Chapter 7 #2
Box thirty-something. Household and personal — the stuff that had come out of the desk in his office, which meant it was the stuff nobody had ever filed, which meant it was the only interesting box in the room.
She found the desk calendar.
It was one of those big leather-cornered blotter things his father had used and Blake had kept using because it had always been there.
He wrote on it in pencil, in the tiny cramped hand that had always been so at odds with the size of him, and he wrote almost nothing on it, because his actual calendar had been kept by somebody else.
Kristin turned it to December.
The sixth was a Friday. In the square, in pencil:
Peterson 6:30. K driving.
And underneath, in the same pencil, smaller, at the bottom of the square where you write a thing you do not want to look at:
talk to J re: load
Kristin sat on the floor of the long room with a desk blotter across her knees for what felt like a long time and was probably nine seconds.
"Blake."
He came over. She held it up.
She watched him read it — understand what it was, and then, about a second later, understand what she was going to say next — and saw him decide not to say anything first, which was the correct decision and did not help him at all.
"What is that," she said.
"It's what it says."
"Say it out loud."
"I wrote a note to talk to Jocelyn about her workload." His voice was completely flat. "On the sixth of December. Before we went to the Petersons'."
"Before."
"Before."
"So when I said it in the car on the way home," Kristin said, "and you told me I sounded jealous—"
"I'd already had the thought myself. That morning." He was standing very still. "Yes."
"You had the same thought I had."
"Yes."
"And when your wife said it out loud you called it jealousy."
Blake did not answer. There was nothing in the answer column.
Kristin looked down at four pencil words.
Here is what was in her chest, and she catalogued it the way she would run a differential, because it was that or start throwing things.
Underneath the anger — which was there, which was enormous — was a thing that was almost relief.
Because for seven months she had carried around a version of that night where she had been paranoid, where the animal thing at the back of her neck had been just a woman getting older in a big house, and she had never once been able to prove otherwise.
And here was pencil. She had been right.
She had been right on the sixth of December, in writing, in his own hand, in a drawer.
And underneath that — underneath the relief, right at the bottom, where the real thing lives —
He had known. He had known and he had said the word jealous anyway, because it was easier than the conversation, and then twenty-three days later he had taken the whole inside of himself to the woman he had been meaning to have a conversation about.
"You didn't even want her," Kristin said.
"No."
"You wanted the twenty minutes in the car to be over."
Blake put his hand over his mouth.
"Say something," she said.
"There's nothing I can say that isn't me trying to get out of it."
"Then be in it."
"I knew," he said.
Kristin put the blotter down.
She was up and moving before she made any decision about moving — through the long room and down the hall past the stairs, going nowhere, because there is no such thing as going somewhere in a house you left, and she got to the kitchen and stopped in the middle of the floor with her arms wrapped around herself.
The chart was gone off the sugar bowl. He had not moved anything else in seven months and he had moved that.
He came to the kitchen doorway and did not come in.
"Do you want me to go," he said. "I'll go. There's nine boxes left and I'll do them tonight and text Lena what's in them."
"Don't call her."
"Okay."
She was looking at the mudroom door.
She had been looking at it for a while, she realized.
Ten feet to her left. Slate on the other side of it and a coat hook and a bench and a drain in the floor, because it was a mudroom in a lake house and of course there was a drain in the floor, and she had been on that floor for what the report said was nineteen minutes before the ambulance and what she remembered as most of a night.
"I'm going to go in there," she said.
"Okay."
"Not because it's healthy."
"Okay."
She walked over and put her hand on the knob and did not turn it.
Blake had come as far as the middle of the kitchen. He stopped when she stopped.
"I can't," she said.
"That's all right."
"It is not all right, I've been walking around the outside of this house for eight months like an idiot—"
"Kristin."
She turned around and he was right there.
Neither of them had meant it. That was the thing she went over and over for the rest of that month: nobody crossed a room.
He had stopped where he stopped and she had turned around, and the turning had put her inside a distance that had not existed a second before, and her forehead was about four inches from his collarbone and she could feel the heat coming off him through the flannel.
She did not step back.
He did not put his arms around her, and later she understood that if he had, the whole thing would have been over — she would have been out the door and gone and he would never have gotten another hour.
He kept his hands down. He stood absolutely still, like a man who has come around a corner into something with hooves.
Her right hand came up and rested flat on the front of his shirt.
That was all. It stayed there maybe three seconds. She could feel his heart going like something in a trap and she could feel her own doing exactly the same thing and she was so angry she could have set the house on fire.
Then Kristin took her hand back, and looked at it, and said, "That wasn't anything."
"Okay," Blake said. His voice had gone completely to pieces.
"I mean it."
"I know."
"Do the nine boxes," she said, and got her coat, and went out the front door and down the steps and across the leaves nobody had blown, and drove the half-mile out with both hands on the wheel and her whole body ringing like a hit bell.
At the mailbox she stopped.
She sat there with the blinker going, which was absurd, because there was nobody on that road for a mile in either direction and there had not been for a hundred and fourteen years.
Then she turned left, toward Mound, and went home to a dog and two rooms and a closing in four weeks that was the only thing in her life she was completely sure about.