Learning to Stay (26 page)

“But Dad—” I can hear Brad arguing from the porch as I shut the door to the house behind me. I agree with him. The barn is no place for a healthy dog, much less a sick one. But at this point, that’s far outside the bounds of my current concerns or cares.

I go upstairs to Brad’s room and haul the nest he made on the floor down to the washing machine in the basement. A part of me wants to know what is going on with my husband, what he was doing out in the woods for days. But a larger part of me wants—needs—to connect with my husband. I need to know we
can
connect. Otherwise, what am I doing here? What are we doing together? And if we can’t connect on his birthday, when can we?

I find clean linens in the hallway closet and as I float and stretch them over the bed, I ignore the thought that this is a fruitless effort—the sheets and blankets will be in a heap on the floor before morning. While I work, I try to calm myself, to put things into perspective. I’ll go downstairs and we’ll have cake. I’ll light candles. We’ll sing to my husband and celebrate the fact that he’s still here, that he didn’t do
anything irreparably rash. And maybe we’ll end the night by sitting on the glider on the porch, shoulder to shoulder, letting our breath escape in wisps from our lips, heating the night around us.

I take a shower and dress in a fresh pair of jeans and a sweater. I put on a little makeup. I take my time, because we have time. We’ve been given that much. That gift.

But downstairs, the cake has already been cut, Mert is asleep in his armchair in front of a blaring television, and Brad, once again, is nowhere to be found.

Instinctively, I head toward the barn.

The barn air feels colder than the air outside and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. As soon as they do, though, I see a misshapen lump covered by an old sleeping bag in the far corner, tucked in among disintegrating bales of hay.

“Brad?” I say, though I know it’s him.

He stirs, as does the lump next to him, curled inside the comma of Brad’s body. Jones.

She pokes her head from the blanket and twists it at an unnatural angle, licking at my husband’s face.

My husband is lying in a drafty, dirty old barn with a mangy dog instead of in bed—or in the same room at least—with me. The hot tears that smart in my eyes surprise me, as does the sudden surge of anger that swells inside me.
He’s safe,
I keep repeating to myself, but it does no good. The swell crashes over me, pinning me in its undertow.

And then I start to cry.

Brad is sitting up now, and I want more than anything for him to stand up and come to me and wrap me in his arms. I need him to do this. Because it will prove that he still loves me. It will prove that he wants to fight for me. For us. It will give
me
something to fight for.

But Brad doesn’t get up. His face makes its own shadows and I brace for an outburst from him. Jones, however, apparently has no
situational awareness—or the situational awareness typical for a dog. She sits up next to Brad, puts a paw on each of his shoulders, and begins to wash his face with her tongue. His face relaxes, and he buries it in the furry scruff of her neck.

Over the years, I watched several friends’ relationships dissolve over infidelity. I saw the anguish they endured after discovering each dalliance. I tried to imagine what I would do if I discovered another woman in Brad’s life. I tried to put myself in their places, to feel what they must be feeling. Yet I could never quite get there. I could never seem to adequately contemplate what it would be like to be them.

And here, just standing in this dank barn, I suddenly know. I feel those pangs. I never imagined that the other woman I’d lose my husband to would turn out to be a goddamn dog.

I walk back to the house and up to Brad’s room. I peel off my clothes, find a T-shirt of Brad’s that’s big even for him and a pair of boxers from his dresser, and crawl between the cool sheets. I’m asleep within minutes. The next morning, I wake alone. Brad is still in the barn with Jones, I presume. After a breakfast of birthday cake that I eat off a paper towel while standing over the sink, I’m on the road back to Madison before anyone else has even stirred.

The college girls of UW-Madison are fully embracing spring today—or, from the looks of it, late summer. The mercury hasn’t inched much above fifty degrees and we’re not quite into April, but outside my office window they’re running and walking every which way in Lycra hip huggers and tank tops. If this is the dress code for these temperatures, I worry that by the time hotter weather rolls around, they’ll have left themselves no choice but to go naked.

And while all of Madison seems to be waking up from its winter slumber, I’ve been hibernating here at Early, Janssen, and Bradenton.

Brad’s being gone has freed me to be the kind of lawyer I thought I was when I first took this job. And so, after I returned from Marquette, I disappeared into the bowels of the firm—into the file room, which is not really a room at all but one, long expanse of metal shelves stretching from one end of the building to another. I took with me a long list of cases—nearly twenty in all—that are similar to
Rowland
: wrongful death suits against companies or corporations. I pulled file after file, dissected them, and came up with a comprehensive list of what we’ll need for trial.

For two full weeks, I have put out of my mind everything except
Rowland
and my job. I spend my days putting together trial binders: contact information for key witnesses and the defense’s legal team, an outline of the opening statement, direct and cross-examination questions, the police report, answers to interrogatories, responses to requests for production of documents and deposition summaries, relevant case law, the burden-of-proof chart detailing everything that we need to prove at trial and the mechanism of proof, and experts’ CVs, subpoenas, and designations. In three separate binders, I assemble all of the discovery documents, the depositions in full, and all of the pleadings related to the case. Unlike those who prepared a lot of the trial notebooks shelved in the basement, I take care to type up labels instead of hand writing them and I use tabbed inserts instead of sticky notes. I want us to put the very best foot forward in court. And while a clean binder might go unnoticed by our clients, the jury, Judge Cianflone, or opposing counsel, a messy and disorganized binder might make us look the same way, casting aspersions on our abilities.

I subsist on coffee and meal-replacement shakes and energy bars. When I wake in the morning, my toothbrush is still wet and I see the same security guard at the office’s front desk as when I left only a handful of hours before. Some nights, instead of going home, I pull two armchairs in my office together to form a tiny makeshift bed and ball up my jacket as a pillow. Other nights I curl up on the floor in the glow of the moon reflected off the Capitol dome. I lose track of hours and days, alerted to their passing only by external cues like the appearance and then disappearance of the lunch carts on the square or the ringing of bells for Sunday services at St. Patrick’s.

I decide to try to reach Brad for the first time on a Sunday night. I know this because St. Patrick’s bells rang both yesterday at five o’clock and this morning at seven. It’s been weeks since I’ve heard his voice,
and I miss it. I miss it in a different way than when I was waiting for him to come home. That was pure longing—longing tinged with the faith of better days to come. This is a hard ache, deep down inside me like a calcified organ.

I’ve tried hard, these weeks, to give Brad as little thought as possible. I tell myself repeatedly that I’ve been released from the weight of monitoring him, caring for him, anticipating his blowups and his needs. If I want to be, I’m free. But with that kind of freedom comes all sorts of choices and decisions I’m not ready for, and so it’s easier not to think about it. It’s easier to think about work. It’s easier yet not to think at all.

But thoughts of Brad aren’t so easily eradicated. I will be ear-deep in
Rowland
, poring over case law or summarizing depositions or writing briefs, and they just show up, fully formed: silent imaginings playing against the dark walls of my head—of Brad and me pushing a stroller around Capitol Square early on farmers’ market Saturdays as the farmers are just setting up, picking out rhubarb, then all different colors of wax beans, and finally, toward fall, bags full of tomatoes for canning and basil for making pesto; smiling at each other, exhausted but so content, at three a.m. when the baby won’t go back to sleep; juggling day care drop-off and pickup; scrambling madly each weeknight to get through dinner, bath, and bedtime routines and then sleeping in, three of us to a bed, on Saturday mornings; and later, attending PTA meetings and soccer games. Our lives one long, crazy-but-delightful scheduling exercise until the day sneaks up on us when it’s suddenly time to take our child off to college, when we wave good-bye and drive away, teary eyed and astonished that it’s all flown by so quickly.

That was how things were supposed to go.

That is not the direction in which Brad and I are now headed. Instead, we are throttling full speed into an entirely different future.
There is no cure for Brad’s injuries. They are conditions not unlike building a house on a flood plain: You can try to sandbag and build levees, but now and again, the waters will inevitably rise and spill over; you can try to rebuild and remodel and readjust, but those foundations will never be quite secure.

And so, we’re stuck in this stalemate. Brad hasn’t called me, and although I pull out my phone and contemplate calling him several times a day, I haven’t actually dialed his number. We both seem unwilling to make the hard decisions that need to be made.

When I put the finishing touches on the very last trial binder, it is dark and late enough that there isn’t a single soul rambling around the square below my office window. I check my phone to see if I missed a call, even though I know I haven’t. It is 3:45 in the morning and I’m bone-tired. The thought of trekking to my house, a little more than a mile away, and working through my bedtime routine of taking vitamins, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and applying moisturizer feels wholly overwhelming. There’s a black sweater in my car that I can slip on in the morning to make it look like I’ve bothered to change outfits, so I curl up under my desk with my coat balled into a pillow. And I think to myself that maybe Brad and I aren’t so different after all.

The next afternoon, proud of the hard work I’ve put in the past handful of days, I shut down my computer for the first time in weeks, fish my coat from under my desk where it was still stashed from the night before, and pack up my laptop and printouts of the two research requests received from Early and Janssen earlier today, to work on at home. I check my phone as I walk out of my office. It is 4:55 p.m. I don’t have one missed call, not one voice mail message.

Through the windows of Early, Janssen, and Bradenton, the sky is still a pale blue. It looks warm. Maybe I’ll go for a run when I get home.

I am almost to the firm’s reception area when Susan emerges abruptly from the office of one of the senior associates and I nearly run into her.

“I’m so sorry, Susan,” I say. “I should look where I’m going.” Actually, it was she who should have checked to see that the hallway was clear, but it seems like the right thing to say to a partner. Susan doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t say a word. She looks me up and down, and then back up again for good measure.

“Headed home?” she asks. The question comes out as a sneer.

If there’s an easy, obvious lie to tell about why I have my jacket on, briefcase slung over my shoulder, and car keys in hand, it doesn’t come to me.

“I—I—,” I stammer, thinking of what to say. In any other profession, in other law firms even, leaving work at five o’clock on a Friday would be considered normal, not “already.” Early, Janssen, and Bradenton, LLC, though, is a big, meat grinder of a place that thinks highly of itself for giving people the opportunity to work there as opposed to being thankful that it attracts talented, driven people who are willing to do outstanding work around the clock. I remember, as a summer intern, listening to Crane Early complain for weeks that he had “let” one of the junior associates have a Friday and then an “entire weekend” off for her own wedding. At the time, I dismissed it as a row or personality conflict, an isolated situation. I should have seen it for what it was: standard and accepted company practice.

“I’ve been sleeping here,” I squeak. Then I force myself to sound more assertive. “I’ve been doing trial prep. I’ve taken it as far as I can until you’re both able to give me some feedback on it.”

Susan actually rolls her eyes. “Of course you have,” she says. “You’re on your first big litigation case. I hope you would be. But there’s always more work to do.”

Susan is a slight woman, shorter and more petite than I am, but
you never notice it because she has the uncanny ability to make you feel mere inches tall. I am not easily intimidated or scared off, even by Early and Janssen, but with her sharp tongue, moods that change with a shift in the wind, and beady glare, Susan often terrifies me.