Twenty-five.
Theo and Kate were beyond excited to see their mom, which wasn’t surprising, thought Charlie. He had felt the usual warm feeling, too, for a nanosecond. Habituated neurons firing as they always had. It takes a while for the head to catch up with the heart, it would seem. He was so incredibly angry with Anne it took all he had not to scream at her or slap her, something he had never, ever even been remotely tempted to do to her, or to anyone. But he didn’t, because his kids were beaming and hanging on her and she was smiling down at them as if she hadn’t just thrown away their happiness for a fuck.
Two days earlier, after he had spoken to the school principal, he had forced himself to call his wife.
“It’s me.”
“I’m so sorry, so sorry, Charlie, I really never . . .” She had started crying as soon as she saw his name on her phone, “ICE Charlie Porter.” Would he even come in an emergency now? She’d have to change that along with every other single aspect of her life.
He couldn’t have been further from tears. “Save it. We need to tell the children together. I just met with the principal. She persuaded me that it’s better for them.”
There was a pause. “What are we going to tell them?”
“We’re going to tell them that we’re not being very good friends right now, and that you’re going to move out for a while so we can stay friends. That we love them just as much, that we are still their mom and dad, and that it has nothing to do with them.”
“You’re not going to tell them about what I did?”
“Not today. Today we’re going to just tell them what’s going to happen. Are you able to do that? Mrs. Garcia said it’s better if we both do it, but if you’re going to fall apart I’ll do it alone.”
For a split second Anne remembered how cold he had been on the phone, as she hugged her children on this hot Saturday afternoon, and looked up at him. He looked like he could punch her any minute, and although she had never been afraid of him before, not even fleetingly, now she dropped her gaze.
“Where do you want to go, my loves?” Focus on the kids, Anne.
Kate shouted out for ice cream, but Theo looked confused. “Aren’t we just going home?”
His dad’s voice came from behind him. “Mommy isn’t living there right now, remember?”
Theo frowned, and turned to face his father. “But she can still visit, right? She’s still our mom.” He turned back to Anne and tugged on her hand. “You can come to my room, Mom.”
“And mine!” Kate said, jealously. “We can play Littlest Pet Shop.”
Theo was scornful. “She doesn’t want to play that.”
Anne would have given her right arm to play Littlest Pet Shop with Kate as if nothing was wrong, but she tried not to show it. She waited for Charlie to give her permission to visit her own house, a house that was half in her name, a house she could choose to forcibly occupy if she wanted.
Charlie was wrestling with competing desires: On the one hand he wanted Anne nowhere near his house, but he also wanted his kids to feel safe, loved, and on his side. He was so ashamed of this feeling that he immediately said Anne could come. Of course.
“I want to ride with Mom!” Kate said, jumping up and down. “Did you get a new car?”
Anne shook her head. “No, I walked here, we can all just go home together.” The words came out smoothly, but she suddenly needed to use the bathroom, her gut twisting at the thought of walking into her house.
But her face showed nothing, and together they all walked to their car, just like it was any other Saturday.
Walking into his house behind his wife, Charlie nearly lost it when Anne went to hang her keys on the hook, then realized she didn’t live there anymore. Like a sound wave her pain passed back from her to him, the whole moment lasting maybe half a second. He wanted to cut out this connection to her like a tumor. He wanted to wind back his arm and throw a ball of shared history arcing out over the ocean, an unheard splash, unrecoverable. But he couldn’t forget loving Anne any more than he could forget a second language spoken every day for a decade. She was in the curls of his brain. His eyes had recorded and decoded her tiniest expression. They’d seen and codified her fear, her caution, her passion, her childbirth, her laughter. His hands had touched her intimately, aroused her, held her hair while she threw up, carried her into their first house, wiped her brow in fever, handed her diapers and wipes, brought her coffee. He’d smelled her perfume, her blood, her hair, her bad morning breath. He’d heard her voice, possibly every word and tone her larynx was capable of. She was talking now, asking the kids if they were hungry, as if she was still their mother, which of course she was, and always would be. Suddenly he hated her with each and every one of the senses that had loved her so thoroughly for so long.
“I’ll get them a snack,” he said roughly, pushing past her, aware he’d made her step sideways, knowing by that brief touch that she’d lost weight, that she was barely holding it together. Get out of my head, he wanted to scream, disappear from the earth and never have existed, all of you.
“Is there raisin toast?” Kate asked. He smiled at her and nodded. For a moment he had the mad thought he was cheating on his children by pretending to be OK when, in fact, he was clinging to sanity with only the tiniest sliver of fingernail. He wondered if this was how Anne felt, if the distance between her inside and her outside had been that yawning a chasm. Well, he was holding it together for the kids and she should have, too, the bitch.
He pulled two pieces of raisin bread from the bag and put them in the toaster, pushing down the lever hard enough the first time, rather than having to do it over and over as so often happened. See? Broken on the inside, capable on the outside.
The kids had run upstairs to change out of their soccer stuff, and Anne watched her husband standing by the toaster, apparently guarding the little machine from attack. He’d made it stay down the first time; she could never do that. It was fussy, that toaster, maybe the fifth one they’d had in as many years. How come they couldn’t make toasters that lasted anymore? Her grandparents had had the same toaster her whole childhood, one with enamel sides with blue flowers on them, drawn by what must have been a drunken artist with a shaky hand, his blue pencil wavering as he drew those long stems and petals.
Charlie was angry, she could see it in his shoulders, and she ached for him more than she’d ever ached for anything. The toast popped and she watched him butter it for Kate with quick, efficient movements, getting the butter to the edges, no further. He loved his kids so much, and he would never love her again. He turned and carried the toast past her, the cool breeze of his passing sweetened by the smell of raisins.
“Charlie,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Toast,” he replied, walking out of the room.
She waited for him in the kitchen, but he didn’t come back. Looking around she noticed how much tidier it was now that she no longer lived there. Who would have guessed she was the messy one? She went upstairs but her bedroom door was closed, so she went to Kate’s room. Kate was out of her soccer uniform, but had clearly been interrupted by the arrival of the toast, because she was wearing leggings and socks, but no top. Anne brushed toast crumbs from her daughter and pulled a little sweatshirt over her head. Then she sat down in the glider where she’d rocked this child from birth, and pulled Kate onto her lap.
“How’s school? Anything fun happen?”
Kate nodded, her smooth hair brushing Anne’s chin. “Ella got a kitten. We wanted to call it Yellowy, but her mom called it Butterscotch.” She pulled her head away from Anne and looked at her. “Isn’t that a dumb name? What does that even mean?”
Anne was surprised. “It’s a kind of candy. And kind of a color, too, sort of a browny yellow.”
“Ohhhh . . .” Kate nodded again, light dawning. “I get why it’s a good name then.” There was a small pause. “Why can’t you be living with us anymore?” Kate’s voice was soft. “Daddy can go away and you can come back.”
Anne was still thinking of the kitten and scrambled to catch up. “I can’t baby. Daddy and I aren’t friends right now, and . . .”
“You told me it’s not nice to stay mad when someone said sorry already. You told me that when Liesl at school melted my Easter chicken and I was so angry and she was crying, remember? I remember that.”
Anne remembered. “Yes, that’s right, it’s better to forgive someone when they . . .”
“And you said sorry, right? You said sorry, didn’t you?” Surely her mother wouldn’t forget this very basic first step.
Anne nodded. Mindlessly she noticed Kate’s bedroom was as tidy as the kitchen. He’d had the cleaners in. It wasn’t her bad influence; it was his readiness to throw money at a problem.
“Well then, Daddy should let you come home and be friends again.” Kate started to squirm off Anne’s lap. “I’ll go tell him, maybe he didn’t hear you.”
Anne held her hand. “He heard me, sweetheart, but he’s just still really mad. I did a bad thing, and it might take more than sorry.”
Kate frowned at her. “There is no more than sorry.”
Anne swallowed. “Do you remember when I told you that when you say mean things it makes little holes in people, do you remember that?” She’d read this analogy on Facebook or something, about nails in wood or some such thing, some deep thing that made her nod thoughtfully and feel a tiny pain in her heart. “And that when you say sorry it’s like covering those holes. It helps, but it doesn’t make the holes go away forever, remember?”
“Yes.”
“You broke a plate.” Theo’s voice came from the doorway. Anne looked up, and Kate turned to face her brother.
“I did?” Anne didn’t remember that. You’d think she’d remember that.
Theo nodded. “Kate wasn’t there. It was after Ollie and I got into a fight at school, and you had to come in and see Mrs. Garcia, remember?”
It came back to her.
“You were super mad, and you took a plate out of the cupboard and you said that when I said hurtful things to someone it was like breaking a plate, and then you smacked the plate on the counter and it broke in two and then you put both pieces together and said, ‘Look, see, it’s fixed but there’s still a crack. There will always be a crack,’ you said.”
Anne frowned. Shit. When she’d performed this magnificently meaningful symbolic piece of parenting she hadn’t considered this outcome.
“But the plate still worked, right?” Kate looked anxious. “Even if you and Daddy are cracked you can still be together, right?” She looked at her older brother, whose face was so still it might have been porcelain itself. “They can be together again, if she says sorry and he says thank you and lets her come back, right?” Her brother shrugged at her, ten so much more resigned to ambiguity than six.
“I did say sorry, honey, but Daddy’s still really angry, and he needs some time apart. Like when you get mad and you want to be alone in your room for a while to calm down, right?”
Kate was visibly struggling, and Anne suddenly wondered if all these allegories and examples and parallels were helping her understand, or if they were just things Anne could say in the face of inexplicable pain. If the people of Pompeii had built a baking soda and vinegar model of a volcano as schoolchildren would that have made their sudden, disastrous demise more . . . relatable? Would they have been like, Oh, hey, we’ve seen this before, we know how this is working. Yes, we’re all about to die in an instant of suffocating heat that cooks our lungs and roasts our beating hearts in our chests, but we get how it works, so, you know, that’s something. We know how, even if we are still blaming the gods for why. Kate didn’t look like she was understanding any of it, and her expression said her heart was running the show because, let’s face it, her brain was letting things go to serious shit around here.
The little girl suddenly left the room. As Theo and Anne looked at each other, she realized the expression on her son’s face was pity.
Down the hall, Kate was tearful but optimistic. “Mommy says she’s sorry, Daddy, she’s really sorry OK?”
Anne got to her feet. She reached her own bedroom in time to hear Charlie say, “I know she is, babycakes, but I think it’s too late for that.”
Kate stamped her foot. “It’s never too late for sorry, you told me that last week when you found the pudding.”
“That was different.”
“No. Mommy did something bad, she didn’t tell you, just like me and the pudding, and then when you found out, she said sorry. And I helped you clean it up, didn’t I? Even though it was all sticky, I helped you, and I said sorry and you said it was OK.” She started to cry. “So why is it too late for Mommy to say sorry?”
“Mommy did more than make a mess, honey. It was a grown-up thing, it doesn’t matter what she did, it’s done and it can’t be cleaned up.” Charlie looked up at his wife standing in their bedroom doorway and all he wanted to say was: Please come home and let’s never, never talk about this again. Let’s pretend it never happened; let’s rip the pages out of the fucking calendar and move to another state and start over. But that couldn’t work because the knowledge would linger under his skin like a keloid and he’d rub it absentmindedly during every silence that fell in their marriage from that moment on.
Anne saw all this on his face, even as she noticed he was wearing the boxer shorts she’d given him for Christmas many years before. Reindeer on skis. She couldn’t see from here, but she knew the flannel under his balls was wearing thin, had thought a few months earlier that new holiday boxer shorts should be under the tree this year. Her stomach twisted at the thought of Christmas. Oh my God, his parents.
“She said she’s sorry!” Kate was losing it, her voice clogged with tears and her un-blown nose. “You have to accept her apology, you have to! You’re the one being mean now, you’re the one who’s doing the bad thing! You have to say sorry! You both have to say sorry!!” She fell, sobbing, to the floor, literally pulling on her own hair, her tiny fingers so furious at herself for not being able to make this right, not being a big enough girl to fix this, until her brother pushed past his parents and joined her on the ground, pulling her onto his lap and rocking her, smoothing her hair and holding her fingers, letting her pinch him so hard, letting her punch and smack at his face—the only person in her life left to safely get angry at. He looked at his father, his eyes cold and unblinking. Ten years old. Battlefield promotion to adult, first grade.
Anne turned and walked downstairs, unable to handle their pain. Coward. As she turned at the bottom of the stairs and stumbled out she could hear her husband closing the bathroom door above her. She walked away from the house blindly, the door left open behind her, her children sitting alone on the bedroom floor where they’d opened birthday presents and run for hugs and crossed for bad dreams in the middle of the night, totally alone. She was every bit the bad mother she’d always known she was, and had a car driven along the street at that very moment she would have thrown herself in front of it with relief.