CHAPTER THIRTY

“GOT A LETTER FROM THE SCHOOL YESTERDAY. Says due to the outpouring of support from the community—no, the overwhelming outpouring of support—they’re looking forward to me returning next year.” Rebecca Darwin laughed bitterly as she rubbed a bowl over her towel-draped hand. “They called it a difficult summer and would like to see the new school year as a fresh start.”

A sink full of dishes floated in bright suds. She placed the dried bowl to her left and stared down at the water, bit her bottom lip, and held a palm to her head. “Apparently, my job was under more of a threat than I thought. So they’re doing me the favor of holding open a job they had no right to threaten to take away in the first place—isn’t that nice of them?”

She always had headaches now. Dull ones. And sharp ones that poked just behind an ear, or an eye. She steadied herself at the sink. This was a dull one.

“They’re going to pity me? Welcome me back and then pass me those looks?”

Rebecca reached into the sink as though it was a magic hat and pulled out a glass. She could count the seconds between any household chore and her next thought of Dallas. The boy emerged from the darkening sink water. He formed in the dust on the end tables. He wafted from the heat of the oven. His voice rattled in baritone thuds with the submerged dishes, settling down after she removed the glass.

“There was this time when . . . this one time Dallas wanted to go see a movie that was coming out and he was begging me and begging me, and I said I couldn’t let him because I hadn’t passed it by you or Minister Roberts yet. I told him I didn’t even know where it was playing. So he sulked into his room and he must have seen the ad for the movie, because he came running out all excited and he said, It’s coming to a theater near us, Mom! It’s at a theater near us! Never made me laugh so hard before then. He was full of all those little lines that he thought were serious. But that’s what made it funnier. And I want to tell that story. I never thought to tell it before, and now I want to.”

Reaching blindly into the sink, she drew out a plate.

“But I can’t because the moment I tell it, I’m going to get that pitiful look and it’s going to ruin the whole point. I want to tell it, but I can’t, and it pisses me off that I can’t tell it . . . Michael, are you listening?”

“You’re telling it now, Rebecca,” Michael said absently. He’d been sitting at the dining room table ever since he’d drifted in through the front door wearing Rebecca’s robe and carrying an empty glass.

“Yeah. Maybe.” She turned back to her dishes. But who’s listening? she thought. He’d not been making much sense lately. He’d developed a habit of sitting up all night in the living room. The past three or four days had been the worst; as soon as he stopped vomiting every morning he’d start to mix his drinks. Then he’d scrutinize the wallpaper in the living room and take out sheets of paper and draw a new pattern. He kept insisting it was their ticket out.

Rebecca remembered Michael’s boss telling him to take all the time he needed before returning to work. But that was awhile ago. Now Michael’s boss would call and she’d hear Michael repeating Yes continuously. Capitulating. A lot of Yes, I knows and Yes, we’ll sees. Meanwhile, the checks had stopped arriving in the mail, but every time she’d try to rouse him to action, he’d say something meaningless and gloomy and it would infuriate her. Even news of David Westwood’s trial wouldn’t stir him to get dressed, or raise his voice.

He’d been so right about so much in their marriage. And trouble had its way of shaking out with the passage of time.

That’s what he’d said about the whole incident with the hallway fight. Her mind, so vividly filled with violence now, cast back effortlessly to the boy walking out of the nurse’s office with his parents. The hem of his skirt sweeping the dusty floor. Had she judged him? She had. She’d judged his parents. But when it came time to cover for Mr. Ragone’s son, she couldn’t do it.

The day she had resolved to lie for the bully, she’d seen the fragile boy coming down the hall. Odin. Strange name for a strange boy with a strange look, but when she saw him that day he looked nothing like the boy she’d rescued.

His black skirt was replaced with brand-new jeans. His hair was shorter, and his nails were washed clean. If not for the fading cut beneath his right eye, and the scab formed at his bottom lip, she may have never recognized him. And when he saw her, when he looked up from watching the floor, he stopped in his tracks. He stared at her a good while, and she gave him a familiar smile and waved. But he didn’t return the gesture. In fact, he turned around and retreated back down the hallway in the other direction. Her gaze remained fixed on the empty space he’d once filled in the hallway and somehow she sensed that it was not the bruises that had made him feel ashamed to face her.

In that instant, she resolved to push forward and tell the truth. The sight of Odin disappearing around the corner steeled her nerves. It would all have to lead wherever it led. Man plans. God laughs.

Michael hadn’t even questioned why she changed her mind and she loved that about him. Not everything had to be said. He just promised that in the spiritual timeline of an ordered universe, all paths lead to justice.

Now was just a matter of waiting. Waiting for him. Waiting for his eyes to blink on. Was the way to rescue him to not come to his rescue? That kind of rationalization was just convenient. The truth: she was exhausted.

The phone rang. Rebecca watched it while she dried a glass. Finally it stopped. She looked through the kitchen doorway at her husband. He’d gone to pour himself another drink, but she noticed that he turned the glass upside down and covered the mouth of the bottle. She looked away. She’d become more self-conscious about watching him.

“The phone rings all the time,” Rebecca said. “If it’s not that reporter from the Turnbull Times, it’s someone from work. I have nothing to say. There are no words to make them understand, but I can’t say that, because then they say, I know, I know.

“Is there anything I can do? That one’s the worst. What do they think they can do? And it will only get worse when I go back to work in September, that’s for sure. I’ll get into the building and the lounge will be filled with baskets and flowers from people I don’t know, and every person I see will drop their eyes and mumble something. And to see all those kids passing by and goofing off, and kissing in the hallways? Some of them were probably friends with those animals.

“And the worst part of it will be watching them all slowly forget. Watching every one around me start to laugh again, and tell their Easter stories, and forget to hide pictures of their grandchildren. Not that hiding them would be any less painful. They’ll all start to move away from it and forget about it. People have short attention spans for other people’s suffering, they’ll move on.”

Reaching into the warm water seemed to soothe her. She pulled out another dish and heard her utensils settle to the bottom of the sink.

“I called my boss after I got the letter, and I told him I wasn’t coming back. He got real silent on the phone and then he did just as I thought. He told me the job would always be open for me in the future. He had that tone of voice on the other end and I could feel his discomfort. I can’t bear to go through that—I’ll climb down into my own grave before I have to endure that.

“I know this puts more pressure on you. It’s the last thing you need, Michael, I know that, but I can’t do it. I have to stay away from that place.” Rebecca looked over at her husband. He’d risen from his chair and gone to the window.

* * *

Lately he hadn’t been listening. Not really. Just her general tone. Apologetic but angry. Restless and annoyed. Her tone seemed to always be reaching for some purpose, but the words it carried landed just inches before the feet of purpose. He knew this, now, that he hadn’t been listening, and felt in some way that turning over his glass on top of the open neck of the bottle was the first thing he’d been aware of consciously doing since . . .

And yet, even his distraction from what she was saying to him just moments before felt different than the way he’d been tuning her out in the past few weeks. She couldn’t know that, but it was true. Another conscious thing. He felt a tingling sensation behind his ears.

The young Illworth boy preoccupied him. Seeing him piece all his materials together to build that tree house had somehow cast Michael back to his own youth. He didn’t build tree houses; they didn’t interest him. He dove for clams in South Bay with his uncle. A smile nearly reached his face as he watched the trees in his backyard form a wall of shadows from the world.

He wouldn’t tell Rebecca just then. It wouldn’t make sense to her. But he told himself about the clams. How his uncle showed him the way to dig with his toes. How to decide by feel, what is a stone; what is the elongated black shell of a mussel. What is a baby horseshoe crab. What is a colony of snails clinging to sea sponge. What is the broken tooth of an old anchor. And, at last, what is a clam. The surf clam snuggled in the arch, the quahog was a golf ball wedged under the toes.

Then how to hold his breath. Dive down into the murky brine and reach blindly into the mud beneath his foot. Grab the clam and firmly pull it from the bed. How his uncle always told him the best part of clamming was that if you missed it the first time, you could always dive back down to get it. The same way he’d learned to stay afloat when the waves surged and lifted him from his feet, by keeping his face turned toward the sun. By taking deeper breaths.

“Otter,” he muttered, his voice broken. The nickname his uncle had assigned to him for all the many times he had to dive back down into the now-disturbed water to redeem himself. He grinned inside the memory. Pressed his forehead to the window pane. The rush of cold from the glass felt good against his brows, which ached every day.

What sounded like a squeak escaped from Rebecca’s voice and Michael rolled his head to look at her.

What is this—thing—they had? What word or phrase existed that could describe how they’d been avoiding each other while they still slept in the same bed, ate at the same table, held hands to the silence of the ticking clock on the living room wall? How many times this week did they hug each other, how often did one dry the other’s tears with their own sleeve, or their hair, or pressed their faces tight against one another. And yet they’d divorced each other, somehow. They’d clung to small facts that were meaningless. She had said to him a few weeks ago, “You were going to beat him.” He had pointed out how she always fought him on getting to the church early, and if they had gone early on that day . . .

And yet, it wasn’t divorce. It was the furthest thing from it. Michael watched her as she methodically dried her dishes and he allowed himself to see her standing before him on their wedding night. How she had dropped her paper-thin nightgown onto the floor with a flirtatious finger and bit her bottom lip. It was all he could do to stay a gentleman.

They’d known without speaking when it was time for Dallas. They’d collapsed into each other that night, and the night after, and the night after, until she finally emerged one night from the bathroom, crying.

She was standing in the kitchen drying dishes and yet she was that woman; she was all of those women—a culmination of a life lived, and even though everything had changed, none of it could change. If anything could be said of his faith in God, it was that, though boiled away and maybe gone forever, he could not deny that the past would often circle back and become the present. And here was his proof, he thought, as he watched Rebecca in the dimming light from the kitchen become that woman who stood before him at the foundation of his world. Flesh of my flesh, he thought. And he knew what he meant.

Michael went up behind Rebecca at the sink and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and kissed her squarely between the shoulder blades. Tomorrow, he told himself, he’d pull his tie on with his face turned toward the sun. He’d step into his old shoes, which were now his new shoes. For nothing would ever feel comfortably nostalgic again, and he knew he still had miles of regrets ahead of him. He felt Rebecca’s hands grip his arms, which were now cinched around her waist. He was no longer a little boy. But in that warm instant he could hear something like a voice singing from his heart: Dive back down. Dive back down.