“I don’t know how you do it,” he murmured. “Keep on going like you do. You’re an amazing woman.”
“No.” She was weary of these sorts of conversations. As if she could choose what she could bear. She put her hand on his arm. Her vision was pleasantly blurry.
“You’re a good man, and she’s a stupid woman. Any woman should be happy to have you.”
There were other things she meant to say that she couldn’t. Things that had to do with the way Henry was gone for weeks at a time now, the way he sounded on the phone when she called him on the road, a faraway quality in his voice as if wherever he was had too strong a pull on him for him to try to be there with her for even a few seconds. And she home with Charlie, night after night trying to be a mother to him, giving him dinner and a bath and books before bed when she was all emptiness inside. She didn’t let herself say these things out loud, but maybe Roberto heard them anyway. He turned to her with a question on his face and she kissed him, or let him kiss her, or in any event their lips were pressed together and she felt her phantom heart unspool, turning rapidly round and round until there was nothing of it left … the old Denise would never do this, would never lie on the hard metal bleachers and kiss a man with such force she felt it throughout her whole body. She felt the nothingness inside her filling up with the stale air of the gym, the smell of basketballs and sweat and plastic mats and carnations and the taste of the whiskey, desire rising and filling every empty crevice, like smoke.
She didn’t know what instinct made her pull back a little, placing her two hands against his chest with the tiniest bit of force, the tiniest push that she herself did not want or mean but which was enough to cause him to reel back, mortified, and flee the room, scattering apologies in his wake. It must have been the mother in her, still alive, even then, drawing her back from the oblivion she craved so very much. She stayed there in the gym for over an hour afterward, sweeping up, rubbing the carnation’s ragged, slippery petals against her burning lips.
It wasn’t something she could do again. The whiskey or the man. Not when the pull was so strong and Charlie still so young. She called in sick the next day and the day after that and then she didn’t come back to the school anymore. She didn’t answer any of Roberto’s calls or messages. She submitted her paperwork and she stayed home. No one else questioned her about it; it was as if they’d been expecting it all along.
“If you ever wanted to come back,” Roberto was saying now, fingering the edges of the glove compartment like a safe he might decide to crack, “we could find something—we could use another reading specialist.”
She shook her head. “I can’t go back.”
He gave a resigned shrug. “All right.”
“How’re you doing, Roberto? You look—tired. Your health okay?”
“I’m good, actually. I’ve—my wife had a baby.”
“A baby?”
“Two months ago.” He smiled in spite of himself, the pure blue light of his joy flaring through the tension in the car, as startling to her as if a bird had flown out of the glove compartment and circled around her head.
“I mean, I’m tired—you know how it is. But it’s—it’s good. Real good.”
“You got back together with Cheryl, then?”
“You didn’t hear? I married Anika. Anika Johnson? Anika Ramos now. She taught—”
“But she’s—”
“Yes?”
He was watching her.
“She’s lovely.”
“Yes.”
She’s so ordinary, is what she meant to say. Plain Ms. Johnson with her straight mousy brown hair and her sallow face, her thin little lips set in a line. And you’re—anything but. But she could keep her mouth shut. She could do that.
Ms. Johnson had been Tommy’s teacher, had sent a predictable flower arrangement with the predictable note … sorry for what you are going through. Tommy is such a nice boy. If there’s anything I can do, blah-blah-blah. Life continued to move faster than she could keep track of it. A new baby in the world. The world kept going on, and going on, how could it be, while she was—while she was— “Are you doing all right, Denise? Can I help you in some way?” He glanced anxiously in her face, as if looking for some pain there he could brush away like an eyelash with his cool, gloved fingers.
She pulled back from him, arranging her features into the face she used day in and day out, the face that was her face now. “I’m just fine, thanks for asking.”
*
Sitting alone in the cold car. She’d turned the heater off the second he’d left, the door yawning open to the freezing and fresh night air and closing back upon her, Roberto’s broad back hurrying away into the darkness. She saw him burying his face in his baby’s soft warm skin in gratitude and fear. She carried that everywhere with her now, that fear she sparked in other parents’ eyes.