Say When (25 page)

She blinked once, twice.

“What I’ve learned since you’ve been gone is that there isn’t a bad guy and a good guy when people in a relationship have trouble. There are two bad guys. And I have come to understand my own part in our…undoing. And I want…” His throat tightened, and his voice hoarsened. “I want you to come home now and for us to have our little family back, and I want us to do it right this time. I want us to wake up. To be careful. To pay attention. To offer each other a kind of respect that was missing from both sides before. I want you to go upstairs and get into bed with me, Ellen, and I want you to look at me and see me. And in the morning, I want you sitting across from me. And the next morning and the next morning after that until one of us croaks. Come back home, Ellen. Please. Don’t…waste this. Don’t lose it.”

She sat staring into her lap, unmoving. “You can talk now,” he said.

She looked up. “You know, you talk about listening. But I don’t think you heard what I said, about not wanting to be loved for my flaws. I want to be loved for the good things about me. But I…” She swallowed. “I can’t find too many. I don’t think I do anything well but love Zoe. And even that…Oh, I
can’t
just come back and let you love me when I have so little respect for myself, Griffin. I can’t respect
you,
that way. I have so much work to do before I…”

“Why don’t you do it here?” he said. “Wouldn’t that be convenient? Wouldn’t that be good for Zoe?”

“What would be good for Zoe is to have two good parents who are happy to be with each other.”

“And you don’t think that’s possible for us.”

“Oh, Griffin. I don’t see how you can ever really forgive me. So much has happened, I don’t know if we can…” She sighed. “I just don’t know.”

He leaned back, rubbed his neck. And then he said, “Wait here. I have a present for you.”

“No,” she said, but he was up and gone to the basement. When he came back into the living room, he handed Ellen a box wrapped in silver paper.

“Open it,” he said. “Please.”

She took the box from him, carefully unwrapped it. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Where did you…” She smiled and held up the ballerina doll, touching her dress, her blue hair, her stained forehead. “You dyed her hair!”

He shrugged. “Well. Yeah, yeah, I did.”

She laughed out loud. “I can’t believe you did this! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome.”

“But I don’t have anything for you!”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, God, Griffin. I’ve got to go; I have to get up so early tomorrow. And I’ve been so tired.”

“Why don’t you stay for just a while longer?”

“I can’t.”

He walked her to the door, kissed her cheek. “Thank you again,” she said, and closed the door softly behind her. He watched her walk to her car, watched her taillights disappear, and then went to the fireplace to stare into the flames.

Upstairs, he checked on Zoe, who slept soundly, all of her covers on the floor. He covered her back up, then went into the bedroom and lay on his own bed, his hands laced over his belly. Well, what had he expected? That everything would be neatly resolved in an evening? That, like the children who sat on his lap believed, he was capable of miracles?

If only it were so. He got up, stretched, and contemplated what he should do tonight. Read? Watch some cable show?

On the dresser lay his Santa beard, and Griffin put it on, then added his hat. He looked at himself in the mirror, saw the stubborn transformation. When he was dressed like this, everything really did change. He put on his wire-rimmed glasses and headed downstairs. Santa would clean up the kitchen, then surf the ‘net for baseball memorabilia for Zoe.

In the living room, he drew the curtains, turned off the lights, and made sure the fire was out. He locked the front door, put the chain lock on. In the kitchen, he turned on the radio and began rinsing dishes. “Because we
need
a little Christmas, right this very minute,” he sang along. His glasses fogged, and his beard seemed to grow heavier with the rising steam.

And then he heard a noise at the front door. He turned off the water and stood listening. Yes. Someone was out there, trying to break in. Only a week ago, someone had broken into a house the next block over and stolen nearly everything of value, including Christmas gifts.

Griffin moved quietly to the front door, reached into the closet for Zoe’s wooden baseball bat. He reached up to wipe off the perspiration that had formed on his forehead, and realized he was still wearing his costume. Well, Merry Christmas, asshole. Here’s your gift: a concussion.

The door creaked slowly open, and Griffin took in a breath, raised the bat up high. When the door stopped because of the chain lock, he heard someone whisper, “Damn it!” It was a woman he was hearing. Ellen!

Relieved, he put down the bat and peered through the crack in the door. “What are you doing!”

“I was…I wanted to surprise you! Hey. You’re in your costume.”

“Just…neck up.” He undid the lock, opened the door fully. “Come in.”

She stood still. “I had this whole thing planned. I wanted to surprise you!”

“Come
in,”
he said.

“No. Just leave the door open, and you go back to whatever you were doing. What were you doing?”

“Washing dishes.”

“Well, go back and do it.”

“Ellen…”

“Please. Please?”

“Oh, all right.” He shut the door, went back to the sink, and began rinsing the silverware. And then, in the window glass before him, he saw the reflection of Ellen, standing there and holding out a gift.

“Merry Christmas,” she said.

He turned around, wiped his hands on the dishcloth. “Considering the way I’m dressed, I’d say this is backwards.”

“Well, I’d say it’s about time.”

She handed him a small white box, wrapped with green ribbon.

“You didn’t have to go get me something, Ellen.”

“I had it, already. I just had to go get it. Open it.”

He took the lid off the box and saw, lying on a folded square of a paper napkin, his wedding ring.

With some difficulty, he asked, “How did you find this?”

She sat down at the kitchen table, smiling. “After you told me what you did with it, I went and looked for it. It wasn’t easy, even with so little snow! I must have walked back and forth in that field forty times. The guy that drives around in the security car asked me what the hell I was doing, and then he helped me for a while. But he gave up. I found it just as I was ready to give up myself—the sun was going down and I was so cold.”

He put the box on the table. “Well, thank you, Ellen.”

She looked at the ring, then up at him. “Aren’t you going to put it on?”

“I’ll put it on when I’m married again.”

“We’re still married!”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’re still
married.”

He stood still for a long time, listening to the sound of his own breathing, then slipped the ring back on his finger. It was cold, at first; but then it warmed against his skin.

She stood. “Okay. Well, I’m glad you have it back.”

“Are you…What are you doing, Ellen?”

“I thought…Look, I want to tell you something. I want to try. On the way home, I thought about everything you told me tonight, Griffin. And here’s what I want to say back. Two things. One is, I think our marriage was like a house we stopped using. I mean, you know, you move in, and there are all these terrific rooms, and you think about how you’re going to read in the living room, and write nice little notes on the dining room table, and have tea over there in that corner, and naps over there, and then you just end up being in the same two rooms all the time. And after a while it just feels odd to be anywhere else, even though you’d
like
to be somewhere else. You begin to feel as though you
can’t
use the living room because you’re never there. I think you and I stopped ourselves from doing so much. We got swallowed up by a domestic routine that didn’t leave room for us as the individuals we are. I think I gravitated toward a…Well, toward a love affair, because I thought it would free me, it would let me be all these wonderful things that I couldn’t be with you. It would make me be someone I would like. I felt like somewhere in me was this wild and beautiful thing, capable of so much more than I was being, and I needed this exotic love to let myself out of a jail I thought you had put me in. But I know now that I was the keeper of the keys. I’ve learned that, Griffin, and now I have to do some things about myself. And I just don’t know how it will go if I try to do it in your presence. I don’t know. It might not work.”

He nodded. He couldn’t force her. He’d said all he could.

“But anyway, I thought I’d give you the ring, and…Well, we’ll see.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going out to the car.”

“…Okay.”

He sat at the table, staring at his ring, listening for the sound of her car to drive away, wondering how long it might take for her to make another move toward him. Or away. He thought of his mother, saying how, after her husband had died, she still listened for his car. Griffin’s father had had a heart attack in the middle of the night, and the day after the funeral Griffin had sat with his mother on the sofa in the living room, the blinds drawn, holding her hand as she wept without speaking for nearly an hour straight, the racking kind of sobs that hurt the observer nearly as much as the one weeping. Then, abruptly, she had stopped. She had blown her nose, sighed hugely, and stood up. She’d said, “I am going to lie down on my bed, under my blue satin quilt, for a day and a night. Do not disturb me. Do not ask me anything, and do not ask me for anything. I’m going to remember every good thing I can think of about your father, and I am going to remember every bad thing. And then I’m going to come down to the kitchen and make some eggs and fried potatoes, and start living what’s left of my life.” He remembered how he’d felt, witnessing that moment of extreme sorrow and strength.

And then he heard the door opening again, heard what must have been Ellen’s suitcase banging into it. That suitcase was heavy; it was always hard for her to handle. He started to get up to help her, but then did not. Rather, he did not move at all. He surveyed his surroundings: the wooden table where he sat, the four ladder-back chairs grouped around it. The fruit bowl over on the counter, low on bananas; he’d get more tomorrow. He looked at the cupboards, thought about how he now knew where everything was: the wok, the pie plates, the allspice, the plastic wrap, the small stash of Band-Aids bound tightly together with a green rubber band, the little calendar that kept track of doctor’s and dentist’s appointments. He looked up at the black square of kitchen window, and saw the reflection of the top of his costumed head. He stood, the better to see himself wholly, and then, with a feeling of a soft turn-over at the center, gave a small wave. Goodbye to this costumed self; and, in fact, to all manner of disguise. He was himself for her to take or leave; either way, he would be all right.

“Griffin?” Ellen called softly.

“In here.” He sat back down and took off his beard, his glasses, and his red hat, put them on the kitchen table. And then he leaned back and waited for her to come to him.