Chapter 26 – Ariane – A Week of Silence
It’s been a week since Richard’s surgery, and the house still smells like boiled chicken and lavender disinfectant.
We’ve cycled through three casseroles, two fruit baskets, and one floral arrangement that looks like it could devour a small cat.
The wicker hamper says Get Well Soon in cursive, which feels both encouraging and vaguely threatening, like the flowers might enforce recovery with thorns if necessary.
Richard is home now. He’s pale, stitched, and fiercely pretending he isn’t fragile.
But, he’s home, away from the machines and white coats.
The first thing he asked for, after a plastic cup of tepid water, was a pencil and paper to sketch out a new gallery layout.
The second thing he asked for was whether the koi pond filter still hums at night because it “ruins the composition of silence.” That’s Richard: editing the world when his body refuses to cooperate.
I’m surprisingly grateful for it though.
The editing and the way he keeps calling the nurse “Lieutenant” like she’s ordering troops.
Grateful that he’s here to annoy everyone back to normal.
But the week is hollow. It’s as if someone scooped the center out of it and left me circling the edges, pretending I can’t see the gap. Finn left after that night in the hospital lawn. Not a word. Not a note. Not even one cryptic and razor-edged texts.
One second, he was a storm pressed against me, and the next he was gone, like the weather changed and took something with it I didn’t realize I was clinging to.
It would be easier to hate him if I couldn’t still feel his hands.
My body keeps betraying me with memory, and my better self keeps trying to slap my wrist like a nun with a ruler.
I should hate him for it. I should hate myself more for letting it happen. Again.
The house is abnormally quiet in the mornings, the lake lying flat and judgmental under a skim of mist. I make coffee and watch the dock because, apparently, I’m a Victorian widow waiting for a ship.
The kitchen clock tuts at me, knowing exactly how pathetic that is.
I tell it to mind its own business, and it keeps ticking anyway.
Mom has been different. That’s the polite word for what she’s acting like.
Different.
She moves through rooms like a figure in a painting: perfectly dressed, untouchable, and shrouded in darkness.
No snarky commentary or frostbitten advice about my hair or my career choices.
She floats in, adjusts Richard’s blanket with exacting tenderness, and floats out again with her phone clutched like a rosary.
When I ask if she slept, she says yes without looking at me.
When I offer to make her tea, she says no, thank you, without noticing whether there’s a kettle on the stove.
Even though I shouldn’t be thinking about it, I can’t help notice that the change started the moment Waren returned to our lives.
She hasn’t given me any details about him.
Honestly, I haven’t even pressed that hard.
Considering everything going on at the house with Richard, now doesn’t seem to be the right time to ask questions about the man who brough ruin to our house. Partially at least.
“You should focus on Richard, not me,” she says on day three, in the tone you use for lost children and people who want to discuss the weather.
“I am focusing on him, Mom,” I tell her, exasperated. “I’m focusing so hard I can see his pores. He’s going to file a restraining order against my eyes.”
“That will be something to arrange after he’s fully mobile,” she replies, and then smiles as if she remembers what humor looks like, but not how it works.
I hover in the doorway of Richard’s room that afternoon, pretending to straighten magazines.
The nurse, Janice, who could lift a car with one hand and puree soup with the other, gives me a look that is three parts fondness and one part drink some water or I’m telling your mother.
Richard snores softly, mouth open, one hand curled on top of the blanket like he fell asleep mid-gesture.
Today, I’ve had enough. I need answers and I need them now. The words gather in my throat like a sour pill when I enter the living room where Mom is sitting with a newspaper.
“Mom,” I start, careful. “That man at the hospital. The one who asked for money… Waren? Who was he?”
Eleanor’s hand stills on Richard’s wrist. For a heartbeat, she is a statue. Then she reaches for the water carafe and pours, the stream perfectly steady. “A nuisance,” she says.
“That’s not a category of human, it’s a description. Who was he?”
“Someone who wanted attention.”
“And money,” I remind her pointedly.
“That too,” she admits, a brittle shine entering her voice. “There are always people who appear when tragedy smells fresh. They sniff it and come to see what can be cut off and sold.”
“He knew Dad, didn’t he?” I push, gentler than I feel. There’s a tiny spark in my chest that feels like a match struck in a dark room, hope or dread, who can tell anymore. I know more than she thinks I do.
Eleanor puts the glass on the bedside table, angle neat, condensation ring perfectly aligned with the coaster because of course. “Ariane, Richard needs peace. This is not the time for gossip.”
“Gossip is when you whisper about the neighbor’s facelift. This is…” I lower my voice. “Mom. He came to the hospital. He asked for money. I want to know why.”
Her gaze slides to my face, cool as pond water in October.
If it were anyone else, I’d call it maternal concern.
With her, it’s inventory. “You should focus on your father, not me,” she repeats, like she’s hitting play on a recording.
“Please bring the chamomile from the kitchen when you come back.”
“That’s not a fucking answer!”
“Ariane! Language! And it is the only one you need.” She flips to the next page of her newspaper and just like that the conversation ends. I stand there with questions quivering in my hands like birds that aren’t allowed to fly.
I carry the basket of laundry to the mudroom just so I have something to do with my hands. Partly, because it’ll piss my mother off to do the maid’s job.
The mudroom smells like wet shoes and old lemons.
I fold towels like I’m wringing a neck. Somewhere, the lake laps the dock, indifferent.
I imagine hurling my phone into it and then imagine diving after it because I’m not actually an unhinged sea creature, just a woman who occasionally has poor ideas.
###
At night, I roam the halls like a scepter.
The estate feels larger than ever at night; it’s large enough to get lost in, especially when you’re trying not to think.
The portraits watch me with bored faces.
The brass sconces cast half-hearted halos over the runner rug.
I pass Finn’s room and tell myself not to peer inside.
But then, I look all the same… because I’m only human and apparently not even a particularly disciplined one.
The door is closed.
It has been closed all week, like a mouth deciding not to say something.
Where did he go? What could possibly keep him away from this house for seven days straight, when his father is jokingly ordering the nurse to stand at attention and his stepmother is turning into a ghost that carries a phone?
Did he regret it? Did he wake up the next day, look in a mirror, and decide I wasn’t worth the ruin?
Or did he leave because staying would make us both combust, and despite everything he’s a man who sometimes chooses survival over fire?
I hate that I miss him. I hate that missing him has a crushing weight makes my chest ache and throat tighter.
I hate that I have a position on the lake I stand at in the mornings because the light hits the water there, and my brain keeps offering me a memory: Finn’s hand wrapping around my waist, his lips parting softly.
I hate how his absence is louder than Julian’s texts ever were.
Julian. Fuck. He’s relentless. If apologies were calories, I could live on his for a year.
He texts in paragraphs, in bullet points, in a tone that veers between contrition and PR damage control.
It was a misunderstanding. I didn’t text her.
I don’t even know who she is. Don’t we mean anything to you?
We. As in, the two-headed hydra of our edible arrangement life.
My favorite so far, if we’re using “favorite” loosely, is “Ariane, be reasonable. We have friends, a future. Don’t throw it away.” I stared at that one until my eyes burned. I imagined my heart in a sequined bikini making card flourishes.
Then I deleted the message and put the phone facedown because if I didn’t, I might hurl it against a wall in a haze of red.
I know if I called him back, life would get easy again. People would stop tilting their heads at me like I’m an abstract painting that’s been hung wrong. I could go to work, well… when I find a job—and grade essays about The Great Gatsby, underlining metaphors.
When I’d come home there’d be a bouquet and a man who loves a version of me that has ceased to exist. The thought makes my stomach turn. I’m allergic to predictability now.
Throughout this week, there have been days when I had no appetite and forgot to eat entirely.
Janice, the nurse, noticed and tutted at me the way the clock does.
Now, she leaves yogurt on the counter with a spoon already in it and writes Eat me on a sticky note like the yogurt is auditioning for a role in Alice in Wonderland. I eat it.