The Things We Cannot Say(62)

I’ve long suspected that Wade suffers from the exact same challenge we have with Callie—his brain runs too fast, and unless he occupies himself with something really intense, he tends to work himself into knots.

And that’s kind of the opposite to my coping mechanism, because I’m upset too, so I run a bath. Tonight, I take the time to light several of the candles—the rose-scented ones—because they remind me of Babcia’s beautiful rose garden at her old house. I dump the whole bottle of bubble mixture into the water, and the foamy bubbles on top rise until they spill over onto the flat edge of the tiles around the bath, but I don’t even care. I sink into the water, and I cry some more because I’m completely confused about what to do next.

This should be simple. I should call the airline and cancel the tickets.

I’m just not sure that’s what I actually want to do. There’s a battle raging inside me; exactly 50 percent of me is cheering and desperate to go on this crazy quest, but the rest of me is every bit as desperate to stay home.

I stay in the bath far too long. The bubbles slowly pop. The water cools. I refill the tub with hot water several times and my skin wrinkles, but I still don’t move. When the door opens quietly, it’s just after midnight, and I’m still sitting here in the bath, still crying on and off. The candles have burned down, and even though they are long finished now, their scent and the smell of the wax linger too heavily, leaving a sickly sweet smell in the air. Wade enters the room gently, as if he’s expecting me to be asleep and he’s afraid to wake me, but then he knocks the toilet lid down and he sits heavily upon it.

“You really want to do this,” he says. It’s a statement not a question, but I seriously wish this were that simple. I look up at him through bleary eyes.

“I don’t know. I know it’s too much to ask. I know it’s going to be too hard for the family but... I feel like I should do it.”

“Ally,” Wade sighs. “I don’t know how we got here. Do you?”

I hate it when I can’t keep up with him in a conversation, and this one has only just started, but I already have no idea what he’s talking about. I scan around the bathroom, then back to him blankly.

“Here?”

“Remember back at the beginning? We talked about everything. Once upon a time you’d call me because you read an article in a newspaper that interested you or you saw something unusual on your way home from the store—and I loved that about you...” A desperate sadness creeps into his expression, and he exhales, then adds, “I loved that about us. Now you book tickets to Europe without telling me. We live in the same house, but I have no clue what’s going on inside your head. Are you even happy? Do you...” His voice breaks, and he stops for a moment before he asks me in a whisper, “Alice, do you still love me?”

There’s a moment of painful silence. We stare at each other—close enough almost to touch, despite the ocean of distance between us.

“Eddie,” I say. That single word is rough with years of withheld emotion. Wade swallows and looks away, down to the gleaming white tiles on the floor. “Eddie changed everything.”

Just as there’s a curtain of chaos between Eddie and the world, there’s now a curtain of chaos between Wade and I, because my world revolves around my son, and my husband hasn’t found a way to connect with him at all. I hate that even on the best of days, but right now as I stare up at Wade, I wonder for the very first time if he hates it too. It’s been easy to assume that Wade’s failure to connect with Eddie was a purposeful form of sulking—the world hasn’t given him the son he wants, so he refuses to acknowledge the son he has. If I force my emotions aside and make myself be completely rational here—that kind of behavior is just not in Wade’s nature. It’s more comforting to tell myself that Wade is at fault here, because the alternative is that Wade doesn’t know how to connect with Eddie—or that he’s too scared to try.

“I found a tour guide,” Wade says, in another abrupt change of subject that leaves me feeling lost all over again. I wave vaguely toward the towels and he hands me one, then watches silently as I step out of the bath. Once the towel is wrapped tightly around me, I glance at him again.

“A guide who can visit those places for Babcia?”

It makes perfect sense. We can cancel the insanely expensive airline tickets, and pay someone who is already in the country to go take some photos for Babcia. I can’t quite understand why I feel so disappointed at the solution Wade has found, given it actually solves every single one of my problems.

“No.” He frowns, then he gives me that haughty look, the one I hate so much—the one he gets sometimes when he’s busy being brilliant and I’m just not keeping up. “Someone who can take you to those places, Ally. She’s fluent in English and Polish, she has a master’s degree in modern history and she’s a licensed tour guide. Her name is Zofia. I’ve just been on the phone with her, and she sounds perfect. She does family history stuff all the time—she said family and war history tours make up most of her business, actually. But she’s normally booked out months in advance and she’s only free because she had a cancellation next week, so I booked her on the spot. She’ll take you to the town and help you see the things Babcia wants to see. She said the three days you’ve booked should be plenty of time to visit the town and take a good look around—it’s a pretty small place.”