35. James
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
James
NOW
Sylvia and Tommy’s neighborhood is charming and eccentric.
A typical street with lush yards and lawn ornaments with multicolored mailboxes—the kind painted by the owners and not ordered or store bought—yet the homes aren’t without the occasional adornments that stand out in an otherwise conventional community.
A yellow door with a bright gold doorknob.
A four-foot-tall stone garden gnome with a pointed hat painted red.
A navy vintage Volkswagen Beetle sitting on a driveway with a burlap pennant banner hung along the back window.
I can picture us living here, raising Sophia right alongside Tommy, Sylvia, and Katy. Just so they can grow up together. That is, if there’s anything left of us to relocate and build a home from the ground up with.
Kendall and I turn the corner around the block, taking a rectangular path while Tommy and Sylvia took the girls to the library.
A weekend outing that’s really a guise. I saw it the second they asked both Katy and Sophia if they’d like to do something with just Uncle Tommy and Auntie Sylvia for the day.
Tommy looked at me, a silent nod of permission while the girls jumped for joy.
And now, I’m using the opportunity to be alone with Kendall. Talk to her like I said, but now that it’s just us two, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say anything, and the words I want to say are just stuck, waiting for permission to be uttered.
“Those walkway lights are nice,” I say, sticking with facts and logistics.
Kendall nods, her gaze following my index finger as I point out a stone path lined with solar lights that would look really nice at night. Similar to what I’ve wanted for our own home.
“We should get something like that for the house,” I suggest. “The ones I was looking at didn’t have solar panels like that.”
She nods again, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her jacket.
I zip my own jacket up. It’s cool with a heavy overcast wafting above us.
I think I saw rain in the forecast, and maybe this walk wasn’t necessarily a good idea, but I thought it would be better than us sitting in the living room while we’re forced to look at each other.
We can walk and face the road in front of us. Keep that wall up for a little longer.
An older couple walks past us, and it forces me closer to Kendall.
I rest my hand on her lower back—instinct—and I notice the man offer a purse-lipped smile in my direction, his own arm wrapped around his wife’s shoulders.
I wonder if he notices us, the way we move together, much like him and his wife.
Or the way we appear as if we hardly know each other anymore, which is the absolute truth.
Or maybe he sees what we’ve always wanted to appear like.
A happily married couple. A man, protectively moving closer to his wife while out on a walk to get air and spend some time together.
I want to tell the man it’s all a lie. This ruse, this scam we’re taking part in, playing house when everything about us is broken.
I feel like a fraud. To Sophia, to my family, to everyone around us.
They don’t know about us, all the broken parts we hate to acknowledge.
All they see is this pretty shell, painted and shellacked into something much more attractive than what it is.
“Why did you come here?” she asks suddenly, sounding frustrated.
The tightness in her voice shows her patience is wearing thin, stretched tight like a balloon.
She asked me the same question last night, and I never offered an answer.
I gave her the biggest non-answer anyone could ever give.
I left it all on the table, open and scattered, waiting for it to be swept away and tossed.
“I wanted to talk to you.” The restless sleep on the sofa gave me the forethought to come up with that. It’s better than I don’t fucking know.
“Okay,” she says. She stops walking, facing me with her arms crossed. “You’re here, and you’re not talking. So, talk.”
“Kendall,” I start. “I don’t…”
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t know—”
She groans, throwing her hands in the air.
“You never know,” she accuses. “You just go along with everything. You never take the initiative to figure things out, and you just wait for things to fizzle or just figure themselves out. And when I finally say something to you, you manage to say the wrong fucking thing every time.”
“Because I don’t know what to say,” I argue. “I am so fucking scared that whatever I say might make you upset. And then you’ll stop talking to me for a week, and then we become this shell. Everything feels so goddamn empty, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Then don’t say the wrong thing!”
“How am I supposed to know what the wrong thing is? You never tell me,” I tell her, our voices growing angry and harried.
I start to realize this is the most she’s ever said to me.
I’m usually met with silence or a cold shoulder.
This is the complete opposite. This is fire and anger and all the things I never knew I wanted from her.
“You never tell me what I’m supposed to say. ”
“I can’t tell you those things.” I hear the strained tremble in her words, the scowl on her face softening into pain and desperation. “If I have to tell you how to talk to me, how am I supposed to trust you—”
“Trust me? You don’t trust me?” I see a water droplet splat on her forehead. My instinct is to wipe it off, but with the indignation evident in my outburst, I stop myself.
“No, I-I trust you. You know I do.”
“Then what do you mean? Why are you talking about trusting me?”
She hesitates. I can tell she doesn’t want to be angry.
She just wants me to understand. And to do that, the gap between us needs to be closed.
That disconnect needs to no longer exist. We need to talk to each other in a way we both understand because if we continue this—attempting to communicate through misunderstandings and resentment—there really won’t be anything left of us.
“There are things I keep from you because I don’t know how to tell you—”
“Then tell me,” I interrupt, my panic growing frenzied inside me.
I want to know how to talk to her, relearn our lost language so we understand each other.
I’ve lost it all, the muscle memory on my tongue atrophied into silence, but I want to master it all over again. “Why do you say you can’t trust me?”
“I—”
“What, Kendall?” I urge.
“I can’t trust you with all the things in my head,” she cries.
“I have these thoughts that haunt me, and I can’t even say them to myself.
And every time I try to say them to you, you prove to me you can’t handle it.
I can barely trust myself with them, and I try to trust you with them, and I can’t. I just can’t.”
“I…” I try to say something, dispute her words, tell her none of it’s true.
This trust in me that’s apparently waned over time is just an excuse for her to keep things from me.
To avoid talking to me and keep our marriage in its rocky state.
But she’s right. I’ve done nothing but prove to her I can’t handle the truth. And I think it might be too late.
The rain starts to flow now at a steady pace, becoming an intrusion we can’t ignore.
She turns to walk back to the house when I don’t say anything.
I follow, watching more drops land on the concrete in sharp splats.
It starts to pour. We both run, our hands hovering over our heads.
We make it to the front door, the rain pelting all over us.
I pull my collar over my neck, trying to stay as dry as possible, but it doesn’t help.
The small awning above the doorway does little to shelter us from the rain, much like my makeshift stole, so I work quickly to get the key out. Only, it’s not where I thought it was.
“What’s wrong?” Kendall asks.
“I can’t find the keys,” I tell her, patting my back pockets.
“I thought you used it to lock the door when you left.”
“It locks on its own,” I explain. “I thought I had the keys in my pocket.”
I turn the doorknob only to confirm my assumption: I locked it before we left. Kendall huffs, clearly frustrated with me. Her hair is soaked now, her clothes a lost cause. We both know we can’t stay out here much longer. The water starts to seep into my skin when Kendall turns away.
“Where are you going?” I call after her.
She doesn’t answer and continues stomping off toward the backyard instead. She gets to the back door only to find that it’s locked as well.
“It’s locked.”
She keeps jimmying with the door, rattling it in hopes it’ll open with one last jiggle.
“Kendall—”
“I regretted being a mom,” she says, giving up on the door and finally facing me.
“And not some passing thought I could wait out until it just went away, but I really regretted it. I wanted to take it all back. Go back in time so we never even had her.” The rain is drowning out her voice.
Gone is the anger and dismay, and I can barely hear her.
But she’s finally talking to me. I lean closer, finally attempting to bridge that gap with something stronger than a few weak wooden slats and some measly strings of rope.
“Things were so perfect in the hospital because we were surrounded by nurses, and we had all the help we could’ve asked for.
But then we came home, and everything was all on us.
She was crying so much, and I was holding her.
She wouldn’t go to sleep, and it was just me and her in the middle of night.
I kept thinking how I’m such a bad mom if I can’t even comfort my own child. I regretted having her.