Where was Mark? In her panic she had been unable to recall, and the phone line was suddenly lifeless, the coach’s voice silenced, and she was there alone with this information. The receptionist had to remind her: Hillsboro. Their mobile dentistry. Once a month one of them went to the Hillsboro Home and saw patients who were too old to leave, too weak to be moved, but required dental care. They traded months; it was terrible work, but they felt too guilty, too necessary, to give it up. That was where he was. That was why he couldn’t be reached. That was why she was suddenly in her car—having somehow gotten herself into it, and driving, and halfway to the hospital before she realized she was still wearing her rubber gloves, and it seemed she had not breathed nor had a thought since she’d heard the coach’s voice.
It was the call she had been waiting for, the bookend—not even to Logan Boone and the porker incident—she saw that clearly during that drive to the hospital—but to a moment in the eighth month of her first pregnancy when she had put her hand on her belly and thought, Stay there. By the ninth month she was not having these thoughts anymore, but she remembered it with such clarity now, a feeling she could not understand nor name but which she felt so strongly (and later attributed to the roller coaster of hormones): stay there.
His eye had been crushed. When she saw him in the emergency room, she knew at once the bloody mass would not see again—how could it?—but in the moment she hadn’t cared about that. She only wanted the MRI. She wanted to know if his brain was bleeding. His brain could be bleeding. While they waited, while she gripped his fingers, his brain could be bleeding, the blood flooding the things (goddamn prestige organs) he most needed to survive. It was only a few minutes but terrible things often only took a few minutes. She had said this to her children, naggingly, “Sometimes a single minute makes a difference.” How she hated that stupid nagger now, wanted to throttle that nagger, because it had always been about homework or being on time for school or getting the trash rolled to the curb before the truck rumbled down the street.
He’d been shaking, her beautiful, terrified boy, those giant powerful hands trembling in hers. She had waited for something to come from her mouth, something useful, something comforting. She had waited and waited and nothing had come.
“Where’s Dad?” Evan had asked, because Dad was better at this, let’s face it, Dad would act rather than standing there in the ER muted and stunned.
“He’s coming, honey.”
And he did come, there he was, soon after—seconds? minutes? hours?—and she could have wept just that he was there and she did not have to carry the burden alone anymore. If she could have physically picked up Evan and dumped him into Mark’s arms in that moment she would have done it.
“Take this,” she would have said. “Take this. Carry this.”
?
Over the years there had been things that had almost split them up. She had nearly left him ages ago, before the kids were even born. Soon after her mother had fallen ill she had fallen, too—someone she knew in high school, someone who had recently returned to their hometown, a brilliant but aimless emotional vagrant who occasionally met her for coffee at the hospital when she flew home on weekends to be with her mother, who touched her hand and said things to her like “Are you sure this is really the life you want?” and “You’re only twenty-six. Nothing’s set in stone”—the worst kinds of things to hear in the days when you are newly married and your mother is dying and you are contemplating your own mortality.
There had been no affair, per se, but there had been long letters and whispered phone calls and panic and indecision. He offered repeatedly to come pick her up at her home in the middle of the night and just drive away. To where? Who knew? For how long? Maybe a month, maybe fifty years. The affair—or whatever it was, she didn’t even know what to call it; it was really just hands and words—lasted through her mother’s illness and continued after her death, and when she found she could not decide for herself what to do, which man to choose, which life to pursue, she told Mark about it in the hopes that he would decide for her, that he would be furious and leave her or forgive her and fight for her. But he misunderstood his role. He was furious and did not leave her. He neither forgave her nor fought for her. Instead, after a day of fuming, he turned it—the admission, the decision—back on her. “Do what you want,” he’d said, “but for God’s sake do something.” That was the night he grew up, she thought now, the night he really stopped being a boy, his ego crushed, his clear vision of the future shaken, his boyish heart hardened, and then, impressively at twenty-seven, his grown-up resolve: “For God’s sake, do something.” Even then she felt sad for the boy she killed that day, in part because she never got to say good-bye to him.
She did something. She made a decision. She decided she would wait and see what happened. She would stop writing the letters and making the phone calls and would see how she felt about things and then after a little while she would decide once and for all what to do. So she waited to see what she would decide. And while she waited, she and Mark went on with their life together and after a couple months she woke up one morning and realized that, in not deciding, she had made her decision. She had not called for the midnight getaway car, had not triggered the escape hatch. She was lying next to Mark, so apparently that was her choice. And so they did not split up.
And then there was Logan Boone, the first-grader whose bright pink gum she had dug into with the point of her scaler, intentionally, to cause him pain, to punish him for mistreating Evan. When she revisited the moment in her mind in the months that followed the incident, she never felt remorse, but rather some delicious satisfaction that was perhaps more damning than the act itself. When she saw Logan Boone outside the elementary school, brushing past the crossing guard, she convinced herself that his strut was less confident, that he’d been taken down a peg or two, that she had won. Yes, won. She had taught the aggressor a lesson, overpowered the powerful, and in doing so had eradicated, permanently, one unmistakable danger from her children’s lives.
Why in the world had she thought Mark would understand? Mark, of all people? Maybe she didn’t, not really. Maybe, as with the non-affair affair, she wanted to tell him so that the feeling of delicious satisfaction would stop. Maybe she needed someone to remind her of the thing Mark had always seemed best about reminding her: “You’re better than that.”
It came up to begin with because he—Mr. Nice Guy!—was complaining about an annoying teenage girl who’d been in for a cleaning that day.
“She wouldn’t stop bitching about the chair,” he said. “She said we should get new chairs because the ones we have are uncomfortable. I swear, I thought about leaving her there with the bite wing in her cheek and going for coffee.”
“You should have,” she said. “Sometimes, well, we need to, you know—”
“Teach zem a lesson?” he said, pretending to crack his knuckles.
Well, there was her opening. “Seriously, honey, listen,” she said. “Okay, there’s this kid. He’s been picking on Evan for years. And so one time I gave him a little extra poke with the scaler.” She smiled coyly. “Just, you know, a leetle poke.”
They were in the file room, finishing up some patient notes. It was the end of the day. Everyone had gone home. He had just knelt down to tie his shoe and now he looked up at her.