Other People's Houses(58)
Anne was still thinking of the kitten and scrambled to catch up. “I can’t baby. Daddy and I aren’t friends right now, and . . .”
“You told me it’s not nice to stay mad when someone said sorry already. You told me that when Liesl at school melted my Easter chicken and I was so angry and she was crying, remember? I remember that.”
Anne remembered. “Yes, that’s right, it’s better to forgive someone when they . . .”
“And you said sorry, right? You said sorry, didn’t you?” Surely her mother wouldn’t forget this very basic first step.
Anne nodded. Mindlessly she noticed Kate’s bedroom was as tidy as the kitchen. He’d had the cleaners in. It wasn’t her bad influence; it was his readiness to throw money at a problem.
“Well then, Daddy should let you come home and be friends again.” Kate started to squirm off Anne’s lap. “I’ll go tell him, maybe he didn’t hear you.”
Anne held her hand. “He heard me, sweetheart, but he’s just still really mad. I did a bad thing, and it might take more than sorry.”
Kate frowned at her. “There is no more than sorry.”
Anne swallowed. “Do you remember when I told you that when you say mean things it makes little holes in people, do you remember that?” She’d read this analogy on Facebook or something, about nails in wood or some such thing, some deep thing that made her nod thoughtfully and feel a tiny pain in her heart. “And that when you say sorry it’s like covering those holes. It helps, but it doesn’t make the holes go away forever, remember?”
“Yes.”
“You broke a plate.” Theo’s voice came from the doorway. Anne looked up, and Kate turned to face her brother.
“I did?” Anne didn’t remember that. You’d think she’d remember that.
Theo nodded. “Kate wasn’t there. It was after Ollie and I got into a fight at school, and you had to come in and see Mrs. Garcia, remember?”
It came back to her.
“You were super mad, and you took a plate out of the cupboard and you said that when I said hurtful things to someone it was like breaking a plate, and then you smacked the plate on the counter and it broke in two and then you put both pieces together and said, ‘Look, see, it’s fixed but there’s still a crack. There will always be a crack,’ you said.”
Anne frowned. Shit. When she’d performed this magnificently meaningful symbolic piece of parenting she hadn’t considered this outcome.
“But the plate still worked, right?” Kate looked anxious. “Even if you and Daddy are cracked you can still be together, right?” She looked at her older brother, whose face was so still it might have been porcelain itself. “They can be together again, if she says sorry and he says thank you and lets her come back, right?” Her brother shrugged at her, ten so much more resigned to ambiguity than six.
“I did say sorry, honey, but Daddy’s still really angry, and he needs some time apart. Like when you get mad and you want to be alone in your room for a while to calm down, right?”
Kate was visibly struggling, and Anne suddenly wondered if all these allegories and examples and parallels were helping her understand, or if they were just things Anne could say in the face of inexplicable pain. If the people of Pompeii had built a baking soda and vinegar model of a volcano as schoolchildren would that have made their sudden, disastrous demise more . . . relatable? Would they have been like, Oh, hey, we’ve seen this before, we know how this is working. Yes, we’re all about to die in an instant of suffocating heat that cooks our lungs and roasts our beating hearts in our chests, but we get how it works, so, you know, that’s something. We know how, even if we are still blaming the gods for why. Kate didn’t look like she was understanding any of it, and her expression said her heart was running the show because, let’s face it, her brain was letting things go to serious shit around here.
The little girl suddenly left the room. As Theo and Anne looked at each other, she realized the expression on her son’s face was pity.
Down the hall, Kate was tearful but optimistic. “Mommy says she’s sorry, Daddy, she’s really sorry OK?”
Anne got to her feet. She reached her own bedroom in time to hear Charlie say, “I know she is, babycakes, but I think it’s too late for that.”
Kate stamped her foot. “It’s never too late for sorry, you told me that last week when you found the pudding.”
“That was different.”
“No. Mommy did something bad, she didn’t tell you, just like me and the pudding, and then when you found out, she said sorry. And I helped you clean it up, didn’t I? Even though it was all sticky, I helped you, and I said sorry and you said it was OK.” She started to cry. “So why is it too late for Mommy to say sorry?”
“Mommy did more than make a mess, honey. It was a grown-up thing, it doesn’t matter what she did, it’s done and it can’t be cleaned up.” Charlie looked up at his wife standing in their bedroom doorway and all he wanted to say was: Please come home and let’s never, never talk about this again. Let’s pretend it never happened; let’s rip the pages out of the fucking calendar and move to another state and start over. But that couldn’t work because the knowledge would linger under his skin like a keloid and he’d rub it absentmindedly during every silence that fell in their marriage from that moment on.