Page 76 of Roadrunner

“It doesn’t help.”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”

I put my face in my hands for a moment. When I looked up she hadn’t moved, hadn’t reached for me, was simply there in the way she had always simply been there, which was its own kind of mercy.

“What do I do with this?” I asked.

She was quiet long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer.

“Some questions,” she said, “don’t get answered in the asking.”

I looked at her.

“They get answered in the living,” she said.

I didn’t know yet what that meant, not really, not the way I would come to understand it months later at a different kitchen table with a different set of people around it. But something in me set it down carefully anyway, the way you set down a thing you suspect you’ll need again.

I put the notebook in the bottom of my suitcase, under the winter clothes I probably wasn’t going to need in Marana.

I thought about calling Riley that night, and telling him everything, and I got as far as opening his name on my phone before I put it face-down on the counter instead.

Not because I was hiding it. Because I didn’t have the shape of it yet myself, and handing someone a shapeless thing has never once made either of you feel better. Whatever this turned out to be, it deserved to arrive whole, or as whole as I could make it, and not as a half-formed thing I’d panicked into saying out loud at eleven at night from three thousand miles away.

I thought, instead, about the version of that June I’d carried around for years. The one where I went to California for a weekend to see if my parents meant what they said, and got ambushed at a dinner table, and drank too much wine I didn’t choose to drink. And woke up in a room I didn’t choose to wake up in, and came home three weeks later with a decision already made for me by a body I didn’t fully understand yet.

That version was true. It had always been true. It was also, I understood now, only half of it. I had spent years believing I was the only person in that story making decisions in the dark. I wasn’t. Joshua had been making his own, in his own handwriting, in a drawer he kept locked even from himself, and I was only now finding out I’d been married to a man running the same quiet arithmetic I’d been running. Just from the other side of a question neither of us had ever said out loud.

I closed the suitcase.

I still had a house to finish packing, and a drive ahead of us I hadn’t let myself think about too closely yet, and a man in Arizona who had no idea what was riding toward him in the bottom of a suitcase.

Some things, I was learning, didn’t get resolved. They just got carried differently once you knew their actual weight.

I picked mine up, and Martina and I kept packing.

The moving truck came on a Tuesday. Two men in matching shirts wrapped the furniture I was keeping in blankets that smelled like a hardware store and asked me twice, politely, if I was sure about the dining table, which had been my mother-in-law’s mother’s and which I sold to them for forty dollars without a flicker of hesitation.

Martina supervised from the porch with the specific authority of a woman who had once run an entire household and saw no reason to stop now.

Arthur helped where he could, carrying what was small enough for him to carry and announcing each item’s destination like a foreman. He didn’t complain, though I caught him standing alone in his emptied bedroom for a long moment before he came to find me, and I didn’t ask him what that had cost him, because I already knew.

I loaded the suitcase into the back of the SUV myself, on top of everything else, where I could reach it without unpacking the whole vehicle, and I didn’t open it again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Alex

Now

Arthur and I left California on a Friday morning, before the fog had finished burning off the water.

Martina followed in her own car with what she deemed essential, which filled her sedan to the headrests and still somehow left room for the plant she’d had on her kitchen windowsill for years and refused to leave behind. I drove my SUV. Arthur rode shotgun.

He’d asked to sit in the front the night before, formally, with the seriousness he brought to requests he considered important. I’d said yes without making him negotiate for it.

He adjusted the mirror on his side within the first five minutes. He didn’t need it. He did it anyway.

I recognized the impulse. It was mine.