“I know.”
“But if you really believed that, about us being a family, you and me, then you wouldn’t have done this. So that means, deep down, you felt we were only a family if we had a kid. A kid would turn us into a family. But without one we’re not. Is that right?”
“No.”
“Well, explain it to me then. Looks to me like you went out and got yourself a family. So where does that leave me?” But before she could make any sort of attempt to explain, he held up his hand. “You know how many people I could have cheated with? You want to know how many? I don’t even know. Remember Meg? She was gorgeous, but I didn’t.”
He could see the pale oval of her face in his peripheral vision as she turned to study him. It wasn’t quite his point. It hadn’t come out right. She should know what he meant without him spelling it out.
“Good for you, Mal,” she said after a minute. “What a guy.”
“Sorry. That was a dumb thing to say.”
“I seem to recall interrupting something a few years ago. Remember Erica Delfino? Because I certainly do. But we never talked about that, did we? And Emma? You can barely make eye contact with me when her name comes up. Come on.”
Malcolm’s stomach dropped. “Nothing has ever happened with Emma. She’s a pretty girl and my best employee. That’s all.”
“If you saw your chance you wouldn’t take it?” And then she sighed. “Don’t answer that. I’m sorry. I mean, Jesus. Look where we are.”
“Wait, I want to say this. I’m sorry about what happened with Erica. I’m really sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. You and I—there was only one subject, you know? Nothing happened, but it could have. I’m not making an excuse. I just—I’ve been sorry since that night and I feel sick every time I think about it. It was completely meaningless.”
“I know that. I know you, Mal. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.”
He cracked the window, took deep gulps of cold air.
“How’d we get here, Jess?”
She’d been thinking about that exact question for seventeen weeks. She pressed her fingertips to her temples and felt far too tired to cry. Neil’s kids were warming to her. The plan was for her to stay just two nights and then head over to her mother’s, but then the snow arrived, far more than expected, and the thought of being trapped with her mother and all her comments, without even being able to go for a drive or take a long walk—no, that was not something she could face. Being in Neil’s house was like time suspended. No need to decide anything because it was not real life, not until the snow melted and the power was restored. The train signals were still out, and Bloom announced everyone in the NYC office could work from home until further notice. Neil’s office said the same. The kids openly stared at her face, her clothes, her hair. Just that morning the girls came downstairs with cheeks covered in blush, eye shadow up to their brows. Jess imagined the contents of her makeup case scattered all over the bathroom floor.
“You two look a little different today,” Jess said, as if she couldn’t quite put her finger on what had changed. They froze, medium and small versions of each other, waiting to see what Jess would do next. “May I just—” Jess said, reaching out with a tissue to wipe the lipstick from where it had passed the boundaries of their lips, and they glanced at each other in relief. The oldest one was still a little reserved, but the younger girl and the baby climbed up to sit on her lap even when there was an entire empty couch available. “Sorry,” Neil said, and told them to give her some space. But it was a heady thing, having these small people place a portion of their love and trust at her feet. They didn’t hold anything back to protect themselves.
Their mother was supposed to take them on Sunday after the storm and keep them overnight, so Jess and Neil made dinner plans. Christine liked her weekends, Neil said, so she preferred having them on Sundays even though it meant a long drive to get them to school on Monday. There was a shortage of road salt in the entire lower Hudson Valley, but Azalea Estates was only half a mile to the entrance to the highway, which was always better than the local roads. Neil packed up their little things and drove them to their mother’s at twenty-five miles an hour, only to discover she wasn’t home. Turned out she flew to Nashville last minute, ahead of the storm, forgot to tell him. She got confused, she told him when he called, irate, and Jess could believe that, she supposed, but then she said the airfare was just too good to pass up, which sort of contradicted her claim of having forgotten. In the meantime, there were three little kids with their teddies clutched to their chests, wondering what was going to happen. When Neil recounted it for Jess, an hour after he packed them up and two minutes after he returned with them, he was afraid she’d be annoyed. They had an evening planned. A movie picked. But all Jess could think about was that the kids were down the hall only pretending to watch TV. She could feel them watching her, ready to take in her reaction.
“So what are you supposed to say?” she asked Siobhán later, once she got up the courage to call her friend, begin to explain. She was in Neil’s bedroom, the door closed. She told Neil whom she was calling and he wished her luck, told her it would be fine, but added that if Siobhán couldn’t accept it, forget her. He pointed out that she had her law school friends, her college friends, her high school friends who’d always been more hers than Malcolm’s. And she had him now. She didn’t need Siobhán.
“Well, no,” Jess said, looking off into a blank distance as she tried to get her mind to catch up with the bad feeling that had sprung up in her belly. “I won’t be dismissing Siobhán with a ‘forget her.’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually,” she said as a cold, bewildered feeling enveloped her whole body like a caul. Siobhán had welcomed him, arranged what were essentially playdates for him, a grown man. She wondered whom he loved, if he could name them, how many there were. And if he could say why. She wondered again what his ex-wife’s version of their breakup story would look like, what picture she’d paint.
Siobhán was trying her absolute best to listen to Jess’s explanation without interrupting. Jess could tell she wanted to understand, but she loved Malcolm. There was that old story about how she’d gotten her period in his car when they were driving down the shore together at nineteen, years before Jess knew either of them. There were three other people in the car, all boys, but somehow Malcolm figured it out—he had a sister, he was no dummy—so he covered for her, dropped off the others at the house they’d rented and then made up some reason why he needed Siobhán to stay in the car, help him with a beer run. He drove to a gas station restroom, and as she rinsed her shorts, dug out a fresh pair from her duffel bag, he bought a gallon of water and scrubbed the cloth-upholstered seat. He never said a single word about it until more than twenty years later, when Siobhán recounted it for Jess and he was at the table, listening.
When Siobhán realized Jess never heard the story she shouted, “You never told her?” punching him in the arm.
“You told me not to tell anyone.” He shrugged.