The Things We Didn't Say Read online

  I recall Jewel’s jaunty wave as she got on the bus. I can’t imagine what she’ll think. But then I remember also the “vision board” she’s making in her room, the collage of pictures representing the things she wants to happen in her life. In the center of the board is a family picture. I’m not in it. It’s a Christmas card portrait; the last holiday when Mallory and Michael were still married.

  She likes me, Jewel does, but when she’s really falling apart over something, she cries for her mother, as all children do, even the children of volatile Mallory.

  Next to me is my journal. I haven’t opened it again since before dawn this morning, when I saw scribbled in red ink on the first blank page: You sure have a lot of secrets, CASEY!!!!!!

  For months I’ve been reminding myself how hard it is to be sixteen, and that for me to move in was a drastic change; maybe she feels supplanted as the reigning queen bee now that her mom lives somewhere else. That’s the story I tell myself, anyway, to explain the hostility spreading like mold over our relationship. When I was just someone her father was seeing, we had fun shopping and drinking lattes together. But the weekend I moved in, she picked a dramatic fight over my inadequate laundry skills.

  Each day since then has been more of a struggle not to see her mother in that haughty raised eyebrow and upturned lip.

  I shake my hands out before I begin.

  Dear Michael,

  I know I’m a coward for doing this in writing . . .

  I seal the letter in an envelope and put it on top of his dresser, where he empties his pocket change every day, changing from khaki pants into sweats or jeans. He’ll see it as soon as he’s home from work.

  There’s a picture on top of this dresser. It’s of me. I’m wearing a baseball cap and my dark blond hair is hanging in a ponytail. I’m holding a baseball bat, glaring with mock concentration at the invisible pitcher, but my eyes are smiling and I know that the minute the shutter clicked I snorted with laughter. I don’t remember the exact joke, but it didn’t take much to get me started back then. I know I kissed him as soon as I put the bat down. Michael had added text to the picture before printing it out. It says, “Casey at the bat,” in the blue sky behind me.

  The ring snags on my knuckle, biting into the skin as I try to pull it off. My hands are puffy. I yank again, letting it bang again into the existing scrape, which is now blooming with a line of red.

  Against my will, my mind flashes to the moment Michael slid this ring on my finger, almost a year ago, on New Year’s Eve. Mallory had the kids that night, and we sat on a rug in front of the living room fireplace. The house was then a place I only visited, a place we had to ourselves when Mallory managed to keep to her visitation days. I’d never seen its dustiest corners, never hauled the smelly trash to the curb. I knew but did not yet grasp this bit of history: it was not just a pretty house, but had been the Turner family home since Michael was a kid, and then the very home where Michael and Mallory had settled in as newlyweds. I still use the mixing bowls they got as a wedding gift to stir the pancake batter every Sunday.

  That New Year’s Eve, amber firelight wavering across his face, he whispered, “I never thought I’d do this again.”

  I gasped. He must have thought it was delight and surprise. It was more like a falling dream; a sickening plunge. A stepmother? Me? I thought of myself drunk at the bottom of a stairwell or puking my guts out in a smelly bar bathroom.

  That wasn’t the girl he wanted to marry. He never met that girl at all, never knew she existed.

  It was me he wanted, the new me, the one who played board games with his kids and didn’t even like the taste of alcohol. He made me chicken soup when I was sick and taught me to play euchre and told me dumb jokes until I laughed when I was having a bad day. He loves me, I thought. And that will be enough. So I said yes.

  The ring still won’t come off. I clench my bloody knuckle and resign myself to leaving it on, for now. An unwelcome loose end. I walk out of the room, no longer my room, and it wasn’t ever, really.

  I pause at the front door with my hand on the knob, holding my breath, allowing myself to feel this tearing away, doubting myself. If it hurts this much to walk out this door, does that mean I should stay?

  But vaccinations hurt, too. Surgery hurts. Exercise hurts. Sometimes pain is necessary.

  I yank on the knob. It comes open hard, as if resisting me, but that’s just fancy. It’s a sticky old wooden door, is all.

  I almost sprint down the porch stairs, my bag slapping against my hip.

  I’m halfway down the block when I realize I don’t have my phone. Also, I should probably leave the key. I’ll have to get my books and things later, but I’ll do that at some appointed time, and Michael will open the door to let me in. Or maybe we can meet at a neutral location.

  And I’ll have to return the ring, once I get it off.

  The house grows larger in my view, again with its surprised-looking front windows. It’s disorienting to have turned around. Just minutes before when I crossed the threshold it had felt so final and momentous. For a moment I stand on the sidewalk in front of the house and consider leaving my phone there, too, maybe leaving it all there, forever.

  The house already seems to me like it belongs to a stranger. A pretty wood house among other pretty wood houses, painted a soft gray-blue like a dawn sky before the sun has gathered full strength, a rounded, half-moon window and a wraparound porch morphing into mere details, as if I hadn’t seen Dr. Turner and Michael carefully painting every spindle of that porch just last spring.

  I can always get new books. I could turn around again.

  But no. My mother will call, and then she’ll worry, and that wouldn’t be fair, considering what she’s been through already.

  I rush back up the porch, and suck in a sharp breath as I turn the key in the lock and shove the heavy wood door open with my shoulder.

  My phone is in the kitchen, and I’m just picking it up when the house phone rings. I look at caller ID: the high school. I let it ring three times before I resign myself to picking up. After all, there could be something wrong.

  Chapter 2

  Michael

  I yank open the heavy metal employee entrance door at the Grand Rapids Herald newsroom, my head already full of yesterday’s story and this morning’s last-minute edits.

  The scent of fresh ink clings to the building, though the presses moved to a facility miles away more than two years ago.

  Every morning as I walk this hall, I recall a full, bustling office, the police scanner fizzing with static, the television on to the morning news, reporters already working the phones, editors squinting at their screens.

  Reality hits me when I round the corner: half the seats are now empty, the computer terminals removed and redistributed to other papers in the company. Here and there a coffee mug sits, ringed with the brown remnants of mugs swilled on deadline. There still should be a buzz of activity. But a malaise has settled on the survivors. The loudest noise is the muted clacking of keys.

  I sit down and punch the button to fire up my terminal, glancing about for Aaron. I see he’s already busy with Tina, so I pull out my notes.

  Gerald used to sit next to me. His computer is gone, as is his stuff. But there’s still a photo print on his low workspace wall, snapped by one of our photogs during a candid moment. Gerald is scowling at his screen, his glasses on the end of his nose like something out of Dickens. The caption reads: “I am smiling, dammit,” which became a famous Gerald-ism, uttered in response to an unbearable intern who exhorted him to smile. On deadline.

  The terminal across from me, where Amanda works, has a note taped to the screen: Just on vacation! Don’t vulture my stuff.

  Now that my computer is awake, I pull up my story about local election reaction, most of which I wrote last night but will polish this morning for the afternoon paper. The city council just had its vote, and one of the more bombastic councilmen was unseated. Made for some fun quotes, but I couldn
’t get his city administrator nemesis to talk last night. He promised to call me this morning though, just squeaking under deadline.

  Aaron has inserted a couple of editing questions easy enough to answer, so I set about doing just that.

  That’s when I hear his clomping cowboy boots coming up behind me. He’s got a press release in his hand. I can see “For Immediate Release” from here.

  “Hi, Michael, listen, I need you to get to a press conference at the university this morning, it starts at nine, sorry for the late notice.”

  I turn back to my screen. “I need to reach Henning for comment on the election. He said he’d talk to me this morning.”

  “We’ll have to go without it. The university is making an announcement, potentially funding cuts, or maybe someone important is quitting.”

  Useless to argue. Our education reporter took the buyout last month. This might be an intern job, except the intern is already at the police station finding out who got killed overnight.

  I sigh and hold out my hand for the release. As he gives it to me, Aaron says, “Oh, did you check out that rumor about a new strip club?”

  “Yes, and it’s officially bullshit, like I told you.” I don’t bother to conceal my irritation, and Aaron ignores it as he stomps back to his own desk. Now that anonymous online forums are part of the paper’s Web site, some of the local cranks have taken to posting rumors, meaning I have to waste my time chasing them down, proving them wrong, wondering all the while how small-minded nameless trolls hiding behind keyboards became so important.

  After polishing up my election story, I was supposed to spend the day analyzing building code enforcement violations for a series I want to do on housing blight and gentrification in the city.

  I was supposed to do a lot of things.

  I’m trying to read the release, but my snapshot of Casey distracts me. I don’t have time to think about her now, so I turn my back to my desk, facing the center of the newsroom as I try to read between the lines of the press release and guess the announcement.

  Still can’t think. Angel’s voice is in my head, telling me this morning something is “up” with Casey. Then she stared hard at me. I only caught a glimpse of her look, because I was watching the road, but I could feel her turned toward me for long moments. Can she detect the distance between Casey and me these days? If so, it’s not a stretch to imagine that she’d be glad of it.

  Last weekend Mallory took the kids, and we’d planned to cook a nice dinner for ourselves at home—going out costs too much, but I told her I’d light candles in the dining room and put on music. The conversation kept circling back to the kids, and Casey turned prickly and defensive at my gentle suggestion she was taking it all too personally. And in the midst of it all, Mallory found reasons to call me three times.

  I’d hoped to fall into bed with Casey right after dinner and stay there, only she got up to clear the table and filled the sink with hot water and washed every dish. By hand, ignoring the dishwasher.

  Watching her do that, her face locked in a resigned grimace, a look I recognized as Casey fighting back tears, twin geysers of sadness and anger erupted in me. I grieved for our vanished affectionate companionship, and was simply pissed that she chose to wash the fucking dishes instead of coming to bed with me.

  My e-mail dings, and I reflexively look. It’s a staffwide e-mail. Groans roll through the newsroom like a wave. Four o’clock staff meetings never bode well.

  My cell phone goes off as I find the first blank page in a notebook, marking the spot with a paper clip. I scribble “Univ. press conf.” on the top line.

  “Hello.”

  “Michael, it’s your father.”

  “I’m at work.”

  “We’re having lunch today, are we not?”

  I hadn’t even looked at my planner yet. “Oh, we are. Though I have a press conference to attend.”

  “Surely you can manage to jot down some canned statements from a podium without too much strain.”

  “I realize it’s not open-heart surgery,” I reply to Henry Turner, M.D., but he ignores my remark. “However, they might have an important announcement, there might be reaction, analysis . . .”

  “Analysis,” he repeats, and I hear him huff through his gray mustache into the phone.

  “I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you.”

  I give up trying to make sense of the release and just take note of the location and parking.

  Turning back to my screen, I decide to give last night’s story one more read-through, double-checking the quotes and the vote totals from the precincts. I can’t find it in the system at first, and I have a moment of queasy panic, thinking it vanished. Then I do find it, in a folder where I can’t open it. It’s already out of my hands, off to the copyeditors. Damn. Now I’ll be anxious all day that I couldn’t double-check. We never used to send the stories so early, but the copy desk is stretched so thin these days, they need more time. If I made a mistake on my late shift last night—I’m careful, but it’s always possible to screw up—now I can’t fix it, and it will be reprinted thousands of times, all over the city, with my byline.

  There’s nothing I hate more than a mistake with my name on it.

  I set my phone to vibrate and put it in my pocket. It goes off immediately, but I don’t even look. It’s probably Henning calling with some terrific quote for the election story, and now I can’t even use it.

  I check my recorder for fresh batteries and head to my car to listen to some canned quotes from behind a podium.

  The press conference is in the atrium of the administration building. They have arrayed many more chairs than necessary for just me, a radio reporter, a college kid in jeans and combat boots from the school paper, and a couple of TV cameras there sans reporters for the sound bite. I pick a seat close to the front, sharing nods with the handful of colleagues. I think I heard something on my way out of the office about a shooting at a nightclub last night, so that’s probably where the TV reporters are, doing stand-ups in front of the building.

  Casey reacted the same way most people do when I told her I was a newspaper reporter. Her eyes got big and she said, “Ooooh.” She asked what I write and I told her, “I cover City Hall.” Most people start to shut down right there, their minds shifting from fedoras and crime scenes to dreary ordinances and budget hearings. But she stayed interested, even when I did talk about the ordinances. Just as she was interested in my kids right off, and not just Jewel, the youngest and most cuddly.

  Mallory—and now Angel—have so much scorn for the fact that she’s young, but there’s something infectious about that twentysomething enthusiasm. I haven’t had that since, well, never. I had my kids too young for that and, anyway, I was old before I left the house for college.

  I look at my watch. They’re late to start. The radio guy looks like he might make small talk. He’s trying to catch my eye. I leaf through my notebook—old notes from old stories, now in recycle bins and at the bottom of birdcages all over town—as if I’m doing something terribly important and shouldn’t be interrupted.

  My eye passes over a note in the margin, a note to myself that had nothing to do with whatever meeting I was in at the time. Call Mallory re: weekend, it reads. As I recall, she’d sent me a text that she didn’t think she could take the kids. Another “headache,” which had years before become code for her just not feeling up to mothering that day. At various times I’d feel compassion for her—I know what she’s been through—and heated frustration. Aren’t you carrying this a bit far now? I’d want to say. In any case, the approach of every weekend when Mallory has “parenting time” means a creeping anxiety about whether she might call it off, leaving me to smooth things over and stay positive, just like that pamphlet from Friend of the Court says to do.

  People have asked me, my father loudest among them, why I stayed so long, as if getting divorced is like a Ferris-wheel ride. Who would gleefully dive into a world of lawyers and paperwork and “primary physical
custody” and “parenting time” and negotiated exchanges of the children from one house to another?

  Plus, divorce means the same income supporting two households. Dr. Turner didn’t bother doing that math when he was telling me I should leave.

  I was getting by. For a long time, I was getting by.

  At least this weekend is our weekend. No explaining, no anxious pacing as we all hold our breath to see if Mallory will call and cancel. We can just pop some popcorn and watch a movie in front of the fire.

  Men in suits spill out of the elevator, and all of us in the press corps, such as it is, straighten in our chairs.

  Canned quotes about a new scholarship. The radio reporter asks, “What is the funding source?”

  The suit behind the mic says, “Dr. Henry Turner’s foundation.”

  My digital recorder clatters out of my hand, breaking off the battery door. It still seems to be running, which is fortunate because I can’t even hear what they’re saying. My own father, mocking my press conference task, and he’s the one behind it all along. This means I’m not even supposed to be covering this; I can’t write about my own dad. I’ll end up typing up my notes and giving it to someone else, to be under some other byline, or maybe no byline, just “Herald Staff Writers.”

  He’s not at the press conference, because he’s not interested in the limelight. At least, that’s what he’ll tell whichever of my colleagues gets to call and interview him about this. Then he’ll say something about the importance of education for underprivileged youth.

  I note that the scholarships are for science and math. Fields he respects.

  The press conference breaks up, and that’s when I catch the quizzical glances thrown my way from the other reporters. Gus, from the radio station, sidles up. “Dude, I’m surprised you’re here.”