Chapter 12 #2
“I know,” he said.
That was all. He didn’t explain. He sat with his back against the boxes and his hands on his knees, and he let it be what it was.
She turned her head and looked at him.
“And I’d do it again,” he said. He said it quietly, to the dark.
“That’s the thing. I’ve thought about it every night since October.
If I went back three years, and you came home from that board meeting and made dinner and pretended it didn’t matter, I’d do it again.
I’d pay for it. I’d make sure you never knew.
” He shook his head, slowly. “That’s the problem.
That’s what’s wrong with me. It isn’t that I did it once.
It’s that I’d do it again. I don’t know how to watch you want something and not arrange it.
I’ve never known how to do that with anybody. ”
Amelia sat still.
It was the first true thing he had said about himself. Not an apology. Not a reason. Just the truth, with nothing wrapped around it. This is what’s wrong with me.
In five years, she didn’t think she’d ever heard him say one sentence like it.
* * *
“Why Heather?” she said.
She hadn’t planned to ask. It just came out, into the cold dark room, and once it was out she didn’t take it back.
He didn’t answer right away. She heard him breathe in and let it out.
“Because she already knew,” he said.
“Knew what?”
“The worst thing about me. She was in the bar. She heard all of it. What I said about my mother. What I said about you.” He was looking at the boxes across the room, at the kids’ names in her handwriting.
“When I talked to her, there was nothing she could find out that she didn’t already know.
So I could say anything. It didn’t cost anything.
” He stopped. “With you, every single thing I didn’t tell you was sitting on top of that bar.
If I’d started telling you about my father, about that year, I’d have had to tell you the rest. And I’d have had to watch your face while I did it.
” His voice went lower. “I was afraid of your face, Amelia. For five years. That’s the reason. ”
She didn’t say anything.
“It’s a reason,” he said. “It’s not an excuse. I know the difference. It doesn’t make it all right. It makes it worse, probably. I gave her the parts of me that were yours because I was too much of a coward to give them to you. That’s what I did.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t ask her to understand. He didn’t ask her for anything.
She sat there on the cold floor with her back against three years of kids’ files and it went through her slowly, like warmth coming back into cold hands. It hurt. Warmth always hurts, coming back.
It didn’t fix anything. She knew that. The bet was still on the dollar. The proposal still happened with it open. Heather still sat in his car for eight weeks and heard things she never heard. Deja’s name was still where it had landed. Nothing he’d said tonight took back one minute of any of it.
But something had opened. Like a door in a long hallway that had been shut her whole marriage, and now it wasn’t shut. It was open a crack, and there was light on the other side.
* * *
The power came back at twenty past midnight.
It came all at once, with a thump somewhere in the walls, and the overhead lights blazed on, and they both flinched and put their hands up against the glare. The radiators clanked. The vending machine in the break room shuddered and went on humming.
They were sitting closer than they had been.
She didn’t know when that had happened. She didn’t remember moving.
But her shoulder was almost against his arm now, an inch away, the same inch as the parking deck.
In the bright light she could see the dust still on his face, and the tired lines around his eyes, and the gray at his temples, more of it than there’d been in August.
He looked at her. He didn’t move either.
Then he got up. He did it slowly, carefully, and stepped back, and held out a hand to help her up. She looked at the hand. She took it. He pulled her to her feet and let go right away.
“The roads won’t be clear till morning,” he said. “There’s a couch in Patrice’s office. It’s the warmest room now the heat’s back. You should take it.” He picked up his canvas jacket. “I’ll take the chair out front. By the door. If you need anything.”
“You don’t have to stay.”
“I can’t get home either,” he said. “And the pipes still need checking.” He paused at the conference room door. “Good night, Amelia.”
She stood in the bright empty room with the boxes and listened to his steps go down the hall.
Good night, Amelia.
* * *
She lay on Patrice’s couch under her own coat and didn’t sleep.
The radiator ticked. Outside, the ice went on cracking and falling in the trees. Out in the front hall, forty feet away, she could hear him get up once around two and go up the stairs to check the pipes, and come back down, and settle in the chair.
She lay there and looked at the ceiling. And she was frightened.
Not of him. She had been afraid of a lot of things since August, and she knew what they felt like, and this wasn’t any of them. She wasn’t afraid he’d hurt her again. She wasn’t afraid of what he’d say or what he’d do.
She was afraid of herself.
Of how much she’d wanted to lean that last inch against his arm.
Of how easy it had been to carry boxes beside him in the dark, and how right it felt, and how fast it came back.
Of the door that had opened a crack in that cold room, and the light on the other side of it, and how badly she wanted to get up off this couch and walk through it.
She had spent five months building a wall. Brick by brick. The frame, the pause, the list, Heather, Deja. She had built it carefully and she had built it well, because it was the only thing keeping her standing.
And tonight a man with dust on his face had said I’d do it again, and that’s the problem, and the whole wall moved.
She pulled the coat up over her shoulders and turned on her side, toward the wall, away from the door.
She did not get up. She held still until morning.