All the Time in the World (37 page)

“I like glitter.” He steps toward me.

“But you don't want him liking glitter, do you? Mae and Simon are staunchly opposed to his love of glitter.”

“He can like glitter when he's old enough to know what that implies,” says Patrick.

Six months ago, I wouldn't have liked that answer, but something about actually
doing
the parenting has watered down my liberal side when it comes to the kids and their preferences. I open my mouth to say that.

Instead, I say, “So. Who was she?”

“An assistant from down the hall.”

“Aren't you worried she'll get you fired?” He takes another step. I stay on the opposite side of the coffee table, trying to keep it between us.

“You're not going to like my answer.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“That's the culture. It wasn't a big deal. It won't be a thing.”

“Well,” I say. “Well. That's … incredibly misogynistic.”

Patrick is amused, and it seems like he should smile, but he doesn't. It's a different kind of amused, one I'm not sure I like. “What do you want to ask me?”

“I guess, maybe, I want to know what that was about. Just now. In the car.”

“That's not what you wanted?” Patrick takes off his suit jacket and drops it on the floor.

“Did I say that's what I wanted?” I want to hang the jacket up for him, but I don't move. I think maybe he dropped it on purpose because he knew that would be my impulse.

“Jesus Christ. Who are you talking to? I know exactly what you came for, with Scotty out of town.”

“Patrick!”

“I didn't hear you saying no,” he says, and out loud, it sounds ruthless.

“What do you mean, with Scotty out of town?” I say.

He looks at me with something hard in his eyes. “It was going to be one or the other of us eventually, wasn't it?”

I haven't been so frustrated that all I wanted to do was smack someone since I was a kid, but I have a sudden appreciation for George's and Matt's temper tantrums. When there's nowhere for your feelings to go, your hands can almost seem like a logical outlet.

“What are we going to do about this?” he asks, moving forward like he's going to come to my side. My painful doubts and insecurity, my fury at Scotty, the wild elation of finally saying my piece to Jess—all of these are moving through me, and I let them. I let them course through my veins and distribute throughout my whole body until I feel like I'm humming with them, until all the things that are unrequited, the things I haven't felt I was allowed to say or feel are right at the surface and aimed at the target standing across the table from me.

There is so much energy building that I can't tell the difference between positive and negative, and I could swear that if either one of us moves, the air will crackle with electricity.

“Don't come over here,” I say.

He is across the room in two seconds, taking it for granted that he knows what I want, anticipating my will. I watch him unknot his tie faster than I have ever seen anyone unknot a tie, and I want to hit him or, better yet, grab him and drag my hands all the way down his back until I have his skin under my fingernails. I am so angry, so angry.

“What do you want me to do?” he says. He doesn't put his hands on me but leans over and bites my neck, kind of hard.

“Not that.” I turn my head. “Don't leave a mark. What am I supposed to say to the boys?”

“
What
do you want me to do?” He leans over again and kisses the spot he just bit. “What do you want me to do, Charlotte?”

“I don't know,” I say. He does put his hands on me then, because he thinks
he
knows. Maybe he does. His hands slide, not to my hips but to the spot right above them, that intimate spot right above hipbone and right below waist. I try not to react, but I can't help it. He doesn't rest his hands there; his hands are moving, and I am shivering. He settles me back onto the table, but I won't be putting my legs up onto his shoulders anytime soon. I haven't been to a yoga class in months.

He turns his face. His mouth comes in contact with mine, but I don't kiss him, and he doesn't kiss me. My skirt is down around my ankles now, and he pulls it off and kicks it away with his foot. I have a feeling he'll go for the tights next, and he does.

“Tell me what you want,” he says, right against me.

What I want
least
of all right now is to be any more vulnerable than I have already allowed myself to be, but for a moment there is nothing but chemicals, and Patrick, and Patrick and his stupid man-chemicals. There is nothing but an immediate cure for loneliness, an outlet for rage, an impending action of mindless need. My willpower is rapidly being absorbed into my pounding, traitorous heart, and I struggle to hold on to my rational mind.

Patrick pushes me further back on the table, and in a minute, my indecision will become a decision, again,
again
, and I'll never be able to take it back. His fingers are inching up the sides of my ribcage, and I keep losing my train of thought. My legs are wrapped around his waist in a natural grip, like I can somehow have more control, slow things to the pace I need them. Without thinking about the implications, I lie back on the table, with the intention of putting more space between my senses and all the chemicals. Of course, that can't be what it looks like, and before I can say so, he is down to his briefs, crawling up over me on the kitchen table. Absurdly, I wonder for a moment if either of us will come back up with spots of mashed avocado in weird places, since I'm pretty sure I forgot to wipe down the table after feeding Georgie lunch. It's this thought that snaps me out of it.

“What was her name?” I ask, right against his face.

He lifts himself up off me abruptly, and I adjust my clothes and think about my heartbeat. I feel like it's slowed way down in the last fifteen seconds, and if I let it speed up again, I'll start blushing. He is standing there, appearing totally at home almost naked, whereas I am scanning the floor for my skirt with every fiber of my being.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Why do you want to know?” Patrick looks dark and unsettled, like he could take off running at any minute.

“I don't know. Maybe so when I tell the story of this night, I'll be able to say something like, I saw him having sex with Bailey in his office, and it really turned me on, so I took him home with me.”

“Bailey?”

“Or whatever her name actually is.”

“Her name is Genevieve.”

“Genevieve? You made that up. No adult is named Genevieve.”

“You have to be kidding me right now.”

“It sounds like one of those situations where the hippie parents let the kid name itself, like Matt's little classmate, Rainbow.” There is no way to cover up my bare legs gracefully. My skirt is on the wrong side of Patrick, and putting on tights is not my stealthiest process.

“Who is it that you're planning on telling the story of this night to?”

“I don't know.”

“Scotty?”

“You're the one who keeps bringing up Scotty.”

He comes at me so fast that I take a few steps back on instinct, and then laugh, and then immediately regret my laughter. He looks like he wants to throttle me, and I honestly can't blame him.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“Jesus,” he says, raking a hand through his hair and finally snatching his pants off the back of Georgie's booster chair. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“I don't know. I really don't know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

Patrick steps into his pants and zips them up, and I hand him his undershirt. He takes it from me without saying anything and puts it on. The backs of my thighs are pushing into the table, because it's as far as I can physically get from him, but he isn't picking up on my need for space, or if he is, he isn't respecting it.

“No one in this family has been very good to you.” He is standing with his knees on either side of my knees, and his shoulder is only inches from my face, which for now makes me feel better, since there's no way I could look him in the face. “Especially not when you consider what you've been to the boys. It's selfish, what we've all let you do, and I know Scotty was worried about it before he left—why he called Mae to come and help out. But I'm sure he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He needs you.” He puts his hands on the table, on either side of me. “We all seem to kind of need you.”

If I were to lean forward even five degrees, I could rest my head against his collarbone, just for a minute.

“You're calling all the shots right now.” I can feel the vibration of his words on my face, skating over the top of my head and all down my sides. “At some point, you're going to have to speak the fuck up if that isn't what you want.”

“How could I have been in their lives for this long and just, just not have feelings about them?” I say, like he's demanding that I defend myself. “I'm not calling the shots. If I'm not here, what happens to these little boys?”

“People need to find their own way through grief,” says Patrick. “You can't do it for them, no matter how much you love them and feel compelled to lift it off them.”

“Maybe I can't,” I say. “But I can keep my eyes on them.”

He looks at me like I'm on a sinking lily pad, and I press myself against him. I can't hold anyone above the water the way I wish I could, not Scotty, not the boys, not myself. All of my buoyancy is gone. And Patrick can't hold me up, either, but I cling to him anyway. If I'm going to sink, I don't want to be alone.

June, sixteen weeks after

A week later, it is the morning of Matt's birthday party, and Scotty is home, and Patrick is gone. I woke up to a screen on my cell phone reminding me that I have missed thirty-nine calls from Jane and Claudia, accumulating from the time I first discovered Matt's secret. My mind is functioning on brownout level, the same way it did when I found out about Jess's betrayal.

It's 5:30 a.m., and Scotty sits across from me. Between our two coffee mugs sits Pup. Scotty is speaking intermittently. We're both supposed to be thinking of what to do, but only one of us is actually trying to do that, and it's not me. I'm staring at Pup and imagining myself tossing him down the trash chute.

“I'm not sure,” Scotty is saying, and I'm annoyed, because that's pretty much all he's been saying since we ran into this incident. He's been saying he's “not sure” from here to Istanbul. I don't open my mouth, for fear I'll accidentally say the words “It's your call” for the twenty-seventh time and hurl us right into the middle of a Beckett play. And there are tons of things left to do if I'm going to be ready to throw a birthday party this afternoon; my mental to-do list feels overwhelming enough without the added pressure of this decision.

I put my palms on the table and start to push back my chair. “S-H-I-T.”

“What's wrong?”

“I forgot to get him a present,” I say.

Scotty reaches across the table and rubs my forearm. “All the presents we give him later today will be from both of us.”

“No,” I say. The tags on Matt's presents cannot say “from Daddy and Charlotte,” even if Scotty's not thinking clearly enough to see that. “I mean, thank you, but no. I wanted to get him something from me.”

“You still can,” he says. “Please. Don't be worried.”

It's at exactly this moment, when we've resorted to distracting ourselves from our crippling indecision by having a disagreement, that Matt comes walking out in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes, scratching his head, catching us red-handed.

He looks like he's about to say something, something normal for morning, like “Can I have a brownie for breakfast” or “I think I'll go outside without pants today,” but the words stick in his throat when he sees Pup on the table between us. He stops moving. His eyes get wide, dart back and forth between me and Scotty. If he were an adult, this would be the moment where he tried his best to come up with an excuse. Being a kid, his brain doesn't work that way or that fast, so all he can do is stand there, like a caricature of combusting emotion.

Scotty says, “Son, why don't you sit down at the table with us,” and Matt does it without an argument. The look on his face is so naked. He has nowhere to go. So though he'd rather be anywhere but here, he's going to take it like a man. I want to sob with pride or, at the very least, reach over and stroke his hair, but I know that if I do, he'll no longer have the courage to face what he knows is coming. There's a certain strength that comes upon you when you know you're on your own. I tighten my hands in my lap.

“Matthew, did you take this from George?” Scotty asks.

“Mmm,” says Matt, not wanting to commit fully to yes.

“When did you take it?”

“At the doctor's. He fell asleep, so I was holding him.”

“The night, ah, the night we were there with Mommy?”

I can tell by the way Matt breathes through his nose that he's about to cry.

“Did you know that Charlotte and George were looking for it?”

“I thought they knew I had him. I was just tricking them.”

“Did you understand that they were looking for it later though? After that night at the hospital?”

He doesn't want to answer, which means the answer is yes. His chin lowers, and his eyes start to water. I dig my nails into my thighs, tighten my stomach muscles, and breathe in measure. Drag air in, push air out, as quietly as I can. Drag and push, drag and push.

“But you kept it anyway?” Scotty is struggling to make this a question and not an accusation, to give Matt room to respond, to exonerate himself.

Matt mumbles something, and Scotty and I both lean forward.