The Things We Cannot Say

by Kelly Rimmer

  I Google frantically—looking at maps and Google Translate and the calendar. I learn that I can fly into Krakow and be at Babcia’s childhood town within an hour. I need a few days to prepare, and then I need to be back within a week—so I decide to stay for four nights. Last-minute flights are expensive—obscenely so—and at last, that gives me pause. I’m being impulsive, and despite what my mother sometimes implies, I don’t do impulsive. The things she sees as impulsive in my history reflect my lack of courage, not impulsiveness—all of the times when I didn’t dare warn her in advance that I wanted so desperately to take a different path to the one she’d chosen for me.

  I can deal with our kids for a few days. Christ, it would be a fucking holiday.

  The door flies open and Wade storms in after me.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, staring at the computer on my lap.

  I look up at him calmly.

  “You can handle our kids for a few days, remember? It will be a holiday.”

  “Alice. Come on, I can’t take time off quickly. You know that,” he says impatiently. Patronizing me. Condescending. As if I am a silly child, instead of the woman who holds his entire world together—which is exactly what I am.

  “I’ll tell Babcia not to die until it suits your work schedule,” I say bitterly, and then I select the tickets.

  “Alice...what are you doing?” I hear the sudden anxiety in Wade’s tone. He can’t see the screen but he can see the expression on my face, and something there is making him very nervous. Well, so it should.

  I let the browser prefill the credit card and then before I lose courage, I jab my finger against the mouse to activate the purchase button.

  Please do not press the back button on your browser. This may take up to a minute.

  For a split second, I feel triumph, but then it hits me what I’ve done, and I feel my heart rate zoom all the way up until adrenaline floods my system and I can barely force myself to breathe. I look up at Wade in a panic, and for the first time, he panics too.

  “Ally...” he says, then he rushes around the coffee table to stare down at the laptop screen. “Honey...what did you do?”

  I do the sensible thing then and I think about how much money I just wasted on flights and how impossible it all is, and I burst into tears. Wade takes the laptop from me just as it gives the ding to indicate the purchase has been successful.

  He’s silent as he reads the payment receipt that’s now loaded on my screen. I glance up at him, and I see the tightening in his jaw and the way his nostrils flare. He doesn’t look at me, not for the longest time.

  “Alice—” he finally starts to say, but I hold up my hand toward him abruptly.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t. Just...don’t.”

  “I’ll give you some time to cool off,” he sighs, and he drops the laptop onto the lounge without further ceremony. It bounces against the leather, then comes to a stop near the edge. Neither one of us reaches for it, like we’re scared to touch it in case it poisons us. Wade turns and walks toward the door, but just before he leaves the room he throws a final missive over his shoulder. “But we need to talk about this tonight.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Alice

  Wade retreats to his study, but when I walk past the closed door, I can hear the rhythmic clicking of the keys on his electronic keyboard. When he is stressed or pondering some complex problem, he does one of two things: he runs miles and miles, or he puts his headphones on and he sits at the keyboard and he tries to learn impossibly difficult piano concertos—a habit that’s lingered from his childhood when his mother correctly predicted that a boy so enamored with math would enjoy the challenge and symmetry of musicianship. In the weeks after Eddie’s diagnosis, Wade worked on Rachmaninoff’s Third until he gave himself a nasty case of Repetitive Strain Injury in both hands. He says distracting the conscious part of his brain with some other kind of work helps him to process things.

  I’ve long suspected that Wade suffers from the exact same challenge we have with Callie—his brain runs too fast, and unless he occupies himself with something really intense, he tends to work himself into knots.

  And that’s kind of the opposite to my coping mechanism, because I’m upset too, so I run a bath. Tonight, I take the time to light several of the candles—the rose-scented ones—because they remind me of Babcia’s beautiful rose garden at her old house. I dump the whole bottle of bubble mixture into the water, and the foamy bubbles on top rise until they spill over onto the flat edge of the tiles around the bath, but I don’t even care. I sink into the water, and I cry some more because I’m completely confused about what to do next.

  This should be simple. I should call the airline and cancel the tickets.

  I’m just not sure that’s what I actually want to do. There’s a battle raging inside me; exactly 50 percent of me is cheering and desperate to go on this crazy quest, but the rest of me is every bit as desperate to stay home.

  I stay in the bath far too long. The bubbles slowly pop. The water cools. I refill the tub with hot water several times and my skin wrinkles, but I still don’t move. When the door opens quietly, it’s just after midnight, and I’m still sitting here in the bath, still crying on and off. The candles have burned down, and even though they are long finished now, their scent and the smell of the wax linger too heavily, leaving a sickly sweet smell in the air. Wade enters the room gently, as if he’s expecting me to be asleep and he’s afraid to wake me, but then he knocks the toilet lid down and he sits heavily upon it.

  “You really want to do this,” he says. It’s a statement not a question, but I seriously wish this were that simple. I look up at him through bleary eyes.

  “I don’t know. I know it’s too much to ask. I know it’s going to be too hard for the family but... I feel like I should do it.”

  “Ally,” Wade sighs. “I don’t know how we got here. Do you?”

  I hate it when I can’t keep up with him in a conversation, and this one has only just started, but I already have no idea what he’s talking about. I scan around the bathroom, then back to him blankly.

  “Here?”

  “Remember back at the beginning? We talked about everything. Once upon a time you’d call me because you read an article in a newspaper that interested you or you saw something unusual on your way home from the store—and I loved that about you...” A desperate sadness creeps into his expression, and he exhales, then adds, “I loved that about us. Now you book tickets to Europe without telling me. We live in the same house, but I have no clue what’s going on inside your head. Are you even happy? Do you...” His voice breaks, and he stops for a moment before he asks me in a whisper, “Alice, do you still love me?”

  There’s a moment of painful silence. We stare at each other—close enough almost to touch, despite the ocean of distance between us.

  “Eddie,” I say. That single word is rough with years of withheld emotion. Wade swallows and looks away, down to the gleaming white tiles on the floor. “Eddie changed everything.”

  Just as there’s a curtain of chaos between Eddie and the world, there’s now a curtain of chaos between Wade and I, because my world revolves around my son, and my husband hasn’t found a way to connect with him at all. I hate that even on the best of days, but right now as I stare up at Wade, I wonder for the very first time if he hates it too. It’s been easy to assume that Wade’s failure to connect with Eddie was a purposeful form of sulking—the world hasn’t given him the son he wants, so he refuses to acknowledge the son he has. If I force my emotions aside and make myself be completely rational here—that kind of behavior is just not in Wade’s nature. It’s more comforting to tell myself that Wade is at fault here, because the alternative is that Wade doesn’t know how to connect with Eddie—or that he’s too scared to try.

  “I found a tour guide,” Wade says, in another abrupt change of subject
that leaves me feeling lost all over again. I wave vaguely toward the towels and he hands me one, then watches silently as I step out of the bath. Once the towel is wrapped tightly around me, I glance at him again.

  “A guide who can visit those places for Babcia?”

  It makes perfect sense. We can cancel the insanely expensive airline tickets, and pay someone who is already in the country to go take some photos for Babcia. I can’t quite understand why I feel so disappointed at the solution Wade has found, given it actually solves every single one of my problems.

  “No.” He frowns, then he gives me that haughty look, the one I hate so much—the one he gets sometimes when he’s busy being brilliant and I’m just not keeping up. “Someone who can take you to those places, Ally. She’s fluent in English and Polish, she has a master’s degree in modern history and she’s a licensed tour guide. Her name is Zofia. I’ve just been on the phone with her, and she sounds perfect. She does family history stuff all the time—she said family and war history tours make up most of her business, actually. But she’s normally booked out months in advance and she’s only free because she had a cancellation next week, so I booked her on the spot. She’ll take you to the town and help you see the things Babcia wants to see. She said the three days you’ve booked should be plenty of time to visit the town and take a good look around—it’s a pretty small place.”

  “You...you what? But...”

  “The town is Trzebinia, right?”

  I stare at him in disbelief.

  “How could you even know that?”

  “You left the tabs open on the laptop...” He shrugs, then his gaze meets mine again. “You can email her and do some planning, but the gist of it is you fly out Monday night so you’ll arrive in Krakow on the Tuesday. She’s booking a hotel for you and she’ll meet you there Wednesday morning and take it from there.”

  I panicked when I booked the tickets, but that was a blistering act of rage and it was something I was half intending to undo. This panic is different; it feels a little bit more like fear, because I have a sneaking suspicion I’m about to find myself well and truly out of my depth. I pinch the bridge of my nose and try to take some deep breaths, because I have no idea whether I should yell at Wade for babying me or thank him for helping me. I look up at him suddenly as I try to decide how to react, but my chest constricts when I see how he’s sitting.

  His shoulders have slumped, and he’s staring at the sudsy tiles on the floor, utter misery in his gaze. He feels my eyes on him, though, and he raises his chin to look back at me. As our eyes lock, I feel so many things—sadness that things between us feel so broken, confusion because I still don’t know how to react to his intervention here, and love. Love, maybe most of all. The man has broken my heart more times than I can count in the last few years, and he’s let me down, and he’s let our son down. But at the end of the day, the love I have for him hasn’t waned even a little bit, and I am furious with myself that he’s ever had cause to think otherwise.

  “You know, for months...maybe even years...I’ve been trying to figure out how to make it all better,” he says heavily. Weariness crosses his face, even as he shifts to avoid my gaze again. “I have everything I ever wanted in life. You. This house. My job. This family...for the most part. But every day it feels like you slip a little further away from me and you’re the key to it all. If I lose you, Alice...the rest of it goes too.”

  There’s a rawness in this declaration that takes my breath away. Wade reaches for my hand, and he holds it against his cheek, then closes his eyes. I stare down at him, sitting there so vulnerable and, well, sitting on our toilet seat, of all of the places in the world we could have had this conversation. It turns out I do have some tears left after all, because as I see my handsome, brilliant husband so desperate at last to fix us when for so long I’ve feared he didn’t even care that we were broken, my vision blurs again.

  “Babcia means the world to you, and you mean the world to me,” he whispers now. “I love her too, of course, but...even though I said stupid things and you were angry, I know you wouldn’t have booked those tickets if, on some level, you didn’t want to go. So—knowing that—I’m going to do everything in my power to help you to get there.”

  “I think you’re conflating two disparate issues,” I say unevenly. He gives me a wry look.

  “Am I?”

  “Babcia’s situation has nothing to do with...”

  “Let’s do a thought experiment,” Wade says. He releases my hand, then leans back against the toilet cistern and raises his eyebrows at me. “Imagine a situation where we had our second child and he happened to be exactly like his very gifted big sister. No...challenges. Tell me what your life would look like by now?”

  I can’t let myself picture that. I can’t let myself want a different son, not for a single second. We got the son we got. I love him just the way he is, and I always will. I stiffen and shake my head.

  “You know what it would look like.”

  “Humor me, Ally. Would you have gone on this trip if we had more typical seven-and ten-year-old children?”

  In a heartbeat.

  I already hate this game, but it brings startling clarity. I keep telling myself my family needs me to stay. But maybe it’s not my family—not Callie or Wade or the group collectively that hold me back from going away for a few days. It’s Eddie, because unlike my brilliant husband and equally brilliant daughter, Eddie needs me. Wade stands, and he rests his hands on my shoulders gently. I reluctantly meet his gaze.

  “You’d have gone on the trip, Ally,” he whispers. “Because you would have trusted me to look after our kids if Edison had been born different.”

  “I do trust you,” I say, but the words are stiff so the lie is unconvincing. Wade sighs, then he tenderly brushes a wet tendril of hair from my shoulder.

  “We were always going to go to Europe, weren’t we?” he says softly. “Shit, I’ve been half a dozen times for conferences and you never even blinked an eye while you waited back here at home for me. We were going to be the family who took their kids on overseas holidays, to broaden their horizons and show them the world. I know that’s not really possible for us at the moment, but it was something you always wanted, even more than I did. You took so many great holidays as a kid with Pete and Julita, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to take this trip to go on a holiday,” I say defensively.

  “I know. I’m not even saying that. I’m saying...this means something to you, and this is the first time I’ve seen you reaching for something beyond the kids in years.”

  “The kids are important. They’re...this family is my life’s work, in the same way that your job and your research is yours.”

  “I get that. I really do. The kids are important but...” Wade says hesitantly, “so is Babcia, right?” When I nod, he adds softly, “It’s okay to want something that doesn’t involve me and the kids, you know. We’re all important—but damn it, Ally—so are you.”

  I can’t remember the last time he said those words to me. It nearly breaks my heart to hear them—and I start to cry again. I nod at Wade through my tears, and he embraces me tightly. We stand like that for a few moments, until the chill in the air starts to get to me and I pull away from him and reach for a Kleenex to wipe my eyes. I open the door to our bedroom and step out to find some pajamas, and Wade follows me, watching silently. Once I’m dressed, he smiles gently.

  “So, honey...this is happening?”

  I’m reassured. I’m comforted. I feel supported now, but I’m still torn, and honestly, I’m still scared. I shrug a little.

  “Can I think about it tonight?”

  “Sure,” he says, then the corner of his mouth lifts and he flashes me the cheeky grin that was half the reason I fell in love with him in the first place. “I mean, you’ve already paid for flights and I’ve just splashed out a small fortune
for a private guide for three days, but sure—go ahead and think about it too.”

  “God,” I whisper, then I close my eyes and swallow. “Even aside from the family, I’m kind of nervous. I don’t really know what Babcia wants—not exactly. And I don’t know how to prepare Eddie for this—or even how to prepare you for the—”

  “Leave Eddie to me,” Wade says.

  I open my eyes and stare at him. “What would you even do with him on the days when he’s not at school?”

  “I’ve already thought about that. Ideally, he’d go to school full-time, but if you’re absolutely sure he can’t deal with that—”

  “He can’t.”

  “Then I’ll take him to the office with me.”

  Once upon a time I desperately wanted Wade to take Eddie to work for a visit, but Wade was determined all along that it was just too risky—he has a very large, chaotic office full of towering stacks of paperwork and heavy reference books—and it’s in an industrial research complex that he insisted was fraught with danger. Callie has visited Wade at work several times. Eddie has not. That was Wade’s decision all along.

  “But—”

  “I know, Alice,” he interrupts me, abruptly. I fall silent. “I know I said it was a bad idea when you asked me in the past, but I’ve really thought about it tonight, and we can make it work. I want to push him a little this week, to get him out of his comfort zone.”

  It’s late. We’re both exhausted. We stare at each other, and I can tell we’re both desperately trying to stop this from disintegrating into a fight. Even with the tension, this is still a more honest argument than any we’ve had in recent history, which have always been littered with passive-aggressive taunts and hints.