Read Things We Didn't Say Online
Authors: Kristina Riggle
He comes around the corner led by an officer, his eyes on the floor.
“Dylan!” I run and grab him, and I don’t care if he doesn’t want me to. For a second I’m surprised how tall he is; with him away from me, I’d regressed him to a smaller, younger child. He has to push back twice before I let go of him.
His skin looks sickly in the hot fluorescent glare. He’s got a little peach fuzz sprouting on his lip. His eyes are red, and it might be from crying, but it might be from sleeplessness, too.
My father claps Dylan on his far shoulder, then pulls him in for an awkward, sideways, one-armed hug.
I apologize to the officers for the interruption, and thank them profusely for watching him. When they leave the lobby, giving us relative privacy, I weigh what to say to Dylan. I want to shake him by his shoulders and scream at him what he did to us, and demand to know why he did it. I also want to hold him in my arms like he’s a toddler because it was so much easier to protect him back then.
I decide to save the heavy stuff for later, when we’ve both slept. When I’ve had time to think. First things first: a logical consequence, and a safety precaution in case he goes temporarily insane and decides to try this shit again.
“I don’t want you contacting that girl.”
He shrugs. “Sh-sh-she wasn’t what I thought, anyway.”
I know that feeling.
Dylan falls asleep at once in the backseat. I’m so relieved I’m feeling sleepy again, too, though each time I close my eyes, my stomach roils. Lousy fast food.
I send Kate a text so she can tell everyone at work that I’ve got Dylan and he’s fine.
Then I call the house. Mallory answers.
“Oh, thank God,” she gushes. “Can I talk to him?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“Sure, poor kid.”
“Poor kid nothing. He did this himself, don’t forget.”
“You’re such a hard-ass.”
“Let me talk to Casey, please.”
“Hi,” Casey says, and her voice makes me smile in spite of the evening. I tell her we’ve got Dylan unscathed, the storm has stopped, and we’re on our way back.
“Good,” she says, and there’s something funny about her voice I can’t place.
“You okay?”
“Just really, really, really tired.”
“Everything okay with Mallory?”
“Sure!” She sounds almost chirpy. “We’re getting along famously.”
I don’t detect any sarcasm, which confuses me so much I wonder if I’m dreaming. “Well, great. Good. Why don’t you get some rest, it will be a long time yet before we’re home.”
“Sure, you bet.”
Mallory and Casey getting along?
I try to remember Mallory at her best, and imagine for the thousandth time what it would be like if she could stay that way. She was most calm immediately after delivering a baby, that baby euphoria carrying her like a wave over whatever rocks and cliffs lay under her surface. Most dads I know groused about those months. The grumpy wives, lack of sex, colicky kids keeping them up even if the wives were the ones rocking and feeding.
Not me. Three times, I had hope for a future with my wife.
And it wasn’t awful in the early days, either. Not immediately.
In college, during those months we dated, before she got pregnant, she was wild and passionate, but back then it came off as impulsive and freewheeling. If she was quick to anger, she was also quick to forget, like a water droplet on a griddle that would sizzle away: hot for one second, but gone the next.
Her jealousy flattered me. To think that any other girl would look my way. Not after Heather, anyway. Who was supposed to be “the one.” My parents loved her. My roommate thought she was awesome. Heather was the perfect easygoing girlfriend, I thought, until she went easy with my roommate.
I still remember Tom going, “Dude, there was a hat on the doorknob,” as if the fact that I’d barged in on sex—with my girlfriend!—was the bigger sin.
Then I went to that party, trying to drown my sorrows in beer—I couldn’t stand the dorm room, every time I glanced at the other bunk I remembered him screwing Heather—and that’s when Mallory swooped in on me.
Her smile was bright, her eyes narrowed like she was sizing me up, which of course she was.
My thought process—such as it was—ran something like,
Take that, Heather.
And what Mallory and I did had nothing to compare with the boring missionary sex I’d had with Heather. We slammed up against walls, she hung from the towel bar, we got rug burns every which way, not that we noticed until much later, comparing our scars gleefully like prizefighters.
I have to stop thinking about this, or I’m going to get a hard-on right here in the SUV.
So instead I think of the day she threw a mug at me and sliced my face open.
My dad thinks I married her to be a rebel. My mother thinks I did it out of love and a sense of old-fashioned responsibility.
They’re both wrong.
Actually I did it for Angel, before Angel even had a name, or discernible gender. Because one day I came home to the apartment—we’d moved in together by then, assisted by my dad’s bank account—to find her glassy-eyed and giggly, her belly poking up under one of my old shirts, empty food wrappers all around. She’d gotten high.
She can’t do this, I thought. She’s not ready.
But ready or not, the baby was coming. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t leave her.
For our whole marriage I insisted to all doubters that I loved my wife, right from the beginning and right up to the end. It’s what a good person does, after all.
That’s a phrase my mom always used, my whole life, whenever she was giving me a life lesson, either directly or by telling some anecdote for my benefit.
You share your sandwich with your friend, Mikey . . .
Don’t honk from the driveway; walk up to the door to pick up a date, Mike . . .
Love your wife, Michael . . .
That’s what good people do.
She never told me out loud to love my wife. But I heard it anyway. It wasn’t until I met Casey that I started to second-guess all those strident assertions. I began to think I hadn’t loved her, genuinely, so much as I’d talked myself into loving her. To be a good person.
My dad startles me so much I almost spill my bottled water all over the heated seats.
“I’m sorry” is what I’d heard.
“For what?” I was so lost in thought, I almost forgot where I was.
“For all this trouble.”
Then I realize it’s a “sympathy” sorry more than an apology. Still, these are two words I never hear coming from my dad.
“Teenagers,” I mutter, not knowing how else to respond.
“He’s a good kid,” my dad says, peering out over the road. “I don’t understand it.”
“I don’t either.”
“Must be his mother.”
“Dad.”
I look back. Dylan is sound asleep. He always could sleep in the middle of a marching band if he had to, so I relax about him overhearing.
“What else could it be? Maybe you should take him to a psychiatrist. My friend Arnold—”
“We took the kids to a counselor once, remember? It cost a fortune and they faked the proper answers and it kept them from getting their homework done and going to practices and stuff.”
“I’m trying to help.”
“I thought you weren’t going to help me anymore.”
He shifts in his seat, and it’s childish of me, but I enjoy his discomfort. “I’m worried about him.”
“Me, too.”
“What if he’s . . . got problems.”
This is unlike my father, to soft-pedal something. “Obviously he does, Dad. He ran away.”
“You know what I mean.”
I do know, of course. But I shake my head. “It’s not like that. He’s too calm, too steady.”
“Still waters run deep.”
Now this is familiar territory for Dr. Turner. The platitudes and proverbs.
“You remember my brother,” my dad continues.
“Yeah?” I ask quizzically. Uncle Joe was a factory worker last I knew, out in Oregon. We don’t see him; there was some kind of rift years ago, and Dr. Turner doesn’t discuss it much
“Our parents believed in letting us sink or swim. They figured we’d rise to our potential, or we would not, but that would be up to us. So they didn’t supervise our studies, or do more than grunt at our grades. If I hadn’t had Mrs. Ellis as a teacher, I might have gone half deaf in a factory myself. But she saw that I was goofing off in the back of the class, and she took me aside and she told me I was wasting God’s greatest gift. This was back when teachers could still talk about God in schools, you know.”
“Don’t start.” I spit that out automatically, but I sit up straight, intrigued in spite of myself.
“Anyway, she challenged me. She knew I was competitive in sports, so she used that spirit, and challenged me to get an A in all my classes that semester, and if I did, she’d get me a scholarship. Not a huge one, just a few hundred bucks from the Chamber of Commerce, where her husband was president. But a few hundred went a lot further than now. I had a lot of ground to make up, but I did it. Yes, I damn sure did.”
He smiles under his mustache.
“Huh,” is all I can think of to say. “Well, good for you.”
“Didn’t get the scholarship, though. She was a little overconfident that she could have a hand in picking the winner. Or maybe she knew she couldn’t, and just figured I needed some kind of carrot on the stick. But the thing is, it wasn’t that hard once I sat down to do the work. Obviously I was smart, smart enough to do well. I’d just never really tried before. And I thought then—and think often, now—what if Mrs. Ellis had never challenged me?”
“I thought we were talking about your brother.”
“Ah yes, my brother. Still waters running deep.”
He taps on the steering wheel, some rhythm I don’t recognize.
“He died in the factory. Got his hand caught in a machine; bled out before they got him to the hospital.”
“What? When?”
“This week.”
“What the . . . Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to. The funeral is this weekend. But then this with Dylan came up. And Joe and I weren’t close. We hadn’t talked in years. He thought that I believed myself better than him, and in an argument years ago I told him he was right, that I
was
better. But in the last few days I’ve been thinking maybe the only difference was that he never had Mrs. Ellis as a teacher. He had Miss Collins, who was very young and always seemed to be on the verge of crying.”
He taps some more on the wheel.
“Yes,” he says with finality, as if solving a difficult medical mystery. “I do believe if he’d had Mrs. Ellis, he wouldn’t have been a factory worker. And he’d be alive right now.”
“Dylan’s not going to be a factory worker.”
“My son the newsman. So literal.”
“I’m not taking him for granted, either.”
“No? Ah look, we’re back in Michigan. Lots of hours left, but that feels like a milestone to me.”
My dad turns up the classical music to indicate he’s done with the revelatory conversation.
I turn back to look at Dylan, the highway lights flashing on his face, and try to remember the last time I had a serious heart-to-heart chat with him, the quiet one in the family.
Y
es! Exactly!” Mallory slaps her hand on the kitchen table so hard I jump. “He’s so nitpicky. Like it matters how you load a dishwasher, especially when he’s not the one unloading it.”
Lucinda Williams sings from the CD player, “
It’s a real love, a real love . . .”
We have moved on to potato chips and dip in the kitchen, under a circle of yellow light from the hanging fixture.
I should feel bad about this. Unloading to his ex-wife, of all people. But it feels like I’ve been straining under the pressure of holding stuff in, and now I finally let it go and the relief is so powerful I could weep. I don’t have any girlfriends anymore, not since I left JinxCorp. No one I know from school will talk to me since I dumped Pete. I don’t even have Billy, who I think would have understood, despite not being a wife.
The dishwasher thing almost made me start throwing plates on the floor. I’d had a horrid day. Jewel was home sick with an earache, and I was trying to program a database for a grouchy, demanding client, and then I had to arrange a new ride home for Angel when her carpool canceled, and Michael was working late and came in just as I was loading the dishwasher.
I didn’t get a “Hi honey” or “How was your day?” or anything. He hung up his coat, looked at me, and said, “Those pans will never get clean in there, you have to scrub them in the sink.”
I told him I’d use the pots and pans setting.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, sighing. “And all the bits of food will get caked on there and it will be twice as hard to scrub, later.”
I tell Mallory now, “I used to think I was lucky that he’s so domestic, but it’s like, everything has to be done exactly his way. He gets after me about the way I fold the socks, too.”
“It’s like living with your parents, isn’t it?”
“I went on strike for a couple days. I figured if he was going to nitpick how I did stuff, he could do it himself. But he was working so hard it just didn’t get done, and I felt bad for the kids not having clean laundry. It’s not their fault.”
“Yeah, kids. They mess up all the best revenge plans.” Mallory winks at me.
“The bitch of it is? He was right about the dishwasher. I had to spend twenty minutes scrubbing the stupid pans the next day.”
Mallory flops her head down on her arms. “Oh, the rightness!” she says, her voice muffled by the table. Then she pops up again. “My God, he’s right all the time. I wish he were a fuck-up, you know? So then I could be relieved at not being awful in comparison.”
I nod, knowing what she means. It’s hard enough for me, and I’m a pretty stable person. These days, anyway. As far as Michael knows.
She goes on, “I used to try to lighten him up, but whenever he relaxes, he always assumes the world is going to crash down on him. And look what happens? Dylan ran away anyway. You can’t control this kind of thing, no matter what kind of grip you have.” Mallory shakes her head suddenly. “Enough. Tired of thinking about it now. Want something to drink? I’m thirsty.”