Things We Didn't Say (22 page)

“ ’Course he does. Boys are dumb, though. They don’t think.”

“Dylan’s not dumb.”

I sigh. “Everyone’s dumb sometimes.”

I actually hate
Hannah Montana
. So I pick up my phone with my free hand and send a one-handed text about the big party.

Mom suddenly stands up from the computer and snatches her coat off the couch. “I’m walking to the store,” she says.

She asks me if I need anything, and I wave her away with my phone.

“Keep an eye on Jewel,” she says.

Duh. What else is new?

Chapter 29
Michael

M
y father and I have not spoken in miles and hours, except to remark that the snow is letting up.

The roads are still tricky, I can tell from the way other cars fishtail in front of us, and the way my dad’s jaw clenches. I wonder if he used to do that in surgery, tighten his face in concentration. No wonder he was always so tired. He would be standing up for hours, awake for hours. I suppose he’s conditioned himself to this kind of thing.

He thinks I don’t appreciate his hard work because of his financially cushy life, relative to mine at least. I just don’t need to give him more credit because he gives himself plenty already.

The sameness of the Ohio turnpike is hypnotizing and, given my exhaustion, makes me feel a bit delirious.

I try sending Casey a text, but she doesn’t reply. Maybe she’s sleeping; it’s late. I hope everyone is asleep by now. I imagine my house dark and calm and peaceful, as a home should be.

My dad clears his throat and I look over. I’ve been stroking my jawline scar.

“What’s on your mind?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

I fold my arms and lean back against the seat, watching the highway lights blur past me out the window.

It was one of the worst fights. I’d gotten an overdraft notice from the bank, in fact, several of them. We should have had plenty of money. Enough, anyway.

I was tired from work, and I should have broached the topic carefully, because there were ways I could handle Mallory to minimize the theatrics. But there were always days when I wasn’t up to it, my resolve to be the stoic weakened by late hours at the office.

This was one of those days.

Dylan and Angel were in bed. This was before Jewel, and when the other kids were young enough that we could tuck them in at a reasonable hour. I’d finally opened the mail.

Mallory was at the table with a travel coffee mug full of beer. She had mints in her pocket she would chew between mugs, as if that fooled anyone.

“Dammit. Mallory!”

“What?”

“What have you been spending money on now?” I threw the papers down in front of her.

“The kids needed clothes.”

“What clothes? I haven’t seen any new clothes.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you do the laundry.”

“I see them every day, I—” I flinched. I’d been sucked into her trap. Arguing the minutiae, missing the point. “We’ll never get ahead if you keep taking money out of the ATM.”

“I need money sometimes.”

“For what?”

I knew damn well for what. I wanted to hear her say it. In fact, a desperate irrational urge seized me, a need to hear her just once come clean about something.

“Stuff.” She took another sip, leaned back in the kitchen chair. She couldn’t look more bored.

“Give me your ATM card.”

She snorted. Didn’t move.

I walked around her to the dining room table, where she always put her purse. It was a rule my mother had pounded into me: never, ever go into a woman’s purse or a man’s wallet. I was past rules, past reason.

When Mallory saw me grab her purse, she jolted to life. She raced to me and got her hands on it. We tugged back and forth, and the sacklike purse exploded onto the floor in the struggle.

In the middle of the wreckage—tampons, loose change, makeup—I spied a flask. Had she started drinking on the go? Her face was warped in fury, her eyes huge and wild. I broke away from her stare and saw her wallet, which I snatched up.

She leaped on me like a feral cat. I turned my back to her, hunching over her wallet, tearing through its contents to repossess the ATM card.

Part of me knew I’d gone too far. Maybe I was right to repossess that card, I was always goddamn right, in fact, but my error was in tactics. I’d sunk to her level, as I later would analyze, but then, right then, my reason had been burned away.

I seized it and held it up over her head. This was a childish action, but I was elated with accomplishment.

She leaped at it, raking her fingernails down my arm.

She slapped my face, but I barely felt it. I continued to hold the card out of her reach and circled back into the kitchen. Coming down from the high of my victory, I was realizing that I had a bigger, more present problem.

Mallory was drunk and crazy-mad, and the kids were upstairs.

“You controlling fascist Nazi sonofabitch asshole,” she spat.

“I only wish I could control you. I wish I didn’t have to.”

“Oh, no. No, you love it. You love dominating me.”

I laughed at this. She controlled everything, in fact, by virtue of her unpredictability setting the tone for my every waking minute.

“Don’t you laugh at me.”

Her hair had gotten ruffled in the scrum over the wallet, and stiff with hair gel, it was sticking out crazy. Her lipstick was smeared.

Something about this struck me as inappropriately funny.

“Shut up!” she screamed.

I found myself unable to stand it.

My wife, my life, everything was ludicrous.

I was a fool, and I deserved every bit of it. That was funny, too, in the way funerals are funny when they shouldn’t be, when you giggle about some little goof and it becomes the funniest thing you’ve heard in years surrounded by mourning on all sides.

I didn’t see her rearing back, I think I was probably looking somewhere else in the kitchen, trying to stop myself from laughing.

But the motion from the corner of my eye caught my attention. I saw something fly at me and flinched and heard something shatter against the cabinet next to my head.

That’s when I saw Dylan emerge from the darkness of the stairway like a specter, dragging his stuffed bear by its leg. He never did talk much, especially under stress. He let his face say it, with his huge eyes and hanging open mouth.

Mallory saw me see him, and she whirled around, unsteadily. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry if we woke you, Daddy and I were having a little argument.”

Dylan pointed at me, then touched the side of his own face.

I put my hand up, and it came away red. That’s when I started to feel dizzy.

I went wordlessly up to the bathroom, concerned—but in an oddly detached way—that if she’d sliced an artery in my neck, I might bleed out right here in front of my son. I figured I should probably go upstairs if that were the case, to spare him the sight.

When I used a wet towel to rinse off the blood, I saw that a shard of whatever she’d thrown had sliced my face. It was a long cut, bloody, but not fatal.

I called Mallory’s sister—back then we were still on speaking terms—to come keep an eye on things, telling her I’d had “an accident” and that Mallory “wasn’t well,” euphemisms with which Nicole was familiar.

And when I got back from the med station with stitches and a bandage, I saw the blood had been cleaned up. I saw, too, that the ATM card, which I’d dropped, was gone.

I’d thought that was my breaking point, that night. I’d thought, as I packed up the kids and we arrived at my father’s doorstep, leaving Mallory passed out from spent rage and beer, It’s finally over. I’d failed in my marriage, but I thought staying would be failing worse, recalling Dylan’s expression as he saw my cut face, wondering how long before both kids witnessed something worse.

I let my father photograph my injury, prepared for the humiliation of labeling myself a “battered spouse,” looked at his handwritten list of expensive lawyers who would help me keep my kids. I slept in the guest bed in my old childhood room, with a child in the crook of each arm.

The next morning I got that call from Mallory, and I knew I’d have to go home.

Chapter 30
Mallory, 2000

I
woke with my limbs shaky and my tongue tasting like paste.

My anger spent, the house now rang with emptiness like a struck gong.

He’d done it. He really had left me.

I’d been expecting it, really, from the first moment we’d met. At every milestone I found myself more surprised he hadn’t bolted, and more afraid of how much I needed him not to.

Because that meant when he finally did, I’d be destroyed.

I pulled myself upright in the double bed.

I hadn’t meant to throw anything, certainly hadn’t meant to hit him with it. He was belittling me, just like they all did, my whole life, only from him it wasn’t supposed to happen. That wasn’t part of the script. He was good, the others were bad.

I couldn’t process it, him joining
them
.

But he did. He belittled me, and when I got angry he ran away and took my babies and I was alone once again.

When this happened as a teenager, when they abandoned and shunned me, I had a solution. Temporary it was, and a poor substitute, but it would obliterate everything else for the time being, and that worked well enough.

But I was old now, my body softer, stretched and marked by two pregnancies. Finding a random screw would not be so easy, these days.

Speaking of my body, I needed to pee. And, despite it all, I was hungry. And thirsty.

Rising from the bed was like peeling apart strong magnets, but I did it. I pulled myself along the wall to the bathroom.

I was searching for another roll of toilet paper under the sink when I saw something that reminded me why I might have felt so unstable yesterday. Oh, yes. Over five weeks since I’d last needed a tampon.

I replaced the toilet paper and then dug in the bathroom drawer, where I kept all my “feminine supplies,” as Michael called them.

I could hardly keep my hand still, and splashed myself with urine. I set the stick on the sink and did not look at it as I scrubbed my hands clean.

I looked back and saw it clearly: two lines.

I clutched it to my chest, sobbing now with relief.

Even when I’d asked my ob-gyn to take out the IUD, I hadn’t really believed I’d conceive again. For one thing, me and Michael barely made love anymore, and I certainly didn’t deserve a third baby. But it was an effort worth making, I thought, in case it was meant to be, in case this time I could get it right.

I never got around to having that conversation with Michael. I definitely had never expected such rapid success. I wasn’t so young anymore, after all.

I brought the stick in the kitchen with me as I dialed the Turner home, knowing that must be where Michael had gone. I stared at the stick like I was afraid the second line would vanish if I blinked.

Michael’s voice was tight and hard when he picked up. He objected when I told him the news, kept saying, “That’s impossible!” and “I thought you had an IUD?”

I’ll go to the doctor today, I told him, and I’ll find out. And I’m sorry, I told him, I’m so sorry you’re hurt.

So very, very sorry, and it’s so lonely here, I told him. I can’t be alone, I said. I just can’t be, not now. Please come home to me. I beg you.

I would tell him later that the IUD had gotten dislodged, skewed, and that my obstetrician removed it that very day I first came in, and what a miracle, but the embryo was unharmed.

When Michael came back home with the children, I was brimming over with apologies and joy and new potential baby names.

And I believed, then, it would all be okay.

Chapter 31
Casey

I
gasp myself awake, as if an alarm bell is clanging in my chest.

I squint at the clock. Midnight.

I leap out of bed, and tiny dots of light swarm into my vision. I sink slowly back to the edge of the bed. I’ve been asleep since dinner, leaving the kids and Mallory unattended. Michael didn’t say I had to keep watch like a jailer, but I know he expects me to make sure everything is okay, and I can’t let him down.

I listen at each child’s door, approaching Dylan’s door out of habit, even, but it stands open, his room light still on, casting shadows over the emptiness. I flick off the light to save electricity, plunging the upper story into darkness, except where the moon slips in through Dylan’s open curtains.

The moon. That means the clouds have parted. The storm has stopped.

I pick my way carefully down the stairs, feeling my nap clinging to me, slowing me down.

I find Mallory downstairs in the living room, watching TV.

“The girls are asleep,” she says.

I resist the urge to ask her if she made sure Jewel brushed and flossed. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.

I sit on the opposite edge of the couch, wishing I’d stayed asleep. If the kids are asleep, there’s no reason for me to be up. The few hours’ rest has made me feel off-balance and foggy-headed. Worse than when I’d been awake on the adrenaline of the sleepless.

“I don’t bite,” Mallory says, smirking at a cop show rerun. Some CSI team is standing around a corpse, frowning at it.

I notice that I’m plastered into the far corner, feet tucked up like I’m afraid of her. I shift a little to the middle.

“You hungry? I made you a plate.”

I jerk my head away from the TV in surprise. She walks out to the kitchen, and I hear the microwave beep a few times. In a couple of minutes she emerges with a steaming plate of spaghetti and sets it down on the coffee table in front of me.

“Go for it,” she says.

My sleep-deprived brain briefly entertains the notion that she’s poisoned me. This makes me chuckle before I dive in. I realize I’m starving.

“What’s funny?” she asks.

I shake my head, not daring to tell her.