The Things We Didn't Say

by Kristina Riggle

  Dylan puts his hands to the side of his head and utters a low, frustrated growl. “That’s not what I meant! I-I—”

  Dylan’s face is working hard, trying to get words out that stall and sputter on his tongue, and I recognize the anguish in his face over this. Angel has turned pink with fury, and Jewel is sitting cross-legged on the floor; so recently she couldn’t breathe, and now she clutches her stomach, rocking slightly in place.

  I put my hand on Mallory’s elbow, fighting against my animal nature, to bring my voice to a moderate, soothing register. “Come on, Mal, settle down, okay? Let’s just catch our breath and talk for a minute—”

  “Don’t patronize me, you pompous ass!” She swings her arm in an arc to shake me away, and in doing so her purse flies loose from her shoulder, spinning as it does, and spilling its contents across the hardwood living room floor.

  I glance down and see prescription bottles. Three or four, and more for Tylenol and aspirin, which I’d bet my useless college degree don’t hold anything so innocent.

  I make a dive for them, flashing back to the time I fought her for the ATM card. She is on her knees on the floor, too, gathering them up to her bosom. The bottles I get my hands on aren’t even in her name.

  “Who’s ‘Patricia Clark’?” I ask, no longer able to screen the contempt from my voice. “And why does she need so much Vicodin?”

  “They’re prescription! And it’s none of your business!”

  “So this is how you’ve stopped drinking.”

  She tosses her head, trying to be confident and failing as she rarely does. “You have to admit I’m much better now, aren’t I?”

  I suddenly remember a failed visitation from a few weeks ago. Mallory was supposed to be home and wouldn’t answer the door, but it swung open with repeated knocking. Angel and the kids came back to the car, said their mom wasn’t feeling good and that they had to go home. They’d said she was lying on the couch, seeming too weak to move, or even give them a hug.

  At the time, I thought she’d gotten swine flu, or perhaps was sleeping off a hard drunk. I called Nicole and left a message to check on her. Drugs never entered my mind.

  How dare I hope she’d changed?

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “I’m visiting my children.”

  “It’s not your weekend.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You’re not getting any extra time after this little revelation.”

  She tosses her hair and smiles at Angel. “Well, we’ll see. My circumstances are changing, I’ll have you know. And so are yours, and not for the better. Did you happen to mention to the children that you lost your job? Or are you saving that pleasant surprise for later? You do need to be able to feed your children in order to have custody.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Daddy Turner will save the day. Or maybe he won’t, this time. Maybe he’s tired of supporting you. And now without darling Casey to pitch in around here—”

  I pull my phone out of my pocket. “Dylan and Angel. Please take Jewel upstairs.”

  “Daddy?” Jewel says, her tiny voice breaking me in pieces with how innocent and scared she sounds.

  “Go upstairs with your brother and sister.”

  The kids scurry away upstairs, whispering.

  I hold up the phone. “I’m calling the police unless you’re out that door in three seconds.”

  “I am not leaving until I’m good and ready.”

  “Can’t you see the looks on their faces? You’re making them sick. I thought I was doing them such a favor by trying to do everything by the book, everything right, never saying anything bad about you, always trying to keep to the schedule no matter what, and here you are, on drugs now, drugs you’ve obtained in a fake name, or stolen maybe, who knows, so you’re a criminal, too. Are you on them right now? Is that why you let Jewel bounce on the couch with a jawbreaker in her mouth? What if that had happened at your place, Mal? What if Casey hadn’t been here, and Jewel choked to death while you stood there in a daze?”

  “That wouldn’t happen! I love my daughter!”

  “Then why are you doing drugs! Why did you drink and drive with her in the car!”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why the fuck shouldn’t it be?” I’m roaring now, past trying, past caring. “I’m tired of your excuses, I’m tired of your tragic past, I’m tired of putting my kids in the line of fire every time I drop them off with you. Get out.”

  “No.”

  I start to dial one-handed. “Get out now, or I’m calling the police to haul you away, with your illegally obtained drugs in your purse.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell the police you hit me.”

  She rears back and whacks herself on the cheek. It leaves a red mark. “How do you like that!” she shrieks, and she slaps herself again.

  I recognize this. Mallory is spinning out of control now, like a dervish. I walk backward up the stairs, slowly. She continues to slap her face, her smile triumphant.

  The kids are all gathered in my room, on my bed. I join them, close and lock the door, and call 911.

  I hear some breaking of things downstairs, which makes Jewel gasp. I pull her into my lap. She presses one ear against my chest, and I cover her other ear with the palm of my hand.

  I hear Mallory scream up the stairs: “Jewel is not even yours!”

  I press my hand harder over Jewel’s ear as I tell the dispatcher, “Yes, I’m having a problem with my ex-wife . . .”

  After a minute or two, I turn on the radio to drown out the tantrum, which has gone past intelligible speech.

  I hear someone shouting on the other side of my front door. I go to my window, and look down to see a patrol car.

  I think of Mallory slapping her cheek, and a sick fear spreads in my stomach that if she plays her role to the hilt, I may be the one hauled off in handcuffs.

  There’s more shouting from downstairs. I look out the window again, and when I hear the bedsprings squeak for the kids getting up I use my best stern-Dad voice. “Stay back.”

  Jewel does not need to once again witness her mother in police custody. Mallory is in cuffs, being lowered into a police car. This is what needed to happen, I know. But she was once my wife. My children’s mother.

  A deep voice calls, “Mr. Turner?”

  “In here,” I answer, forcing myself to be calm.

  “Come down the stairs, sir. Make sure I can see your hands.”

  I tell the children to wait, and descend the stairs, hands palm out, in front of me, and I reach the landing where the stairs curve down into the living room, where I have an aerial view of half the main floor.

  The officer’s face has a practiced calm. Surrounding him are the remnants of my living room. A fireplace poker is in the guts of my TV. Curtains are torn down, the computer is smashed to the floor. DVDs, books, anything she could grasp in the living room, she must have used as ordnance.

  This makes the time she threw a mug at me look like an amusing prank.

  He asks me who else is in the house and where they are. While I wait on the landing, he ascends the rest of the stairs, peeks into the rooms, always watching me at the same time. When he seems satisfied no one is lurking about, we descend the stairs together.

  “We need to speak to you, sir. She says you hit her, and there’s a mark on her cheek.”

  I flinch. “No. This is going to sound crazy, but I swear it’s true. She slapped herself, on purpose, trying to get me in trouble. That’s when I took the kids upstairs. She’s . . . she’s not right. Never diagnosed, but—”

  “Just tell me what happened.”

  He writes notes, listening, nodding. He tells me he would like to interview the older kids, separate from me, separate from each other. I’m relieved he doesn’t ask to talk to Jewel.

  But I’m sick that Angel and Dylan have to go through this, even so. At fourteen and sixteen they can act
so adult, but they’re not. Not even close.

  The officer talks to the kids upstairs while another officer babysits Mallory in the patrol car. I read books to Jewel—she’s perfectly capable of reading to herself, but this is comforting, normal, and childlike—and keep her from looking out the window.

  He comes down the stairs, asks me to wait, while he goes outside to confer with his partner, a woman I notice now, with red hair pulled into a low ponytail. Dylan and Angel have the wide-eyed look of kids watching a scary movie who are afraid to look but can’t tear their eyes away.

  “Daddy, are they going to arrest you?” Angel asks me, looking out the front window at the police. “Because I told them it’s not your fault.”

  Dylan nodded soberly. “I snuck partway down the steps while you were fighting. I saw her hit herself.”

  I relax my shoulders. Wish he hadn’t seen that, but it can only help me.

  The officer returns.

  “I’m not going to arrest anyone today. I’m going to take her out of here, separate you two, basically. We’ll write up a report and include your statements and hers. She may pursue charges, though. Just so you know. As it’s alleged domestic violence, the report will have to be reviewed as a statutory requirement. Also, if you wish to press charges for malicious destruction of property, you can follow up with a detective on Monday.” The officer gives me a card.

  I savor the relief that I won’t be hauled away from my children, at least not today.

  When they leave at last, my joints feel wobbly, and my eyes won’t stop watering looking at the wreckage she left, and not just in my living room, but in the white faces of my children.

  “Kids. Pack an overnight bag. We’re going to stay with Grandma and Grandpa.”

  Usually this would be greeted with glee by Jewel, a shrug from Dylan, and rolled eyes from Angel, who gets grilled by my dad on her college plans every time he sees her.

  Now, they move numbly, quietly.

  I call my parents’ home. My father answers.

  “Dad,” I say, my voice breaking like I’m in puberty. “I need to come over.”

  Chapter 44

  Angel

  Dylan lines up a ball at the pool table in the downstairs rec room. He says to me, “Do you think that was true? About Jewel?”

  I look up the stairway. Jewel is upstairs helping Grandma make cookies still, so it’s safe to talk. “I don’t know. She says weird stuff when she’s like that.”

  “I’m an idiot,” Dylan says, missing the shot. The three-ball bounces out of the corner. He says it without emotion, like he’s just reporting the news. I also notice he hasn’t stuttered at all since we walked into Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

  “You’re not an idiot,” I tell him. “At least, not all the time.”

  “I should’ve known better.”

  I chalk up the pool cue. Dylan rolls his eyes. I always use too much chalk. I don’t really like pool, even, but it’s something to do. I blow the dust off and try to line up a shot.

  I miss the cue ball entirely when Dylan says, “Why did you read her diary?”

  I stand the cue on the floor and lean on it. “I didn’t know it was a diary at first. It was just some random notebook. But then when she wrote that I was acting like a bitch . . .”

  “You probably were.”

  “Hey!”

  “Be real. You’re hard to live with.”

  “Oh, and you’re all perfect, running away and starting all this.”

  He turns away from me, leaning on the pool table with his back to me. In the dim light from the lamp above the table, I can’t see his face. “I already said I was an idiot.”

  “It wasn’t just that, anyway. She was writing about this other guy, and how she wanted a drink so bad. Dad didn’t know that stuff, and he was supposed to marry her. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Not tell Mom.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Well? Doesn’t that seem like a bad idea now?”

  “She was seeming okay. And she kept asking me about Casey, and what she was acting like around the house. She seemed concerned for us. And look, Casey loves you, always listening to your practices, so of course you’ll defend her.”

  “Mom’s not that concerned for us. She just hates Casey.”

  “Well, whatever, it’s all out there now.”

  Dylan turns around. “It’s your shot.”

  I line up a shot and sink the cue ball. Dylan picks it up and walks around the table, choosing his shot.

  “What’s going to happen?” I ask.

  “I dunno. We might have to go to court if Mom presses charges against Dad for supposedly hitting her.”

  “Oh, God. He didn’t do it, and you saw her do it to herself.”

  “Totally. But what if she says we made it up to take his side?”

  “Shit. You know, I think she got Casey drunk on purpose.”

  “She’s like a puppetmaster or something.” Dylan finds his shot, sinks the ball, starts to line up another.

  “She was talking about us coming to live with her again.”

  “In that dinky apartment? Great.”

  “No, in a big swanky house in Forest Hills.”

  “And how’s she gonna manage that?”

  I shrug, not having thought that deeply about it. “I’m sure not sure that’s such a good idea, anyway.”

  “Duh. But you said that’s what she wants? She’s going to try and get us back?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Dylan looks up from where he’s stretched out across the table. “We could run away.”

  “Ha. Smartass.”

  Dylan sinks another shot. “It would help if Casey came back.”

  I cross my arms and glare at him. “How does that help? And, hello? She thinks I’m a bitch?”

  “Which you are. Sometimes, anyway. Dad just lost his job, did you hear that? And he’s dealing with all this crazy stuff. He’ll do better if he’s not alone.”

  “He’s got us.”

  “Not the same.”

  Dylan’s winning anyway, so I go sink into one of the leather chairs at the edge of the room. “She probably hates me forever now, anyway.”

  He shrugs. “Bet she won’t, though.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because as we found out, she’s not exactly perfect herself. Not much room to judge.”

  I let him go ahead and sink all the rest of the balls and stare off into the dark outside the lamplight. For months I’ve been annoyed by Casey looking like a kid, butting into my life, sucking away my dad’s attention, and then all weekend I’ve been stinging over that bitch thing . . .

  I close my eyes and remember Casey, on the floor, saving Jewel from choking while my mom stood there and gaped like, well, like she was stoned. What if I’d managed to run Casey off earlier?

  And then I think of my mom trying to get my dad arrested and tearing apart our living room.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I tell Dylan. “I’ve gotta talk to Dad.”

  Chapter 45

  Michael

  My father, silhouetted in the light from the gas fire in his den, taps the edge of his glass, but is otherwise silent.

  After we settled the kids down to various activities resembling normalcy, after my dad checked out Jewel’s breathing and peered down her throat to make sure she was fine, after my mom started baking cookies, after I gave him a summary of the brutal events since he dropped us off at the house, my dad and I collapsed into silence near the fire with a drink. Club soda for me.

  My earlier bravado in the SUV about not needing his help has evaporated. If I have to be dependent on my father for the rest of my days in order to keep my kids with me, then I’ll hand him my balls on a platter.

  “I’m sorry,” my father says, staring into the fire.

  “For what?” I ask, assuming he’s going to say something about not having clean sheets on the bed in my old room.

  “For trying to r
un your life. For what I said in the car. Forget it. Take whatever time you need, and I’ll help you. And I’ll do my best to stop making you feel like shit about it.”

  I do a double-take, at both the content of his apology and the curse word.

  “What brought this on?”

  “When you called me, you were on the brink. I could hear it. And then you told me just now what happened, and I saw your kids coming in here looking like shock victims. I’ve been holding you to an impossible standard. All this time I’ve been looking at your surroundings, your bank account, the car you drive . . . A proud man, a foolish man—after that big speech in the restaurant about not needing my help—would have done anything at all to keep from coming back here. But.” He holds up one finger, like he’s giving a lecture. “You knew what was best for your kids was getting them out of that chaos. And you were right. They started relaxing the minute they walked in the door. Dylan stopped stammering. Angel and Jewel smiled. The color came back to their faces.” He pauses, staring still into the fire. I dare not speak and break the spell. “It takes a man to put his kids before himself in everything, all the time.” He winks at me, but his smile is sad, his voice with no mirth. “Here’s to my son, the real man.” He leans over and clinks my glass.

  My business is words, but words have left me, utterly.

  “Dad.” It’s Angel, looking angelic indeed in the firelight. Her features are soft instead of pulled into a sneer or an eye-roll. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  My father gets up immediately, and gestures to the chair. He bends down and kisses her forehead. Angel looks at me in surprise; physical affection is not generally in his repertoire.

  Angel lowers herself into the chair. It engulfs her.

  “I’m sorry about reading Casey’s diary and talking about it to Mom,” she begins, picking at her fingernails. “I didn’t mean for any of that to happen.”

  “I know you didn’t. It’s not your fault.”

  “I think you should know that I think Mom tricked Casey.”