Kate normally didn’t go along. Not that she wasn’t invited—it was her car and her child; obviously she could have gone, too—but the care with which Nolan drove Robin, as if he were about to break, made her insane. She wanted speed for her little boy. Ninety miles an hour on a hot summer night with the top down, an arm stuck out to dance in the wind. But Robin couldn’t ride like that anymore.
That afternoon, she’d thought they were driving. Out somewhere. She’d taken Nolan’s car when she’d left, knowing Robin liked hers best.
So when Kate had gone into the garage and smelled the exhaust, when she’d heard her Saab putt-putting along, when she’d seen the garage door all the way down, she hadn’t panicked. They were getting ready to go. Or maybe they were just getting back; Robin was asleep in the backseat, she could see through the window.
When she saw Nolan slumped at the wheel, though, she couldn’t quite make her brain work fast enough. Something. Do something.
Thwack! She hit the garage door button. She ran through the house and grabbed the portable phone and dialed 911 so quickly that it felt like she’d always had the phone in her hand. The dispatcher asked questions Kate couldn’t answer, and she hung up, hurling the phone into the bushes. While she waited for the sirens, at first so far away, to get closer, she dragged Robin out. She pulled him more roughly than she ever had before, knowing somehow that the tilt of his head was just wrong, and if she could get him out on the lawn, she could get it right. Get him normal again. As normal as he’d been that morning, maybe. Or even better, the week before. Or the month before, before they’d lost what was left of their hope.
Robin wouldn’t go like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It couldn’t end this way.
Nolan was still in the garage, still slumped at the wheel. Kate pulled open the driver’s-side door and undid his seat belt. He was heavy, slouched forward as if his spine had softened. She didn’t know how to get him out, only that she had to, so she leaned in and put one arm under each of his and then pulled as if her own life depended on it. He moved more easily than Robin, perhaps because if she looked into her heart to examine it, she cared less, if only by the smallest—almost immeasurable—fraction. She moved faster, with a tiny bit less caution. She was stronger, too. The fear had by then become a raging beast inside her, and she probably could have picked up the car and shaken it over her head if she’d needed to.
She had to move fast with Nolan, because the sooner she dragged the man she loved outside to the good air, the sooner she got to go back to Robin, the boy she loved most.
Nolan on the grass. Faceup. Not breathing. She knew he wasn’t, and there wasn’t anything else she could do, just pray the ambulance got there in time to help him.
She chose Robin.
His mouth was still warm, and the feel of his lips on hers gave her hope. She could taste the banana he’d had for lunch, the food that sat best with him now. And there was the acrid yellow smell of his medicine, the smell that made both of them gag when she gave it to him.
His chest, under Kate’s hands, moved perfectly. She was strong. Nolan always told her how strong she was—it wasn’t even hard to do this, to keep his lungs moving for him, to give him her breath. She willed herself not to use any of the oxygen before she gave it to him. She didn’t need it, and her boy did—she knew that—even though his lips were still pink, his cheeks ruddy, as if he were in the best of health. When Robin was a baby, still healthy, Kate would sneak into his room, convinced he’d stopped breathing. It was only by sheer force of her own will that his chest had risen and fallen—staring at him was what started him breathing again. She knew it was a ridiculous idea, but it was one she believed. She had given birth to him. Her body had made her son breathe. She should be allowed to do it just one last time. For fuck’s sake, she was finally getting good at it.
In between breaths, she screamed for help. From anyone, from God, from Mr. Foster next door. The screams ripped from her lungs, shredded terror that she sent out with nothing returned. While she pressed Robin’s chest again and again, she thought bitterly of the two-income houses they were surrounded by. All their neighbors had fabulous jobs, fantastic lives. Their perfect, healthy children were either in day care or in expensive charter schools. Where the hell, then, was the help? Kate saw maids go in and out of people’s houses, saw their gardeners with their leaf blowers and poison sprays—where were they now? Where was someone, anyone else that she could direct to do CPR on Nolan?
No one came. No one saw. No one helped.
She felt incredibly small, as if the grass were falling away beneath her and Robin. The only thing left was her, pumping his chest, putting air in his lungs—above them, a vast sky of blue that reached so far into the heavens that not even God could see them.
When the engine pulled up, a firefighter who looked barely old enough to drink had to hold her in his arms, had to lock her there while two full crews attended to each of her men. Two police officers helped him hold her—she was a wildcat, a banshee, a hurricane—while more, so many of them, stood along the lawn’s edge watching. She fought the firefighter so hard she knew his face and arms were bleeding by the time the ambulance left the scene, sirens blaring, but she didn’t apologize.
Nolan was put in the hyperbaric chamber. The carbon monoxide was forced from his hemoglobin so that regular carbon dioxide could reattach as it was supposed to. The chamber was used for divers who had the bends, they told her. Kate wondered if they would let her borrow it someday, since she was at the bottom. She’d float up eventually, right? Wasn’t that what she would have to do? Bodies underwater bloated and, at some point, surfaced. But while they saved Nolan’s life, no one could bring Robin back. The doctor said his lungs were too weak. It had been too much for his body to handle. Robin hadn’t felt a thing, he said. Not a thing. He’d just drifted off into his last nap.
Kate felt a jealousy that she’d never felt in her whole life, an envy so thick and viscous she could almost see it, a film in front of her eyes. Robin drifted off.
R is always, always R is always for Robin.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Saturday, May 17, 2014
7:45 a.m.
Fred Weasley looked at Nolan with rheumy, wary eyes as Nolan dressed to leave Saturday morning. “Never seen me like this, have you?” He meant the way he was dressed, although he was never this deeply furious, either. Nolan put on his one pair of slacks, a thrift store find, dun-colored with a slight stain at the right hem, and a nice blue shirt he’d bought in the city on a whim one day when he’d passed Brooks Brothers in Union Square, remembering all the money he’d dropped there over the years. He’d thought maybe he’d someday need an outfit for a date, though it had felt like an impossibility even then. Now it just felt ridiculous. The knot forming of the dark blue tie came back to him as if he’d done it yesterday instead of more than three years before. He tugged it harder than he needed to, rage coursing through his upper arms and into his fingers. He watched his face turn red in the mirror. Only then did he loosen it. His eye was deeply purpled, and he felt satisfaction that one part of him, at least, looked the way he felt.
Other than the black eye, he looked okay. For a funeral.
It was still early, before eight, when Nolan pulled up in front of the house. Only one cameraperson had come out, was still waiting on the sidewalk.
“Mr. Monroe! Do you have any statement about whether or not you’re reconciling with Kate?”
He gave what he hoped was a crazed smile and waved with only his middle finger. Tomorrow there would be none of them left.
When Kate opened the door, she looked almost happy. It was just for a second, and then she brought the lines of her face back under control. It made him even more furious.
“Come in,” she said.
Inside, through to the kitchen—it was tidy, the dishes put away. As if she’d sent that e-mail and then gone about her business cleaning up. All of it was so unlike her.
“Coffe
e?” she asked, holding out a cup—his blue mug—the way she had a million times before.
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
She said nothing. Just stood there, her eyes swimming with tears he didn’t want to see.
“You kept my daughter from me?”
“She wasn’t ours. She couldn’t be.”
“You sure seem to have her now.”
Kate shook her head. “Up until the day she turned eighteen, it was a closed adoption. Still is, technically. I couldn’t tell you.”
“She found you somehow.” Nolan’s feet remained planted rigidly apart.
“Internet. You know, like the kids do.” She smiled again, thinly. “I put my info in. Late one night. I was drunk—I barely remember doing it. I wanted to tell you a thousand times.”
His hands balled into fists at his sides, then starfished out. “You told me everything else.”
“I did.”
“Everything. You were the most honest person I’d ever met. Too honest.”
Kate nodded. She looked as miserable as she had in the courtroom, her skin white, her eyes wide.
“But you didn’t tell me I was a father. Even after I’d lost that part of myself.”
She shook her head and sucked in her lips.
“Jesus, Kate! You took my daughter. The only chance I had at a daughter. You stole it from me.”
“Wait—”
“You robbed me of the chance to keep doing the only thing I was good at.” His shoulders shook.
“We couldn’t have found her. We weren’t allowed to. If I’d told you, it would have been worse. I thought I was protecting you. And I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of losing you. I was used to losing things by then. Dad. I lost Mom even though she was still around. Then you. The biggest mistake of my life was not telling you when we found each other again—it should have been the very first thing out of my mouth. When it wasn’t, it was too late. That sealed the lid of it shut. I didn’t know what else to do. You were gone. You’d left for Hawaii with your parents. As far as I knew you were never coming back.”
“We should have had her, Kate. She should have been ours. This whole time, she could have been our little girl. We’d be the ones sending her to college. We’d know her favorite color. She’d come to me when she was scared. There’d be no cause for her to be frightened of me.”
“She’s not scared of you . . .”
“Her brother’s dead. Of course she’s terrified of me. She has to be. Everyone else is.”
Kate jumped as he kicked the bottom of the cabinet next to the stove. It flew off its broken hinge, the one he’d always told Kate he’d fix but never got around to. It clattered across the tile with a crash.
He’d have been good with a daughter. He knew it. Crouching, he tried to put the cabinet door back on.
“This hinge is blown.”
“It has been.”
“I’m gone for three years and you don’t fix a single goddamn thing.” It wasn’t a question. “The bathroom sink still not draining?”
“Oh, love . . .”
That word was what did it. He stood and was forward, inside her space before he knew how he’d gotten there. Kate pressed herself against the edge of the counter, her back bending as she moved backward. She couldn’t go any farther. He pushed against her.
“She’s mine.”
“But I—”
“I could kill you for this.” The pain in his fists, in his chest, told him it wasn’t an idle threat. Her breath was warm on his cheek, and every single fucking thing he wanted to do to her was physical. He wanted to put his hand to her neck and tighten until she went as red as he had that morning with the tie, holding until she went blue. He wanted to pin her arms back and fuck her hard, standing up. He wanted to kiss her so that she couldn’t breathe. He’d never felt such a need to hurt someone. Ever. “Fuck.” He pushed back, the lower half of his body pressing against hers before he moved away from her. He focused on Robin’s chair. He knew she’d felt his cock and he didn’t give a shit.
She was even paler now, so white Nolan wondered if she would faint. What would he do if she did?
Kate said, “It was what you loved the best. What you were the best at. Being a father.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I’d managed to give that to you. With Robin. You never needed to know how much I’d screwed up back then. It was so long ago, and I’d had to let her go completely. I pushed her away. I almost never consciously thought about her. Only on her birthday. I’d compartmentalized my brain so much by that point that it didn’t even feel like lying. I can’t explain it. It was like it had happened to another person, someone who wasn’t me.” She paused. “It’s not something I’m going to apologize for, Nolan. Not after what you did.”
Nolan clenched his hands and then released them to hit the tabletop, which shook as if it might collapse. He roared, a noise he’d never made before, not even when he’d woken in the hospital to be told he’d lost his son. The sound went on and on, filling the kitchen, filling the house where Robin and he both used to live.
Then Nolan sank to his knees and her arms were around him. He struggled against her. He kicked, flailing against her, and his shoe hit her shin, but she didn’t cry out. She was stronger, in this moment, than he was. She held on as if she were riding him, as if there were a cash prize for staying on top of him as he thrashed and wailed. He kicked the wall and the chair; his arms beat the floor. He heard her gasp and then she twisted again, wrestling him so that he was holding her on his lap. Then she launched herself at him, this time in a kiss—not so much a kiss as a battle. The winner would be the most ferocious. Blood bloomed inside his mouth and he wasn’t sure whose it was. Kate gasped for air. In that fraction of a second, as her body relaxed for a short moment, he pulled at the top of her jeans. She retaliated by yanking his belt so hard it slapped against her forearm.
When their clothes were disposed of, strewn around them, under them, he paused, holding himself above her, right at the very edge, his arms shaking with the strain of holding himself up. He looked down. Kate’s eyes were full of tears and rage. He wouldn’t . . . he couldn’t just—
She did it for him, shoving her hips upward as hard as she could, taking him in his moment of indecision. He was in her then, and collapsing on top of her; he pinned her as they bucked against each other, their sobs disguised as gasps. When he came, there was nothing left but the feeling—he’d chased everything else out, away, and the blank silence felt like forgiveness. She clenched against him, her eyes screwed shut, her fingers digging into his upper arms, pulling him harder against her as she reached her own release on a strangled curse.
Kate shifted then, rotating on the floor so that she was tucked in against his side, her face pressed into his neck. She cried, softly, the way she’d never let herself cry in the old days. Then she’d been stiff, holding her tears back until they burst from her violently all at once. Now the tears were slow and steady.
When eventually she stilled, he sat up, taking her hand. They walked upstairs without discussion and he led her into their old bedroom. It smelled different now, but Nolan found he didn’t care. They pulled the covers back and slid in, he on the right, she on the left, as they always had. She laid her head on his shoulder and his arm still fit around her. The morning light streamed through the glass and lit up the side of her face the way it used to. Through the bed and up through the floorboards, he could feel the strength of the front door he’d chosen and hung by himself.
Kate cleared her throat. “Do you want to know how Mom died?”
His answer was a kiss to her temple.
“I was going to pull the plug.”
“Kate.”
“She wasn’t breathing on her own. Her heart was barely putting up a fight. They said she was most likely brain-dead and wouldn’t be coming back. I’d been waiting for her to wake up. I wanted her to say she wished
she’d met my daughter. Or to just look at me and really see me. I knew she’d wake up and we’d say everything. Finally. But then she didn’t. The doctors said she never would. The thing I’d wanted from her for so long was never, ever going to happen. So I made the decision to have them shut off the machines. It’s funny, I guess I’d always kind of seen an actual plug in my mind. Like someone bends down to the wall and yanks out the cord. I was sitting here at home, sitting on this bed, choosing the time my mother would die. But then . . . I went to the hospital that morning, and she’d just died. Five minutes before I got there.”
Nolan started to say something, but his voice choked. Finally he simply said, “I’m so sorry.” It was enough. Long minutes passed as they stared up at the ceiling. Their ceiling.
“Pree doesn’t know who you are,” said Kate. “I told you but not her.”
“You should have told both of us.” But the rage had left him, the heat of it burned out by the shape of her in his arms.
“I know. And you shouldn’t have left me alone.”
“I didn’t want to.” She didn’t know it for the truth it was, and he knew he couldn’t explain it to her, not in a way she’d believe.
They kissed again, and this time it was different. It was the way it had been the first time. And on their wedding day. And over Robin’s head, the first time they met him. How they should have kissed when they let him go.
Chapter Forty
Saturday, May 17, 2014
10 a.m.
Pree steered her car into a small parking lot along the water. Dozens of boats bobbed at their moorings. Tiny white birds battled the larger seagulls over the fish guts a guy was tossing off the pier. She had no freaking idea how to find Kate. She’d never thought there would be this many boats here and they hadn’t set up a real meeting point. She drove slowly through the lot, easing into the next one, craning her neck to look at the various people.
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