He looked at me blankly. I knew the look. I wasn’t going to affect him. I wouldn’t get anything out of him, no reaction, positive or negative. He’d gone neutral, which always succeeded in making whatever reaction I had, no matter how measured and reasonable, seem like a nuclear incident.
I needed to tell him about Rhoades and Hernandez, about Marshall and Ada, about the lawyer who would be coming to the hospital tomorrow, but he beat me out with his own news.
“Kevin called,” he said. “He can’t take my charter tomorrow.”
“So did he cancel it?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to go out.”
I stared at him. He was going to leave. It hadn’t been a week yet, and here it was, the slow shift back to daily life. He was going back to work, to spend his days on the water fishing.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “What do you want me to do? We still have bills to pay, Chloe, and we’re going to have a ton more before any of this resolves itself. We can’t do . . . this, forever.”
Ah, but I could. I’d ship every Highwayman painting in mid-restoration back to its owner, would not take another commission from the fine art galleries in Naples, would figure out what to do about the bills.
But I also knew, did not want to admit, but knew, that I could afford to do that. Because, really, Cal did bring in more money, more regularly. What did the mothers do who didn’t have a husband to help support them, or who were the main breadwinner for their family? How did they make that shift?
I didn’t have to answer that. Because this was my situation, my family, my husband. And I was torn between punishing him for his realism and falling on my knees in gratitude for it. Because it would allow me to stay here, with Meghan, as long as I needed to.
“No sense going all the way home,” he said, studiously not looking at me. “I’ll just stay on the Trill.”
“What do you mean you’ll stay on the Trill?” I repeated.
“It’s closer to the hospital than home,” he said.
“So, you’re not going to stay here overnight?” I asked, ignoring the larger question looming in the back of my mind.
“I have to get up at four in the morning,” he said. “I need a decent night’s sleep. I think you should get one too.”
“I’ll be staying here,” I said, enunciating each word, pointing to the floor.
“You can’t be a martyr forever.”
“I’m not being a martyr. I’m being a mother.”
“You’re being stubborn.”
“And you’re shutting down so you don’t have to hurt over any of this.”
“We can’t keep doing this.”
“What? You want to go down to the chapel and bitch at me there?”
He sighed. “No, I don’t mean where. I mean—” He waved his hands between us, as if he were guiding a plane in. “—this. We can’t keep doing this.”
“You know, Cal, people go through hard times. Sometimes they fight through it, but they get through it.”
“Believe it or not, Chloe, I’ve been through tough times before. And we’ve been going through tough times for a lot longer than just this particular tough time.”
My heart was beating so hard in my chest that I could feel it bumping against my ribs, and my breathing was shallow and becoming more so with every moment that I continued to stare at him. “What are you trying to say, Cal? Just say it.”
“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just—Chlo, I’m just going to stay on the Trill for a little while, okay? What do you care? I thought you said we didn’t have a marriage, and you’re not at home anyway.”
I didn’t say anything. He was right. “Do you want to know about Marshall?” I finally asked, looking away from him, my arms crossed tightly over my chest.
“He home?”
“No. Wait, is that it? You don’t want to go home because Marshall is there?”
He hesitated, and I could tell he was weighing something, but I could not tell what it might be, and I ached for that, for the fact that I couldn’t read him when he was closed off like this. “No, that’s not it.”
“Well, I don’t know where he is.”
“What do you mean?”
I took a deep breath. “He bailed Ada out last night after I dropped him off at home. Nobody’s seen him since.”
His jaw tightened and he leaned in toward me. “What are you telling me here? He jumped bail?”
I almost laughed. Cal had never been one for cop shows or detective mysteries. I’d never heard him say anything like “jumped bail” in my life. We had grown apart. There was no denying that. Somehow, we had grown apart and not made an effort to change it. Not a real effort. We made token efforts, and I wasn’t willing to take all the blame for that, we had both only made token efforts. We’d gotten lazy, it was that simple. We’d gotten lazy with our affection.
But I could not help but remember how cute he was when he said something out of the blue, something that surprised me, that arranged his lips in unfamiliar shapes, that reminded me of how much I had wanted to kiss him that first time we’d been aware of each other in the airboat. Attraction was still there, and if that was still there then did that mean there was still hope? Did you really still want to kiss someone if it was over?
I wouldn’t know. Cal had certainly not been my first kiss, or even my first lover, but he had certainly been my first love. And yes, absurd as it sounded, him saying “jumped bail” made me want to kiss him.
I didn’t.
He was, after all, talking about our son, about whom I was even more conflicted than I was about Cal.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t jump bail. He’s not due in court for almost two weeks. For all we know, he’s just holed up in some hotel because he’s afraid to bring Ada to our house.”
“Yeah, he’d better be,” Cal said darkly, and all thought of kissing him fled. I had never been, and never would be, attracted to anger against one of my children, no matter how deeply under the surface it simmered. It made things easier. Cal would find out about Marshall and Ada sooner or later. But it wouldn’t be from me.
If we were separate but for our physical presence in Meghan’s room, then I supposed we would just have to discover what else was happening in our once shared lives on our own. I had Rhoades and Hernandez, I had Mingus and this new lawyer, Barker, and I knew that when Marshall realized he was out of his depth, I would be the one he came to.
Cal was—consciously or subconsciously, I didn’t know yet—removing himself from the life of this family. And I wasn’t sure I was terribly sorry about it.
“So, you’re moving onto the boat.”
“For now, Chloe, just to make things easier . . . on all of us.”
I nodded. “Fine.”
It did not feel monumental. It simply felt sad, and I looked at Meghan, wondering what she heard. We had never hidden our relationship from our children. I had never known if my parents had problems with each other. If they did, they were well hidden from me. Cal and I did not have the kinds of disagreements that needed to be hidden.
I had often thought that in order for our children to realize that something might be wrong with our marriage, they would have had to develop more finely tuned sensibilities. They had not yet appeared to realize that their parents existed outside of their lives.
But if Meghan had heard what was happening in her room over the past five days, she could not help but know that her parents were in trouble. Even a girl in a coma could tell that we were falling apart. I motioned to Cal.
“Can we talk in the chapel?” I asked.
He looked at Meghan. “Could you give me a minute?”
“I’ll meet you down there,” I said, and walked out the door. Almost ten minutes later Cal eased himself into the pew beside me.
“We have to come to some sort of understanding,” I said quietly.
“About what, Chloe?” He sounded exhausted. But so was I.
“About how we’re g
oing to handle this. We can’t talk in front of Meghan as if she can’t hear.”
“Do you really think she can?” he asked. I almost snapped at him, but when I saw his face I realized that he was asking the question earnestly, as if he truly wanted to know my ideas on it.
“Everybody tells us she can. I think we just have to stop thinking about her as asleep. She’s not asleep. She’s in there.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either, but when she does wake up, do you want her to remember that while she was lying there we did nothing but fight?”
He turned toward me, the rough seam of his old jeans rubbing my knee through my thin cotton skirt, and then leaned in, closing us off from the empty room, from the glass gaze of the dove.
“Do you really, really believe she’ll wake up, Chloe?” His voice was pleading.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I do. I’m so sorry you don’t.”
His shoulders slumped and his leg moved away from mine. “Me too,” he said. He left, taking his bag with him. Before he did, he leaned over the back of the pew and kissed the top of my head. His mouth connected this time, and as he pressed his lips against my hair, I breathed in deeply of him.
MARSHALL
Ada placed her hand on his wrist and he dropped the knife. He wasn’t exactly sure what they had just agreed to, but he was as terrified as he’d been in that boat. Ada looked into the living room.
“Why don’t you go sit down with your grandmother? I’ll finish this.”
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” he said. “Besides, do you really want to touch fish guts?”
“I had a life before I became a vegetarian, Marshall,” Ada said with a grin. “Believe it or not, I’ve done this before.”
He remembered her ease hooking the worm, how quickly she’d picked up casting, how she managed to unhook a fish and release it without flinching. He wondered what else he didn’t know about her. He thought they knew everything about each other.
But he hadn’t been completely honest either, had he? This was the first she’d heard about his grandfather, the first time she’d heard about this family at all really. He hadn’t told her about his grandparents, and she hadn’t asked. The first time he’d told her about Ira had been on the drive down.
So she hadn’t told him about being born in Canada. There was no crime in being Canadian. And she hadn’t told him about what her life was like in the other states she’d lived in. Still no crime. But there was no question that he was starting to wonder about what else he didn’t know.
She took the knife from him, gently moving against him until she was standing in front of the sink. He breathed her in, and then joined his grandmother on the sofa.
“Hey,” he said.
“Well hey yourself, son,” she said. “That girl of yours is a real firecracker, isn’t she?”
He laughed. “Yeah, she is. She likes you.”
“Hmmm, well, she don’t know me yet, really. I know I’m a tough one to get on with sometimes.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You seem all right to me.”
“What’s your daddy told you about me?”
“Nothing much,” he admitted. “I got the feeling there was some kind of fight—”
“Wasn’t no fight.”
“Well, I don’t really know then.”
She nodded. “It’s hard to hear about where we come from sometimes. Sometimes people think they have to get away from their people. Your girl there, she seems like she wants to get back to her people.”
“She does,” he said with a nod. “She comes from solid people, people of faith.”
“Mmm hmm, she mentioned that. She knows her Bible, that’s for certain.”
“She’s helping me to know it better.”
“You know, you want to know your Bible better, you can come to me.”
“I didn’t—”
“Why don’t you tell me what kind of trouble you’re in, son? What are you two runnin’ from?”
“We’re not running.”
“I raised two boys. I know when one’s in trouble. And, your Ada, she’s got a spark, I can see that. But she’s not in the same kind of trouble.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying, I don’t know what you mean,” he said desperately.
“You got some kind of trouble of the conscience. That one’s got trouble in her soul. You got trouble can be taken care of. Hers, I’m not so sure.”
He stared into the kitchen. He could just see a bit of Ada’s hair, her shoulder, a slender leg cocked to the side as she worked over the fish.
“I’m in love with her,” he said.
She nodded. “Oh sure, I can see that much.”
“She loves me.”
“Your folks like her?”
“Yeah,” he said, his face flushing. He could feel Grandmother Tobias’s steady gaze on him. He couldn’t look at her.
“Calvin ever tell you about your granddaddy?”
“Just that he was a minister,” he said, relieved that she’d dropped the subject of Ada. He wouldn’t leave them alone again.
“You ever seen any pictures?”
“Just the ones in your hallway. My dad looks just like him, doesn’t he?”
“He does. Randy takes after my side more. Now here,” she said, opening up a heavy, blue, cloth-covered photo album across his knees, and pointing to the first photo, a black-and-white group shot taken in front of a tiny house with a single window. “These are your granddaddy’s people. He’s right here.” She touched a shaky finger to the brittle, yellow plastic protecting the photo, pointing to a lanky teenager with a nearly shaved head, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and squinting somewhere beyond the camera.
He looked strong, as though his lankiness, his casual stance was hiding long, lean muscles ready to burst into action. He looked . . . tested, proven somehow. He was clearly younger than Marshall was, but he seemed more of a man than Marshall had ever felt.
It made him ashamed of his soft life, of his freedom to choose how he spent his days. It made him ache to run a plow behind a horse, to fish for dinner because he had to, not for sport, to have dirt creased into his calloused hands. He felt spoiled by the heaviness of the cell phone in his pocket, his electronics-filled dorm room, the classes he took.
The classes he used to take.
He felt a sudden cramp in his middle, and he hunched over as his grandmother turned the page in the photo album, touching the hard faces of his ancestors, pointing out everything he wasn’t.
Ada brought them both tall glasses of lemonade, and then took her own out to the backyard, where Marshall saw her stretch out in the grass, apparently unconcerned about the dogs. He couldn’t tell if she was gazing up at the sky or closing her eyes, but he knew that what she was really doing was giving him time with Grandmother Tobias, and they stayed on the sofa looking through album after album for almost two hours.
She told short anecdotes about the people, occasionally telling the same one over again whenever she came upon the same face. But the one he sought out in all of the pictures was his grandfather. He watched him change from the hard teen into a hard man, with his parents and siblings, fishing, driving, preaching in front of small groups of men as hard as he.
Finally he had his own wife by his side, Grandmother Tobias, looking much like she did now, he saw in amazement. Yes, she’d gotten older, much older, but everything was recognizable, the shape of her face and eyes, the gaze direct and knowing, the body sturdy and capable as a man’s. And then the children, two boys who grew tall, their eyes less hard when they were young, both of them looking uncertain and wary.
Until the pictures progressed to their early teens, the photos turning from black-and-white to color, that was when they finally changed, when they grew shuttered. Even in the photos that showed them at play, in a canoe or with long shotguns cradled in their arms, posing over gutted deer or fowl, their faces were inscrutable.
&
nbsp; The album ended abruptly, blank pages for the last half of it, and Grandmother Tobias pulled out a final, slim one, covered in vinyl, and slid it onto his lap. To his surprise, it was filled with pictures of his own family. Mostly of him at first, baby pictures, photos of him tearing open Christmas presents, school photos. There was an occasional one of him with his father, and after staring at photos of the males of his father’s family, he was struck by how alike they all looked.
He could even, for the first time, see his grandfather, his uncle, and his father in his own face, his own eyes. And like his father and uncle, his photos changed at some point. He flipped the pages back and forth, looking for the exact moment it happened, and, at last, he thought he found it. He remembered the day at school that it had been taken, remembered the shirt that drove him crazy because of the high collar, it had made him feel as if he’d had a noose around his neck, as if it were keeping the air from filling his lungs completely.
But Shelly Williams, an eighth-grader with long blonde hair and the astonishing beginnings of a chest, had once told him that his arms looked good in it, and he wanted to make sure he was immortalized wearing it.
It was before Ira died.
If he had ever been asked to point to a defining moment in his life, he would have pointed to Ira and the train. Would have talked about seeing him hit, how he saw Ira place the penny on the tracks, saw it tip off the edge, catching the sun and blinking bright and gold and copper for a half second as Ira darted away. And saw the thing that everyone asked about later. Saw Ira turn back, even as the train bore down, saw him turn back to right the penny, saw him fall over his own clumsy feet, in the brand-new, too-big Nikes he got just the day before, an early bar mitzvah present.
He didn’t remember reaching for him, but he must have, because when the train hit Ira—hit him as though he were soft as a pillow, as though he had never had bones—the rush of wind from the train knocked him off his own feet. When he fell, blinded by the swirl of grit and dust kicked up by the hungry metal wheels, he ripped his shirt, a jagged tear that exposed the right side of his chest. He didn’t remember how it happened. Later, all he remembered was the wink of the penny.
Matters of Faith Page 17
