of the way on and picked up the drive. “See you at the mix.”
* * *
And Jason did nothing.
That was the whole of those three weeks, and it was the loudest thing that happened.
He did not call Roger, and she knew he had not because Roger would have told her.
He did not call the network; Nate said so, unprompted, in a tone of some surprise.
He did not have a statement ready. When Ardith Fairbanks said something at a dinner in the second week — Christina reported it, furious — he said my wife made it, ask her, and changed the subject, and Ardith went home and told four people, which was how Mila found out he had done it exactly right.
He came to the barn twice, on dates she set, on subjects she named.
He never asked how it was going. Not once.
Not gently, not at the end of a phone call, not in a way he thought was casual — and she caught him not asking, twice, visibly, as she had caught him stopping the sentence in April, and both times she stood there in a barn aisle with her heart going and said nothing about it at all.
On the second Friday in May she drove herself up to Kennett Square and rode her own horse at a walk for twelve minutes around a sand track in Pennsylvania, and cried the entire way home, and did not tell anybody that either.
She had two weeks and a piece to finish.