Learning to Stay (10 page)

I explain the case while more of our food arrives, then look to Brad, expecting him to ask me why parents would deny their child care—expecting him to engage me on where the moral, religious, and legal implications intersect, because that’s what he would have done before. But his mind, I can tell, is elsewhere. I’m not sure if he even heard what I said. He is scanning the room; I try to follow, but I can’t determine what he’s looking for. Gusts of wind catch the outer door and rattle it, and, by extension, my husband. Brad picks up his Jack and Coke and downs what’s left of it in one gulp. His skin looks cold and clammy, as though he’s coming down with something.

“Do you mind if we go?” he asks.

I am about to point out that our last dish, the spare ribs, hasn’t come yet, but there’s something about the way Brad asks the question that stops me short of wondering why. And by the time I squeak out, “Okay,” he has stood up and put his coat on.

It just takes time,
I tell myself.

“I’ll meet you in the car,” he says. And before I can answer, like a ghost he’s already gone. I pull out the emergency credit card to pay the outrageous tab and wait for the server to box the spare ribs.

It just takes time
, I tell myself.
It’s going to take some time.

The restaurant is situated at the corner of an L-shaped strip mall, and the sidewalk that runs alongside it is covered with a light, fluffy snow. It’s fallen faster than the business owners of the strip mall can shovel, and I hope that maybe Brad will see me and pull the car around. But none of the cars that I can see are even running; their headlights are all dark. So I pick my way down the sidewalk and then across the parking lot. I take choppy, deliberate steps, wary of falling in the cute but impractical heels I chose for this evening. Snow soaks my feet, wet and sharply cold, with every step, and I almost wish I hadn’t bothered with the shoes. With the dressing up. With any of it.

Flakes continue to make their way to the ground, floating in the beam of my headlights like illuminated dust particles. The drive home feels like traveling by sleigh through the woods. Everything is quiet and coated in white—the trees, the guardrails, even the road.

We are one of the only cars in sight for mile after mile. Brad is jumpy and nervous, and I am lost in thought, trying to design the perfect sentence to ask him what is wrong, to help me understand what went on there at the restaurant to make him bolt. Is it something I should even ask? I don’t understand what happened—what is happening to us. But Brad is like a human grenade, and I don’t want to pull that pin. I am distracted and the car drifts right. The tires hit the rumble strips and Brad, jolted from his own private thoughts, screams, “What the fuck was that?”

I jerk the wheel hard to the left, back onto the road proper, and tell him it was nothing, but he is shaking, almost convulsing. His face is red, and he is gripping the door handle so hard that I can see it straining to come lose.

“You’re going to get us killed,” he spits out.

“I—I’m sorry. I just zoned out for a second there and—”

“Shut the fuck up and do your job,” he says.

Brad has never talked like this to me before. Brad doesn’t talk like this. He sounds like a superior giving orders to a subordinate who just endangered an entire platoon, not me—his wife. My breath hitches in my chest.

And then he is yelling at me again—yelling and grabbing for the steering wheel.

“Get over! Fucking get over! It’s going to blow!”

I don’t know what he’s talking about, but my strength is no match for Brad’s as he jerks the wheel hard to the left, toward the median. I brake instinctively and feel the wheels lock and start to slide. Everything outside of the car is a blur of white. Things inside the car are in
sharp focus: Brad’s face hard and angry; my hands slipping from the steering wheel; time slowing down. I have time to think,
Who are you?
and also,
I don’t want to die like this
.

I close my eyes and brace myself—for the rumble of skidding off the road; the brief feeling of weightlessness as the grade of the median drops off below, and as we sail over it; the impact of hitting the opposite bank or the disorientation of rolling, wheels over roof. I wait. But it doesn’t come. When I open my eyes, we are at a standstill. The car is pointing in exactly the wrong direction on the divided highway, but we are not moving and we have not died.

Brad is still yelling: “Go! Go! Fucking go!” And he is pointing straight ahead.

He wants me to drive in the direction he’s gesturing—the wrong way up a four-lane highway. It seems any sort of movement will do. He’s alternately yelling at me and glancing behind us at a full black garbage bag that someone dropped carelessly on the shoulder of the road.

My hands are shaking so badly, I can hardly steer the car into a U-turn. A little ways up the road, the garbage bag out of sight, I exit and then pull over. I put my forehead on the steering wheel and a sob wells up from somewhere so deep inside that I barely recognize it as mine. And then there is another anguished sound doing a two-part harmony with my own. I look over and see Brad curled against the passenger-side door. He is saying, “I’m so sorry. Oh God, I’m sorry.”

My hands continue to shake and I can’t steady them. I wonder how I’ll be able to get us home. I look over at Brad. He is a ball of limbs—knees to forehead, elbows folded into hips, and his head tucked into the crook of his arms. “Make it stop,” he says. I don’t know what “it” is and I don’t know what he’s asking me to do, or if he’s even asking this of me.

I’m scared of what might happen if I touch Brad—if he’ll yell at
me, or swing out and hit me. But I’m more scared of what might happen if I don’t, and so I reach out and pull him to me. He resists at first, but soon his body slumps and his head leans heavily on my chest. I smooth his hair with my open palm. “I love you, Brad. You don’t know how much I love you,” I say. Then I shush him like a baby, rocking him the same way. “Shhh, now. It’s okay. It’s all right.”

But I’m not sure, right then, that it is.

This late at night, with the whole world fast asleep, I still startle when a car drives by and slows at our intersection, fearful that it will stop. Fearful that men in dress greens will step out and deliver the news that I lived in fear of receiving, every hour, every day, for an entire year. Even now.

He is here,
I tell myself.
He is here and he is safe.
But even with Brad sleeping in our bedroom instead of across an ocean in that sea of sand, those words hit the wrong pitch.

After this evening, adrenaline is still coursing through me, and after hours of staring at the ceiling, listening to Brad yell out in his dreams, I give up on sleep and sneak out to the living room with my laptop. The screen casts a ghostly glow reflected in the front window as I wait for the search engine to load.

Once it does, I type in the letters of the one word I know I shouldn’t—the one word I know I should leave well enough alone:
awariyah
.

The answer pops up. Loosely translated from Arabic, it means “damaged goods.” A lump the size of a lemon forms in my throat. My stomach constricts as if I’ve just been struck there. My hands start to shake. I have to clasp one with the other to steady them. I can’t take my eyes off that word, the translation of those letters. Is this how he thinks of himself now? Enough to have the label permanently affixed to his skin? I feel ill. And profoundly sad. And frightened.

I think of Brad sobbing against me tonight, my shirt wet with his tears and his yelling at me the other night, “March!” over the cereal and shards of glass. I think of that summer only a few years ago that might as well be three whole lifetimes over, when the air-conditioning in our apartment broke during a heat streak so relentless people said even the elephants over at Vilas Zoo would hardly venture outdoors. Brad and I walked to the Union to dip our feet in Lake Mendota and sipped directly from the sweating pitcher of Spotted Cow between us while a group of skinny white college guys with dreadlocks who clearly equated volume with passion tried to rap their way through what I assumed was supposed to be a musical set. After the beer garden closed and the band mercifully stopped, we trekked back to our apartment, stripped the couch of its cushions, and placed them under the only window that opened. The light of the moon fell through it and onto us, both trying to sleep in the sweltering heat. I tossed and turned and at one point, found myself nose to nose with Brad, his eyes wide-open.

“E., if I roll over every morning for the rest of my life and you’re not there, I couldn’t live with myself,” he whispered, out of nowhere. “I don’t want to live without you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Making this official,” he said.

And I remember, three days later, on a Wednesday afternoon, when I put on a white dress I had scavenged Aura Vintage for, and Brad wore a navy blue pin-striped suit. I didn’t have parents to invite, and I didn’t want Granna to feel she had to travel all the way from lower Michigan to be there, and Brad just had his brother and dad. During any given month he might or might not be talking to them because his dad could be a real son of a bitch, so it was only Brad and I and a judge at the Dane County Courthouse. Afterward, we splurged on lunch at the Ocean Grill and then walked to the Monona Terrace
where we asked the Tai Chi instructor who had just finished her afternoon session if she would take our picture. That’s the only photograph we have of our wedding day, and it now sits on a shelf across the room, but in it Brad’s teeth are as big and white as Chiclets, and the water of Lake Monona in the background is as steely blue as my eyes, and my eyes—those eyes of mine are dancing.

Around me, our house is still and empty, dark, and quiet. I can barely make out that photo. I don’t know whether I’d recognize us in it if I could.

I remember his words: “I don’t want to live without you.”

I look down at the illuminated computer screen, at the search results:
damaged goods
.

“I’m still here,” I say out loud—to the night, to my quivering lip and rolling stomach, to my heart hammering in my chest and the metallic taste of fear coating my mouth, to this man who has come back, pretending to be my husband, and to my Brad who’s still in there, somewhere. “I’m here and I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s a challenge, an edict, a flag with which I’m staking this ground.

As I roll into work at seven fifty-eight for an eight a.m. meeting, I vow, once again, to be more punctual. Being on time, after all, is a relatively low-level skill—one I should be able to master. One I should have mastered by this point in my life. And yet.

I get my jacket off, swap my boots for a pair of black heels I keep in the bottom drawer of my desk, and score a cup of sludge from the break room. Miraculously, I am only two minutes late for the meeting. Not so miraculously, I fail to pay attention to much of what is being discussed. My mind is churning through the events of yesterday, the night before, and all the days and weeks before that since Brad has been back, trying to sort out how much of his odd behavior is just plain old readjustment, and what might be cause for concern.

As it turns out, paying attention might have been a good idea.

“Elise, what are your thoughts on
Rowland
? What does Wisconsin case law say about its merits?” Susan asks me.

The normal me would have started rattling off pros and cons to taking the case and citing relevant or precedent-setting case law to support my final conclusion, because this is what I do best: I prepare more and know more than anyone else. I pride myself on being an
encyclopedic font of knowledge for the partners, and I think that, like my law school profs, it’s impossible for them not to appreciate some well-recited case law or an issue that’s been researched from every possible angle. Obsessive, comprehensive knowledge of minutiae is in every good attorney’s DNA. I learned early on to embrace that obsessiveness, to speak the language of my legal superiors.

But that was the old me. The new me, with a husband recently returned from war, has done the bare minimum in the past weeks and can’t seem to follow a single thought from start to finish. All I can do is stare, gape-mouthed, back at Susan. Her own mouth is drawn into a tight, thin line.

“It’s a slam dunk,” a voice to my right says. “There’s no way this is a wrongful death.”

The voice belongs to Zach Newsome. He is a senior associate, whereas I am a junior associate. There are six of us on the litigation team at Early, Janssen, and Bradenton, LLC. Normally I’d be irritated at him for inserting himself into my moment, but today I’m all sorts of grateful.

Two of the non-equity partners, Mark Abuzzi and Connor Lax, flank Susan. To their right sit Crane Early and Gordon Janssen, finishing out the Early and Janssen part of Early, Janssen, and Bradenton.

“I don’t know if I’d call it a slam dunk,” Crane Early says. “A little boy died on our client’s work site. They could get us on attractive nuisance.”

While Crane continues to play devil’s advocate, the others jump into the discussion like vultures and I look over at Zach and mouth,
Thank you
. He smiles and gives me a wink.