Page 118 of What You left in Me
“Don’t concern yourself with what you can’t control.” Julia says, not unkindly.
I nod too many times like a bobblehead at a car show. “I’m trying…”
She leaves me to my crumbs and my stupidity. I finish the tea because I’m an obedient child who received many gold stars for finishing things. When I stand, my legs feel like furniture I’m not sure I bought. I take the back way in and pause at the study again, listen for movement, hear only the ghost of pages.
I knock, very soft. “Richard?”
Silence. Then the tiniest sound: the throat clear of a man who has been taught his whole life to speak only when ready. “Come in.”
He’s in the chair by the window, sweater, slacks, the kind of socks old men wear to sayI am still civilized.His hands lie on the armrests like he’s doing a demonstration in how to be polite. When he looks at me, he doesn’t smile. He tries. It fails.
“Hi,” I say, and sit on the edge of the ottoman like it won’t bear more weight than my guilt.
He studies my face. His eyes snag on my cheek. He flinches. “Does it hurt…”
“It’s fine,” I lie.
“It isn’t,” he says. His voice is hoarse. “Nothing is.”
We sit in that nothing for a while. He looks past me out the window where the oak stares back, unhelpful. “When Erica died,” he says, “I told myself grief makes men see patterns in chaos. That sometimes tragedy is just tragedy.” He swallows. “I chose to believe what was kindest.”
“I know.” My voice sounds like I borrowed it and it doesn’t fit my mouth. “You must have been trying to keep everyone together.”
“I wasn’t brave enough to question what blessed me,” he says. His gaze drops to his hands. They look older than yesterday. “That is another kind of cowardice.”
I want to tell him he did his best, that love makes you short-sighted on purpose, that my mom could sell ice in December if she wanted to. The words feel like cotton stuffed into a wound.
“I’m so sorry, Richard.”
He nods, eyes shiny in a way that makes me furious with the universe for getting to make him cry. “You’re a good girl, Ariane.”
I stare at my hands. They don’t look like a good girl’s hands. They look like someone else’s—someone who will walk down the hall tonight because she can’t help it. “Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes I’m something else.”
He closes his eyes. “We all are.”
I leave before I do something embarrassing like put my head in his lap and cry until we float away. In the hall, the day has lengthened into that bright nowhere time where you can’t nap because you’re an adult, but sleep is the only thing you want because your brain is an unhelpful roommate. I make it three steps toward my room and then hear footsteps at the far end of the corridor.
The kind that sound like they know where they’re going and why.
I duck into the linen closet so fast I almost become a towel.Welcome to maturity.
From my ridiculous vantage point, I watch Finn pass. I’m not ready to face him yet. He’s in a dark shirt, sleeves pushed up, throat bare. He looks like a war you want to sign up for. His face is set in that really-not-smiling line that says he’s already buried something today. He doesn’t look toward my door. He disappears toward the back stairs and the office. I stay in the closet until the scent of cedar makes me light-headed and then I tiptoe to my room like a thief.
I tell myself I’m avoiding him because I have dignity.
The anklet at my ankle laughs,Sure, babe.
I spend the rest of the morning pretending to do tasks. I make lists and then throw them away because they look likecrime notes. I try to read and stare at the same paragraph for twenty minutes. I open my laptop and answer two emails with the prose style of a raccoon.
Every time the floor creaks, I freeze. Every time a door closes I picture Mom walking back in, chin high, and a new story already loaded. I try to imagine what I’ll say if she does. My brain offers:hiandwhyandplease don’t. None of them feel sufficient.
By noon, I have consumed one piece of toast, three cups of tea, and an entire bag of pretzels I didn’t know we owned. I could call Penny and ask her to take me somewhere banal, like Target, and we could touch throw pillows until things felt normal. But she’s not here. So instead, I pace my room and get acquainted with how many steps there are from the dresser to the window. (Sixteen. Seventeen if your heart is heavy.)
Memory keeps choosing its own programming. I keep replaying last Night. The slap. Finn’s fingers biting around Eleanor’s wrist, ugly and beautiful all at once. His voice. The calm way he put the phone on the table like a dealer laying down a straight flush. The way Mom’s face changed when she realized he’d cornered her, fear and fury, all in one terrifying second.
And then the worst: Richard’s shoulders collapsing. The sound he made when he stood, the sound I will hear in my bones until they turn to dust. I wanted to run to him. I wanted to run to Finn. I did neither. I stood and burned, because that is apparently my new skill set.
Around one, there’s a soft knock on my door. I have the ridiculous thought that it’s the universe and she’s here to apologize. “Who is it?” I ask, because I’m a coward who would like to pre-screen agony.