Chapter 15 #2
Nicole sat in a folding chair in an empty room and cried, badly, without any dignity at all, and Gordon Sutton did not come over and did not touch her and did not say don't cry.
He sat four feet away with his hands on his knees and let her.
After a while she said, "That's the first true thing you've said to me since 2012."
"Yeah," he said. "I know."
They sat there for a while longer.
"Whitney," Nicole said eventually.
"Yeah."
"Say that one too."
Gordon breathed out.
"She never met the other one," he said. "That's it.
That's all it ever was and it's so stupid I can hardly say it out loud.
Whitney arrived in year six. She has never in her life seen me be good at anything except being Gordon Sutton, and she thinks Gordon Sutton is enough, because she's never had a reason to think otherwise.
" He turned his wedding ring, and then stopped, and put his hand flat.
"So talking to her was easy. It's the easiest thing in my life.
And talking to you meant being with somebody who knew exactly how much I'd lost, and I couldn't stand it, and I never once said so — I just started telling her things instead. A bit at a time. For years."
"You told her about the hospital."
"I told her about the hospital."
"At two in the morning, while I was asleep in the same building."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you'd have looked at me," Gordon said, "and I'd have had to be a person, and she just — took the information."
Nicole wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
"That's the whole thing," she said. "Isn't it. That's the whole fourteen years in one sentence. She took the information."
"Yeah."
"God, Gordon."
"I know."
She laughed, then. It came out of nowhere, wet and undignified, and it was at nothing — at the two-bar heater, at the folding chairs, at a man of fifty-one who had been sitting in an empty room on Sundays for nine years — and it went through her before she could stop it.
And it terrified her.
Because that laugh was not forgiveness and it was not weakness and it was not confusion.
It was the specific sound she had made in this room in 2007 and 2009 and every year since, and it belonged to him, and it always had, and eight months of the hardest work of her life had not taken one ounce of it away.
She put both hands over her face.
"Nic?"
"Give me a minute."
He gave her a minute.
When she took her hands down she said, "I have a condition."
Gordon went completely still.
"All right."
"I'm going to say the whole of it and you're not going to answer until I've finished."
"All right."
Nicole stood up, because she had learned in February that she said hard things better on her feet.
"They're re-staging the anniversary," she said. "September. Same ballroom at the Trumbull, most of the same people, because Trevor's been trying to fix the year since April and that's the only fix he's got."
"I know. I told him no."
"Tell him yes."
Gordon's jaw moved.
"You're going to stand up in that room," Nicole said, "and you're going to say out loud exactly what you just said to me in this room.
Not the nice version. Not I let it happen — you did that in April and it cost me everything I had.
You're going to say that you read the script four days early, and that you struck the one line about yourself and left every line about your wife, and that you wrote the front-desk joke yourself and sent it to Whitney at four o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon. "
She kept going, because if she stopped she'd never start again.
"And then you're going to say the why. The relief. You're going to stand in front of three hundred people who think you're a great man who did a beautiful thing in a lobby in April, and you're going to tell them you laughed because it was comfortable to be in a room where I wasn't real."
Gordon's face had gone gray.
"No notes," Nicole said. "No Trevor. Nobody sees it first, including me. If one line of it has been near a communications person I'll know, because I've been listening to that man's sentences for twenty years."
"Okay."
"I'm not finished."
"Sorry."
"And when you've said it," she said, "you're going to stop.
You will not ask the room for anything. You will not ask me for anything — you will not say my name in the second half of that speech at all.
And then you're going to put the microphone down and walk away from it, and whatever happens next in that room is not yours. "
She stopped.
The heater ticked.
"And after that night," Nicole said, "for the rest of your life, you don't speak about me in public.
Not to praise me. Not to correct anybody.
Not to a journalist, not at a dinner, not on a stage, not ever, unless I have asked you to in that specific instance.
If somebody says something about me in a room, you look at me, and I'll handle it, and if I want you I'll tell you. "
Gordon sat looking at her.
"That's the condition," she said. "Both halves. They're one thing."
"Yes," he said.
"You're allowed to think about it."
"I don't need to think about it."
"Gordon—"
"Nicole." He stood up. "I've been trying to work out for five months what I could possibly do, and you've just told me, and the answer is that I say the true thing once in public and then shut up forever. Yes. Obviously yes."
And Nicole — standing in the room where she had signed a lease at twenty-six — confronted the thing she had been most afraid of, which was that his yes had made her feel better.
"That's not the test," she said.
"What?"
"You agreeing." She picked up her bag. "Gordon, you've agreed to everything since December. You agreed to the trust and you agreed about the boards and you'd agree to anything I said in this room right now, and I believe you mean every word of it, and it is worth nothing."
"Then what's the test?"
"September," she said. "The test is that you do it. In that room. Out loud. When it's happening and it's horrible and there are three hundred people looking at you and every instinct you've got is telling you to soften one clause."
She went to the door.
"And then," Nicole said, "the test is the twenty years after it, when somebody says something about me at a dinner and you keep your mouth shut and let me answer."
He didn't say anything.
"That one you can't do in an evening," she said. "That's the actual price. I'm not going to know for about a decade whether you paid it."
She got as far as the top of the stairs.
"Nic."
She stopped.
"For what it's worth," Gordon said, from the doorway of an empty room, "I'd have said all of it anyway. In September. I'd already told Trevor I'd do the event if he'd let me have the microphone with no script."
Nicole stood in the stairwell with her hand on the rail.
"When?"
"July," he said. "The week after the phone calls started reaching you."
She went down the stairs and out onto Dorchester Avenue into the August heat, and stood on the sidewalk outside a shuttered print shop for a full minute, and could not have said whether what was in her chest was hope or terror or the plain animal fact of being fifty percent of a thing that had lasted twenty-four years.
Then she got in her car and drove to Quincy, and did not tell Bridget any of it, and slept for ten hours.