One morning as they were about to leave for the day—breakfast dishes scattered across the counter, jackets and hoodies in the same pile in which they’d been dumped the evening before—they heard a loud thump at the door and when they opened it—all together, all curious to see who might have come calling so early—they found an injured bird on their welcome mat, one wing still fluttering. The kids had to get to the bus stop, Kate had to get to work, but they all stopped, dropped their clutter of bags to the ground, and looked at it. Frankie brought a few seeds from the bird feeder and laid them by its beak. Molly went inside to get a tissue to be its blanket. Kate thought about how she’d get rid of it without them seeing—it was a goner, clearly—when next thing it scrambled to its tiny bird feet and blinked. Molly reached out a finger and stroked its wing and it hopped once, twice, and then zoomed past their faces and into the overgrown boxwood on their neighbor’s lawn. They cheered, gathered their things. All three would spend the day telling the story again and again.
Backing out of the driveway, Kate said, “I thought I was going to have to bury it and then tell you guys it flew away.”
Molly said, “Would you have told us a lie?”
“No,” Kate said, but in the rearview mirror both of them looked dubious.
* * *
All day, all week, all month felt as if she were expecting news, but then the news, whatever it was, never arrived. The kids had apples for dinner. She let them skip their baths. She let them watch TV. If their clothes were cozy—sweats, not jeans—she let them sleep in them instead of changing into pajamas. At Frankie’s Little League games she chatted with the other parents, and when they asked for Peter, she said he was so disappointed to have to miss this game but would definitely be at the next. Then at the next game she said something else.
When she spoke to Peter the conversations were forced. Things were going well, he said. He felt good. He missed them. He was looking forward to coming home. Kate clutched the phone and tried to decode secret messages. She told him that she wanted to picture where he was, the room, the windows, the blinds. Were there people listening? Was he allowed outside? She told him anecdote after anecdote, like throwing stones into a lake to watch the ripples rush toward shore.
“Let’s talk in a few days,” he always said as a closing. He didn’t want to talk to the kids.
A freak October snowstorm came, and school was canceled for two days. The radio reported record-breaking low temperatures. Downed trees took out power lines all over town, and Kate started worrying about the pipes. She hustled the kids into the car and went to three hardware stores before she found a generator. “Don’t turn it on inside,” the salesman warned her after loading it into her trunk, handing over the manual like he still wasn’t sure she wouldn’t accidentally kill her whole family. “You have help? Someone to lift it out when you get home?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, waving his question away. At home she sent the kids inside while she contemplated the hundred-pound machine and came up with a plan. She went into the garage and brought out a hand truck. Then she braced one foot against the rear bumper of her car and pulled until her whole body shook. When she got it up on the lip of the trunk, she balanced it there for a minute to gather her strength again. From there all she had to do was give it one mighty heave and swing it down.
Sara visited. Natalie visited. They asked for Peter but they didn’t push when they could see that Kate didn’t want to say more than the plainest facts: he wasn’t home, and he’d be gone for a few more weeks. Anne Stanhope had returned to Saratoga. She called once a week but their conversations were always brief. Francis called every night after the seven o’clock news. Kate answered only every third or fourth time.
She watched garbage TV at night after the kids fell asleep. One night she went down to the basement and sat on the couch she thought of as his. She ran her hands over the cushions where he often slept. She buried her face in the throw blanket down there and waited for tears. When they didn’t come she climbed back up the stairs.
* * *
He was discharged on a Tuesday. He called the preceding Sunday to let her know. “Sorry you’ll have to come all the way back,” he said.
“Not at all!” Kate said. She did the math. Thirty-three days. The longest they’d been apart since the years they were apart. Whatever the bill showed it would be a little price to pay for a life returned to the rails.
She took the day off work. She kept the kids home from school and packed their lunch boxes with snacks for the car.
Traffic was heavier than it had been on the afternoon she’d dropped him off. Every ten minutes the kids demanded to know how much longer. The row of boarded-up farm stands they’d passed that rainy night in September were open, and Kate pulled over, wanting to get something she’d be able to keep, something with the name of the town on it so she’d never forget the place he’d come to save himself. Back at the car she unscrewed the cap to a jar of honey and let them each dip a finger to the first knuckle.
* * *
He was waiting outside, sitting on a bench under a maple that was ablaze with color, the bright red embers lying at his feet. He stood when he saw the car, and when he saw that the kids were in the back, fidgeting, applauding, his face broke open with joy.
“Hey,” he said to her over the tops of their heads as they hurled themselves at him, told him everything at once.
“Hey,” she said, but found she couldn’t bring herself to move closer to him. It would be good to go through the motions, she knew that and scolded herself, but paralysis had set in. She should fling her arms around him like the children had. She should kiss him and squeeze him and tell him it would all be fine. Instead, she felt something withdraw—some of the warmth and hope and urgency she’d been feeling since she left their house, dinner in the Crock-Pot to be ready for them when they got back.
“You look good,” she said. “Do you feel good?”
“Yes,” he said, looking away.
Later, several months later, she understood that what she meant to ask was: “Are you cured?”
Anyway, he still would have said yes.
She’d scrubbed the house for his return. Made everything shiny, opened the shades so that the light would be there to greet him. She filled the fridge with fresh fruit and vegetables. The kids made cards and a giant banner. Still, for days and days and days, it was difficult to put her body near his. It was difficult to look at him head-on, in case he might know what she was thinking, in case she saw similar thinking working inside him. While he was gone she’d taken out their wedding album. Far from the linen-tufted and ribboned album Sara and Natalie had purchased of their own wedding photos, Kate and Peter’s was a dollar-store album containing snapshots they’d asked strangers to take on their way to work. There was Kate, in a pale pink dress that barely covered her thighs, a lilac twisted into her hair. There was Peter, skinny and tall in a suit that sagged at the shoulders. Their arms around each other. Triumph in their faces.
He seemed so busy during those first days at home, when she expected he’d feel bored and lost. Mornings he spent on his laptop, then he went to the library, then he returned to his laptop. When she asked what he was doing, he said, “Nothing,” without taking his eyes away from the screen. Benny called to tell him his pension hearing was scheduled, but he barely seemed to care. He took a call while pacing on the sidewalk, and Kate watched him from the window. He’d started drinking herbal tea while he was “in New Jersey,” as they’d come to refer to it, and now he had ten, twelve, fifteen cups a day. She found the mugs around the house with the soggy tea bags inside like she used to find empty bottles. She almost complained about it—he could at least dump the bags, stick the mug in the sink—but then in a rush of remorse she stood in the middle of their living room, two dirty mugs in her hand, and vowed if he stuck to tea she would never, ever complain again.
Finally, after two weeks back at home, he told her he wanted to be a teacher. Specifically, he w
anted to teach high school history. He’d had the idea when he was in New Jersey, and he’d begun putting feelers out. He didn’t have a master’s degree; he wasn’t certified. But a parochial school might consider him. The deputy chaplain of his old precinct put him in touch with a Catholic boys’ high school not far from where they lived. He had an interview scheduled for the Wednesday after Thanksgiving.
“Amazing,” Kate said. “I can see you really liking that, Peter. Such a good idea.” She was happy for him. Delighted. Relieved that this was what all that busy industry had been about. But it felt apart from her, and even as she agreed and kept agreeing that he’d be happy, that it was exactly the kind of total change he needed, she felt a shifting of plates, a fault line down the middle, him on one side and her on the other. All those blank phone conversations and he’d never once mentioned this. She was hurt but feeling hurt also felt selfish, so she tried to brush it away.
He woke early now, helped get the kids out to school. She could see him trying, willing himself to health, to happiness, and felt a swell of love for him. As she showered, as she dressed, as she backed her car out of their driveway, she listed over and over the things that made her lucky. It was a trick her mother had taught her for when she was down, and until now it had always worked. She tried to make herself understand how it must feel for him to have been something for so long and then to not be allowed to be it anymore. But on other mornings, when his enthusiasm for domestic life showed signs of wear, she felt all that sympathy collapse and she wanted to turn on him and ask if he had any idea how great she was, how great the kids were, how there were a million people in the world who’d love to be standing exactly where he was standing.
“Was it really so important to you? Being a cop?” she demanded one morning when he was wearing his concerted effort too close to the surface. Even as she said it she knew she was purposely overlooking some crucial details, but life went on, didn’t it? Chapter over. Next. What was the point of being so broken?
He looked stricken, walked out of the kitchen, but returned not five seconds later. “You’re harsh, Kate. Everyone says you’re so strong, but what you are is harsh.”
Practical. Level-headed. Mentally sound. Not harsh.
Blunt, maybe. Honest. Not harsh. How dare he.
They went on like this for weeks, two steps forward, one step back. But slowly, slowly, days seemed to pass more easily and Kate felt walls crumble. She tucked in closer to him at night. She put her hand on his back or his chest when they swapped places at the kitchen counter. One evening when he touched her shoulder, she turned and took his hand in hers, kissed his palm.
To save money they cut out the after-school program for the kids, and when Kate was at work he took them to the library for Lego Club and music. Molly announced at dinner one night that allllll the mommies liked to talk to her daddy, and Peter grinned at Kate over Molly’s head, his face alive with mischief. He had dinner ready most evenings when Kate got home from work. He started going to AA meetings, telling Kate exactly where a particular meeting was, what time it began and ended, even though she’d never asked him to do that. When he came home he’d sit close by her on the couch and ask about her day, tell her about his. She’d grill him for gossip about the people at the meetings, make him swear he’d tell her if someone showed up who would shock her—Frankie’s teacher, for example, or their local state senator—and he just laughed, said he’d be put in AA jail if he ever did that.
One night, finally, he moved her hair away from her neck and kissed her throat, and then her mouth. He drew back when he felt her trembling, and held her tight for a long time and told her it would be all right, everything was going to be all right. When they slept together now it was on a shore so distant from the one they’d set out from that Kate found herself looking over her shoulder, looking back at the blinking light of their beginning to compare over and over the way things were then and the way things were now. What used to be fluent between them felt incomprehensible lately, far more difficult to translate. But things are meant to change, Peter said. Because life changes and people change. As long as we change together, we’re okay.
On the day of his interview at the high school, just six weeks after he got home from New Jersey, he put on the same suit he’d worn to his hearing.
Kate could imagine how well the interview went. He knew everything about history, all the angles, the complexities. The boys of that high school would be lucky to have him, and it turned out the administrators agreed. They had him back for a second interview and then they offered him a job. He needed to learn how to plan classes and organize the units around tests, but they told him he could start after the Christmas break, when one of their teachers was going out on maternity leave. She taught American History II, so that’s what he’d take over, but the following September he would teach Modern European History. Summer would be spent doing professional development. If he wanted to, he could coach the track team. After the second interview, the head of the history department, a man named Robbie who was roughly Peter’s same age, walked him out and said that he remembered Peter from high school track meets, that in fact they’d run against each other. “Well, we were in the same heat a few times,” Robbie said shyly. “There really wasn’t any chance of beating you. Maybe you remember me? I ran for Townsend Harris?”
“You know, I thought you looked familiar,” Peter said, though he had no recollection of anyone from Townsend Harris’s team.
* * *
At Christmas, which Kate and Peter always hosted, Kate called around to her parents, to Natalie and Sara, to tell them that there would be no booze that year, but she knew that was depressing so if they wanted to go somewhere else she totally understood. She wasn’t interested in answering their questions, but she knew they knew—Francis had no doubt told them and they’d all discussed together—so she figured she might as well let them know in advance. They all came—arriving early and leaving early—and Peter, though he insisted he was fine with them all coming as they always had, was awkward, uncomfortable. When Kate asked what was wrong, he said only that he hadn’t realized they all knew.
He began to say it was fine, but he stopped himself and said instead that he wished she’d told him, that it felt like something private, his own news to tell, not Kate’s, that was all. Kate could almost hear the therapist’s voice in his words, encouraging him to say what he felt.
“I didn’t tell them. I never discussed it with any of them. But you were gone for a month, Peter. They’re not idiots.”
* * *
Anne waited until Peter came home after his thirty-three days and then she stopped by the house, refused to come inside, and told Peter that she just wanted to see him in person, make sure he was okay. She told them that she hoped they’d come visit her sometime, all of them. She’d lived there for so many years and not once had she ever been to the races. The kids might like to see the horses run. “That would be nice,” they both said, and as Peter walked her back to her car, Kate thought, I will never ever be visiting you in Saratoga.
And then, on the night before he was to begin his new career—three new pairs of khakis pressed and hanging in their bedroom closet, a new pair of shoes—he came home from an AA meeting and went straight downstairs. When Kate passed by the basement door she thought she heard a clink of glass on glass.
“Peter?” she called down into the dark. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he called up. “I’m just looking for something. I’ll be right up.”
She stood perfectly still. She held her breath. She could feel his stillness, too.
“Why are the lights off?” she called down.
“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I’ll turn them on. There.”
The room flooded with bright light and he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her.
After what felt like a long time she turned away from him, went up to their bedroom, shut the door behind her, and crawled under the covers
.
The next morning—after he rushed around the house like a maniac searching for something that he wouldn’t let anyone help him find, after he cursed to see the coffeepot had never been turned on, and after he finally drove away—she heard Frankie calling her, and she looked up to see a car she didn’t recognize pull away from the curb.
“There you are!” Frankie said when Kate appeared. “A man dropped off Dad’s wallet. He said Dad left it on the bar. He opened it to find out the address.”
Kate held the wallet, and calmly, rationally, she recalled exactly what he’d said: it was a ninety-minute meeting, fifteen minutes away.
He’d been gone for over two hours and when he returned, just before he headed downstairs, he said he was going to get fat with all the donuts and junk people bring. “These addicts,” he said, “they replace one thing with another.”
“Uh-oh,” Kate had said, easy in her heart now that he was home. “Don’t say that, they’ll send you to AA jail.”
She remembered the clinking sound she thought she heard coming from the basement the night before, the expression on his face when he flicked on the light. She descended the dark stairs and saw immediately that the little blue cooler they used in the summer to take sandwiches to the pool had been moved. She opened it and found three little bottles, hidden under an old PennySaver.
She called up the facility in New Jersey first, as if she might be able to demand a refund. What kind of science did their approach rely on? Who were the doctors there? What were their credentials? Questions asked several months too late. She asked to speak to Marisol, the woman who’d first let the possibility of failure into the air and so the person completely at fault. But Marisol was unmoved, and her tone implied she’d gotten thirty similar calls already that morning. Then she called Peter’s sponsor, a guy named Tim who’d scribbled his name and number on the title page of the Big Book. No answer. Then she called her father, who said he wasn’t the least bit surprised, it was too much to ask a guy to go cold turkey, it was both unrealistic and unnecessary, and he never saw Peter getting on board with all that higher power stuff anyway. What he should do now is a quick dry-out again, then switch to brown liquids, only between seven and nine at night. The guys who had it real bad always drank clear. That should have been their first clue.
Ask Again, Yes Page 35