“I will throw up.”
Henry exhales hard through his nostrils. Roughs up the back of his hair. “You are exactly the same, you know.”
I stare down at him. “It takes extraordinary nerve to say that to me right now.”
“When it comes to how you are, when things get serious, when things get soft—”
“Please, I beg of you—”
“You are impenetrable.”
I shake my head tightly. Everything Henry is saying is an echo of everything my husband says of everything Henry said to me before that. I screw my eyes shut, waver uneasily on my feet. I can feel this thing, the answer to this question—what are wereallydoing here?—filling out, solidifying, but I cannot yet get my arms around its shape. “Why didn’t you tell me you were planning on killing Campbell? Why didn’t you tell me Corrine has been involved since the start? Why give me half the story?”
“Because if I told you everything, the question you would be left with was why. Why sell?”
I open my eyes. Yes. The answer to that question is the shape of it. The Henry I knew valued the family history of this land and the responsibility he inherited to protect and preserve it. The Henry I knew would not siphon it off for money. The Henry I knew did notneedmoney. But sitting on the bed before me, his head lowered in shame, is not the Henry I knew.
This Henry begins to tell me the truth.
His wife is sick. Not dying sick, but chemically unwell. Bipolar is what the family doctor suspects, but she refuses to submit to an evaluation or seek treatment, so he can only speculate. She suffers from episodes of mania that culminate in obscene spending sprees. Henry goes to bed with two cars in the driveway and wakes up to three. She enrolled their children in a kindergarten that cost as much as the colleges. She books Emirates flights to the Maldives that she misses, and she makes risky investments. Once, Henry went up to summerize the cabin and when he came back a week later, she had installed painted Toto toilets in all the bathrooms, seven thousand dollars a pop.
“Henry,” I say, as aghast as he was to learn my husband and I do not fuck. “How have you allowed this to go on?”
Henry’s shoulder blades expand and expand wider with long, deep breaths, the kind your doctor tells you to take at your annual checkup to make sure there’s nothing rattling around where it shouldn’t be. He tells me that it started small. Little things, like hiring a night nanny for the first six months of his daughter’s life when most people do three months, or one, or none at all, and definitely not for twenty-four hours a day. But his wife would assure him that someone in her family was paying for it. Some rich childless aunt who doted on her like she was her own. But when the bill arrived in the mail, suddenlythe aunt was reneging on the offer. When Henry tracked her spending, when he pointed out that they didn’t need a third car or a fourth or toilets with a gold maple-leaf motif on them, he was told he was being controlling. He was reminded that this was an issue for him. He was reminded of what he did to me.
You said your control issues got in the way of your last relationship, Henry’s wife would say.You said to tell you if history started to repeat itself, because you did not want to lose me too.
“After a while,” Henry says, “I was just… unable to discern if I was the problem or if she was. And then it didn’t matter anymore, because we were falling behind on our mortgage payments, and I thought it would be a wake-up call for her. She promised it would be. And for a while I thought we were through it. She cut back on her spending, and a part of me knew it was too good to be true, and of course, it was.” Henry pauses. Takes a deep inhale. “She had opened a credit card, in my dead grandmother’s name. And so we were on the hook for all of that, plus paying for a lawyer to keep her out of jail for identity theft, and eventually the house was foreclosed upon and we were evicted.”
Evicted. It’s such a dirty, lowbrow word. The sort of word that does not belong to Henry’s world, that would have made more sense in mine, at least back when we knew each other. I feel my innards twist and revolt, imagining Henry destitute,vulnerable. I don’t want to think of him like that. I don’t want to fuck someone like that.
“That finally snapped me out of it,” Henry says. “I asked for a divorce. She moved in with her parents, and I came here. I had a lot of time on my hands. Quiet hours, to think. To step back and see things for what they were. I could make out my marriage for what it was. I could make out what happened with us, here.” He pauses, looks around the room like he’s watching the two of us deteriorate the past. “I was scared of losing you, and I treated you horribly, butalso, in treating you so badly, I made it easy for you to leave.” His gaze lands on the wispy flames of the fire, the occasional flashes of blue. “I could have supported you to the ends of the earth, Faye, but the problem was that I loved you, and that was intolerable for you.”
It’s like there is a second set of eyes inside of my head, blinking twice for help, warning me off.Intolerable. I can only tolerate seeing so much.
“Obviously,” Henry says with a miserable laugh. “I still love you. So I kept up the facade that you like, that you need, to be able to tolerate me. That I have money. Stature. Influence over you. That I can still push you around.” He looks down at his hands on his lap, anguished. “I wish you could just love me too, but I will take whatever I can get from you.”
I look around the room, mystified. The truth has exploded between us, and there should be bloody brain matter on the rough rug and the log walls, fragments of my skull. My mind has beenblownout. The truth is a bomb site, severed electrical lines at your feet, the long and daunting labor ahead of rebuilding, rewiring. Henry is so far from the first person to suggest I have an issue with intimacy, but until now it has always seemed to be an abstract and numberless problem. How can I say what it all adds up to when the figures have been concealed from me?
When I am the one doing the concealing?
I come around the corner of the bed so I am facing Henry, though I keep my distance from him. I am shaking, surging with adrenaline and knowledge that feels new but is actually very, very old. Henry looks up at me, his face warm with fire and cool with moonlight. Both things. He is both things. “I have to tell you something,” I say.
The thing that happened at the daycare. The thing we laughed about while watching my show projected onto the wall of PT’s cabin. That’s not it. That’s part ofit, but it’s not the root that needs to be yanked so the weed stops growing back.
When I was about nine or ten years old, I told my parents. I don’t remember what possessed me to confide in them, what must have presented as the proper segue to someone who still preferred her Velveteen Rabbit with the silk-lined ears to a pillow, but I remember they were furious, which is what I was afraid they might be, only to my complete shock, their anger was not directed at me. They were stomping around, talking about making calls to lawyers and congresspeople and other parents. But first they wanted to know, they needed to understand, why I did not tell them what was happening while it was happening. I had paused, not because I needed time to think about my answer but because the answer seemed so obvious I could not understand why they needed to ask at all.
I was being punished because I had misbehaved, I managed to convey to them in my nine-year-old’s way, and I was afraid of being punished a second time at home. Why would I tell them that someone was hurting me when I deserved to be hurt?
But, they had said, as befuddled as I was,we are the ones to decide what you deserve. We are your parents, and so we are the ones to slap your soft cheeks when you leave your wet towels on the carpet, to give you the silent treatment when you get a bad grade, to berate you and call you selfish and ungrateful when you fail to recognize all that we have done for you, to wash your mouth out with soap when you sass us and when we march you to the bathroom only to discover that the Irish Spring bar is too big to fit in your small mouth, we are the ones who get to tell you to take a bite of it, to chew and swallow instead. We get to do all this to you because we love you.
Henry’s face is still but for small flickers of movement in his jawline. There is an angry, sensual energy coming off him, and it has rearranged the molecules in the air, sparked a brushfire of goose bumps along thebacks of my arms, the tops of my thighs. Whatever is about to happen, whatever Henry is about to say, it will be new for us.
“Hearing that,” Henry says in a husky voice, like he has been startled awake by the garbage trucks too early in the morning, looked down, realized his cock was swollen against his leg, reached over to wake me too, “makes me fucking crazy.”
Blood booms from my heart.
“Crazy, Faye. It makes me crazy.”