Page 143
She doesn’t say you’re right.
Her head comes up and her eyes are already wet and something in her face breaks wide open, and when she speaks it isn’t the slow careful let-down. It’s fury. Real, shaking fury, from a woman I have never once heard raise her voice.
“Are you kidding me?”
She’s on her feet, both hands flat on the table, and the noodles jump. “You think I don’t love Bo? You think that’s what this is?” Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “I love that kid, Luke. I love him so much it terrifies me. He is the first child in my entire life I have ever let myself love. The first one. And I did it by accident, in a hallway, over a dropped piece of paper, before I could talk myself out of it. I carry his rock in my coat. I put his drawings on my refrigerator. I went white at Christmas because he asked me to be his mom and I wanted to say yes so fast and so hard it scared the life out of me, and I didn’t know if I was allowed to want that, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I want to be that boy’s anything.”
I don’t move. I can’t.
“You and Bo and Dottie,” she says, and her voice drops out of the fury into something worse, something wrecked, “are the most I have let myself have in years. You are the whole thing I was afraid to want. And you sat down at my table tonight and asked me if I’m in?” She laughs, and it’s a terrible sound. “I’m so far in I can’t find the door.”
And I sit there with my careful speech in a hundred pieces on the floor and I understand, all at once, that I got it exactly, completely backward.
She’s not pulling away from Bo.
She’s not pulling away at all.
I read the two silent days and the pale face and the secret and I built the only ending I know how to build, the leaving ending, and I aimed it straight at the softest part of her and fired, and I was wrong. I was so sure, and I was so wrong. Reading people is the one thing I never miss. I missed this by a mile.
If the problem isn’t Bo, and the problem isn’t me, then there is a problem I know nothing about. It’s the actual reason she went dark for two days, and I just spent that whole time accusing her of the single thing she would never do.
I look at her, standing over a table of cold food with tears running down her face, and I finally see it, too late, the thing I was too busy bracing to read. This is not a woman with one foot out the door.
This is a woman coming apart.
And I have no idea why.
I’m out of my chair before I’ve thought about it. I come around the table, and I don’t reach for her yet. I just crouch down in front of her, get low, so I’m not a grown man looming over somebody who’s already overwhelmed, so she has to look down at me instead of up. The way she got on the floor for Bo.
I rest one hand on her arm, light. An out, if she wants it.
She doesn’t take it.
“Olivia.” My voice comes out rough, scared, nothing like the man who walked in here twenty minutes ago so sure he had it figured. “What happened? What’s actually wrong?”
Chapter 31
Olivia
I didn’t mean to yell.
I have not raised my voice at another human being since I was a teenager. It’s a point of professional pride. You don’t yell in my line of work. You stay level, you are the calm in the other person’s storm, and I have been the calm in a thousand storms.
And I just yelled at the calmest man I know. He walked into my apartment holding my favorite Chinese food, in that stupid hat, the ridiculous, unfairly good mustache, and then he put his hand on the one thing in my life that isn’t broken.
Bo. He aimed at Bo. And Bo is the single solid thing in a week where everything else has come down around me, and when he questioned the one load-bearing wall I had left, it all came out sideways. All of it. The fury and the fear and the two days I’ve spent not answering his texts because I couldn’t let him see me like this.
He’s standing now. He came up out of his crouch the second I started moving, and now he just lets me have the room, and I’m using all of it. I can’t hold still. I step back from him, into the kitchen, and put both hands flat on the counter, and that isn’t enough, so I pick up a dish towel and fold it and set it down and pick it up again. I wipe a counter that’s already clean. I square the salt and pepper. I am doing the thing I always do, which is clean and move and manage, except there is nothing here to manage. The mess is me.
He asked what’s actually wrong in a voice with all the certainty scared out of it, and the question cracks me the rest of the way open.
So I tell him.
Everything. Not in order, because it doesn’t have an order anymore.
Natalie. Sobbing over a mother she posts about a dozen times a month, and how underneath all of it there’s a girl who cries in a parking garage. How I sat there and watched the gap between the two of them.
“It’s the exact thing, Luke.” My voice is shaking and I let it. “It’s the exact thing that broke me at seventeen. The person on stage and the person in the parking lot, and you cannot tell which one is real, and I handed all of these people my whole self. This room. These people I let myself trust. And any one of them could be lying to my face with a smile on. That’s what I walked back into. I knew better. I knew better for years and I let a good sermon talk me out of it, and I was right the first time. People perform. Community isn’t safe. It has never once been safe.”
