I groaned and dropped on the bed. Neither of us moved an inch and after ten minutes I rolled to my side and looked at her. I remembered how she had appeared the night we met, her body slack, everything about her seeming downcast and beaten while radiating such a deep sadness that I had felt it myself on some level. I had wrongly attributed it to virtue and naïveté, which were two of the features I had found attractive about her. And then I talked to her and everything brightened, and it continued that way for a long time. An emotional convalescence. But it was over now, and as I stared at her I realized she looked almost exactly as she had back then. But she had become hardened too, containing an almost indiscernible tension that bordered on fatigue. Every so often a tenderness would sneak into her face and push the stress away, but it never stayed gone for very long.
I stood and went to the window. It hadn’t rained in weeks and dust covered the brittle-looking leaves of the oak tree. As quiet as any other day in the hot sun, but a train was quickly approaching and the silence wouldn’t last.
“There’s not much hope for us anymore, is there?” I asked just before the train reached us. I had timed it that way, wanting her to think it over before answering.
“I don’t know, Stratton,” she said when the room fell silent again, and I couldn’t help but notice the unhappy finality in her voice.
I turned away and we didn’t talk about it any further, not my father or the growing uncertainty of our relationship. I sat at the desk and tried reading. Carolyn turned on the TV to rid the apartment of silence. She watched from her side of the bed and I climbed in and watched from mine. After an hour she asked if I wanted to help with dinner. I took it for what it was, a peace offering, a “let’s agree to disagree and move on for the time being” sort of thing. I accepted. We baked two chicken breasts and whipped up mashed potatoes and peas. I drank a few screwdrivers to fight my discomfort. I teetered back and forth between feeling angry and feeling sad, and not a minute passed without my wanting to bring it all back up again. But I knew it’d only open the door to another fight I was far too tired to endure. So I just bit my tongue and pushed it all down into the pit of my stomach, as deep as I could bury it, just as I’d been doing for twelve straight years, though knowing the subject was far from being closed.
thirty-one