Ask Again, Yes (45 page)

“You know, I thought you looked familiar,” Peter said, though he had no recollection of anyone from Townsend Harris’s team.

At Christmas, which Kate and Peter always hosted, Kate called around to her parents, to Natalie and Sara, to tell them that there would be no
booze that year, but she knew that was depressing so if they wanted to go somewhere else she totally understood. She wasn’t interested in answering their questions, but she knew they knew—Francis had no doubt told them and they’d all discussed together—so she figured she might as well let them know in advance. They all came—arriving early and leaving early—and Peter, though he insisted he was fine with them all coming as they always had, was awkward, uncomfortable. When Kate asked what was wrong, he said only that he hadn’t realized they all knew.

He began to say it was fine, but he stopped himself and said instead that he wished she’d told him, that it felt like something private, his own news to tell, not Kate’s, that was all. Kate could almost hear the therapist’s voice in his words, encouraging him to say what he felt.

“I didn’t tell them. I never discussed it with any of them. But you were gone for a month, Peter. They’re not idiots.”

Anne waited until Peter came home after his thirty-three days and then she stopped by the house, refused to come inside, and told Peter that she just wanted to see him in person, make sure he was okay. She told them that she hoped they’d come visit her sometime, all of them. She’d lived there for so many years and not once had she ever been to the races. The kids might like to see the horses run. “That would be nice,” they both said, and as Peter walked her back to her car, Kate thought, I will never ever be visiting you in Saratoga.

And then, on the night before he was to begin his new career—three new pairs of khakis pressed and hanging in their bedroom closet, a new pair of shoes—he came home from an AA meeting and went straight downstairs. When Kate passed by the basement door she thought she heard a clink of glass on glass.

“Peter?” she called down into the dark. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he called up. “I’m just looking for something. I’ll be right up.”

She stood perfectly still. She held her breath. She could feel his stillness, too.

“Why are the lights off?” she called down.

“I don’t know,” said Peter. “I’ll turn them on. There.”

The room flooded with bright light and he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at her.

After what felt like a long time she turned away from him, went up to their bedroom, shut the door behind her, and crawled under the covers.

The next morning—after he rushed around the house like a maniac searching for something that he wouldn’t let anyone help him find, after he cursed to see the coffeepot had never been turned on, and after he finally drove away—she heard Frankie calling her, and she looked up to see a car she didn’t recognize pull away from the curb.

“There you are!” Frankie said when Kate appeared. “A man dropped off Dad’s wallet. He said Dad left it on the bar. He opened it to find out the address.”

Kate held the wallet, and calmly, rationally, she recalled exactly what he’d said: it was a ninety-minute meeting, fifteen minutes away.

He’d been gone for over two hours and when he returned, just before he headed downstairs, he said he was going to get fat with all the donuts and junk people bring. “These addicts,” he said, “they replace one thing with another.”

“Uh-oh,” Kate had said, easy in her heart now that he was home. “Don’t say that, they’ll send you to AA jail.”

She remembered the clinking sound she thought she heard coming from the basement the night before, the expression on his face when he flicked on the light. She descended the dark stairs and saw immediately that the little blue cooler they used in the summer to take sandwiches to the pool had been moved. She opened it and found three little bottles, hidden under an old PennySaver.

She called up the facility in New Jersey first, as if she might be able
to demand a refund. What kind of science did their approach rely on? Who were the doctors there? What were their credentials? Questions asked several months too late. She asked to speak to Marisol, the woman who’d first let the possibility of failure into the air and so the person completely at fault. But Marisol was unmoved, and her tone implied she’d gotten thirty similar calls already that morning. Then she called Peter’s sponsor, a guy named Tim who’d scribbled his name and number on the title page of the Big Book. No answer. Then she called her father, who said he wasn’t the least bit surprised, it was too much to ask a guy to go cold turkey, it was both unrealistic and unnecessary, and he never saw Peter getting on board with all that higher power stuff anyway. What he should do now is a quick dry-out again, then switch to brown liquids, only between seven and nine at night. The guys who had it real bad always drank clear. That should have been their first clue.

She called George, but before she could tell him anything he asked if he could call her back later because Rosaleen wasn’t feeling too good and in fact had been admitted to Lenox Hill the night before.

“Yes of course!” Kate said. “Is everything okay?”

“Her heart,” George said. “I don’t know. I have to go.” Kate hung up quickly, feeling immediately how paltry her response had been.

And then she saw it all so clearly, the whole trajectory of their lives, a twin flare of lights against the gunmetal winter sky: we’re born, we get sick, we die. Beginning, middle, end. She saw her life as if held aloft by her own hand, and in an instant it spun away from her. Where did she want it to land? She was in the middle. The exact middle. Peter, too. How could she have failed to notice that the beginning had come to an end?

She couldn’t wait until he got home. Instead, she got in her car and went to find him. In the parking lot of his new life, standing beside his new leased hatchback, she waited for him to walk out and see her and know that she knew. She had considered, very briefly, not calling him on it, not on his first day, not until he’d gotten a hang of his new job, but she quickly acknowledged that sort of discipline was beyond her.

“You want to see harsh,” she whispered into the frigid air, the doors of the school as forbidding as a prison. She felt wraith-thin, old.

She thought of Frankie and Molly, who would carry their pain—hers and Peter’s—for the rest of their lives if they weren’t careful.

And then the doors opened, and mobs of people spilled out, and he broke away from the crowd and walked toward her.

twenty-one

A
PPROACHING HER, HE WONDERED
how many thousands of times in his life he had looked out to find her waiting for him. How many times in his life had he turned to tell her something only to realize she already knew? That morning, coming out of the shower, her shoulders and back scalded red, she’d twisted her hair into a threadbare towel as the water ran down between her breasts. She said she was sorry she’d taken so long, she’d forgotten he’d need to get in there, too.

He cursed when the water ran tepid. He raced to rinse himself before it was ice cold.

“Sorry,” she said again when he got out. She was making their bed in her underwear, letting the cream she’d rubbed all over her legs and arms soak in a little before dressing. He’d never, not once growing up, seen his own mother in her underwear, but their kids saw Kate all the time. They wandered in and out asking for things, for help, as if she were fully dressed.

But now he was the one who was sorry. He’d been almost unbelievably nervous for his first day, considering he’d been a commanding officer and thought nothing of it, but this was different. Who could spot
a faker better than a class of eighteen teenage boys? When he began speaking to them, he’d looked out at eighteen sets of drooping eyelids, hanging heads. But he said what he’d practiced alone in the basement the night before, and one by one they perked up, cocked an ear to listen more closely. History isn’t about memorization, he told them. It’s not about studying, burying your head in a book. It’s in our daily lives; it’s now, living inside us. And he’d spend the rest of the year proving it.

He saw she was holding his wallet. He saw that she knew where he’d been the night before when he told her he’d gone to a meeting. This woman, the one who knew all the secrets of his life, was the one he’d lied to.

She handed the wallet to him in silence, her face pale under her thick winter hat.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again.” He meant it. But he also heard how cheap it sounded. All around them, car doors slammed.

Her eyes searched his. She’d come ready for a battle and now she didn’t know what to do.

“Was this the first time? Since coming home from New Jersey?”

“No.”

She hugged her stomach and dropped to a crouch.

“It was the third time. Just this week, Kate. I’ve been feeling so good I thought it would be okay to go to a bar like a normal person and just have two pints. Two. Just beer.”

It was true. He’d had two pints, paid his tab, and left. He’d felt so proud of himself. But then, the very next day, he’d been standing in the kitchen doing nothing when the need to do it again set in. He felt it across his scalp, through the crook of his jaw. He felt the burn in his throat, the warm heat filling out his chest. So he went, again. Just two, again. Then the next night. But on the third night, he stopped at a liquor store on the way home to buy a few of the little airplane bottles of vodka they kept by checkout. A cop habit: he kept his cash in a clip and didn’t notice he’d forgotten his wallet at the bar until that morning. He’d spent
all day wondering why he’d done it. He hadn’t enjoyed it, and it meant stepping right back into the same rip current he’d worked so hard to swim away from. Even before she showed up he’d decided to never do it again, he told her.

“How do I know that?” she asked, and he could see that the question wasn’t rhetorical. She wanted an answer with specifics, a plan of action. “How do you know that? Why should I believe you?”

When he couldn’t answer, she got into her car and drove off.

At dinner that night and for the next hundred nights, he tried in every way to let her know it was all over now, it was all better. The need hadn’t gone away—anytime he wanted to he could close his eyes and imagine holding the nimble little airplane bottles in his hand—but every day and night, he fought that need, and won. She did all the things she’d always done, except she didn’t look at him, and whenever he caught her eye she looked away. She asked the kids for stories and responded to them. She asked how his day was and made appropriate responses when he told her. When he went down to the basement or into the garage for any reason at all, she listened to everything he did, every move he made, and when he returned she went about her business as if she hadn’t been terrified. She cleaned and cooked and studied and rushed around looking for her keys. But now she did all of those things from within glass walls, and when he spoke to her, he felt as if he was pushing his words through a chink in the glass. He’d wobbled for a few days, yes. Yes, that night when she’d caught him downstairs in the dark, he’d lied. But he was not his father. He was not his mother. He was himself, and it was taking longer than he expected to decide what being himself meant. It was taking more than thirty-three days. She listened to everything he said, but for a long time she didn’t react to any of it.

“What can I do?” he asked her one night, grabbing her wrist to stop
her from following the kids up the stairs. Instantly, her eyes were full of tears and she yanked her wrist away.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He decided the only thing to do was be with her as much as he could. He started going up to bed at the same time as her again. On nights when she stayed up to study, he made tea and kept her company in the kitchen, reading the paper or preparing lessons. When she sat on the couch and tried to find something good on television, he sat next to her. She began looking at him again, sometimes just long enough to let him know that she knew exactly what he was doing. When he had to go through his boxes of old books to find something for his students, he brought the boxes upstairs and went through them in the kitchen.

“If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help you,” she said, and together they sat on the floor, legs splayed, and flipped through book after book.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.

The school year ended and the long, empty summer stretched out before them. He took classes and selected only the ones that met in the mornings. He learned how to pace and map out a course, how to best deal with wayward students. Some of what he learned wasn’t all that different from the advice he’d given to young cops. Kate had finished her thesis; all that was left was to defend it and then she’d have her master’s. Before, when he was at the precinct all the time, he hadn’t seen how much work she put into it. He hadn’t really understood how important it was to her.

And then came one summer night in early September, their wedding anniversary, just three days before the start of a new school year. They’d gotten married so young that he kept calculating and recalculating to make sure he hadn’t gotten it wrong.

It was a Saturday. After he came home from coaching cross-country practice, he helped Kate pack lunch and they spent the day at the town pool with the kids. But she seemed to be turning something over. Finally, when they got home, the damp towels stuffed into the washing machine, the kids in front of the TV because they’d earned it with all those hours in the sun, she asked, tentatively, if she should find a sitter so they could go out to celebrate. Fifteen years was no small thing. And they hadn’t gone out to dinner in ages.

“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” She picked up his hand and placed hers against it, palm to palm.