He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Laundromat

Cormac waits on the sidewalk outside her room and says he will go where she tells him. She states the three years plainly, puts a hand on his jaw to stop his talking, and mocks him. He says the boy has her eyes and she hears it as a knife.

Cormac Shanahan was on the sidewalk outside the laundromat at nine the next morning, and he did not come in.

I saw him from my window, standing at the curb with his hands in the pockets of a black wool coat.

He looked like a man who had been standing there a while.

I watched the pigeons on the wire for a few minutes, and then I put my coat on and went down.

The stair door stuck, as it always did, and I put my shoulder to it.

He took one step back to give me room.

"I didn't come up," he said. "I was told once that you didn't like it when I came to the door."

"I told you that, on the porch, in the second year."

"You did."

"You came to the door anyway," I said.

"I did." His blue eyes held mine. "I'm not going to do that again, Siobhan. I'll go where you tell me to go, and I'll stand where you tell me to stand."

"That's a very easy promise to make on a public sidewalk."

"Then it's a promise anybody can hold me to."

It was cold, and the avenue smelled of bus exhaust and the bakery down the block.

A woman came out of the laundromat behind me with a basket of wet towels, gave Cormac a long look and went the other way.

"Let's get one thing straight," I said. "I'm not here for you."

"I know."

"I'm here to find a grave."

His face did something small and terrible, and then he put it away.

"Then I'll help you find it," he said.

"Will you?"

"I don't know where it is." He kept his voice level. "I never asked. I should have asked, and I didn't. I told myself it was kinder."

"Kinder to whom?"

"To me."

I looked at him for a long moment.

I had thought I would feel triumph, or hatred, or a clean cold nothing.

I felt a tired anger that went all the way down.

"I'm going to say something," I said. "I want you to stand there and hear all of it, and I don't want you to say you're sorry."

"All right."

"You decided what I wore. You decided who I spoke to, and you took my phone when my aunt called."

He did not move.

"You kept me in that house for eleven days once because I'd gone to Mass at a church that wasn't your mother's," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"You broke the bathroom door off its hinges because I'd locked it. You broke my left wrist in the kitchen because I said I wanted to go home to Southie for my mother's anniversary."

He stood and took it.

"The doctor in the emergency room asked if I'd fallen, and I said yes. You stood behind me holding my bag."

"I did," he said.

"I had a cast for six weeks, and I learned to cook with one hand," I said. "It healed wrong, and it aches when it rains."

I held up my left arm so he could see the scar.

He looked at it.

I watched him look, and I saw his throat work.

"I was twenty-five," I said. "I was pregnant, and I was so tired of being afraid that I took a bus ticket and ran. And you found me."

"I found you."

"And then I was handed a glass."

"Siobhan," he said.

"I said no apologies."

He shut his mouth.

A truck went by, and the wind came down the avenue and lifted the hem of my coat.

"I'm going to get in my car," I said. "I've got an appointment at the parish office, and I'd like to be alone."

"You don't have a car," he said.

"I've got a rented Corolla in the lot behind the bakery."

"That's mine," he said.

"I rented it from your cousin's brother-in-law, and I paid for it," I said. "I know whose bakery it is."

I walked to the end of the block, and he fell in beside me, a pace behind, with his hands still in his pockets.

The Corolla was a dented grey thing with a cracked taillight.

I unlocked it and got in, and he stood at the passenger side.

"May I?" he said.

"I don't want you in the car."

"Then I'll stand here."

He stood on the asphalt in the cold.

It was a stupid thing, and he did it with perfect gravity.

I leaned across and opened the door.

"Get in," I said. "Not a word."

He folded himself into the little seat with his knees against the glovebox.

The car smelled of old coffee and rental-lot air freshener.

I had my hands on the wheel, and I stared at the back wall of the bakery, and I did not turn the key.

The silence in the car filled up.

"I'm going to talk," he said in a low voice. "I'm sorry. I have to."

"No."

"There are things you ought to know about that night. I've never..."

I turned in the seat and put my left hand on his jaw.

It was not gentle.

His jaw was rough with a day's beard, and his skin was warm under my palm.

He went completely still.

I felt the pulse under his ear, hard and fast.

His eyes closed, and a muscle jumped in his cheek.

I looked down and saw his hand on his thigh, curled and shaking, held there by main force.

My own heart was going.

I had thought about that jaw in Lisbon on nights when I did not want to, and I had hated myself for it.

"Siobhan," he said, with his eyes still shut.

"Stop talking."

"I'm stopping."

"You're still talking," I said.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh, and I felt it in my hand.

I looked at his mouth.

It was a full mouth, a little crooked where his nose had been broken twice.

I knew the taste of it, and I knew exactly what it had done to me when I was twenty-two.

I took my hand away.

"Five years sober," I said coolly, "and you still don't know when to be quiet."

His eyes opened.

I saw the hit land, and I saw him take it and not look away.

"No," he said. "I don't."

I turned the key.

The engine caught on the second try.

I put the car in reverse and backed out of the space.

He sat beside me and said nothing at all, which was the first time in nine years I had known him to do it for more than a minute.

We got out onto the avenue.

I drove to the stop sign by the Savin Hill T station, and I stopped, and I did not look at him.

"The boy has your eyes," Cormac said quietly.

I put the car in park in the middle of the road.

A man behind us honked.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have. I've looked at him for five years and never known who he looked like. Then I looked at you across that table."

My hands were white on the wheel.

He said it as a man says a thing out loud because he can't hold it any longer, and he had no idea what he was saying.

The man behind us honked again, and I drove on.

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