Read Things We Didn't Say Online
Authors: Kristina Riggle
“And the weekend before that you were
ill
,” Casey shoots back, advancing into the kitchen. She sheds her parka and throws it on a chair.
“Yes, I was! And that makes four weeks since I’ve even seen my baby! And maybe I won’t ever again!”
Jewel gasps, and I turn around to carry her back upstairs. The shouting continues, but I can’t deal with it, I’ll have to let the women in my life tear each other apart for now.
Once she’s tucked under the covers, Jewel creases her forehead, and tears shine in the corners of her eyes. I tell her to pray hard for Dylan and try to sleep and that maybe we’ll have good news by morning, and that he might even call us, and remind her that her mother gets really worked up sometimes and sometimes there’s no reason to be. At this I can see Jewel thinking hard; she looks up at the ceiling, and I can see her running through her memory for times Mallory flew off the handle over nothing.
Her nod to me is false, though. She’s not a good liar like her mother, and I hug her in gratitude for that.
“Do you want me to stay with you until you sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, baby.”
I finally take off my necktie and rest on top of the covers next to her, where she’s curled around her teddy bear like a little kidney bean.
H
ow dare you put this on me?” I shout, sinking into the futility, in fact knowing that every time I shout at Mallory, Angel hates me just that much more.
“I just can’t believe that I was supposedly such a terrible parent that I couldn’t have my children and yet here you are, someone I don’t even know, getting to live with them, and then my son gets involved with some stranger on the Internet and runs off, and you! You’re a computer person even, and you just sat back and let it happen! Because you’re an
idiot
who knows nothing about children!”
“I was respecting his privacy!”
“He’ll have all the privacy he wants if we never see him again!”
I clench my fists. It’s not my fault. It’s not. “Stop with the melodrama, you’re scaring the kids.”
“I didn’t know Jewel was on the steps. And Angel is not a child anymore, she deserves to know what’s going on. And listen to you:
melodrama
. My child is missing, and you call this melodrama? I’ll show you drama.” She picks up a candy bowl from the counter, an earthenware thing that Angel had made in school years ago when she was young enough to be doing arts and crafts. She heaves it up over her head and stares me down.
I’m lifting my arm to protect my face when the phone rings. She plunks down the bowl and seizes the phone.
“Yes! Yes, Detective, this is Mallory Turner. Thank you so much for calling. I’m really worried.”
Angel stares at me as she backs away toward the stairs. “Just what we needed right now. A fight with the girlfriend.”
She turns and stomps her way up.
Mallory takes the cordless phone downstairs to the computer, and I’m all alone in the kitchen as fear wells up in my chest that Mallory might be right, that I respected him right out of the house and out into the dangerous world.
But it’s the only way I could connect with him. I learned quickly not to ask him how school was. He’d say “Fine,” or not reply at all. But in the evening, in breaks from practicing his sax, he’d volunteer an anecdote. And if I limited my responses to neutral signs that I was listening—
Really? Huh, weird, wow—
he’d tell me more. From this I learned about his first crush, a flute player named Emily who’d just gotten promoted to first chair in her section. But if I sounded too interested, he’d turn his eyes back to his music and bring the sax back to his lips and let the music do the talking.
Maybe this is what comes from living with a reporter for a father and Mallory for a mother. I get the impression that when they all lived together, Mallory wanted to know every detail of their lives, down to which snack they bought from the vending machine. I sensed something like relief from him when we were together. He gradually laughed more often. Smiled at me.
These things meant more to me than any gooey declaration of affection. It was his way of skywriting “I like you.” I even imagined he might love me, in a certain way.
Until he stopped asking me to join him during his practice. About the same time he started getting the mail every day.
Maybe I am stupid about kids.
My phone rings in my pocket, and I almost shut it off, but the area code is unfamiliar, so I answer.
“Hi,” is all he says.
“Dylan?” I try to keep myself from shouting, screaming. I grip the kitchen counter for support as I tremble where I stand. “We’re worried about you, pal. What’s going on?”
“I’m okay. I wanted to tell you.”
There’s a loudspeaker. What’s it saying? I can’t make it out. Voices, shuffling. “Are you okay?”
I bite my lip so I don’t pepper him with questions.
“Yeah, that’s what I s-said.” He’s testy. I can almost see him tensing on the phone, getting ready to hang up.
“Where are you, buddy?”
“I’m . . . I’m . . .”
A blur from my peripheral vision becomes Mallory inches from my face, shouting, “Gimme that phone!”
I hunch my shoulders and turn away, trying to listen for clues, to his voice, for his answer.
Her fingers dig into my shoulders as she whips me back around to face her. One hand seizes my phone and the other shoves me down hard.
“Dylan!” she shrieks into the phone. “Dylan?”
Then she starts sobbing his name over and over, slumped on the kitchen counter and mumbling about the dropped call.
I pick myself up off the floor as Michael comes running down the stairs. I wipe the blood from my face from where I bit my lip hard in the fall, and allow myself a bittersweet recognition that when Dylan decided to call home, he called me.
M
allory sobs on the counter and Casey is on the floor with blood on her face but what draws my attention is that Mallory is sobbing our son’s name. Casey picks herself up so I go to my ex-wife shouting, “What? What happened?”
“She wouldn’t give me the phone,” wails Mallory, and that’s when I notice she’s holding Casey’s cell. “And now he won’t answer.”
I look questioningly at Casey, who’s applying a damp paper towel to her lip. A circle of pink spreads.
“Dylan called,” she says, examining the towel. Her voice is steady. “I couldn’t make out where he was, but he says he’s fine. He was somewhere with a loudspeaker.”
Mallory tenses. I’ve seen that look. I grab her wrist and pry her fingers off the phone.
If Dylan called this number, this phone has become the most important thing in the house.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I demand of Mallory. “Keep your hands off Casey, or you can get your ass home.”
“Oh please, she just
fell
. It’s not like I punched her. Trust me, if I wanted to do some damage, I’d do better than that.”
“And I suppose her falling had nothing to do with you.”
“I was just trying to get to the phone! That
girl
was standing between me and my son!”
Casey looks pale, but answers evenly, looking again at the paper towel pink with her blood. “He called me. I was just trying to hear where he was.”
“And then the call dropped!”
Casey stares back at her, throwing the damp towel in the sink. “Dropped my ass, he hung up because you were screaming at him.”
“How dare you, you silly little bitch!” shrieks Mallory, and I seize her upper arms, anticipating her. I’d started to forget how strong she is when she’s mad.
“Let go of her!” hisses Angel, who has come down the stairs. She’s wearing her pajamas, and without her makeup, her hair brushed smooth, she looks so much younger. I open my hands from her mother’s arms, wanting to explain but knowing in the same instant she won’t care.
Mallory rubs her arms as if I’d wounded her, and she calms with the appearance of her daughter, an ally. In fact I might have hurt her a little. It wasn’t until I let go that I realized how tight I’d clenched.
“What the hell?” says Angel. “Stop with all the fighting down here, J. is asleep.”
“Dylan was on the phone,” I tell her. “He said he was fine.”
Angel forgets her umbrage over the fight and relief blooms on her face. “So he’s coming home?”
I turn to Casey, but Mallory answers. “He didn’t say that. We got disconnected, so we don’t know much. But he seems okay.”
Angel’s shoulders sag, and she sighs. “I’m going to try and sleep now, I guess. If I can trust you guys not to tear each other apart like a pack of hyenas.” She cocks an eyebrow. “Wake me if he calls again, though.”
Casey has remained silent, dabbing her lip now with a dry towel. The blood on the towel is down to a few specks. There’s a divot in her lower lip. I approach Casey to get a better look at her face, reach for her cheek. She jerks away from me, strands of her hair falling between us, blocking my view of her eyes.
Casey clears her throat once Angel has gone back up the stairs. “Could I have my phone back, please?”
I’d pocketed it, without realizing it.
Taking it out, I find myself staring at it. Dylan called this number. Not the house, not my phone. He could try again, especially if the call really did drop.
“Michael.” Casey’s voice has a note of pleading.
“Can’t I hang on to it? I’m not going anywhere.”
Her coolness crumbles before my eyes. “My mother might call. I promise to let you talk to him if he calls again, but please, it’s my phone.”
I hand it over to her, and Casey snatches it from me, burying it deep in her jeans pocket. I hear a disgusted snort from Mallory, and when I glance at her, she’s glaring, slit-eyed, at Casey.
I can’t count the number of times Mallory paged through my cell phone records or my personal e-mail, grilling me about this or that conversation with a woman, usually a source, sometimes a coworker. Sometimes Kate, until I told her not to call me at home. I stopped trying to hide my password, that very act being enough to set her off, and accepted my lack of privacy.
So I’m well used to paranoia.
But I do wonder . . . why won’t Casey let me hold her phone? When so much is at stake?
“I’m going to see if he updated his Facebook page,” Casey says.
She heads for her desk in the office at the other end of the house.
“Stop beating up my girlfriend,” I say to Mallory, in a half-joking tone, trying to keep things light, keep her away from her personal red zone.
She sinks into a kitchen chair. “Oh, please.
Beating up
. She tripped when I grabbed the phone. She bit her own lip. Not my fault she’s clumsy.”
I take the chair opposite her. Most of the lights are off in the house but the one over the kitchen table, and this makes me feel like a TV cop interrogating a suspect.
“She’s not clumsy.”
“Michael, I did not try to hurt her. I wanted the phone, and she kept it from me.”
“Couldn’t you wait for your turn?”
“Jesus, what am I, six years old? That was my least favorite thing about being married to you, when you talked to me like one of the children. And anyway, she had no right. She should have given me that phone the very instant she knew it was him. I gave birth to him.” At this she hits the table hard with her index finger. “I nursed him, I sat by him in the oxygen tent when he was two, I took him to speech therapy.”
“When you could get out of bed.”
“I was going through a rough time then.”
“When are you not?”
She tosses her hair back over her shoulder. “Oh yes, the rich doctor’s son is going to lecture me again about how long I’m allowed to have a rough time.”
“At the expense of the kids.”
“Fuck off. You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”
I have no retort for this, never had. Though the story has changed often enough I’m not sure which parts are real, it’s clear she didn’t have an easy time of it. One doesn’t get to be like Mallory without some damage of some kind.
“I’m still their mother,” she says, her voice strained, as if trying to hold something in, an unusual effort for her.
I see her love for them in her face, and this breaks down my fortress. She loves them and they love her back despite it all, and this is why I can’t hate her.
“I should have spent more time with him.” Her hand traces circles on the table, over and over. She’s stroking it, almost lovingly. “I’ve been trying lately, Michael. I need to be better, I know. I’m going to be more involved, I am. That is”—she slides her eyes over to me, turning her head only slightly in my direction—“if you’ll let me.”
“Of course,” I tell her, grasping her hand, stopping it from its circling. The closeness startles me, and I let go. “That’s all I’ve wanted, I want you to see the kids, I want you to keep to the parenting time.”
“ ‘Parenting time.’ ‘Visitation,’ ” she says, her face puckered. “I don’t want to just pick them up at appointed hours when the court says so. I mean, I want to come over more often, take the kids out even if it’s not ‘my time’ on the schedule.”
It sounds like a reasonable request. But I feel that little
ping
in my gut, same as I get at the newspaper when a source tells me something that
feels
wrong. So I’ll have to check it out, dig deeper.
But now is not the time.
“We’ll talk later,” I say, pulling my hand back. “I can’t think about it right now.”
She nods, and her hand resumes the slow circles on the table.
M
y eyes fail to focus on the glowing computer screen in front of me. I have not turned on the rest of the lights, preferring the shroud of darkness for the illusion of walls and privacy. I doubt Dylan put anything on Facebook. I just needed to get away from them.
Past my computer screen I can see the porch and the street outside. Under the streetlight, a couple stands close together. I think they’re arguing, based on their posture. The man gestures broadly, limbs flying fast in the air. The woman stands straight, her arms wrapped so tightly around her you almost can’t tell she has any. Her head is bent toward the ground like a shriveled flower in the frost.