Sweet Water(91)

It makes my belly tense and curdle. I place my silverware on my plate, unable to take another bite.

Everyone is clearly ready to move on from this tragedy except me. No one, including Martin, has said one more word about Yazmin’s journal, but decoding it is important. It’s more than just blind yearning for truth and justice; it’s the warning festering inside me that we should not move on without finding out why this happened. It started last night, when we discovered the difference in the drug screens, and it has only grown, this feeling I can’t shake that something much worse is on its way.

“Sarah, can you help me clean up in the kitchen?” Martin asks.

My dad gives me a stern look, as if to say, “Go on.”

I follow Martin into the kitchen, more for my father than for him.

“Thanks for coming.” He’s clearing the plates, his formality of thanking me reminding me of how he speaks to his parents, and if I wasn’t completely turned off by him before, we’re there now.

I take Martin’s glasses off his face and clean them on my sweater, because they’re driving me nuts.

“Oh, thanks, dear.” He’s squinting now.

“Don’t call me that,” I say.

Martin sighs and then slides behind me and places his hands over mine. “What’s the matter, Sarah? Did you lose your glass slipper?” Is he kidding me? “We’re okay now,” he adds for good measure.

“We are far from okay, Martin.” I drop the dishrag in the sink, not because his words are disgusting but because he has absolutely no remorse for what he’s done. I wipe my hands on my jeans to get the water off, but I can never get them clean.

I’ll never wash her off.

She’s always with me. He doesn’t feel that way. He washed himself clean of them both—Tush and Yazmin—as soon as the police closed their files.

“Look, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about not telling you about Tush. We were barely dating when it happened, and I knew it would drive you away if you found out. My father orchestrated the whole thing. I was just a kid, Sarah.”

“What about the part where your father collaborated with the dean to threaten my father’s job and my tuition?” I’m still not facing him, and I haven’t really been able to look him square in the eye all night. He’s damaged. We’re all so damaged. And it’s not the kind of damage that can be fixed. It’s the first time I’m seeing the true extent of it, feeling it, the way his touch truly revolts me, and it’s beyond repair at this point.

“That wasn’t my doing,” Martin defends.

“Innocent bystander, huh?” Just like me. I can see it now, how it could happen. The tragedy wasn’t that it happened when he was a teenager and he said nothing. It was that it happened again when he was an adult—and he said nothing.

“Look, so much has happened in a few days. I want to work on it. Don’t let one bad week end a twenty-year marriage.” His words make me pause, but what does it mean when a wife can’t physically stand to look at her husband? Can’t stomach his touch? Fled into the arms of another man just to escape his?

“I don’t think you understand the problem, Martin. We can’t just pretend this didn’t happen,” I whisper.

“Don’t give up on us, Sarah. We’re your family.”

I clench my eyes shut, because now he’s using the kids, and yes, tonight was nice sitting around the table eating dinner with them, and I wish to coparent in a way that it could happen again in the future, but I know that dream is a stretch at best.

“I’ll do anything to make it better,” Martin says, his voice growing needy at my silence.

“Okay. Then go to the police station and tell them what really happened with Finn’s girlfriend, Martin. Because we can’t just leave it like this. And I can’t do it myself. Alton will bury me or your parents will destroy me, somehow, for giving us up, but you can do it.”

“They’ll book him because we didn’t offer the information sooner. The case is closed, and if we go down there now, they’ll assume Finn had something to do with it. He can’t even defend himself because he doesn’t remember. Do you know why he doesn’t remember, Sarah?”

I know what’s coming, so I just place the last dish away and don’t answer.

“Because she was trying to hurt Finn. Going to the police is not the right move for our family,” he says definitively.

“You don’t know that for certain; you just want it to be the truth. There’s what happened and there’s what you think happened.”

“Then instead of turning away from me, let’s figure this out. Let’s be a team.”

“There’s a novel concept, three days too late. How can I be your teammate when you’ve been ordering me around like an indentured servant? Telling me where I can go, who I can talk to, what to say to them, taking my phone? Taking Finn’s phone. I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

I give him a shove to the chest. He’s too close to me. The expression on his face is the saddest I’ve ever seen, and I think he might cry.

“Give us a chance to find our way back. Come to the gala with me tonight,” he pleads. “We need a night out together, to talk, alone,” he whispers, and I realize our voices travel in this old house and that maybe they can hear us in the dining room.