Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

  She called George, but before she could tell him anything he asked if he could call her back later because Rosaleen wasn’t feeling too good and in fact had been admitted to Lenox Hill the night before.

  “Yes of course!” Kate said. “Is everything okay?”

  “Her heart,” George said. “I don’t know. I have to go.” Kate hung up quickly, feeling immediately how paltry her response had been.

  And then she saw it all so clearly, the whole trajectory of their lives, a twin flare of lights against the gunmetal winter sky: we’re born, we get sick, we die. Beginning, middle, end. She saw her life as if held aloft by her own hand, and in an instant it spun away from her. Where did she want it to land? She was in the middle. The exact middle. Peter, too. How could she have failed to notice that the beginning had come to an end?

  She couldn’t wait until he got home. Instead, she got in her car and went to find him. In the parking lot of his new life, standing beside his new leased hatchback, she waited for him to walk out and see her and know that she knew. She had considered, very briefly, not calling him on it, not on his first day, not until he’d gotten a hang of his new job, but she quickly acknowledged that sort of discipline was beyond her.

  “You want to see harsh,” she whispered into the frigid air, the doors of the school as forbidding as a prison. She felt wraith-thin, old.

  She thought of Frankie and Molly, who would carry their pain—hers and Peter’s—for the rest of their lives if they weren’t careful.

  And then the doors opened, and mobs of people spilled out, and he broke away from the crowd and walked toward her.

  twenty-one

  APPROACHING HER, HE WONDERED how many thousands of times in his life he had looked out to find her waiting for him. How many times in his life had he turned to tell her something only to realize she already knew? That morning, coming out of the shower, her shoulders and back scalded red, she’d twisted her hair into a threadbare towel as the water ran down between her breasts. She said she was sorry she’d taken so long, she’d forgotten he’d need to get in there, too.

  He cursed when the water ran tepid. He raced to rinse himself before it was ice cold.

  “Sorry,” she said again when he got out. She was making their bed in her underwear, letting the cream she’d rubbed all over her legs and arms soak in a little before dressing. He’d never, not once growing up, seen his own mother in her underwear, but their kids saw Kate all the time. They wandered in and out asking for things, for help, as if she were fully dressed.

  But now he was the one who was sorry. He’d been almost unbelievably nervous for his first day, considering he’d been a commanding officer and thought nothing of it, but this was different. Who could spot a faker better than a class of eighteen teenage boys? When he began speaking to them, he’d looked out at eighteen sets of drooping eyelids, hanging heads. But he said what he’d practiced alone in the basement the night before, and one by one they perked up, cocked an ear to listen more closely. History isn’t about memorization, he told them. It’s not about studying, burying your head in a book. It’s in our daily lives; it’s now, living inside us. And he’d spend the rest of the year proving it.

  He saw she was holding his wallet. He saw that she knew where he’d been the night before when he told her he’d gone to a meeting. This woman, the one who knew all the secrets of his life, was the one he’d lied to.

  She handed the wallet to him in silence, her face pale under her thick winter hat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again.” He meant it. But he also heard how cheap it sounded. All around them, car doors slammed.

  Her eyes searched his. She’d come ready for a battle and now she didn’t know what to do.

  “Was this the first time? Since coming home from New Jersey?”

  “No.”

  She hugged her stomach and dropped to a crouch.

  “It was the third time. Just this week, Kate. I’ve been feeling so good I thought it would be okay to go to a bar like a normal person and just have two pints. Two. Just beer.”

  It was true. He’d had two pints, paid his tab, and left. He’d felt so proud of himself. But then, the very next day, he’d been standing in the kitchen doing nothing when the need to do it again set in. He felt it across his scalp, through the crook of his jaw. He felt the burn in his throat, the warm heat filling out his chest. So he went, again. Just two, again. Then the next night. But on the third night, he stopped at a liquor store on the way home to buy a few of the little airplane bottles of vodka they kept by checkout. A cop habit: he kept his cash in a clip and didn’t notice he’d forgotten his wallet at the bar until that morning. He’d spent all day wondering why he’d done it. He hadn’t enjoyed it, and it meant stepping right back into the same rip current he’d worked so hard to swim away from. Even before she showed up he’d decided to never do it again, he told her.

  “How do I know that?” she asked, and he could see that the question wasn’t rhetorical. She wanted an answer with specifics, a plan of action. “How do you know that? Why should I believe you?”

  When he couldn’t answer, she got into her car and drove off.

  * * *

  At dinner that night and for the next hundred nights, he tried in every way to let her know it was all over now, it was all better. The need hadn’t gone away—anytime he wanted to he could close his eyes and imagine holding the nimble little airplane bottles in his hand—but every day and night, he fought that need, and won. She did all the things she’d always done, except she didn’t look at him, and whenever he caught her eye she looked away. She asked the kids for stories and responded to them. She asked how his day was and made appropriate responses when he told her. When he went down to the basement or into the garage for any reason at all, she listened to everything he did, every move he made, and when he returned she went about her business as if she hadn’t been terrified. She cleaned and cooked and studied and rushed around looking for her keys. But now she did all of those things from within glass walls, and when he spoke to her, he felt as if he was pushing his words through a chink in the glass. He’d wobbled for a few days, yes. Yes, that night when she’d caught him downstairs in the dark, he’d lied. But he was not his father. He was not his mother. He was himself, and it was taking longer than he expected to decide what being himself meant. It was taking more than thirty-three days. She listened to everything he said, but for a long time she didn’t react to any of it.

  “What can I do?” he asked her one night, grabbing her wrist to stop her from following the kids up the stairs. Instantly, her eyes were full of tears and she yanked her wrist away.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He decided the only thing to do was be with her as much as he could. He started going up to bed at the same time as her again. On nights when she stayed up to study, he made tea and kept her company in the kitchen, reading the paper or preparing lessons. When she sat on the couch and tried to find something good on television, he sat next to her. She began looking at him again, sometimes just long enough to let him know that she knew exactly what he was doing. When he had to go through his boxes of old books to find something for his students, he brought the boxes upstairs and went through them in the kitchen.

  “If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help you,” she said, and together they sat on the floor, legs splayed, and flipped through book after book.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.

  * * *

  The school year ended and the long, empty summer stretched out before them. He took classes and selected only the ones that met in the mornings. He learned how to pace and map out a course, how to best deal with wayward students. Some of
what he learned wasn’t all that different from the advice he’d given to young cops. Kate had finished her thesis; all that was left was to defend it and then she’d have her master’s. Before, when he was at the precinct all the time, he hadn’t seen how much work she put into it. He hadn’t really understood how important it was to her.

  And then came one summer night in early September, their wedding anniversary, just three days before the start of a new school year. They’d gotten married so young that he kept calculating and recalculating to make sure he hadn’t gotten it wrong.

  It was a Saturday. After he came home from coaching cross-country practice, he helped Kate pack lunch and they spent the day at the town pool with the kids. But she seemed to be turning something over. Finally, when they got home, the damp towels stuffed into the washing machine, the kids in front of the TV because they’d earned it with all those hours in the sun, she asked, tentatively, if she should find a sitter so they could go out to celebrate. Fifteen years was no small thing. And they hadn’t gone out to dinner in ages.

  “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” She picked up his hand and placed hers against it, palm to palm.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that.”

  “You think you can handle it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  She smiled like the old Kate, and he saw that she’d been afraid he’d say no. A few minutes later he heard hangers sliding back and forth as she pushed around the clothes in their closet, deciding what to wear.

  He chose the restaurant, one they both thought of as new because it had opened during those dark months leading up to his hearing. It looked out over the sound, but they didn’t arrive until after dusk and missed the sunset. Walking from the car they could hear water lapping the shore. Once seated, a bottle of Perrier on the table between them, they discussed the kids for a while, the house. They talked about whether Kate’s position at the lab would change. They talked about the school where Peter worked, and whether he should have become a teacher after college, whether he regretted not considering it when he was in his early twenties, when he spent all those months casting around for an idea of what to be. Since they were already on the subject, and as they were finishing up their meals, they wandered into other regrets. They began small. They began safe. The classes they wished they’d taken. The places they wished they’d been.

  “But big ones?” Kate asked. “I’ve never really thought about it. What’s the point? I guess I should regret sneaking out with you that night.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I’m sorry about everything that happened after, but if we hadn’t snuck out that night, maybe we wouldn’t be together now. Frankie and Molly wouldn’t be here.”

  Peter thought about that.

  Kate picked up her napkin and folded it neatly before her. She smoothed the edges and then tucked and retucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “I’m not sure it’s a regret but there is something I have to tell you.” She looked over at the table next to theirs, at the people sitting there. As Peter watched her struggle, he felt something inside him cave in. Her lips were pursed. A vein in her neck throbbed.

  “What?” he said, and just like that the ground beneath him felt more precarious than it had in months.

  “Your mother. When she showed up that night looking for you, it wasn’t the first time. I spotted her years ago, when we were still in the city. Before we were married. And after. And a few times at the house.”

  “And what? You sent her away?”

  “No. Not exactly. I just knew she was there, watching. Checking in on you. And she knew I knew. She didn’t approach and neither did I. Until that night. I went out to her car because I felt like I needed help. I needed to talk to someone who loves you as much as I do, who was looking out for you first. So I lied about that. She didn’t come to the door.”

  Peter leaned forward over his elbows to better understand what she was saying.

  “All those years when I thought you were better off without her maybe you could have used knowing that she was there. Maybe it would have made things easier for you. To know she hadn’t forgotten about you, that she did care about you. Maybe if you’d known that she was out there fifteen, seventeen years ago, you wouldn’t have ended up feeling so lost.”

  It was news, yes, but not at the level she thought it was, clearly. As he’d tried to explain to her before, he never doubted that his mother loved him. But as Francis Gleeson had once told Kate, love is only part of the story.

  “I used to tell myself that I was keeping it from you to protect you, but I’m pretty sure I was thinking more about myself.” Kate was looking at him closely now, to see how he was taking all of this.

  “Okay,” he said. What would he have done if he’d known? Maybe nothing, just as she had done nothing. He felt lost long before his mother left his life, he wanted to tell her, but it would ruin their dinner, their night. He thought of Frankie and Molly doing their homework with music and talking and laughter in the background. The doorbell ringing, kids stopping by, Kate on the phone, pots boiling over, everything a chaos of love. Then he thought of himself at their ages, alone in a silent house, listening for a creak on the stairs.

  “You’re not angry?” she asked.

  “No.” He checked himself to make sure it was true. “I have to think about it more, but, no, I’m not angry.”

  He watched relief pass over her face, her shoulders relaxed.

  “I have one,” Peter said. He went back to the day they decided to get married.

  Kate sat up straighter in her chair and listened so closely it was as if she’d shut an actual door against the noise of the other diners, against their chatter and the tap of knives on plates. Her hair fell over one of her shoulders and he thought about how lovely she looked that evening. He’d been looking at her face for so long that sometimes he forgot to notice it.

  He’d been thinking about it a lot lately, he told her. That they’d just slipped into marriage, maybe because it was a fantasy they’d had as kids. But he hadn’t even had a ring. Why had she said yes? He always said he’d get her a nice ring one day, but he never had. She still wore that seventy-five-dollar band they bought on Bleecker Street. So he hadn’t properly asked her, not really.

  If she’d married anyone else, that person would have planned the question as an event, would have presented her with a beautiful diamond. He wished he’d done that.

  She listened from across the tea lights at the center of their table, and then she threw her head back and laughed.

  “So you don’t regret marrying me, you just regret the way you asked? Oh, Peter, I can think of so many other things you should regret.”

  “Yeah.” He looked down at his empty plate. “Probably.”

  “Hey. Come back.” Kate covered his hands with hers. “If you regret it so much, ask me now. Ask again. Properly, this time.”

  But what would she have said, truly, if there’d been a way for her to glimpse everything that was coming for them? For the second time that night, he felt something at his center go unsteady.

  The waiter came, cleared their plates. Still, she didn’t look away.

  “Things are better now, they feel like they’re getting better—don’t they? But there might be more coming. This might be the least of it. Have you thought about that? We knew nothing about what it meant to grow up, to be partners, parents, all of it. Nothing. And maybe we still don’t. Would you have said yes back then if you’d known?”

  “But I know now. So ask me.”

  But he couldn’t find the right words.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” she said, squeezing his hands until he looked up to meet her eyes. “Then and now, I say yes.”

  twenty-two

  A YEAR PASSED SINCE PETER got home from rehab, since Anne drove away from Floral Park and headed back upstate. Anne didn’t have a phone, so she left them the number at the nursing home, just in case they wanted to reach her
for anything. Every time she arrived for a shift she checked the messages at the nurses’ station. Peter called on Christmas Day and was surprised that she was there, working. She told him she was going to Christmas dinner at a friend’s house that evening. That she was just putting a few hours in but then she’d head over. She told him that she was in charge of bringing a vegetable. She told him the friend was named Bridget.

  But then she didn’t hear from him again for months and months. Maybe she should have sent presents to the kids, but what would they have liked? She could have sent them each a twenty-dollar bill in a glittery card tucked inside a bright red envelope. Every year, when she sorted the Christmas mail for the residents, she got a pang seeing all those colorful cards, like ornaments sent through the postal system, and that year, just a few months after meeting her grandchildren, she received one: a green envelope that had gold leaf lining the inside. It was a picture of the children and on the back, the dog. She would have liked a picture of Peter, too. She put the card on the fridge and kept the envelope open on the counter until mid-January because the light from the streetlamps glanced off that metallic liner even in the middle of the night.