Chapter 8 #2
“I’m fifty-one percent sure I’m getting divorced,” Christina said, with her mouth full. “Wrong week to mention it. Don’t tell Jason.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not a crisis. It’s a long slow nothing.” She pushed the plate away. “God. Look at me. Both of us at this table. My mother would be thrilled.”
Mila sat down opposite her.
“Can I ask you something,” Christina said. “And you can tell me to shut up.”
“Then I probably will.”
“Fine. Fair.” She turned her glass around on the table. “You know he found you. In the field.”
The kitchen went still.
“He was in the car,” Christina said. “He’d gone the long way around to the Ridgely place to get you because the fog came down, and he came around the bend and the mare was standing in the lane with her reins over her head.
And he went over the fence and up that field and he got to you about six minutes before the ambulance, which the ambulance people said afterward was — well. They said it mattered.”
Mila looked at the table.
“He’s never told you,” Christina said.
“No.”
“He’s never told anyone. I only know because I was at the hospital that night and he was sitting in the corridor with your blood on his shirt and he wouldn’t let them take it off him.
” Christina stood up and put her plate in the sink.
“I’m not making a case. I’m honestly not.
I don’t even know what he did, and I’ve decided I probably don’t want to.
” She turned on the faucet. “I just think you’re a person who’d rather have the whole thing in front of her. ”
She went to bed at nine.
Mila sat in that kitchen for another forty minutes on her own, and did not cry, and did not decide anything at all.
* * *
And this was the part nobody warns you about.
Not the anger. The anger was easy. The anger was a clean fuel and she had run on it for three months.
This was the other thing: that there was a rhythm between them, laid down over ten years, and that it had not gone anywhere.
It sat under everything like rails under snow.
She could not be in a room with this man for forty minutes without falling into it — the timing, the shorthand, the way she knew what the end of his sentence was going to be, and the way he set her up for the joke because he had always set her up for the joke.
Eight years of marriage had built a machine, and the machine still worked, and it did not care in the slightest what he had said in a hospital room in November.
She went back to the cottage on the Friday and did not go to the house for two days.
* * *
She worked. That was the answer, and she knew it was the answer, and it half worked.
Nate came out on the Saturday with a producer’s schedule and a set of names, and they spent five hours going through who she should be talking to.
She did not tell him what the series was.
She told him it was about what people say over the unconscious, which was true and was also the shape of the thing rather than the thing.
“Hospitals,” he said.
“Mostly.”
“You’ll need clinical people.”
“I’ll need nurses,” Mila said. “Nurses, aides, porters. Not consultants. The consultants will give me a position. The nurses will give me a room.”
Nate looked at her for a second over his glasses and wrote it down word for word, which she pretended not to notice and thought about for two days.
She started calling people that week. She got two nos, a maybe, and a retired charge nurse in Dundalk who talked for ninety minutes on the phone before Mila had gotten the recorder out of the bag.
She was good at this. That was the astonishing part. Three months out of a coma with a hand that shook and she was better at this than she had been at twenty-nine, because at twenty-nine she had been waiting for her turn to talk.
* * *
On the Sunday after that the wound came back into the house.
Roger came for the campaign, and Jason took him into the study, and Mila was in the kitchen making Larry’s lunch when she heard the name through a door that was not quite shut.
“— and Bethany’s view is that we go to the Fairbanks people first, before the gala, because if they —”
She stopped with the knife in her hand.
It was the first time in four months anybody else had said that name out loud within her hearing, and her whole body had an opinion about it before she did: the flat expensive shoes, the chair by the window, you should be able to say things out loud.
She stood in her own kitchen and held the counter.
Then the study door opened properly and Jason came out, and saw her face, and she watched him understand exactly what she had heard and what it had done.
“Mila —”
“Don’t.”
“She’s not — there’s nothing —”
“I said don’t.” Her voice came out perfectly level. “I know she still runs your foundation. I’ve known since November. You’re not obliged to hide it, you’re only obliged not to say her name in front of me in my own kitchen.”
He stood there.
“Your father’s lunch is going cold,” she said, and went down the hall.
* * *
It took two days to come back from that and then she was back on the Tuesday night anyway, because the bell was wired to the rail and nobody else knew the four o’clock thing.
The house was quiet. Verity left at six. Jason had gone up at midnight for the first time in three weeks, at Mila’s instruction, which she had delivered in the register of a woman managing a schedule.
At about half past two Larry rang.
She went down. He was all right — he was thirsty, that was all, and he took water from a straw and closed his eyes, and she sat with him for a while and told him it was Wednesday and that the frost was off and that Nikki’s second field was still a disgrace.
His hand moved on the blanket.
“What,” she said. “Larry. What.”
He looked at her. He looked at her for a long time with those absolutely present eyes, and then, with everything he had, he got his left hand across the blanket and laid it flat on the rail, and turned his head, very slightly, toward the door.
Toward the hall. Toward the rest of the house.
“No,” Mila said.
His eyes did not move.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “You don’t get to do that. You can’t say a word to me and you’re going to make a speech?”
The corner of his eye. That was all. That was all he had.
She sat there with her heart going, and then she stood up and went out into the hall.
* * *
Jason was on the stairs.
Not coming down. Sitting, halfway, in the dark, with his forearms on his knees — a man who had heard the bell and come as far as the landing and stopped there, because he had been told not to come into that room while she was in it, and had decided that the stairs were not the room.
The hall light was off. The only light was the one over the range in the kitchen, forty feet away, and it did not reach.
“Is he okay?” he said.
“He was thirsty.”
“Okay.”
She should have walked past him. The cottage was twenty-five minutes away and she had her coat over her arm and the truck was in front of the house.
She stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“You’ve been coming down every night,” she said. “Haven’t you.”
A pause. “Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since the bell.”
Mila looked up at the shape of him in the dark.
“I don’t come in,” Jason said. “I sit here till the door opens and then I go back up. That’s all it is.
I know what you told me and I’m keeping it.
” He stopped. Then, quieter: “I just want to know he’s all right.
And I want to know you got back up the hall okay, because the runner’s loose at the top and I haven’t fixed it, and I’m not going to fix it because then you’d know I’d noticed. ”
The house ticked.
Mila stood at the bottom of the stairs in her own hall at three in the morning with her coat over her arm, and the whole distance between them was twelve feet of dark carpet, and she was so tired, and everything in her that was still eight years married took one enormous step toward him without moving at all.
“Fix the runner,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m going home.”
“Okay.”
She did not move. He did not move. It went on for three seconds, which was two seconds longer than it should have, and both of them knew what those seconds were.
Then Mila turned and walked out of her own front door and sat in the truck for a while before she was fit to drive.