“Fixing it, Hope! Making it better. For you. For the girls.”
“You can’t fix what happened, Jack. You can’t make it better for everyone.”
“So I just do nothing? Well, I can’t do that, Hope. I won’t do that.”
“Well, what? You’ll do this? Working a hundred hours a week so you end up in the hospital. After all that happened with Hannah, you went to work. Boon told me. You refused to talk about it, refused to deal with it. And here we are, twenty years later.”
“One has nothing to do with the other, Hope. That was a million years ago.”
“It’s grief, Jack!” Her voice was loud now, full of emotion. “Grief!” She leaned into me, her face inches from my own, finding my eyes, making me look at her.
“It’s called grief,” she said again, her hand on my cheek, stopping me from turning my head away from her crumpled face, the anguish in her eyes, the tears streaming down her face.
The knot in my throat unraveled and a noise slipped out, guttural and raw.
Hope stood up, went to the door and locked it, pulled the shade, even though it was the middle of the day. She walked to my side of the bed, took off her clothes, and climbed into bed next to me. We didn’t speak. It hurt to move, but I wanted the pain. As if everything that hurt inside of me needed a way to get out. We stayed in bed for hours, not saying a word.
And later, when Kat knocked on the door, and Hope opened it and told her, go tell Daddy how good he is, how much we love him, I pressed into the pillow to hide my face.
Maybe it was the medicine clearing my lungs, or the sleep clearing my mind, but things seemed different after that day. There wasn’t that heavy feeling inside of me anymore, and the dread that had hung in the air was gone.
Hope was different too. I’d waited for her to close back up again, but she went the other direction. I told her after the third night in a row that we’d made love that I wasn’t sure this was what the doctor meant when he’d said to rest. She slipped out of her clothes and said, Then let me do all the work. How can you argue with that?
We’d put the last window in at the Salt House this morning, the last day of summer vacation before the kids went back to school. Hope was writing her column in her office and it was already a day late, and all the hammering wasn’t helping. She yelled out to everyone that we should go look at paint colors for the house, but what she really meant was take the kids and go look at paint colors so I can get some work done. Anything but red or green or yellow would work she told us, and Kat shouted “Purple!” and Hope had looked up from her computer and told us that anything actually meant white or tan.
What she didn’t mention was the number of different shades of white and tan.
So Jess and I had been standing in front of the paint samples for almost an hour now, while Kat played with a stack of them on the floor next to us, arranging the square cards in a pyramid, the puff of air that came in when the front door opened threatening to demolish the delicate structure.
We’d picked out a dozen colors and placed them on the flat edge of the display in front of us when Jess reached out, picked one up, and handed it to me. It was a light, clean color, but not what I had in mind. I shrugged and held it back out to her.
She didn’t move to take it. “Mom picked it out,” she said. “Last year. When she was thinking of doing Maddie’s room over.”
I looked down at it. It wasn’t a color I thought Hope would’ve wanted for a little girl’s room.
“Really?” I asked. “It’s so . . . white.”
“Read,” Jess said, pointing to the small letters on the bottom right.
I pushed the paint sample away, squinted, and brought it closer. “I don’t have my cheaters, Jess. What is it?”
She leaned in, pointing to the word as she said it. “Salt,” she said. “The name of the color is salt.”
I looked down at it, then up at Jess.
“I was with her when she found it. She got all weird. I didn’t get it then,” Jess said. “I mean, I got that it was the name of the summerhouse, but I didn’t get why she was so excited. Why it had anything to do with Maddie.”
“It was where we . . . It’s um . . .”
“Where Mom got pregnant,” Jess said, rolling her eyes. “I know how it works.”
“Right,” I said, looking back at the color, remembering that weekend with Hope.
It had been the second weekend in September, and we’d gone to the Salt House one last time before closing it up for the season. The weather had been unseasonably hot for that time of year, and the girls had gone to sleep in our room, the only one with an air conditioner.
After they’d gone to sleep, Hope had grabbed a cold bottle of white wine from the fridge, and we’d sat outside on the Adirondack chairs, a breeze finally stirring off the water. At some point I opened another bottle.
Later, we’d pulled a mattress down from upstairs, put it on the floor of the screen porch off the kitchen, and made love. I remember Hope scrambling to find her tank top and shorts the next morning, throwing my boxers at me when she heard our bedroom door open, the girls’ feet slapping against the linoleum floor.
It’s like camping, Kat had said when she saw the mattress where we’d slept, and Hope had caught my eye and pressed her hand against her mouth to hide the smile. It was a joke between us now. Let’s camp tonight, wink, wink. Or it’s been forever since we went camping. A month later, Hope missed her period.
I looked over at Jess now, thinking of how it didn’t seem that long ago that Hope was pregnant with Jess. And just the other day she’d turned seventeen. I cleared my throat. Thought of where to start.
“That Alex kid. You like him?”
She glanced at me and nodded.
“Your mother said I should apologize to you.” I cleared my throat again. “And she’s right, as usual.” Jess’s cheeks colored, and I saw that Hope had talked to her. Had told her that I wanted to speak to her. Not that I wanted to talk about this. But I knew I needed to.
“It wasn’t about me not trusting you. Not wanting you to date,” I said. “I just . . . I made some bad decisions when I was younger. And um, well, it was my stuff, Jess. I mean, heck, you’ve got so many more smarts up here than your old man does.” I tapped my knuckles on her head, and she flushed and laughed.
“Okay?” I asked, and she leaned her head against my shoulder.
“Do you think your mother will like it?” I asked, holding the sample out in front of us.
“I think it’s not purple,” Jess said, and snorted, a sound that made Kat look up from the floor and grin, even though she hadn’t heard a word we’d said, the paint samples arranged in front of her, a house of cards two stories high.
We bought the paint and were heading for the door when Kat turned and tugged on my sleeve.
“Look, Dad,” she said. “My house is still standing.”