Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 29

Michael



My father and I have not spoken in miles and hours, except to remark that the snow is letting up.

The roads are still tricky, I can tell from the way other cars fishtail in front of us, and the way my dad’s jaw clenches. I wonder if he used to do that in surgery, tighten his face in concentration. No wonder he was always so tired. He would be standing up for hours, awake for hours. I suppose he’s conditioned himself to this kind of thing.

He thinks I don’t appreciate his hard work because of his financially cushy life, relative to mine at least. I just don’t need to give him more credit because he gives himself plenty already.

The sameness of the Ohio turnpike is hypnotizing and, given my exhaustion, makes me feel a bit delirious.

I try sending Casey a text, but she doesn’t reply. Maybe she’s sleeping; it’s late. I hope everyone is asleep by now. I imagine my house dark and calm and peaceful, as a home should be.

My dad clears his throat and I look over. I’ve been stroking my jawline scar.

“What’s on your mind?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

I fold my arms and lean back against the seat, watching the highway lights blur past me out the window.

It was one of the worst fights. I’d gotten an overdraft notice from the bank, in fact, several of them. We should have had plenty of money. Enough, anyway.

I was tired from work, and I should have broached the topic carefully, because there were ways I could handle Mallory to minimize the theatrics. But there were always days when I wasn’t up to it, my resolve to be the stoic weakened by late hours at the office.

This was one of those days.

Dylan and Angel were in bed. This was before Jewel, and when the other kids were young enough that we could tuck them in at a reasonable hour. I’d finally opened the mail.

Mallory was at the table with a travel coffee mug full of beer. She had mints in her pocket she would chew between mugs, as if that fooled anyone.

“Dammit. Mallory!”

“What?”

“What have you been spending money on now?” I threw the papers down in front of her.

“The kids needed clothes.”

“What clothes? I haven’t seen any new clothes.”

She rolled her eyes. “Like you do the laundry.”

“I see them every day, I—” I flinched. I’d been sucked into her trap. Arguing the minutiae, missing the point. “We’ll never get ahead if you keep taking money out of the ATM.”

“I need money sometimes.”

“For what?”

I knew damn well for what. I wanted to hear her say it. In fact, a desperate irrational urge seized me, a need to hear her just once come clean about something.

“Stuff.” She took another sip, leaned back in the kitchen chair. She couldn’t look more bored.

“Give me your ATM card.”

She snorted. Didn’t move.

I walked around her to the dining room table, where she always put her purse. It was a rule my mother had pounded into me: never, ever go into a woman’s purse or a man’s wallet. I was past rules, past reason.

When Mallory saw me grab her purse, she jolted to life. She raced to me and got her hands on it. We tugged back and forth, and the sacklike purse exploded onto the floor in the struggle.

In the middle of the wreckage—tampons, loose change, makeup—I spied a flask. Had she started drinking on the go? Her face was warped in fury, her eyes huge and wild. I broke away from her stare and saw her wallet, which I snatched up.

She leaped on me like a feral cat. I turned my back to her, hunching over her wallet, tearing through its contents to repossess the ATM card.

Part of me knew I’d gone too far. Maybe I was right to repossess that card, I was always goddamn right, in fact, but my error was in tactics. I’d sunk to her level, as I later would analyze, but then, right then, my reason had been burned away.

I seized it and held it up over her head. This was a childish action, but I was elated with accomplishment.

She leaped at it, raking her fingernails down my arm.

She slapped my face, but I barely felt it. I continued to hold the card out of her reach and circled back into the kitchen. Coming down from the high of my victory, I was realizing that I had a bigger, more present problem.

Mallory was drunk and crazy-mad, and the kids were upstairs.

“You controlling fascist Nazi sonofabitch a*shole,” she spat.

“I only wish I could control you. I wish I didn’t have to.”

“Oh, no. No, you love it. You love dominating me.”

I laughed at this. She controlled everything, in fact, by virtue of her unpredictability setting the tone for my every waking minute.

“Don’t you laugh at me.”

Her hair had gotten ruffled in the scrum over the wallet, and stiff with hair gel, it was sticking out crazy. Her lipstick was smeared.

Something about this struck me as inappropriately funny.

“Shut up!” she screamed.

I found myself unable to stand it.

My wife, my life, everything was ludicrous.

I was a fool, and I deserved every bit of it. That was funny, too, in the way funerals are funny when they shouldn’t be, when you giggle about some little goof and it becomes the funniest thing you’ve heard in years surrounded by mourning on all sides.

I didn’t see her rearing back, I think I was probably looking somewhere else in the kitchen, trying to stop myself from laughing.

But the motion from the corner of my eye caught my attention. I saw something fly at me and flinched and heard something shatter against the cabinet next to my head.

That’s when I saw Dylan emerge from the darkness of the stairway like a specter, dragging his stuffed bear by its leg. He never did talk much, especially under stress. He let his face say it, with his huge eyes and hanging open mouth.

Mallory saw me see him, and she whirled around, unsteadily. “Oh, baby, I’m sorry if we woke you, Daddy and I were having a little argument.”

Dylan pointed at me, then touched the side of his own face.

I put my hand up, and it came away red. That’s when I started to feel dizzy.

I went wordlessly up to the bathroom, concerned—but in an oddly detached way—that if she’d sliced an artery in my neck, I might bleed out right here in front of my son. I figured I should probably go upstairs if that were the case, to spare him the sight.

When I used a wet towel to rinse off the blood, I saw that a shard of whatever she’d thrown had sliced my face. It was a long cut, bloody, but not fatal.

I called Mallory’s sister—back then we were still on speaking terms—to come keep an eye on things, telling her I’d had “an accident” and that Mallory “wasn’t well,” euphemisms with which Nicole was familiar.

And when I got back from the med station with stitches and a bandage, I saw the blood had been cleaned up. I saw, too, that the ATM card, which I’d dropped, was gone.

I’d thought that was my breaking point, that night. I’d thought, as I packed up the kids and we arrived at my father’s doorstep, leaving Mallory passed out from spent rage and beer, It’s finally over. I’d failed in my marriage, but I thought staying would be failing worse, recalling Dylan’s expression as he saw my cut face, wondering how long before both kids witnessed something worse.

I let my father photograph my injury, prepared for the humiliation of labeling myself a “battered spouse,” looked at his handwritten list of expensive lawyers who would help me keep my kids. I slept in the guest bed in my old childhood room, with a child in the crook of each arm.

The next morning I got that call from Mallory, and I knew I’d have to go home.