Читать книгу Alone: A Love Story - Michelle Parise - Страница 24

I just threw a vintage ashtray across the room in his general direction. It was made of glass, and when it hit the wall it sprayed everywhere, millions of tiny pieces all over the room. Some pieces even made it to the kitchen somehow, skidding across the floor.

I am howling, crying, begging him to stop twisting words. We’ve been like this before, but it’s been worse these past few months, these months where something has happened to him and I don’t know who he is anymore. It feels like he’s a ghost in this house, a ghost that stares infinitely at the TV. It makes me sad and then angry. And then, angrier. The more confused and angry I become, the more it leads us here, to a place where I throw a glass object clean across a room.

Suddenly, there’s a tiny voice. “Guys?” the voice says. It’s Birdie. She always calls us “guys” which is usually the cutest, but right now it is 1:00 a.m. and she is four years old and in her pyjamas in the kitchen, possibly standing right on top of tiny pieces of glass.

The Husband springs up like a saviour, shouting at me, “Look what you’ve done!” and scoops her up, cooing to her gently. He whisks her upstairs, comforting her like World’s Best Dad, leaving me here, World’s Worst Mom, I guess. I can only guess. I don’t know why we are fighting like this, or what’s happening. I’m so unhappy. I miss him and us, and I hate him and us, and I feel trapped, but not in a way that makes me want to break free. No, just in a way that makes me want to understand and fix, a trapping we can somehow transcend, together.

So I sweep up the glass. I sweep and sweep. He comes back. He holds the dust pan. He explains the properties of the glass to me, by way of explaining how something so small could shatter into so many pieces.

And then, we sit on the kitchen floor and talk. We stare at each other across this floor that only a few years earlier we put in ourselves when I was pregnant, tearing it up to reveal layer upon layer of linoleum in every pattern imaginable, decades piled on top of one another, an excavation of another family’s life.

On this night, like all the others before it, neither of us storms off. Instead we talk. We talk and talk until we are calm again. Until one of us laughs. Until one person reaches out to the other and we are in each other’s arms. Until one of us says, Sorry, I’ll do better, and the other answers, No, no, I’m sorry, I will do better.

And so, like every single argument we have ever had, this one turns out okay. Exhausted, we go to bed together. We tangle our bodies up purposefully and kiss goodnight. We fall asleep pledging things will be different.