Or not, it occurred to him. Or not.
A memory skittered through him, how he’d been brushing his teeth with the bathroom door open one morning and in the mirror he’d seen Jess lift his work shirt out of the hamper and press it to her face. He was about to ask what she was doing, when it hit him. He tried to never mention Emma at home, but maybe it was the omission of her name that pointed Jess to his interest. But interest wasn’t a crime. Nor was the way his belly tightened when he passed close to her in the narrow space behind the bar. When Emma asked him a question, she didn’t immediately doubt his answer, and that felt good. When she reported a problem, she looked at him with an expression of total faith that he would figure it out. One time, once, he stood so close to her as they were looking at an invoice that he could feel the light down on her arm brushing against him. She held perfectly still and so did he. Then Roddy came in and Malcolm shifted away.
In the days since Cobie told him Jess was in Gillam, he’d been tempted to drive by her mother’s house, but he held strong. Every time he passed her block and didn’t turn, he felt like he should be applauded for his self-restraint. How stupid he felt now. What a joke. He’d have been out on the street imagining every lighted room had her in it, when she wasn’t even there. The night his friends came by specifically to tell him that she was not, in fact, at her mother’s house, was the night he chose to drive over there and see for himself. The roads were getting worse by the minute, but he put the windshield wipers on the highest setting, leaned over the wheel to glimpse between the strokes, and turned onto her old street. Normally, he loved the drive home from the bar late at night, the feeling of being up and out when everyone else was asleep. It was like time outside of time, whenever he cruised around after closing, looking at the quiet of everything. But on that night, the utter stillness felt like a warning. He reached the crest in the road where he could glimpse her childhood home, where the first time he slept over—just a few hours after going down on her in her twin bed, an INXS poster taped to the wall—he tried to leave through the kitchen with only a brief hello, but Mr. Ryan stopped him, told him to sit. He had meant to go home before Jess’s parents woke up, but he must have fallen asleep because next thing the room was full of light and Jess’s bedside clock read eight thirty. Eight thirty meant he’d slept over. He was a guest of the whole house.
As they talked, Mr. Ryan folded a crust of bread and pushed it into a soft-boiled egg. A yellow drip landed on his beard, and Malcolm tried not to gag. He sipped the orange juice Mrs. Ryan made out of a frozen cylinder of concentrate, and wondered if the conversation was just a ruse, whether Mr. and Mrs. Ryan were just acting nonchalant until Jess emerged, and then they’d both get scolded. He was far too old for that, but he knew from his own house that girls were never too old to get scolded, and it would be wrong to leave now and have Jess take it alone.
And then Jess walked into the kitchen, freshly showered, in sweats and a T-shirt, her skin rosy, her green eyes bright despite only four hours of sleep. He could see that she was surprised he was still there, nervous about what her father might be saying.
“He didn’t sleep in Mickey’s bed,” Mrs. Ryan said to her daughter, as if Malcolm couldn’t hear them.
Jess’s father was pretty sick by then, though no one knew it. Malcolm remembered him running his fingertips across his chest that morning, back and forth, sort of absentmindedly, as if feeling for something. When Malcolm recollected that for Jess several years later, she said he made it up.
“How old are you?” Mr. Ryan asked Malcolm point-blank. Far too old to be sitting here, Malcolm thought. A four-and-a-half-year difference seemed greater in those years. At twenty-four, Jess still had one foot in childhood, despite two years of law school under her belt. Despite an apartment in the city. Jess’s high school bedroom was downstairs and her parents’ was on the second floor, but the house was not big. She’d refused to go to his apartment because she thought his roommate was weird, and they’d have to take a taxi from the bar because Malcolm’s car was in the shop. Her house was walkable, she said, though it turned out to be a longer walk than he expected. “You said it was right up the road!” he complained, but she just laughed. “You’re sure your parents won’t wake up?” he asked when she opened the back door and paused to listen for a moment. The house was dark and silent.
“They didn’t wake up last night,” she said.
“Wait,” he said, drawing up. “What?”
“I’m kidding,” she said, rolling her eyes.
* * *
“He slept on the couch,” Jess told her mother, by the sink. He’d glimpsed an old sofa in the little nook off the hallway and figured that was the couch she meant. He got nervous for a moment, as if he might be asked to prove it—what blanket did he use? what pillow?—but Jess’s mother nodded and accepted that explanation so readily that he understood she didn’t care whether it was true or not.
That was fifteen years ago, he realized as he rolled to a stop in front of the house. Her car wasn’t there. He stared at the blank space in her mother’s driveway as if waiting for something to appear, some bit of evidence that would prove Patrick and Siobhán wrong, some sign that she was in there with her mother, thinking about how to come home to him.
When he parked in his own driveway just three minutes later, the whole block, the whole town, felt lonelier than it ever did in daylight. He got out but when he turned toward the door, he found he couldn’t go in, not yet. It was one thing to get home in the wee hours of the morning, collapse into bed, wake up, and rush out the door for another day. But it wasn’t even midnight, and he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. He sat on his front step, the small awning over the door protecting him from the snow, and drew out the cigarette he’d bummed from Scotty an hour earlier, with this exact scene in mind. The temperature wasn’t that cold. There was no wind, though the news said that was coming. The snow made a whisper-soft crystalline sound as it fell. He hadn’t smoked in years, but right then, his empty house waiting behind him, he wondered if it were possible to change, to end up in a life completely different from the one he thought he was in.
He should have followed her that day. He should have stopped her from getting in her car and talked everything out with her, like Dr. Hanley said was important. But he’d just let her go. Because he was shocked. Why else? Because his feelings were hurt. Why else? Because he didn’t know what to say.