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She hid her face in the bed. “I don’t want to have to figure it out, I want to have been doing this for years already, and I’m angry that I wasn’t.” She lifted her face to him. “I’m so mad, Winston.”
“That seems reasonable. Would you like a cuddle?”
“No. A cuddle is the last thing on earth I want.”
But she didn’t look as angry as she wanted to sound. She looked terribly sad. So he put his arm out, and she tucked herself against his side, her face in his neck.
She bit him lightly. Then hard enough that he hissed. “Your teeth are sharp.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
Allie kissed his arm, then turned onto her back, staring up at the ceiling. “I hate feelings.”
“Sure.”
“I hate failure.”
“Yes.”
“Even orgasm failure.”
“I’m not sure one can actually fail at orgasm.”
“One can fail to orgasm.”
“Yes, but that’s in the spirit of the idea that orgasm is the only reason to have sex at all, which I feel we’ve just resoundingly disproven.”
“I’m not sure ‘disproven’ is a real word.”
He settled more comfortably into the bed. “I’m not sure I mind whether it is or isn’t.”
They were quiet for a minute. His skin cooled, his erection softened. His bollocks ached. None of it unpleasant.
“I followed my mom to New York because I thought I could stop her,” Allie said. “But I can’t stop her. I never could.”
He waited. She needed him to be the mailman again, and he liked the role. Though he felt less all the time like Allie’s mailman, as he became her friend. Her lover.
He didn’t have a name for what their relationship was, just at this moment, and he didn’t want to put an endpoint on it that might spoil everything that came before, distorting it by forcing it into a direction. But he cared for her, and he wanted most of all to have an opportunity to keep doing that.
“I just couldn’t stand even one more time to wait at home while she went somewhere else and made her decision to come back or not. We aren’t supposed to talk about it, we aren’t allowed to know why she leaves or what we did that made her decide to stay with us, nothing to tell us when it’s going to happen again. I can’t do it anymore. It’s too horrible.”
“No child, no husband, should have to wonder if it’s safe to grieve, or if they should be…hoping.”
“Worse, be asked to wonder silently. Without fucking talking about it. Once she left when I was around sixteen. Early in my junior year of high school. It had been a long time since she had gone the last time. I thought, ‘We’re all old enough, now, to discuss this like adults.’ I kept waiting for my dad to sit us down and tell us what the deal was. But nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then I came down for breakfast one morning and she was there, making scrambled eggs, her suitcase in the mudroom. I ran out the door, slammed it so hard that the storm window came out of it and smashed on the walk, which I didn’t even notice, my dad told me later. I got in my car and drove and drove and drove. I didn’t stop until I was somewhere in Iowa. Some nowhere town in Iowa. I thought, ‘Here. I’ll just live in this nowhere place, because who fucking cares? Who do I even belong to?’ All those times—”
She had been talking over her voice cracking, her chest hitching without allowing herself tears, and it was awful every time her throat caught. He tucked his leg between hers, held her tighter.
“Like, it’s supposed to be baby makes three, right? Did they not notice something was fucking missing? Their little fucking trysts…they were all about them, the two of them. I was by myself, in all that silence, and I never had even one moment where I was…anyone’s. It was them. I could never decide if it would be worse to find out they talked about me all the time, or if they never mentioned me at all. Pretended I didn’t exist, just like my dad pretended I was his.”
It was awful, this. He thought of Bea and had a sharp, keen desire to hug her and tell her how much he loved her. He thought of impossible things, like bottling Allie’s anger and grief in this moment and smashing the bottle at her mother’s feet, and Justice’s, watching it release pain they were forced to take in, right in their faces.
After they had been quiet together, after her breathing slowed a little, he said, “I think that my brother, Nev, Neville, has felt a bit of what you felt. We all knew, from when he was very young, that he was different. Not in this way, this big way that has happened in your family, just in that ordinary way. But my dad’s approach was to simply jovially, and in a very English way, ignore all the difference and keep telling Nev that he ‘guessed he was all right, then.’ My mother tried to raise him like she raised me. None of it worked, none of it made him feel loved, or safe. I was the one who thrived under the kind of love my parents were prepared to give. Nev didn’t need all that much more, I realized later. Just his parents to let him know that they saw him, and loved him. That it was all the things that made him different that made him most worthy of love.”
“Yes. That…helps.” She was quiet for a long time, while he swept his hand over her hair, over and over. “It would be so good, I think, if my dad said, my dad that raised me, my dad, said, ‘Just so you know, Allie, you’re mine. You’re mine.’ And if my mom said, ‘I’m not sorry I had you. I never, ever was.’ And if my sister said—”
And then she started crying, this woman he had met yesterday, tenderized. Dear, already. It scared him, but all of this, he had something in him that made it easy, maybe fatherhood, maybe everything he’d been through with Rosemary, to just…hold this woman and be glad he was here with her and that she felt the way she did.
Rosemary had said once, in the blurred days or weeks after she’d told him she wanted the divorce, that she wasn’t hurting him. That all the pain he felt, the pain of their d
