Part Four: The Hours Between
Daniel left ten minutes later.
He said something at the door — something quiet and useless, some version of I’m sorry — and Sarah nodded without hearing it and closed the door behind him and stood in the hallway with her back against the wood and her eyes on the ceiling for a very long time.
Then she walked to Emma’s door.
She raised her hand to knock.
She stood there with her knuckles an inch from the wood.
She couldn’t do it.
She went to the kitchen instead and sat at the table and stared at the two coffee mugs still on the counter. She got up and washed them both. She dried them. She put them away in the cabinet with the handles facing outward, the way Thomas liked them.
Then she sat back down and pressed her hands flat on the table and tried to think.
But thinking required a future she could picture, and every version she could imagine now had a fracture running through the middle of it. The fracture was ten years old and sitting in her room down the hall with her backpack probably still on her shoulders, because Emma always forgot to take it off — and the thought of that, the image of her daughter sitting on her bed still wearing her backpack because she was too stunned to remember the ordinary mechanics of being home, broke something in Sarah so completely that she put her head down on the table and wept.
She wept for a long time.
She wept for Emma, for Thomas, for the thirteen years of Tuesday dentist appointments and Sunday morning phone calls and the broken umbrella at the bus stop. She wept for herself, which she knew she had no right to do, and did anyway.
When she lifted her head, the kitchen was darker.
Nearly five o’clock.
Thomas would be home in two hours.
She knocked on Emma’s door at five-fifteen.
“Em?”
Silence. Then: “What.”
Not what, exactly. Not a question. Just the word, flat and careful.
“Can I come in?”
A pause.
“Okay.”
Emma was sitting on her bed. The backpack was on the floor by the door, finally removed. She was holding a book open in her lap but she was not reading it. She was staring at the page the way people stare at a wall. Her shoes were still on.
Sarah sat on the edge of the bed.
She had rehearsed something in the kitchen. Some version of there are things that are complicated between grown-ups and this has nothing to do with how much we love you. All the phrases she had heard in films and read in parenting articles about honest conversations. Careful phrases, protective phrases, phrases designed to build a small soft barrier between a child and the truth.
She looked at Emma’s face and every one of them dissolved.
Her daughter was ten years old. She was sitting on her bed with her shoes on and a book she wasn’t reading and an expression that belonged on someone much older. And Sarah understood, in the way that mothers understand things below the level of language, that Emma did not need careful phrases.
She needed her mother to be honest.
She needed, possibly for the first time, to see her mother as a person.
“Emma,” she said.
“Is Daddy going to leave?” Emma said.
Not who was that man. Not what were you doing. Just the straight line, the only line, from what she had seen to what she feared most.
Sarah’s throat tightened.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Emma nodded, once, slowly. As if she had expected that answer. As if she had already understood that the honest answer was worse than a lie but better than nothing.
“Will you tell him?” Emma asked.
Sarah looked at her hands in her lap. “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to tell him.”
Emma looked at the page of her unread book for a moment. Then she said, very quietly: “He tied my shoes this morning.”
Sarah closed her eyes.
“I know,” she said.
“He always does it too tight,” Emma said. “But I never tell him because he likes to think he does it perfectly.”
Sarah said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Emma turned the page of her book, though she wasn’t reading it. “Okay,” she said finally. Just that. Okay. The word of someone who has received news they cannot change and is deciding, in real time, to survive it.
Sarah reached over and placed her hand over Emma’s.
Emma did not pull away.
They sat like that, the two of them, in the quiet afternoon bedroom, while the clock moved toward seven and the sound of a key in the front door drew slowly, inevitably closer.
