All Adults Here(79)

“No,” Porter said. “I mean, about us. Do you want to tell her about us? What do you think she knows? She must know something, right? We never talked about it. But she’s not a moron, obviously she must have known something was going on. And I feel shitty lying about it, too, it’s not just you.” The baby kicked, as if in solidarity.

“Huh,” Jeremy said. He sat down on the couch, forcing Porter’s legs in the crack at the back of the foldout. “That is not what I was talking about.” He put his hands on her knees. “I meant about Sidney and your niece. I told her that I would talk to you and get some reassurance that she wouldn’t do it again, and we wouldn’t press charges or whatever, you know, not like anything big really happened, just that there could be a formal apology and then we’d all move on. I think that’s what Kristen was thinking.” He leaned back, using her legs as a human lumbar support pillow. “What do you think?”

“Well,” Porter said. “I think that Cecelia and Sidney and the school can probably work out whatever apologies need to be made. No one should get hit, obviously, and no one should say something that would make someone else hit them. I don’t know what Sidney said, for the record. Cecelia is actually very discreet.” She grunted a little, trying to maneuver her legs from out behind Jeremy’s back, and swung them heavily back down to the floor. “What about the rest?”

Jeremy pulled on his chin. “The rest?”

“Yeah. Like us. I don’t want to feel like Molly Ringwald here, asking you about prom, but what’s the deal?” Whenever she’d had the conversation in her head, Jeremy was smiling. He was crawling across the floor to her, he was holding a ring, he was filling a bathtub with rose petals. That was dumb, of course, and Porter didn’t want a grand gesture anyway. She just wanted an audible confirmation, like a flight attendant talking to the people sitting in the exit row.

“Come on, Port,” Jeremy said, his head zigzagging like a snake. “You know it’s more complicated than that. You know I love you—I have always loved you. Do I love you more than I love my wife? Maybe. Yeah, shit, you know what? I do. I fucking do. Being with you makes me feel like I’m sixteen years old, and totally invincible, like I’m fucking Superman. The way you look at me, Porter? When you look at me, I don’t feel like a middle-aged loser who sticks his finger up dog butts all day, who has to put cats to sleep just like his father did, you know? I feel like a kid who is going to screw his brains out all night long and maybe all day the next day too. Do you know how often I sleep with my wife? Never. I never, ever sleep with my wife. Maybe on my birthday, or our anniversary, if she doesn’t have her period. She wouldn’t care if my dick fell off when I was taking a shit and I flushed it away by accident.” He leaned over and embraced her. “You mean everything to me. You are amazing, and I love you. Is that confirmation? I want to figure this out. Do you know how happy it would make me to come home every day and have you there?”

Porter wrapped her arms around him. Jeremy was warm and smelled like sweat. She thought she’d wanted to hear it, but she hadn’t expected it to sound so sad. When Astrid had cleared her throat and told the noisy kitchen about Birdie, her face had been as full of joy as her face could be without breaking. She was nervous but happy, Porter had seen it. But now that Jeremy had said what she’d asked him to, more or less, Porter felt like she needed to go home and take a shower, like she’d eaten an entire cake, and it would all have to come out, one way or another. “I have to go,” Porter said. “We both have to go.”



* * *



—

It was almost eleven when Porter got home. Her porch was dark, because she’d been gone all day and hadn’t left the light on. She pulled the car in and kept her keys in her hand. The front door was sticky, as usual, and she kicked the bottom with the toe of her shoe, sending the wooden door skidding open. Every old building in Clapham was like that, rickety and full of eccentricities. Porter reached for the light switch with muscle memory, flipped the whole row up, flooding the house with yellow light. There were a dozen pink balloons floating in her living room. She screamed and then clapped her own hand over her mouth.

“Hello?” Porter said, to the balloons, to the otherwise seemingly empty room. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing a murderer would do, but she kept her keys in her fist, just in case.

A groan came from the direction of the sofa. There, underneath a blanket, was her little brother, Nicky. “Surprise,” he murmured, head still buried deep in her pillow. “Where have you been? I brought dinner. And balloons. It’s not easy to get balloons on a train, I want you to know.”

Porter screamed again, more happily this time, and then climbed on top of her brother, sitting on his rib cage. Personal space did not exist for siblings. When Porter was angry with her mother, there was always this: Astrid had given her two brothers, including one Porter actually liked. She wasn’t alone. “My baby,” she said, bouncing a bit, until Nicky cried uncle.

“I’m a total idiot,” Porter said. “I can’t even tell you. I mean, I can tell you, but you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, you’d believe it.” She shook her head.

“Me too,” Nicky said. “I’m an idiot because I shipped Cece up here because I was scared of some teenage girls and the internet. Why are you an idiot?”