Sweet Water(41)

Martin was the more convenient choice for me at the time. But I’m now coming to realize that convenient didn’t mean better and that I made a bad choice when I told him yes. Does he know I’m thinking that now?

“Don’t go anywhere, Sarah,” he says.

I don’t answer him, and when Martin leaves through the front door, it slams shut, his version of the truth punching me in the gut. There’s no way I can go to my father’s now. Martin knows I don’t have it in me to lie to him—or tell him the truth.

He said just the right thing to keep me locked here, a prisoner in my own home. I can’t go cry to my dad when I’m just as much at fault as Martin. My father will make me own my mistakes, and I can’t do that without putting Finn at risk. I promised my father I wouldn’t become like the awful rich people who used their money to push others around, and here I am screwing over a poor single mother, and it’s a terrible feeling. I’m the person I never wanted to become, and I can’t even talk to my father about it.

Martin is able to run to his daddy and get counsel while I’m stuck here, alone, to face my demons. I throw my keys on the kitchen island. My throat is sore from arguing, and I need a glass of water.

A glass of sweet water.

When my hand touches the faucet, I get a flash of Yazmin’s dead body, and the wave of guilt hits me like a truck.

My body rocks as I grip the sink. The waves come on so suddenly.

My fingertips graze the windowsill in the kitchen, the vertices strong and encased in metal, the protective windows thatched in a crisscross pattern with the same girding material. I reach for a heavy crystal glass in the cabinet. Everything is so weighty in this house; it feels unnecessary. “What now?” I ask Stonehenge.

When I talk to the house, every once in a while, I get an answer. I stare out the window to the side yard, where the leaves on the tree are depleting fast.

No matter how much sweet water the trees absorb, it’s still time for their foliage to wither and die. To shed all that’s grown there the year before.

Everything has its season.

Death and rebirth. This is a different season in our marriage than we’ve experienced in the past, cold and barren of love. Maybe there’ll be a time for rebirth, but right now it doesn’t feel like it. My attention is drawn to the bench under the pergola—Joshua’s old stage, where he used to play his music. There’s a flash of something red that catches my eye. “What have you got for me?” I ask the house, wiping away a tear.

I slink out and sit on the bench framed by pillars. I’m like a grain of sand in an hourglass, so small and insignificant, I feel like I could disappear at any moment and no one would notice.

A single rose lies on the thick cement bench, brilliant red and full like the ones that used to grow there on the wooden trellis. I wonder if my mother has heard my pleas in Heaven and sent me a gift to ease my soul, because this rose can’t have grown here.

We assumed the roses would still grow after the tiny outdoor renovation we did, but the bushes died after we tore out the foundation, and I was upset that we’d somehow disrupted the rooting of the old bushes.

Joshua hadn’t liked much about his life here, but he had liked the outside area of his house most. It’s where he played his music. There’s still a loose stone on the steps in the far-right corner that I wouldn’t let Martin remove. The deep hole beneath it is where Josh used to hide his weed.

Even though his parents bought the house with the ceiling fit for acoustics in mind, they later decided they didn’t want to hear the noise, which always made me sad.

I don’t know where the rose came from, certainly not Martin.

A gift from the house, perhaps.

In any case, I pick it up and inhale the petals’ scent and let the thorn prick my finger. “Thank you,” I tell it. “But I’ve done a terrible thing.” And I deserve to bleed.

I wipe the blood on my jeans and shudder, these dark thoughts a part of me now. There is no turning back.

I’m not sure how long I sit out there, but when Martin’s headlights reappear, it’s dark and I’m chilled, and we have so much to talk about. Finn’s legal options for one. And our consequences. How we’re going to handle speaking to Finn about what we’ve done, how it’s morally wrong—he needs to understand. This is not how we handle situations.

I carry the rose with me and go back inside. Martin is in his office, doors shut. I don’t knock; I just yank open the french doors and poke my head inside.

“Damn it!” Martin jerks up so hard, his knee accidentally jams a ledger in between the desk and the drawer. He yelps like an injured cat. “You scared me. Did you call your dad?”

He doesn’t look at me when he asks the question. He wouldn’t dare.

“No,” I answer. He doesn’t care about anything else—where I was when he got home, why I’ve been crying. Only that I didn’t tell anyone about what we did.

I decide that the questions I have for him don’t matter because he won’t include me in the decisions surrounding them anyway. Decisions that affect our son’s future. “I’ll leave you to work.” I close his office doors and walk to the stairs, a ghost of the woman I used to be.

At the base of the stairwell, I put out the candles on the console table that Martin lit when he got home. It’s an almost nightly ritual, especially in the fall. Martin prefers his home to smell pleasant when he walks through the doors, so he lit the candles when he arrived to a stale house.