“This man is supposed to be one of the best, Maya. He’s why we sent her there. .”
“Well, he’s not, obviously. Obviously. .” She stops. She picks a few stray flakes of snow off her coat. “I’m trying to figure out how to love her again.” She almost whispers this.
Her husband’s voice gets firmer, quieter. He crosses his arms and wheels the chair in closer to the desk and shakes his head. “You think you can make it better? What she did?”
She sees the curve of Charles’s waist below his shirt.
He looks across the desk at her, then around at all her books. He opens the copy of Mrs. Dalloway and starts flipping through it. It’s the copy that he gave her, years ago, her birthday, twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth — she can’t believe she can’t remember — it was one of the first birthdays she had after they’d met. He’d forgotten. She’d been hurt, though she’d never thought herself a woman who cared much about birthdays. And then, late at night, he’d shown up at her apartment with this book, a book of which, he knew, she had probably five copies already, because, he’d said, he was certain she’d love it.
“You know what, Maya? The thing you hate about me? Whatever it is about me that’s so reprehensible to you. It’s something you created. We created it together. I had no choice but to become the stolid, cold one. There wasn’t any room for me to be anything else.”
That day: “Mommy”—Maya hadn’t heard Ellie’s voice in months. They’d communicated through short missive emails. Text messages, the punctuation of which hurt Maya’s eyes. For less than a second Maya’d thought, She’s coming back to me. My girl.
But then, quickly, violently, this thought dissolved. Ellie was in the car, Jeffrey’s, the Jeep they’d given her to use. She was pulled over on the side of the road. She was afraid to go back to their house. But no one was there and she had to get her things. She had no wallet. No clothes, besides the underwear she’d been wearing when it happened, the wet shirt and T-shirt lost somewhere. Underwear, thought Maya. Why underwear? And she knew, of course. She understood what she, herself, had done, sending her daughter there. Inflicting her daughter on that boy. Telling Annie bits, but not enough, not warning her properly of what Ellie might be capable of. They’d given her scrubs at the hospital, Ellie said. Maya had an image of her. The flat hot roads of Florida, scrub grass, lines of houses that all looked the same. Ellie small and crying, shoulders bare, dark hair matted to her head, going under, maybe not coming back up.
“El,” she said. But she couldn’t help her, wasn’t sure she could stand to hear what her daughter had done.
But she listened to the first part of the story. The whole of it unfurled over her like a cold wet stretch of cotton wool, and she thought briefly she was about to vomit in the sink. She looked out onto Stephen’s garden. It was fall and the leaves on the maple tree were just turning, half green still, with reds and yellows creeping in. She felt Stephen come up behind her, and Maya handed the phone to him without saying anything to either him or Ellie. She walked slowly to her office. She closed the door, and turned the old heavy bolt into its place. She sat up on the couch with her legs pulled in until she was as small as she thought she could be. She rocked slowly back and forth and tried not to breathe or think.
The lawyer Stephen called said to get her into rehab. They needed to show that she was sorry. That she was ill and working to be cured. She wasn’t reckless: she was sick. But Maya didn’t know, she wasn’t sure, what was the difference, and what was sick and what wasn’t, and what did calling her daughter sick do but make her something that needed to be fixed? And even if there was a sort of comfort in imagining that fixing her was an option, it also felt as if it was all too fundamentally a part of her to not have consequences beyond getting well. But they would do things; they would listen to the lawyers and they wouldn’t go to her. Maya wasn’t sure she could. Every time she thought of her daughter those first few weeks, she thought just after that of Annie. She thought of the little girl, sitting at her desk and looking small and sad. She thought of the woman who’d done her this great favor. The woman to whom she’d not told the whole truth about her girl.
The snow melts between Maya’s fingers. She lays her coat on her lap, places her palms on her thighs. She looks past him at the lines of books along each wall, the spines solid, darkly colored, mostly hardbacks. “I talked to Annie,” she says to him.
Stephen stiffens, sits up straight. “You can’t talk to her, Maya. The lawyer was very clear,” he says.
“I will absolutely talk to her if she’ll talk to me.”
Stephen shakes his head. “Maya, this isn’t negotiable.”
“She’s not contesting the release, Stephen. She’s not going to press charges. .”
Stephen’s silent a long time and Maya stands, not sure where she’s going. She walks over to the window, fixes her eyes on a single snowflake, and watches as it falls.
She feels his body tense, then slowly loosen.
“We can request another doctor,” he says. “If she’s released we’ll have to find her someone new up here.” He sets the book down on her desk and stands and walks toward the coat rack. “If she’s released.” He comes closer to her. He looks past her shoulder, his chin almost at the middle of her head. “If she’s released, we’ll find a way to help her here.”
He’s not terrible, her husband, Maya thinks. She burrows each of her hands beneath her thighs. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”
Outside, a couple walks by under an umbrella. It’s too small to share, but they try valiantly. Maya watches as one of the spokes gets caught in the boy’s hair. Maya thinks of all the different ways they’ve failed to help their daughter until now.
“You think you’ll always hate me?” asks her husband.
This is the last thing she expected. She keeps her eyes fixed on the snow. “Oh, Stephen. I don’t. You know I don’t.”
“But you’re angry.”
She thinks how to answer this honestly. She is angry, but it’s no longer so specific an anger as to be directed just at him.
“I’m angry at everything, maybe,” she says. “Mostly myself.”
She reaches over the desk and closes the books, shuffles the papers into a pile. He hates disorder. She’s never sure what she might uncover when she clears her desk.
“Maya.” He stands and steps closer to her. He holds her wrist, halts her rearranging. He stays hovered over her, and she can almost taste his breath.
She stiffens underneath his grasp, those nerves, the shoulders, then the clavicle. She can’t remember the last time that they touched. They’ve brushed past one another. They’ve accidentally fallen close to one another when Maya’s managed to sleep the night through in their bed, but this is only the second time she can recall, since before they sent Ellie down to Florida, when her husband’s purposefully reached for her.
“You’re so thin,” he says. His voice is soft now, quiet; the taste of him so close to her is the same as it was twenty years before.
She could have been better for him. She has, also, not reached for him in all these months. She’s thought of it. Sometimes the impulse almost blinds her, the need to touch him, grab hold of his face, but she is a master of tempering these impulses. The more she’s felt the need to touch some part of him, the farther she has stayed away.
“Why don’t we get something to eat?” he says. He lets go of her, steps back. Maya almost asks him to stay put.
She’s still holding her coat and slips it on and buttons it. Stephen takes his from the rack and does the same. The snow’s still falling on the cobbled concrete, then through the gates and, cars speeding past, honking, wipers running, on Broadway, so close to one another as they walk that Maya’s shoulder almost touches Stephen’s upper arm.