Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  Who did the children look like? Not Peter, really. Not Kate. The older one looked to be about eight already, the girl maybe six. In the spring they shed their layers like skins, leaving jackets and sweatshirts thrown over bushes and on the steps. In the warm months they turned on the sprinkler in the side yard and played in their bathing suits with some kids Anne recognized from up the street. Had they met their other grandparents? she wondered. Of course they had. What word did they use for Lena Gleeson? She wondered if Peter and Kate ever mentioned her. She could already imagine the story they might tell about that one terrible night. Or maybe they would take the easy route and simply tell them she was dead. Each time she pulled up to the curb and turned off the car, she decided the moment had come, that finally, after so many years, she was going to walk up and ring the doorbell and say she was sorry for everything and it was time to know each other again. She’d think and debate with herself about the best way to do it and then she’d decide: next time. Again and again and again: next time.

  * * *

  And then, late June 2016, the smell of a thunderstorm followed her all the way to their street. She parked several houses past theirs, as usual, nearly hidden by the weeping branches of their neighbor’s tree, the rearview mirror tilted to show their front door. It was dusk. She did a quick calculation, as she always did when she first pulled up. Peter was thirty-nine, Kate was still thirty-eight for several more weeks. Anne turned the radio on low and unwrapped her sandwich and settled in to watch the house while she still had the light. When it was fully dark she took a short walk to stretch her legs and get closer, pulling up the hood of her light summer sweater in case they should come outside. She looked at their cars and their flower bed and their beach towels slung over the railing of their deck to dry. He was in there. His car was parked in the driveway, Kate’s behind it. Lights approached from the main road and Anne picked up her pace, dropped her chin to her chest, and turned away. The car slowed outside Peter’s house, and Anne waited until she was well out of sight before crouching to pretend to tie her shoelace. It could be him, maybe, someone dropping him off. But when she looked over her shoulder, it was not Peter she spotted but another familiar person, a man, though it took her a few seconds to place him.

  “Francis Gleeson,” she whispered to the cicadas, to the automated sprinklers that were beginning to rise and whir. She watched Francis cross the lawn, how he ignored the walking path. She tried to get a good look at his face, to see what damage she’d caused there, but it was impossible in such low light. She watched him knock on their door three times before simply pushing it open. Something was happening.

  When she returned to the car, she didn’t bother with the rearview mirror and instead turned fully around in her seat, her back to the steering wheel. She just watched the house, to see if Francis would come out again, or Peter or Kate, to see if she might be able to tell what was going on and who was in trouble. He had the same expression on his face as he had all those nights ago. Not one of the little ones, she prayed.

  She waited and waited and waited, but the house betrayed nothing and the front door stayed closed. So he could drive then. His posture was good, his gait was just that tiny bit off, something about the way he swung his arm on one side, but a person might not notice it if they weren’t searching for it. She remembered that he’d once carried her in his arms all the way across her front yard and up the stairs to her bedroom. How had he gotten the door open without setting her down?

  * * *

  She must have dozed off because when she woke up, the neighborhood was steeped in a middle-of-the-night kind of silence except for the sound of a sharp knock—one, two—on the roof of her car.

  She opened her eyes to see, first, that Francis Gleeson’s car was gone. Then she turned just slightly to find Kate Gleeson’s face framed in the driver’s side window, which she’d rolled down to let the air circulate. The night was hot.

  “Jesus Christ,” Anne said, hand to heart.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Kate said.

  Anne wondered if she’d always known when she was out there, every single time.

  “We have to talk,” Kate said.

  sixteen

  IT DIDN’T MEAN SHE’D forgiven her, Kate told herself. It didn’t mean that history didn’t matter. It only meant she’d try anything that might help.

  And there were things she wanted to know—about Peter, about Peter’s father, about Anne, about Ireland, about all the people connected to Peter by blood so that she’d know for sure what she was dealing with. George could help, maybe, but whenever he sensed questions pushing up from her, he was suddenly in a hurry to get to the restroom, the fridge, his car. Peter, though, Peter he stopped for, tried to make listen. She’d seen them conferring on side-by-side recliners. She’d seen him sidle up to Peter at the grill. “It’s the job,” George always said, before Kate even got a whole sentence out. It was the weather. The mortgage. Being a man. But he frowned when he watched Peter navigate around their kitchen, offering drinks and things to eat. Peter drank O’Doul’s when George was over, one after another, like the next one might quench his thirst.

  “Have a real one,” George said once, last summer. They were out on the patio, the kids trying to catch fireflies.

  “Nah, this is fine,” Peter said.

  “But you did already, right? Before we came? And you’ll have more once we leave?”

  “George,” Rosaleen said.

  “Brian used to do that.”

  Peter just looked over at him, and George held his gaze for so long that even Kate got uncomfortable and had to look away.

  When did it begin? If she had all the information, then maybe she’d be able to figure this thing out, find that critical moment in time when things could have gone in one direction but instead they went another. She was a scientist. She solved problems. Since moving in together they’d always ended their days with a drink or two. If he was on a midnight tour, he came home, slept, and then maybe had a drink after lunch, to tide him over until Kate got home from work. They were always too broke to afford more than one or two drinks at bars in Manhattan, so they mostly drank at home. When he was on a day tour they’d have a glass of wine while they made dinner, and then another with dinner. As they got older they became a little pickier, learned about body, legs, tannins. Peter learned about tequila and gin. They remembered the cheap booze they’d been happy with in college, and laughed. When Kate was in her late twenties, something about a glass of red wine with dinner on a Monday or Tuesday felt sophisticated, and Kate often thought of her own mother, who had a Diet Coke with almost every meal.

  Kate was capable of rigorous study, of drawing complex, defensible conclusions. Since her undergrad organic chemistry class she’d imagined the world as a ceaseless machine: churning, grinding, turning matter into other matter. On the day she realized she might be pregnant—a quick calculation of days, the fact that her breasts were spilling out of her bra—she sat on the crackled plastic of her favorite lab stool and swabbed her arm, held the tourniquet with her teeth. She did a qualitative test first: positive for hCG. The quantitative test told her she was about seven weeks. Then she disposed of everything neatly, rolled her sleeve down, and did every single thing she had to do that day except with the feeling that she’d been hit by a shooting star.

  Her job, most days, was to find the contours of an invisible universe and then map it for others to see. She performed forensic analyses on hair, fibers, body fluids, fingerprints, gunshot residue, fire accelerants, documents, soil, metals, polymers, glass. On her best day, she found a whole story contained in the pull tab of a hoodie. Another day, she unlocked a riddle with one single strand of hair. So why couldn’t she solve this problem, too?

  * * *

  When Frankie was born, Kate began noticing how quickly Peter poured that first drink after coming home from work, how eager he was to get to it, but she thought maybe she was just jealous that he could stick to the old routine when
she was always worried about nursing, pumping, getting a decent night’s sleep. There was nothing wrong with a man having a drink at the end of a long day. Her father had always had two whiskeys while he watched the evening news, and the sight of his glass sweating rings on the TV Guide where he set it down was always comforting, a sign that he was home safe.

  So when, exactly, did the sound of a bottle clinking against the kitchen counter and the second clink of a glass set down beside it begin to annoy her as the years went by? In her most reflective moments—alone in the car on her way to work, or in the shower before the rest of them woke up for the day—it didn’t seem fair that she should feel angry with him for having a drink when it so rarely showed on him. He’s bigger than I am, she told herself, seventy pounds heavier. He can handle a lot more. He always cleaned up after dinner, helped bathe the children, read them their books. When they were infants he did his best to soothe them when they cried in the middle of the night. He’d put a hand on Kate’s hip and tell her to keep sleeping, and then he’d pick up Frankie or, two years later, Molly, and rock them or offer a bottle or a song hummed low. It wasn’t his fault that neither of the kids ever settled until Kate had them in her arms.

  Once when Molly was about a year old, she started wailing in the middle of the night, which wasn’t unusual. Kate was so exhausted that she rolled over to ask Peter to please go pick her up, but Peter wasn’t there. So Kate went to Molly, tried to get her to breastfeed, and when she refused, using her angry little fists to push Kate’s breast away, Kate went downstairs to warm a bottle. When she got to the bottom step, she thought she saw something dark on the living room rug, and when she flicked on the light, she gasped. A bottle of wine had tipped over, staining the cream carpet a deep blood red. “Peter,” she said, trying to nudge him awake. She thought back to earlier in the day: two vodka sodas when he came home from work; they’d split a bottle of wine with dinner but actually Kate had had only one glass, and he’d had the rest; a few beers after dinner, she didn’t know how many; and this, a different bottle of wine. Not an extraordinary amount, but it was a lot when she added it up, a lot for a Tuesday night, a lot considering he’d had the same the night before and would have the same the next night. How much did other people drink when they were at home doing nothing? she wondered.

  The thing was, he didn’t really drink that much when they went out, met up with friends. A few, yes, but at the same pace as everyone else. If she told him ahead of time that she wanted him to drive home, then that was never a problem. It was at home that he kept going and going. But he always got up and off to work the next day. He always showed up exactly when and where he was supposed to show up. He was patient with the kids, and listened to their endless stories, and he made funny faces while he plunged spoonfuls of mashed food into their mouths. Surely a person with a problem would have to call in sick sometimes. Surely a person with a problem would not be able to play rodeo with a toddler for a solid hour almost every day. That night, as she pressed mounds of paper towels into the carpet to soak up as much wine as she could, she thought back on a recent autopsy at work. A man had been found dead by a piling near Pier 57, and the death was deemed suspicious, though there were no signs of trauma on the body. Friends reported he was not a drug user. He drank a lot of craft beer, considered himself something of a connoisseur, but no wine, no hard alcohol. In the autopsy report, the pathologist had identified fatty liver with cholestasis, and acute portal fibrosis.

  “An alcoholic,” Kate said, looking up from the paperwork. “But his friends and family reported only beer. Do you think he was drinking in secret?”

  “Not necessarily,” the pathologist had said, looking at Kate with a curious expression. “His ex said he drank as many as eight or ten beers a day, every day.”

  “But no alcohol.”

  “Beer is alcohol, Kate.”

  “No, I know. I’m just—” But she didn’t know, exactly, why she felt confused.

  As she blotted and scrubbed the stain on the carpet, as she blocked out the pitch of Molly’s impatient howls, as Peter snored on the couch and the television blared, she wondered if, in fact, she had no idea what a problem looked like.

  The next morning, at breakfast, she found she couldn’t think of a way to begin. As he waited at the counter for the coffee to brew, she asked lightly if he was feeling hung over. She told him about coming downstairs to find that stain, that for a second she thought it was blood.

  “Hung over?” he repeated, folding his arms across his chest. She could sense his hackles rising.

  “You had kind of a lot to drink.”

  Again, he looked puzzled. And privately, she understood. He’d not had any more than any other night, really, and so, for him, this conversation was coming out of the blue. It was only for her that something had changed. It happened while she was scrubbing the carpet, her heart racing like something terrible had happened. It was as if some blurry thing that had been hovering in the margins before finally stepped into view.

  “Did the stain come out?” he asked. “I’ll get at it with vinegar later.” It was the sort of practical information he knew: for red wine try warm water and vinegar, plus a little dish soap.

  “Might be too late for vinegar,” Kate said. “But, Peter—”

  He looked at her as if he already knew what she was going to say.

  “You’ve been going pretty hard lately. Did you really have to open that second bottle of wine? The kids need to get to the sitter early this morning. I have to be at the lab by eight.”

  “And I’m up, right? I said I’d drop them and I’ll drop them.” He moved his broad body around her as he reached for his favorite mug, as he grabbed the handle of the coffeepot. And it was true: She knew she’d never have to worry. He’d get them where they were supposed to be exactly on time.

  After that, Kate watched more closely, and all that did was make him cagier. He drank less when she was awake, and more after she went to bed. The number of drinks he’d had in a given day was always hanging over them, a tally kept by Kate. She never used to look in their recycling bin, but she started looking, and every Thursday morning when she peeked under the lid, it was full to the brim.

  He saw her doing it once. He watched from the garage, probably curious why she’d gotten out of her car.

  She gestured toward the bin and from the end of the driveway she called to him. “It’s too much, Peter. I know you know that it’s too much.”

  * * *

  There’d been a simple arithmetic to life, two and two equaled four. But slowly, as years went by and the kids got older, started school, she often couldn’t make things compute. He was still sleeping beside her at night, unless he was on a midnight tour. They were still doing steak on Sundays, pizza on Fridays. They still walked the same routes around the house, doing the same things they’d always done, more or less, but lately she felt a poverty of something—happiness, she supposed—deep inside her ribs, the place were she used to feel her joy spill over. What they’d told each other when they got married was still true, at least for her. She wanted to work, come home to him, discuss their days, eat meals together, go to bed. She wanted to watch a movie on the weekend, maybe go for a long walk, maybe go out to dinner, maybe see friends. She wanted to be able to tell him anything and have him tell her everything. And there were some weeks, still, when they did just that. If they could do all those things and pay their bills and not dread going to work each morning, coming home each night, then that was a life. That was a great life, in Kate’s view. What else could there be? If they reminded themselves that these small things were enough, she believed, then they’d always be okay. So that was part of their vows, all those years ago when they climbed the steps of city hall on a Tuesday morning, the first appointment of the day. They vowed to live simply and honestly and to always be kind to each other. To be partners.

  But ever since the math stopped adding up, Kate was constantly puzzling over a problem that was so abstract that it was
like trying to pin down a fog.

  If she were at work and having this much trouble knowing the right thing to do, she would simply hand all the data to a colleague and ask for another opinion. But asking for an opinion on his particular problem meant betraying Peter, telling people things about him, about them. She couldn’t tell her sisters, her mother. She certainly couldn’t tell her father. Whenever she seemed even vaguely critical of Peter, he reminded her that she could always leave him, come back home, her bedroom was there waiting for her. The kids could sleep in Nat and Sara’s old room.

  “Are you happy?” her mother had asked her just a few months ago. Kate had taken the kids to Gillam for a visit. Peter tried not to go to Gillam if he could help it, and that morning said what he always said, that he wanted to get things done around their house. He insisted it didn’t bother him to be there, didn’t bother him to see his old house decked out in beige when it used to be blue. Didn’t bother him that the cement steps his father had poured had been replaced with flagstones. And Kate could believe that it didn’t bother him because everything he said made sense: The house looked so different he felt no attachment to it. And it was all such a long time ago. Yet it took something out of him, each time they went, whether he realized it or not. People recognized him there. They stopped him on the street and said it was so good to see him, asked how he’d been, said what a great kid he was and how nice it was now to see him grown, happy, a family man. Kate would think about how lovely it was to be welcomed home despite everything, that a native son is always a native son, but she’d turn to Peter and see that he was struggling to nod and smile and accept their greetings. No one ever asked for his mother or his father, and one time, when he pointed that out to Kate as the reason he found the encounters so exhausting, everyone dancing around what was there in front of them, Kate said that was out of respect for him, that they didn’t want Peter to think they’d lumped him with those people.