“What?” he said.
“I just tapped him a little bit. You know.” She held her thumb and index finger a half inch apart. “A leetle.”
He stood up, his shoe still untied. There was no expression whatsoever on his face, which was probably the most frightening expression she had ever seen. “You’re kidding.”
Rewind, she thought. Rewind. She actually almost prayed this word: rewind. She’d been fooled into thinking she could tell him anything, lured by a connection that in that moment—despite the fact she’d kept this secret for three years—seemed not only could withstand a little honesty but maybe even flourish because of it. Okay, well, obviously an error had been made. Rewind. Obviously she had misjudged the situation. Rewind. The non-expression on his face made this very clear.
“I’m kidding,” she said, so utterly unconvincingly that if they’d been onstage an audience would have roared with laughter. “Of course I’m kidding.”
“You’re not!” he’d shouted, loudly enough that she took a step back. “You’re not kidding! Jesus Christ! You’re telling me you stuck a kid in the gum because he was mean to your son? Are you really telling me that?”
“It was one time,” she said. She was still trying to smile. “Mark, really, it was like literally for one second.”
“But you did it! You did it. You thought about doing it and then you actually did it.”
“I—I know. I thought—I don’t even know what I thought. I wasn’t thinking.” Appeal to fatherly instincts. Must appeal to fatherly instincts. “I was, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I felt like I was protecting Evan or something.”
“Protecting him?” He yelled this. He never yelled. Actually, once he’d yelled at three-year-old Meredith when she’d rushed into the street in front of Independence Hall, and the entire city had screeched to a halt. “Protecting him? What the hell? How does that protect him?”
“I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “It was just—”
“That’s not protection, Claire,” he said. “That’s revenge. Those are two very different things.”
“It wasn’t revenge,” she said. “It wasn’t even . . . ”
“What?”
“I already told you, I didn’t really even think about it,” she said. “It just happened. You know how things just sometimes happen. Don’t things ever just sometimes happen to you?”
He didn’t answer. He just stared at her. The contempt, the utter disgust, that she had felt for Logan Boone was being reflected back at her. She wasn’t sure anyone had ever been disgusted by her before, but here it was, here was how it looked and here was how it felt. And yet, even as she stood there among the patient files, withering under her husband’s appalled gaze, she did not regret what she had done. She only regretted telling.
?
She was walking down the carpeted corridor, past the tooth posters, full of friendly reminders to practice responsible dental care. Sometimes she wanted to make a poster that said, FOR CHRIST SAKES, JUST BRUSH YOUR TEETH.
Maybe it wasn’t Evan that the phone call was about. Maybe it was her father. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. She had pictured this many times, her father keeling over, because, though nearly eighty, he insisted upon pushing a hundred-pound wheelbarrow around his yard and putting Christmas lights on his roof. So this was how it would be: swift. The good-bye with her mother had been endless; with her father there would be no such torture. DOA. Nancy on the phone (technically her stepmother, though it felt odd to say this about a woman she’d never had as a mother, so only Nancy), tears, etc. She’d have to cancel everything, clear the appointment calendar, get the kids out of school. Two days before the funeral, then the funeral, then a day after—four days away for certain, maybe more for her. Why this lack of emotion? It wasn’t as if she did not love her father, only that the details were—
“It’s a police detective,” the receptionist said.
“What?”
They were sitting behind the desk, three of them, in a row, silently. The one holding the phone held it out to her.
“It’s the police,” she said.
?
After she’d spilled the beans about Logan Boone, Mark didn’t speak to her for two days. It was the week before Christmas. They were supposed to drive halfway across the country to see her father and Nancy. They had always loved car trips, taken them whenever they had the chance, first when it was just the two of them, then with just the three of them, then with the four of them. They’d never understood people who flew around the country, friends who complained about a ten-or twelve-or sixteen-hour car trip, who said their kids couldn’t stand being cooped up for more than a couple hours, or that they couldn’t stand being cooped up for more than a couple hours with their kids. It was pathetic, really. Together Claire and Mark believed: if you raised your kids on car trips, your kids loved car trips. And if you really didn’t want to spend several hours in close proximity with your family, maybe your issue didn’t have anything to do with cars, or trips.
Oh, life had been so much simpler when they were better than everyone else! Now, with Mark not even speaking to her, it was difficult to imagine they would be going anywhere together ever again, in any mode of transportation. But he packed his bags and the kids’ bags and paid the cat sitter and stopped the paper and watered the plants, all without speaking a single word directly to her. And then as they were loading the luggage into the back of the minivan, he turned to her. He was wearing a T-shirt and basketball shorts, even though it was twenty-five degrees outside, because this was what he liked to drive in, regardless of season. She loved that about him, as stupid as it was, as ridiculous as he always looked in his long black shorts, standing in the cold, pumping gas at the turnpike service plaza as the snow fell around him. God, she loved him.