Page 38 of What You left in Me

Good men would call that restraint.

I’m inclined to call it a stay of execution.

I pass the turnout where we used to park in high school and lie to each other about futures that didn’t happen. The guardrail is still dented where I spun Mom’s Subaru and convinced her it was a shopping cart at the grocery store lot. She laughed. She knew even though she pretended not to.

I think of how the brain hemorrhage is a snake coiled under everything. I keep seeing the monitor behind Dad’s bed, the numbers climbing and falling like they mean something I can change if I stare hard enough.

I keep hearing Eleanor insisting that money and force can glue a man back together.

I keep seeing Ariane’s face when the doctor said the words that pulled the ground from beneath her feet. Her mouth opened, but no sound escaped her lips. She looked at me like I might hold her up from across a room I’d been studiously ignoring all day.

I take the turn onto the long road that threads through the north woods toward the estate and roll the window down farther. The night’s cool enough to bite. The silence here is cricket static.

In it, I can hear my mother’s laughter echoing in pine and then not echoing at all.

I see me at twenty-five with a bag in the trunk, putting a hundred miles between myself and this town.

“Fuck,” I say again, because some words do their job until they don’t, and then they do it anyway.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder and lights my hand up ghost-blue. I don’t fucking care. I don’t care about any of it.

“I am not leaving,” I tell the steering wheel. “I’m not leaving him. I’m not leaving her. They can scream, write checks, call donors, draft statements. I am not fucking leaving.”

It’s a vow, which sits with contention in my chest.

###

After an eternity, I head back to the house instead of the hospital.

I don’t make it past the foyer before the night decides to pick a fight with my willpower.

The house is half-asleep, chandeliers cooled to a smug glimmer, and the roses on the stairs giving up the last of their perfume like a bribe.

Security headlights crawl along the service road and peel away. Presumably, they’re all still at the hospital. The family car wasn’t in the driveway.

I tell myself I’ll pour a drink, look at the lake until the view begins to blur, and try not to think about a brain bleed I can’t cauterize with will. So, I hit the bar, thumbing through the cut crystal, and the pour my poison of choice in the glass with a familiar splash.

I don’t drink it, however; I don’t get the chance before I hear them.

A laugh, brittle and taut, echoes through the house. It sounds like someone tried to tape a laugh together out of nervesand habit and it cracked anyway. Then a second sound is much deeper-set.

My hand stops mid-air. The hair along my arms prickles like the night put teeth on me. I don’t decide to move; my body makes the decision and tells me about it after. Before I know it, I’ve set my glass down and am walking towards the sound.

The runner on the back stairs stifles the sound of my footfalls. Nothing muffles the voices that spill down the corridor. Hers, thin with exhaustion, threaded with apology. And his, smooth, practiced, and the exact register that makes donors open checkbooks and interns forget their names.

“Julian, I’m…” Her breath hitches like she’s been running upstairs, like she didn’t want the house to hear.

“It’s okay.” He’s already soothing, already arranging the scene in his favor. “You’re shaking. Take a breath, sweetheart.”

It’s pretty fucking obvious where this is headed.

Still, I keep moving towards it, because I’m a man. Also: I’m a fucking idiot.

I can tell myself it’s protective fury, and not the hunger that’s been pacing my ribs since the car, but it doesn’t matter either way.

The corridor narrows as I pass the framed prints Eleanor hung to make history look curated.

Ariane’s bedroom door is slightly ajar. It’s just enough that I can see inside through the cracks. I don’t have to look. Yet I can’t fuckingstoplooking.