All the Time in the World (38 page)

“Speak up, son,” says Scotty sternly.

Matt starts to cry. “I said, I woke up, and he was in my bed.”

“Patrick must have assumed it was his,” I say.

“I came out in the morning to give it to Mommy,” says Matt. “But she wasn't here. Gramma said she went to heaven. I'll give it to her when she came back.”

Scotty sits back in his chair and grips the armrests, and I think I know how he feels. What to do? Set an example of stoicism for my child? Get angry and discipline him, to show him that we move on, that we don't get an excuse to stop doing what we know is right? Live in this emotional tar pit with him? Watching Scotty struggle is almost as bad as watching Matt flail around, but I can't be the one to throw them the life vest. Or is it that I can't wear it for them?

“But she didn't come back,” I say.

“Yes,” says Matt.

“Yes,” says Scotty, right on Matt's heels. They're different yeses, but somehow they mean the same thing.

“Well, Matthew, I guess I don't know what to do,” says Scotty. “I'm not happy that you kept this a secret, especially from George. But I know that things have been sad and scary without, without her.” Without my wife, your mother, Mommy, Gretchen. He chooses
her,
still. “It's not black and white. Do you know what that means?”

“Mommy says that,” says Matt.

“Yes. She did say that.” The silence stretches out. Neither one of them can stand to walk any further into the memory of her.

It's that moment that another voice cuts through the racket. A voice that's clearer, possibly quieter, but much more distinct.

“Pup come back?”

George has somehow removed almost all of his clothing, probably in his sleep, the sweaty little mess, and he's just standing there in his underwear, with his belly sticking out like an old man who doesn't give a shit about clothes. Chickie is tucked into the back of his underpants, held fast by the waistband.

“He wasn't gone,” says Matt. “He was living in my room, Georgie. Sorry you thought he was gone.”

“It okay,” says George. He puts Chickie on the table next to Pup and says, “Nice to meet you,” in a high baby voice. Chickie's voice, I guess.

Scotty lifts George onto his lap. “Pup can come back and live in your room now.”

“He can live in Matt's room. He like Matty,” says George, and the way he says it is casual, almost flippant. But to me, it's the sound of a match strike in a dark, dark place.

*   *   *

IN THE EARLY
evening, when the party has ended, we are all at home together, me and Scotty and the boys and Patrick. I am so tired I could lie down on the living room floor and pass out, but George and Matt are on fire from the success of the party. Or maybe it has more to do with the onslaught of endorphins ricocheting around in their little brains, due to the cupcake and brownie and doughnut consumption that mostly went unmonitored. They're getting ready to open a tremendous pile of gorgeously wrapped presents, and they are too excited to sit still.

A little over an hour later, we are nearing the end of the present pile. Scotty hands them out, Patrick reads the cards, and I take notes on who each one is from. We come to two identically wrapped packages, which I know are some sort of fancy new handheld gaming devices that Scotty picked up in Germany, and the boys start to open them, and Patrick reads the card over the sounds of tearing paper.

“For Matthew, with love on your sixth birthday, from Daddy, George, and Charlotte. And yours is for George, with love on Matt's sixth birthday, from Daddy, Matt, and Charlotte.”

All the air in my lungs rushes away. Some kind of mass is cutting through my chest in free fall. Nothing to grab on to. A straight drop. Matt and George giggle at the funny tag on George's package. I start cleaning up abruptly, balling up wrapping paper as tightly as I can inside my fists.

“I asked you not to do this,” I say to Scotty, ignoring the protests of the boys as I add the ribbons, even the fabric ones, to the trash pile.

“Do what?” Scotty says.

“Put my name—were you even
listening
—”

Patrick sweeps all the presents into a pile and runs off down the hall with them, and the boys laugh and run after him.

“Why is this so upsetting to you?” Scotty asks.

“Because you mentioned it earlier, and I said not to, and you didn't—”

“I don't know why it's even a conversation. I was trying to—”

“Why would you write that? It's, it's confusing—”

“It won't confuse anyone who matters,” he says. I pick up as much of the trash pile as I can and walk to the kitchen with it, losing a few pieces of wrapping as I go.

When I turn around to retrieve the stray paper, Scotty has followed me into the kitchen and is standing in the doorway with his hands pressing into his temples. The hair around that area is sticking straight out to either side, due to the repetition of this gesture, and if he were a little grayer, he'd look like a mad scientist from a public television show.

“Can you hand me that piece of foil?” I ask, pointing to a scrap with Ninja Turtle faces all over it.

He picks it up and brings it to the trash himself. “I didn't think it mattered that much, okay? I'm sorry.”

“If you say so.”

Scotty bangs his fist down on the counter, four or five times in a row. “I don't want to fight with you,” he says, and his voice has increased in edge and resonance, a combination that spooks me, making it harder to hold my corner. “I left all the hashing out, all the details, all the employee stuff—”

“The
employee
stuff?”

“Jesus Christ! The
life
shit. I left it to my, my, to her.”

“Gretchen,” I say, but he ignores me.

“She had the talent for knowing what the right thing was to do, always. I don't have an ounce of that intuition.”

“Well, me neither,” I say.

He's giving me a look that makes me feel like a pillar of salt. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to hold out before I start to blow away. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I don't feel that way about you. I feel like you always know what you're doing, and it takes me ten fucking years to catch up,” he says.

“Well, that's how I always felt around Gretchen. I had to take a cue from someone,” I say. He actually winces at the sound of her name, and it seems to make him even angrier.

“So, what?” he says. “What do you want to do?”

“I don't know what's on the table.”

“Well, you could quit.”

“Okay.”

“Or I could fire you.”

“Okay.”

“You could move into my bedroom with me.”

“Oh, well, if that would keep you from
firing
me—”

“Seems like the next logical step, doesn't it?” He should be flipping tables, throwing vases, breaking dishes for all the energy that's trapped there underneath his voice; instead, the nastiness comes out through his words. “You? Me? The kids? Isn't that why you're still here?”

“Aunt Lila thinks it is, that's for sure.”

“Cut the crap, Charlotte.”

“I don't know! You asked me here. Is it what
you
want?”

He presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, but it can't stop the tears from starting to come down his face, and he lets out a noise that sounds like George when Matt snatches all the square Magna-Tiles from his pile.

“I know it's not,” I say, and it would be much better, much more elegant, if my eyes and nose weren't streaming the same way his are. “I know what you want. You
want Gretchen
, and I'm not her; no one will be her, ever. So if you're mad about that, and you need to scream, then do it.
Do
it.”

And I think that if things had gone differently, he might have. He might have screamed at me, sobbed with rage and fury, punched a wall,
something
. Something. But instead, a movement in the doorway to the kitchen catches our attention at the same time, and we both look, and we see Matt. And we don't know how long he's been standing there.

Nobody says anything for a long time, and I expect the silence to be thick and suffocating, but instead, I can hear all the noises of the house. The TV still on a low volume because Patrick insisted he be able to watch the NASDAQ while we opened presents. The dishwasher changing cycles. George chatting back in his room. The sound of plastic clicking against other plastic—maybe the newest Lego set? Matt is looking from one to the other of us, waiting for an explanation that never comes. And so he nods a few times, like maybe he knew this was coming all along, and then he walks out of the room.

“No more,” I say.

“What does that mean? You're leaving?”

“No, no more of
this
,” I say. “No more ‘her.' No more ‘my wife.' No more ‘she.' You have to be able to say her name! If you don't talk about her, then she'll be nothing. And George will never know her, and even Matt will start to forget what it was like when she was alive. You have to,
you
. Mae is telling them that she's in heaven, but they don't know what that means. I can tell them that she loved to dress Matt in green and George in orange, and I can tell them that she was staunchly opposed to spaghetti, or I can tell them about that time when Matt heard the story of Jonah and the Whale from Mae, and he was so scared that Gretchen had to look up pictures of cuddly whales to show him on the Internet—”

I can see that Scotty is starting to really come undone now. He's pulling at his collar like it's too small, like it's strangling him. His face is flushed. He has his hands flat on the kitchen island, like he doesn't trust himself to let them be anywhere else.

“But that is nothing.” I am past the point you can come back from, so I'm going to have to try and find my way to the other side. “
Nothing
compared to what you could tell them! How it felt when George was getting older and older and still not speaking to you, and all the research she did, and how she struggled to keep the faith. How she was when you first met her, how she was when you got married—how those two versions of her were different, how she changed! What you did that made her crazy, what she wore, how fast she walked, all those moments that made up your life as a family. The outings she took with Matt when he was a baby, and what she did when she had two of them! That time when your brother Max and his family came to visit, and she got up at 4 a.m. to poach eggs and arrange flowers; that time she bought you all those belts from Brooks Brothers, more belts than you said you could possibly have use for; the time she let Matt take all those pictures with your digital camera, and he erased the vacation pictures by accident, and she covered for him and told you
she
did it; that time she made that horrible sesame seitan for dinner, and you and the boys rebelled and secretly ordered pizza; that time she made a Halloween costume for you out of
stainless steel—
”

“Stop, oh God, stop. Stop.” Scotty looks at me. His expression is like a wound that will never close, on its way to a permanent scar. “I'll tell them, if you want me to. I'll tell them I made a mistake.”

“What?”

“That I got the tag wrong, I'll tell Matt and George—”

“I can't be part of Daddy, Charlotte, George, and Matt. It has to be Daddy, George, and Matt. Just Daddy, George, and Matt.”

Scotty walks out of the kitchen. I'm afraid he's going to leave. I follow him and find him sitting in the middle of the couch, as if he'd like to be swallowed by it. As if he'd prefer to be the smallest thing in the room. “I can't be that,” he says. His head is resting on the back of the couch. His eyes are on the ceiling. “I can't do that.”

“You don't have to let this decide for you,” I say. “She had to leave them. You don't. You can still be their father.”

“I'm too tired,” he says. “So if you could just stay, stay here, I'll give you whatever you want. Just please stay here with me.”
Not them, not us,
and then I know. I know it's not me he's talking to. “If I hadn't been away so much—”

“No,” I say, and I cross the room to him quickly.

“If I had paid more attention, helped more, you wouldn't have felt like you needed to work, you wouldn't have gone to—” Scotty is gasping, like he can't pull enough air into his lungs.

“No,” I say. “No. Calm down.”

“We had such a stupid fight, the night before.”

“I know.” I kneel next to him on the couch.

“Do you think she died thinking I didn't value all the things she did to make our life together?”

“No, not even a little bit.”

“It should have been me. It would be better for everyone. It should be me.”

“Stop it,” says Patrick, from the doorway, and I should have known he was coming. Matt has never been one to keep his mouth shut. “Don't try to bargain. It's bourgeois. McLeans don't bargain.”

“You're such an asshole,” says Scotty, but it looks like he can breathe again.

“I have to go now,” I say, and I get up, and I leave them there. A short while later, when I get to the front door with my belongings, I look down the hall toward the boys' rooms. But I'm absolutely sure that I need to walk out of here before I see their faces, so that's what I do, even though it means I can't say good-bye.

*   *   *

I MAKE IT
back to my apartment, which hasn't felt like mine in months, and climb the stairs. When I step into my living room, there are Jane and Claudia, sitting on my couch, looking at me through eyes that could be my own, knowing me. I walk across the room without acknowledging them, kick off my shoes, and crawl into my own bed. And a moment later, I feel the mattress depress as my sisters crawl in after me.