Chapter 6 Tyler
I went back inside and found the senator's aide again, picked up a conversation about a zoning issue that mattered to exactly nobody in that room except the two of us, and told myself Darcy would find me again once she'd cooled down.
That was how it usually went. She got quiet, I gave her a few minutes, and by the time dessert came out she'd be back at my side with some dry comment that let us both step around whatever had happened without either of us having to say much about it.
I actually believed that, standing at the bar with a fresh drink, for a good twenty minutes.
It was Joanna who found me, weaving through the tables with her phone in her hand. "Have you seen Darcy? I texted her and she's not answering."
"She's probably handling something with the band." I said it easily, but something in my sister's face made the easiness harder to hold onto. "Why, what's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong, I just can't find her anywhere. I checked the kitchen, the coat check, everywhere."
I found the venue manager myself a few minutes later, the woman who'd been unfailingly competent all night, and she told me, with the careful neutrality of someone delivering news she suspected wasn't good, that Mrs. Westcott had given her closing instructions around nine and left through the side entrance.
Family matter, she'd said. She didn't know anything else.
I stood there with my phone in my hand, three unanswered texts already sent, and felt the first real drop of my stomach, the kind that came from understanding a situation had moved somewhere I hadn't accounted for.
I texted her once more, something short and reasonable-sounding that I typed and deleted twice before sending, Where are you, I'm worried, can we talk, and stood there a full minute watching the screen for the three dots that would mean she was writing back.
Nothing came. I told myself she'd seen the venue was chaotic, needed air, would turn up near the valet stand any minute now with some perfectly ordinary explanation, and I almost convinced myself of it standing there in the noise of the reception, the band still playing, nobody else in that room aware that anything at all had gone wrong.
My mother found me before I could decide what to do next. "Is everything all right? Someone said Darcy left."
"I don't know yet. I'm trying to reach her."
"Well, I hope she's not making a scene out of nothing.
" Claudette adjusted the clasp on her bracelet, unbothered, already scanning the room for her next conversation.
"It's rather rude, leaving your father-in-law's seventieth without so much as a goodbye.
After everything he's done for this family. "
"She didn't leave without a reason, Mom.
" I heard myself say it, some reflex of loyalty rising up before I'd fully thought through what I meant by it, but I didn't push further, didn't ask my mother to sit with the actual content of the toast she'd given twenty minutes earlier.
Edmund was across the room, laughing with the Ashworths, and it was his night, and some part of me still believed that meant this wasn't the moment to make my mother examine herself. "I should go find her."
"Don't let her turn this into a whole production," Claudette said, already turning away. "You know how dramatic these things can get if you let them."
I stopped by our table on my way out, mostly out of habit, and found Douglas's wife still sitting there, watching me with an expression I didn't have time to fully read. "She's not answering," I told her, more to myself than to her. "I don't understand what happened. It was one comment."
"Tyler." She said my name carefully, the way you'd say something to someone standing too close to an edge they couldn't see.
"I was sitting right here. I watched her face when your mother said that.
I watched yours too." She didn't say anything else, didn't finish the thought, just let it sit there between us, and I told her I needed to go, and left before I had to decide what to do with what she hadn't said.
I left through the same side entrance, called Darcy twice more from the car, got voicemail both times, and drove home faster than I should have, running the evening back through my head and arriving, each time, at the same conclusion: that she'd overreacted to a toast that hadn't been about her at all, that a difficult night with my mother had triggered something disproportionate, that whatever this was would resolve itself once I got her alone and reminded her how much I loved her.
The house was lit when I pulled in, which surprised me enough that some of the tension in my chest eased before I'd even gotten out of the car.
She was home. It was fine. I sat in the driveway for a moment gathering the speech I'd half built on the drive over, some version of an apology for the toast wrapped around a larger apology for how I'd handled the corridor, and told myself I'd say the real thing this time, whatever the real thing turned out to be once I was standing in front of her.
She wasn't in the kitchen or the living room. I found her in our bedroom, a duffel bag open on the bed, half filled with clothes she was folding with a precision that looked more like control than packing.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm staying at Maxine's tonight." She didn't look up from the folding. "Maybe a few nights."
"Darcy, come on. You can't just leave in the middle of your father-in-law's birthday and disappear without telling anyone.
" I heard how it sounded as I said it, the complaint coming out wrong even to my own ears, and tried again.
"I mean, I was worried. Joanna was worried.
It looked strange, you vanishing like that. "
"It looked strange." She finally looked at me, and there was something in her face I didn't recognize, not anger exactly, something quieter and more finished than anger.
"Your mother called Felicity the daughter she should have had, in front of two hundred people, and I looked at you, and you said nothing.
And then when I told you how that felt, you told me not to make your father's night about me.
That's what looked strange to you? That I left? "
"I'm sorry. I said it wrong." I sat on the edge of the bed, reaching for her hand, and she let me take it but didn't soften into it the way she usually did.
"I was trying to keep the peace. You know how my mother gets, and I didn't want the whole night to turn into a scene over one comment.
I wasn't thinking about how it would sound to you. "
"You weren't thinking about how it would sound to me.
" She repeated it back slowly, giving me time to hear my own excuse.
"Tyler, I've heard some version of that sentence from you for years.
Don't make it about you. Not tonight. My mother doesn't mean anything by it.
You know how she is. Every single time, I've been the one asked to make the discomfort smaller so everyone else can keep having a nice evening. "
"That's not fair. I've defended you plenty of times."
"When?" She asked it plainly and waited for an answer, and I opened my mouth and found I didn't have one ready, not a specific one, not a moment I could point to with a date and a sentence attached to it.
"I'm not asking rhetorically. Name one time you actually stood between me and your mother in a room full of people, the way you'd expect me to stand between you and anyone who insulted you. "
I searched for something and came up empty in a way that unsettled me more than the argument itself. "I don't know, Darcy, I can't just produce a list on command. That doesn't mean it never happened."
"Maybe it doesn't. But I can't find one either, and I've had twelve years to look.
" She zipped the duffel bag closed, and the sound of it felt more final than anything she'd said.
"I waited for you tonight. I looked right at you when she said it, and I gave you every chance to say something, and you picked up your wine glass instead.
That's not a moment I can talk myself out of anymore. "
"So what, you're leaving me? Over one bad sentence at a party?"
"It's not one sentence. It was never one sentence.
Tonight was just the one I couldn't explain away.
" She picked up the bag, and I stood, some part of me still expecting this to resolve the way our disagreements usually resolved, with me finding the right combination of words and her deciding the words were enough.
"I need some space to think, and I can't think clearly in this house right now. "
"How much space? A few days? A week?" I heard the bargaining in my own voice and couldn't stop it. "Darcy, I love you. Whatever I did wrong tonight, we can fix it. We always fix it."
"We don't fix it, Tyler. I let it go. That's different.
" She paused at the bedroom door, and for a second I thought she might soften, might set the bag back down, might let me hold her the way I'd held her a hundred times after harder nights than this one.
Instead she said, quietly, "I'm not asking you to fix anything tonight.
I just need you to understand that this isn't a bad mood I'm going to sleep off. I'll call you tomorrow."
She was gone before I found anything else to say, her car pulling out of the driveway while I stood at the bedroom window watching the taillights shrink down our street, and I told myself, standing there in my father's birthday tuxedo in an empty house, that she'd be back in a few days, that this would feel enormous tonight and smaller by Tuesday.
I believed that for exactly as long as it took me to walk back downstairs and find her key to my parents' house and the foundation office key, sitting on the kitchen counter where she'd left them on her way out.
I picked them up and turned them over in my hand for a while, standing at the counter in a house that had never once felt this quiet with both of us in it.
I thought about calling her again and didn't, some instinct telling me that a third unanswered call would only prove her point more thoroughly than anything I could say in a message.
I thought about calling Douglas, and got as far as pulling up his name before I put the phone down, because I didn't know yet how to explain what had happened in a way that didn't make me sound the way I suspected I was.
I ended up in the kitchen with a glass of wine, sitting at the island where Darcy and I had eaten dinner three nights ago, before any of this, and I let myself replay the toast the way I hadn't let myself replay it in the ballroom, with all the noise and the crowd and the obligation to keep smiling stripped away.
My mother's voice. The daughter I should have had.
The laughter. Darcy's face turning to find mine, and mine sliding away from hers toward the room, toward the wine, toward anywhere that wasn't the direct weight of what she needed from me in that second.
I could tell myself, sitting there, that it had been one sentence, poorly timed, quickly forgotten by everyone except the one person it had been about.
I could also see, if I let myself look at it straight on for the first time, that I had done the same thing at Thanksgiving two years ago, and at Joanna's engagement party, and at the spring gala, and probably a dozen other times I hadn't bothered to count because counting them had never seemed necessary before tonight.
I sat with that a long while, the glass going warm in my hand, and I did not yet know what to do with it.
I only knew that the house felt different than it had an hour earlier, and that I did not think it was going back to the way it had felt before, no matter how many days passed.