What I Shouldn’t Want

Chapter 2

CALEB’S POV

She did it fast, jabbing the screen with her thumb like it had burned her, and then she stood there holding the phone against her chest with both hands. The kitchen went quiet again. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, the water kept slapping the pilings like nothing had happened.

I wanted to say something. Anything. Every word I came up with was either a lie or too true to say.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't."

"I didn't mean to call it. I don't even know how I..." She stopped and pressed her lips together. Her eyes were red and her hair was wrecked from my hands, and she was wearing her shirt inside out. I didn't tell her. It felt like the one thing in the room I could leave alone.

"It's okay," I said.

"It's not."

"No," I said. "It's not."

She laughed, one short breath through her nose, and wiped her face with her wrist. Then she walked past me to the sink and ran the water and stood there with her back to me. I watched her shoulders. They were shaking, but she was trying hard not to let me hear it.

I picked my jeans up off the floor and put them on. My hands didn't feel like mine. I found my belt under the table, and when I bent down the room tilted, and I held onto the chair until it passed. I was drunk, but not as drunk as I'd have liked to be. I remembered every second. I was going to remember every second for the rest of my life.

"You should go to bed," I said. "I'll clean this up."

"I can do it."

"Nora. Go to bed."

She turned off the water. She dried her hands on her shorts, which she'd put back on crooked, and finally looked at me.

"Where are you going to sleep?"

"Couch."

"Okay." She nodded too many times. "There's a blanket in the hall closet. Top shelf."

"I know where it is."

Of course I did. I'd grown up in this house. Daniel and I used to hide in that closet when our dad came home angry, and later, when we got older, to smoke a joint where our mother wouldn't smell it. Daniel always got the top shelf because he was taller. I got the floor.

She stood there a second longer like she wanted to say more. Then she went down the hall, and I heard the bedroom door close. It didn't slam. It just closed. That was worse.

I stayed in the kitchen.

The whiskey glass was on its side on the counter. I stood it up. There was a wet ring on the granite, and I wiped it with a dish towel, then wiped the counter again where she'd been sitting, then stopped, because I couldn't do that. I threw the towel in the sink and put both hands on the edge of the counter and breathed.

Fuck.

I had done it. I'd actually done it.

I'd told myself for eleven years that I never would. Not when she showed up at our parents' house in a green dress and Daniel said "this is Nora" with that stupid proud grin. Not when I stood next to him at the altar, holding the ring and trying not to look at her coming down the aisle. Not when I enlisted three months after the wedding because I couldn't be in the same room with them and pretend I was fine. I'd stayed away. I'd sent birthday cards and Christmas texts. I'd come home twice in nine years, and both times I stayed at a motel in town so I wouldn't have to sleep down the hall.

And then Daniel died. I was in Alaska on a contract job when my mother called, and by the time I got a flight out, the funeral was over. I missed it. I missed my brother going into the ground. I had been trying to figure out how to live with that for eight months, and tonight I'd made it so much worse.

I'd come home three weeks ago because my mother asked me to. She said the house needed work, and she said Nora needed someone. That second part she said carefully. I should have known better than to take it at face value. My mother never says anything by accident.

I told myself I'd help fix the porch and the roof, check on Nora, and go. That was the plan. Be useful, stay quiet, leave.

Then tonight she called me at the lake house, where she'd been hiding out for the weekend, and said, Can you come? I don't want to be alone and I don't want to talk to anyone who's going to be nice to me. I was there in twenty minutes.

I grabbed my keys and then put them down. I couldn't drive. And I didn't want to be in the truck, alone with it.

The couch in the living room was the same one from when we were kids. It sagged in the middle. I sat on it and put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands.

On the wall across from me was a family picture from the summer before Daniel died. All of us on the dock. My mother in the middle with her arms around her boys, even though I wasn't there that summer. Somebody had put my school photo up to fill the space, and it had been cropped in later. Daniel was laughing at something off camera. Nora was beside him, leaning her head on his shoulder.

I looked at it for a long time.

He would have known. That's what I kept coming back to. If he'd been in this room, he'd have looked at me and known in half a second. Daniel could always tell when I was lying. When we were ten, he knew I'd broken Mom's good vase before I opened my mouth. When I told him I was fine about the Army, he looked at me and said, Bullshit, Cal, and let me pretend anyway.

He let me pretend about a lot of things.

There was one night, the last time I talked to him, that I hadn't told anyone about. Not my mother, not Nora. I'd kept it in my chest for eight months like a stone. It was a phone call from the Alaska bunkhouse, with bad reception and Daniel's voice cutting in and out. He'd sounded off. Tired. He'd said, I need to tell you something, when you're back. Not on the phone. I said sure, and I was half asleep and in a hurry, and I said I'd call him tomorrow.

I never did call.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until I saw sparks. Whatever he wanted to tell me, I'd never know, and tonight I had slept with his wife on his mother's kitchen counter.

I didn't know if that made me a bad person. I thought it probably did. What I couldn't figure out was why I didn't feel worse. I should have felt sick. Part of me did. But another part, a part I'd been shoving down for eleven years, was lying there in the dark thinking about the sound she made when I said her name.

I hated that part of me. I wasn't going to be able to kill it, either.

Down the hall, a floorboard creaked. I held still.

Nora's door opened. I heard her bare feet on the hardwood, slow, and then they stopped. I didn't look up. I couldn't have taken it if she'd come out and said it was a mistake. And I couldn't have taken it any better if she'd said anything else.

"Caleb?" Her voice was barely there.

"Yeah."

"Are you awake?"

"Yeah."

Silence. The floor creaked again. I pictured her standing in the hall in the dark, deciding.

"Okay," she said. "Just checking."

Her door closed again.

I lay down on the couch with my boots still on and pulled the blanket over me. It smelled like cedar and old dust, like every summer I'd ever had in this house. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the water against the dock, and I tried not to hope she'd come back.

She didn't.

I didn't sleep.