The Things We Cannot Say(61)

I stand so fast and so hard that I tip the chair over and it crashes to the tiles. The sound is loud and it echoes all around us. Wade falls silent, but his determination to hold the line is evident. This argument is overdue. Maybe by weeks, maybe by years. Apparently we’ve both been looking for a reason to dump our cards on the table, and that time has now arrived.

I don’t want to fight with him. I don’t want to hurt him. But I have to make him understand, and the only way I can do that is to be honest.

“You couldn’t cope, Wade,” I blurt. He raises his eyebrows at me.

“Are you kidding me? I’m responsible for three hundred people at work, Alice. I can deal with our kids for a few days. Christ, it would be a fucking holiday.”

There’s an odd sensation within my chest—the splintering and shattering of something precious that had been straining under pressure for years. Truths unspoken are falling out all over the place today, and it turns out there is a straw that’s just too heavy for this old camel to carry.

I spin on my heel and walk toward the family room. I slam the door behind me, and then I return to my armchair. I down the last of my wine in one gulp, then I reach for the laptop. I open the photo I snapped of Babcia’s notes, and I start rapid-fire Googling. It takes about two minutes to confirm some of the entries are addresses—and Google maps them easily, so I take that as some kind of cosmic confirmation and it amplifies my determination to help her. Next, I search for the names. I get a lot of pages—mostly social media pages for young people with the same arrangement of names, but then I find a Wikipedia page for Henry Adamcwiz.

Henry Adamcwiz (1890-1944) was an American photographer known for his coverage of Nazi-occupied countries during World War II. He was part of an early but unsuccessful effort to alert American and British governments about increasing Nazi brutality toward the Polish Jewish population, working with the Zegota Council to arrange for couriers to smuggle film and documentation out of occupied Poland. He was executed by Nazi forces during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944...
I Google frantically—looking at maps and Google Translate and the calendar. I learn that I can fly into Krakow and be at Babcia’s childhood town within an hour. I need a few days to prepare, and then I need to be back within a week—so I decide to stay for four nights. Last-minute flights are expensive—obscenely so—and at last, that gives me pause. I’m being impulsive, and despite what my mother sometimes implies, I don’t do impulsive. The things she sees as impulsive in my history reflect my lack of courage, not impulsiveness—all of the times when I didn’t dare warn her in advance that I wanted so desperately to take a different path to the one she’d chosen for me.

I can deal with our kids for a few days. Christ, it would be a fucking holiday.

The door flies open and Wade storms in after me.

“What are you doing?” he asks, staring at the computer on my lap.

I look up at him calmly.

“You can handle our kids for a few days, remember? It will be a holiday.”

“Alice. Come on, I can’t take time off quickly. You know that,” he says impatiently. Patronizing me. Condescending. As if I am a silly child, instead of the woman who holds his entire world together—which is exactly what I am.

“I’ll tell Babcia not to die until it suits your work schedule,” I say bitterly, and then I select the tickets.

“Alice...what are you doing?” I hear the sudden anxiety in Wade’s tone. He can’t see the screen but he can see the expression on my face, and something there is making him very nervous. Well, so it should.

I let the browser prefill the credit card and then before I lose courage, I jab my finger against the mouse to activate the purchase button.

Please do not press the back button on your browser. This may take up to a minute.

For a split second, I feel triumph, but then it hits me what I’ve done, and I feel my heart rate zoom all the way up until adrenaline floods my system and I can barely force myself to breathe. I look up at Wade in a panic, and for the first time, he panics too.

“Ally...” he says, then he rushes around the coffee table to stare down at the laptop screen. “Honey...what did you do?”

I do the sensible thing then and I think about how much money I just wasted on flights and how impossible it all is, and I burst into tears. Wade takes the laptop from me just as it gives the ding to indicate the purchase has been successful.

He’s silent as he reads the payment receipt that’s now loaded on my screen. I glance up at him, and I see the tightening in his jaw and the way his nostrils flare. He doesn’t look at me, not for the longest time.

“Alice—” he finally starts to say, but I hold up my hand toward him abruptly.

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t. Just...don’t.”

“I’ll give you some time to cool off,” he sighs, and he drops the laptop onto the lounge without further ceremony. It bounces against the leather, then comes to a stop near the edge. Neither one of us reaches for it, like we’re scared to touch it in case it poisons us. Wade turns and walks toward the door, but just before he leaves the room he throws a final missive over his shoulder. “But we need to talk about this tonight.”



CHAPTER 19

Alice


Wade retreats to his study, but when I walk past the closed door, I can hear the rhythmic clicking of the keys on his electronic keyboard. When he is stressed or pondering some complex problem, he does one of two things: he runs miles and miles, or he puts his headphones on and he sits at the keyboard and he tries to learn impossibly difficult piano concertos—a habit that’s lingered from his childhood when his mother correctly predicted that a boy so enamored with math would enjoy the challenge and symmetry of musicianship. In the weeks after Eddie’s diagnosis, Wade worked on Rachmaninoff’s Third until he gave himself a nasty case of Repetitive Strain Injury in both hands. He says distracting the conscious part of his brain with some other kind of work helps him to process things.