Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  “I want you to tell me that you drank two cases of wine in two weeks. I want you to hear yourself say it out loud.” And then added, “In addition to whatever else.”

  “Fuck you, Kate,” he said instead, and the blood drained from her face as if he’d slapped her. She dropped to a chair and stared at the wall with a bewildered expression. From the living room came the sounds of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He’d never, ever spoken to her that way before. He regretted it immediately. He didn’t ever speak that way. Not to women. Not to his wife. Not to Kate, the person he’d loved his entire life.

  And as always in the first moments after a fight, he cycled through the same facts: He’d been in charge of himself since he was fourteen years old. He’d gotten himself through school, through academy. He’d flown up the ranks. He’d never done a single thing wrong. He’d never even been late with paperwork. He made a good salary. He took overtime whenever he could. Had she ever taken overtime? Not that he could recall. The kids, she claimed. She had to get the kids, be home for them, drive them to games and birthday parties and the pediatrician and get to class and get her master’s degree, which would get her a raise of maybe two percent, all of which had already been spent on the extra childcare they needed for her to attend those classes in the first place.

  He apologized for cursing. He apologized on the spot and about a hundred more times in the hours that followed. When after all those apologies she still offered no condolence, he told her that it was unfair of her to yell at him like that when he hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Yell?” she said, turning to him finally. “Who was yelling? I wanted to talk to you about something that was bothering me.” She sighed. Both of them knew that if they waited it out, it would blow over after a few days. Neither of them could go that long without speaking. “Besides,” she said. “We both know you only get mad when you know you’re wrong.”

  She looked at him calmly, with clear eyes. “I hate fighting. I have to tell you something and I want you to listen now, Peter. Listen to what I’m about to say. I won’t live like this for much longer.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, the kids and I, we have options.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  But she wouldn’t say it, and he didn’t ask again, and suddenly a door sprang open that he never knew was there, and he saw her walking toward it, a child’s hand in each of hers.

  * * *

  Sometimes he tried to think of the beginning of their marriage, their years in the apartment and then their first years in the house. The memories seemed almost too sweet to be real. Did they have arguments? They must have, but he couldn’t recall any. One time, before Frankie was born, they were afraid they’d be short on the mortgage payment that month, so they hauled the contents of their giant coin jar to the bank to pour it bit by bit into the sorting machine. It was so heavy they’d had to split the load into three backpacks and Peter had to carry two of them. The total came to eight hundred fifty seven dollars, and as the cashier counted out their money in twenties, it felt like a million.

  They did all the things they imagined any couple would do: trivia night at a local bar, movies, Saturday morning hikes with sandwiches in their backpacks. Sometimes they’d remember their paper plane date, that night when they’d met up at midnight, when they’d run hand in hand down their street, and somehow, for both of them, that half hour alone on a neighbor’s abandoned swing set was separate from what happened later that evening. Over the years the two events moved farther and farther apart in Peter’s recollection. Had it really all happened on the same night? One very long night? Kate often spoke of the fantasy she used to have about going out to eat in restaurants with him. About being grown-ups, taking their groceries out of their car and unpacking them together. In the beginning, when she watched him dress, Kate would remind him that when she was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, when her girlfriends were dreaming of mansions and fairy-tale weddings, this was all she wanted, to know Peter again, for the sight of Peter’s naked back to be ordinary, for the clothes he wore yesterday to be tossed over the arm of a chair that was also her chair, under their shared roof, their babies asleep down the hall. For the shape and heat of him next to her to feel familiar. For their stuff and their lives to be mingled so thoroughly that they wouldn’t have any idea how to separate them.

  He knew exactly what she meant, but it was exhausting to think about it all the time, to drag the weight of their shared history around with them every minute of the day. They won. They were together. Why go over it again and again? Kate thought about their wedding day as a conclusion to something, where he thought about it as a beginning. Rising action versus falling action. They were reading different books.

  “Behold,” he would say, heading off her thoughts by gesturing toward the mountain of laundry spilling out from the top of the wicker hamper. “All your dreams have come true.”

  And besides, if their marriage was a conclusion to something, what did that mean for every day that came after?

  * * *

  At a few minutes before five o’clock on Saturday morning, just twelve hours after Kate told him that she’d spoken with his mother, Peter awoke from a dream of racing in a cross-country meet.

  “Did you say my mother?” Peter had repeated the afternoon before, stupidly. There was a storm coming. He could feel it in his bones, though the summer sky was still blue. Sure enough a slash of lightning cut across the sky, and when the kids came inside, screaming, Kate sent them straight upstairs so she could continue with what she needed to tell him. It wasn’t what he was expecting her to say. She was nervous, so nervous that Peter braced for the worst. She pulled a chair to face his so that they were knee to knee. She took his hands in each of hers and he thought, She’s going to tell me she’s leaving. He felt a cold sweat spring up under his T-shirt, a low-grade nausea through his whole body. But it was like bracing for a punch to the throat only to get hit in the kidney instead. He was still trying to steady himself when Kate plowed forward with the details: that his mother had used a private detective to find their address, and then she’d just shown up at their house one night two weeks earlier. The night after everything happened on the job. Peter was passed out downstairs.

  “Oh, fuck this,” Peter said, dropping her hands when his mind comprehended what she was saying to him. He stood up, so Kate stood up, too. “What is this? What are you doing?”

  “Nothing!” Kate said. “She showed up here! I couldn’t let her in given the shape you were in, so I told her she could come back.”

  Peter walked out of the kitchen, pushed the back door open, crossed the yard despite the pouring rain, but Kate still followed.

  When he accepted that he couldn’t shake her, he stopped and turned. “We’re talking about my mother.” Peter looked into her eyes for absolute confirmation. “Anne Stanhope.”

  The timing was odd, Kate acknowledged, given all that had happened in the last few weeks.

  “More than odd,” Peter said.

  “Okay,” Kate agreed. But even before Peter was moved to restricted duty, Kate said, even before Anne showed up, she’d been thinking more and more lately about the fact that Anne had carried Peter in her body just as Kate had carried their children in her body. For so long, Kate had thought of Anne only as the person who shot her father. She’d forgotten that she was also Peter’s mother. Not only in title, but in practice, at least in the beginning. Anne had spoon-fed him and soothed him and cleaned him just as Kate had done for their children, and that earned her something, didn’t it? Kate asked Peter as she pushed her rain-soaked hair from her forehead. It’s not something she ever thought about before she had children, she said. How much work Anne had put in right up until the moment she and Peter parted ways.

  “Maybe not having a mother in your life is the reason you . . .”

  “The reason . . . what?”

  “Come inside, won’t you? Let’s dry off and talk.”

 
; “No. Just say it. The reason what?”

  “I don’t know. I just try to imagine if I made a terrible mistake and never saw Frankie again. What gets more weight? The good or the bad?”

  “Not seeing me was her choice, not mine.”

  “Now it seems she’s making a different choice.”

  “So I should open my life to her? I’m almost forty years old. It’s been twenty-three years since I’ve seen her. Twenty-three years. And she’s had no interest in me or in us in all that time.”

  “Well . . .” Kate looked back at their house and didn’t complete her thought.

  “What? Is there something else?”

  “No.”

  “What about your father?” Peter asked.

  “I’m not saying I can get over what she did to my father,” Kate said, “but for now I can separate that from the fact that she’s your mother, same as I’m Frankie and Molly’s mother. It’s just an hour or so, and then she’ll be gone. Because I do think she loved you, Peter. And I think it might help you to see her now.”

  He listened to every word, and when she finished saying what she wanted to say, he crossed the yard once again. For the first time in years he went to bed before she did.

  * * *

  Once in a while, when he awoke suddenly, he carried from his dreams a feeling of total disorientation, and in that half second, less, he understood that the person lying next to him was Kate but she seemed like a stranger, and everything about her—the shape of her profile, the scatter of her hair across the pillow—seemed foreign to him. Not only foreign but terrifying in its presumed familiarity, like one of those movies where a person wakes up in a different family and no one believes he’s not who he appears to be.

  “Are you awake?” he whispered, and though she didn’t answer, he wasn’t so sure she really was asleep. As he studied her—genuinely asleep, he could see—he felt a tidal wave of love wash over him. How desperate she must have felt to agree to let his mother come to their home. How he wished she’d just sent his mother away and never mentioned it to him.

  “Kate?” he said. “Hey. Kate?”

  “Yeah?” Kate whispered, eyes still closed.

  “Do you remember the day I climbed the telephone pole?”

  Kate was quiet, trying to remember maybe, or maybe had fallen back to sleep.

  “It must have been summer because I was wearing shorts. We were nine or ten.”

  “I don’t remember,” Kate said. Over the years, whenever Peter remembered something that Kate didn’t, her response was always to tell him he had it wrong, that she wasn’t there, that he was thinking of someone else. That is, until he eventually coached her back into the place she’d boarded up: you were wearing this or that, it was your Frisbee, it was my Ouija board. They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that’s been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room, anyone else who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.

  Slowly, Kate’s mind went quiet save for one small bell that rang from the way back. She recalled sitting on the curb outside her house, dropping sticks through the sewer grate. After a while, some of the other kids came around, and someone suggested they try climbing the telephone pole.

  “Oh, I think I do remember,” she said now.

  “There’s nothing to hold on to,” Kate had said then.

  “I can do it,” he’d said.

  It was something Kate might have done, not Peter, and he wondered now if he’d been trying in that moment to be more like her. He began by running at it and taking a flying leap, jumping as high up on the pole as he could get. Then, after clinging to it for a few seconds, he began shimmying up like an inchworm, hugging the pole tight with his arms while he brought his knees up, grasping it with his thighs when he needed to reach higher. She was the one who began chanting for him, he said. “Pe-ter! Pe-ter!” They rooted for him all the way.

  And then, two-thirds up, he stopped. His arms were too tired and he was afraid he’d fall. Where Kate would have called down an excuse, a roadblock, a good reason to drop back to safety, Peter said simply that he was afraid to go higher, and no one made fun of him for it. The black wires strung from the top were maybe two arm lengths away.

  So he loosened his grip and slid a few feet down the pole. Suddenly, he stopped and cried out, his whole body trembling. “Help!” he gasped, a strangled cry. He sounded like a girl and Kate giggled. Nat and Sara were there. The Maldonados. Who else? Then, before any of the kids could react, Peter dropped all the way to the grass and landed on his back. “Are you okay?” someone said, but he was moaning quietly, had drawn his knees to his chest.

  Next thing, Peter’s mother came running outside.

  “Show me,” his mother said as she knelt beside him. Peter parted his legs just a few inches, enough for her to see, and from his knees to his groin all along the most tender skin of his thighs were dozens of splinters. Kate ran her hand up and down the telephone pole and winced. It was smooth on the upward stroke, but rough coming down.

  And, lying in a bed fifty miles and thirty years away, Kate felt the roughness of that pole on her palm, a memory so strong she closed her hand into a fist. Like a circle drawn onto the night air with a sparkler, round and round and round as fast as a child’s arm can swing, the entire picture hung there for a second and they both glimpsed it: Peter’s bony knees, the sun-scorched grass, Kate at the pole’s base gaping at him along with four or five other kids. Another circle appeared: Kate’s father—five minutes later? A day?—yelling that one touch of those wires would have killed Peter, would have killed Kate if she’d volunteered to go first and had gotten all the way to the top. Kate waited until he was finished yelling, and then she asked calmly how the birds can perch up there if it’s so dangerous.

  “What about it?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you what happened after.”

  So he told her. Inside his house, always so grave from the outside, so unfriendly, his mother had spread a clean sheet on the couch and told him to lie down. She put a pillow under his head. Before beginning work on a splinter, she dabbed the spot with rubbing alcohol, and as she drew each one out with a tweezers, she said how strong he must be to have gotten even halfway up that pole. She herself, she said, wouldn’t have been able to hang on for even a second. It took nearly an hour to get all the splinters, and one, he remembered, was the length of his pinkie finger. She handed it to him for inspection. After, she drew a warm bath, unwrapped a new bar of soap, and told him to wash gently so there wouldn’t be any infection. Before he undressed she came back with two butterscotch candies she placed on the lip of the tub.

  “You know,” he said, “to make it nicer.”

  Kate listened closely but couldn’t make sense of it.

  “I already know she loved me,” he said.

  eighteen

  WHEN THE DAY ARRIVED that Anne Stanhope would be coming to their home, eating at their table, neither of them knew quite what to do or how to act or what to wear or how to explain to the kids who this person was who would be visiting later.

  “Can you call her and cancel?” he asked at one point, but Kate didn’t have her number, had no way of getting in touch.

  “Well, when she comes, tell her I’m not here,” he said.

  “Really?” Kate asked. “Is that what you want me to do?”

  He told her to leave him alone, that he needed ten minutes to think. But thinking only made it worse.

  “Let’s get the kids out of here,” Peter said when he understood it was truly happening. Kate picked up her phone to call a friend who had two kids the same ages as Frankie and Molly, but she didn’t end up dialing because she couldn’t think of what reason she’d give for suddenly needing childcare in the middle of a summer Saturday afternoon. She thought about calling Sara, who’d moved to Westchester a few years before and who wouldn’t mind coming to get the kids, but that would mean te
lling Sara what was happening. In the end, they decided to let the kids stay. After breakfast, Kate put on her brightest expression and told them she had something exciting to tell them, that Daddy’s mommy who lived very far away was coming to visit that day, and was looking forward to meeting them, so they had to be very, very good.

  Peter, pale and steely at the sink, crossed his arms tight and nodded. He forced a pleasant expression and her heart squeezed for him.

  “You have a mommy? I can’t believe it!” Molly said, throwing her arms around Peter as if to congratulate him on his good fortune. When the kids left the kitchen, Kate asked for a second time if he might think about calling George. Having another buffer there might make it easier.

  “She won’t like it,” Peter said. “She’s never liked him.”

  “She owes him.”

  “Exactly. That’s why she won’t want to see him.”

  “But you want George here. I can tell.”

  He did want George there but he didn’t want to rattle her, not when she’d be nervous already. It was an old habit, anticipating her moods, and it came back easily. Kate said she’d seemed calm but that didn’t mean she’d be the same person when she turned up that afternoon.

  “Okay, you call him,” Peter said. George had called Peter’s cell phone at least a dozen times since the night he fired his gun, and that told Peter he’d already heard what happened. Mrs. Paulino, probably. She lived on the first floor of George and Rosaleen’s building and her grandson was in the Fifth Precinct. He pictured the confusion on George’s face, like she might have gotten her facts mixed up. For all he knew he’d show up at the house anyway, and at exactly the wrong time.

  “No, wait,” Peter said. “I’ll call him.”

  * * *

  George whistled down the line when he heard who was coming to lunch. Peter blurted it out so they’d move right past what did or did not or could have happened when he discharged his weapon. But George circled back. “Mrs. Paulino keeps asking me if I’ve spoken to you,” he said. “Something happen?”