The Burning Side(72)

“I didn’t even want anything with him.”

Leo dumps the popcorn into a bowl and says, “I saw you, April. You weren’t trying to stop him.”

“You had already given up on us.”

“So it was my job to keep you from running into someone else’s arms?” He scoffs.

I rub my eyes and say, “No. But did we not have something worth fighting for?”

“You tell me. Because you didn’t fight for it. You just used another man to sabotage it.”

Well. We remember two different marriages. And if this is how he feels—if he’s so unwilling to entertain the possibility that anything else went wrong besides the minutes I spent with Cody—then he’s right. We couldn’t live like this.

“I signed the petition today,” I tell him. “We can start our settlement.”

He blinks, the popcorn bowl in his hand.

When he says nothing, I ask, “Did you turn off the stove?”

He looks over at it. “Yes.”

I pick up my copy of the book and stand. “I’ll go.”

But as I step forward to leave, I see Leo’s foot, bright red with blood.

I gasp and rush past him for some wet paper towels.

I kneel down quickly and press a paper towel to the gash on his toe, mumbling, “How did you not feel this?” I apply pressure until the bleeding stops, switching out the paper towel when the first one is soaked with blood.

Leo’s breath catches when I clean the crimson trails from the side of his foot and around the toes. “Sorry,” I say. “I know this hurts.”

“No.”

I look up at him, confused.

“No,” he repeats. “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

His gaze is intense. “You were right,” he says. “In my fear of being abandoned, I abandoned you.”

My hand is still on his foot, the paper towel pink with water and blood. I’ve wanted this acknowledgment for so long, but I assumed it would never come, because I’m a felon to my husband’s misdemeanor. And the question of forgiveness forces us to look at the wound.

Looking back down, I ask, “Do you have bandages?”

He stares at me. “Bathroom cabinet.”

I get them, return with antiseptic, and apply two bandages carefully across his cut.

“Thanks.” His voice is coarse.

I rise to throw away the trash, feeling his gaze follow me, and feeling the chasm between us—between forgiveness and trust, mercy and idiocy.

With some needed distance I ask, “Why then? Why when we were welcoming our second child and I needed you most?”

There is nothing left to lose. This is a postmortem.

Leo stares at his toe and says, “You didn’t need me, though. Not after Sadie’s birth, not during our isolation, and definitely not once Otto arrived. You needed space, you needed to do things yourself, you needed a new job and new friends, you needed me out of the way.”

I balk. “Of course I needed that sometimes. But it wasn’t either-or.”

He runs a hand down his face. “Well, that’s how it felt.”

We couldn’t see the fire from inside it, couldn’t articulate the subtle shifts of structure as they happened. And now we’re here with years of distance and disillusionment, colicky babies and unfaithfulness, divorce papers and wounds made on top of scars.

All of that, and I still don’t want to walk out of this trailer right now.

Leo nods toward Identity. “Should we just go ahead and finish it? We’re almost done. We could write to Jonathan together.” The intensity has not left his face.

So I sit back down, as does he, propping up his bandaged foot.

The bowl of popcorn is untouched on the counter.

I find the page where I left off, and I start to read again.

Leo watches me fumble through that same scene. The character’s skin is aflame. A hand eases below a waistband. Soft lips find their way to— “We get it already,” I mumble, skipping to the next scene, my ears warming. It was a mistake to keep reading.

It is also a mistake to glance up at Leo now, conflict across his face. I wonder what he would do if I went to him. Crawled on top of him and ran my hands up his chest, filled with need for him.

I look back down at the page and manage to churn out words.

Then, the turn at the end of Jonathan’s book is so well done that it pulls even us away from our little barbed lives. Our attention shifts as we trace the end of the prisoner’s journey, which lifts us out of this trailer and sets us down on hot pavement where a scarred inmate is standing, fresh out of Beaumont.

After decades of confinement, the prisoner goes straight to his mother’s house. It’s been years since he has seen grass, and it’s greener than he remembered. Color hurts him. He arrives home, saying Mama. Saying I’m sorry. He is a killer; he will always have been a killer. Safe with his mother at last, he grips his chest in the grief of freedom. She is old and crippled now, but she holds him in the way only a mother can. That night, he eats a home-cooked meal and vows to be a new man. He means it with all his heart. But come sunrise, he opens the front door to the barrel of a gun. There is a debt to settle, and the collectors don’t care about intentions. The man’s last lines are spoken from the other side: My greatest enemy was the man I once was, and forgiveness has something in common with vengeance—it remembers everything. Now the colors no longer hurt me, and the bullets cause no more pain. But freedom is different than I ever could have dreamed.