Susan Smith - Out at Night

She was going to have to push him away. If not now, then soon.

Her breath came in short gusts. “What are you offering, Mac?”

“I think that’s pretty clear.”

“No, I mean it.” She rocked back away from him, but all that did was position her closer. If he moved, even slightly, toward her. Into her.

“Okay, what am I offering. The truth. Ask me anything.”

“Risky business.”

“Riskier not to.”

He touched her breast, her belly, the soft part of her that melted under his touch. They stood together in the dim light, their bodies naked except for her T-shirt. He swallowed. Sighed as if it took everything he had. He pushed her gently away.

“Truth then. I get the feeling you’re a whole lot of work. Maybe I’m not up to that. Maybe I’d give it my best shot, and still come up short.”

Her heart was beating very fast.

“You kept Katie away for five years. When I think about that too much, it makes me crazy.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“Maybe it is too late. Not for Katie. But for us.”

His room held a king-sized bed, a mahogany sideboard, a bar, a flat-screen TV. Through the French doors she could see the ocean. She looked everywhere except his face.

“So that whole ‘sticking around when you’re not sure’—that stuff you said after you got out of the hospital and flew here to surprise us and meet Katie—that’s bullshit?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore. Not here. Not this way.”

He was a big man, his movements economical. He found his shorts and pulled them on. It was abrupt, final, and changed everything. The small window he’d offered—the one through which she could have slipped without penalty or disguise—had closed.

It would take much more now to open it.

Yet as Grace returned to her solitary bed next to Katie’s, listening to the commingled sounds of the surf and Mac gargling into his sink, it seemed as if they’d been doing this forever, or a version of it, and maybe when things evened out, they’d add back in the sex part and get married.

A fantasy she’d construct brick by fragile brick.

They spent the morning in a golf cart touring the candy-colored clapboard Harbor Island village, stopping at Angela’s Starfish for fresh conch, searching for Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise. Mac had been polite and remote with her, lavishing attention on Katie and right before Grace’s eyes, their daughter bloomed.

There had been one reoccurring speed bump, an awkward one, when she noted it: she seemed incapable of letting Katie and Mac hold a conversation without interjecting herself into it, trying to change the focus, not to her, but so that Mac was closed out.

He’d point at a modest wooden house set back from a road and tell Katie it was a library. Grace would turn her in the other direction and point out the sea.

As the morning wore on, the tendency became more pronounced until Katie and Mac’s defense was to close Grace out entirely, and it was then that she finally lost her footing on the emotional cliff face she was climbing—this strange new territory with no toeholds—and slid a good distance backward, scraping parts of her psyche she didn’t know existed.

Battered, she thought jauntily. But still there.

On the heels of that thought, she felt it start in her throat, and then behind her eyes. She’d found herself close to tears.

Now she and Mac lay on lounge chairs at the pool, watching Katie paddle in the shallow end, her water wings bright glints of inflatable pink plastic against the turquoise. A brilliantly colored wall of bougainvillea shielded the pool from the walkway. There were other people sunbathing on towels, but Grace didn’t get the sense that anybody was actively listening. It was only the two of them side by side, and the quiet sounds of Katie paddling and singing a small, tuneless song.

“I talked to my folks.”

“And?” She reached for her lemonade and drank.

“They were wondering if I could take Katie back to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. They live about an hour away. They could drive in.”

“You mean, by herself?” Grace kept her voice steady, but the panic was rising.

“Well, me.”

“That’s in less than two weeks.”

He was silent.

It hadn’t occurred to her until just that moment that maybe rehabilitating herself with Mac would be the least of her worries. The image of grandparents, bewildered and furious at having had a grandchild withheld, suddenly rose in her mind. It was another prick threatening the bubbly bliss of Grace’s imagined life.

“She’s barely five years old. I thought we were going to try trips, the three of us.”

“This is sort of one.”

“You flew out. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I wasn’t going to meet Katie while I was in the hospital, Grace.

We agreed. I didn’t want to scare her. You’d told me any time I was ready was fine with you.”

“Yeah, well, people usually call first, but maybe that’s me.”

He started to speak and stopped. This wasn’t going the way she’d envisioned.

“She’s got a whole other side of the family, Grace, she’s never met.”

“She’s got plenty of relatives she hasn’t met on my side either, she can start with those; I barely know them myself, we can start together.”

She stopped. It was exactly what she’d done all day; promised herself she wouldn’t do again.

“I found us a therapist. Elise Lithgow.”

She sucked in a breath.

Mac scribbled a phone number on a napkin next to his Coke and passed it to her. Grace glanced at it. It was a Mission Hills prefix.

“She wants to meet both of us separately first, to see if we’re each comfortable with her, so if it’s not a good match, I’m open to something else, Grace, if you’ve got another idea.”

Grace shook her head. Katie grabbed the side of the pool and kicked. She was wearing pink nail polish on her toenails and every so often the color winked in the water.

“Grace, when you stopped me last night—slowed me down so I could think through what I was doing—I realized something. You were right.”

“No, no, I wasn’t. Do over. Let’s do a do-over.”

“Let’s just do it right. ” He looked at Katie and hesitated. “When I was in the hospital I worked with a Realtor. I bought a place near your house; with the market sliding, everything’s available. It’s a condo in the Rondolet. Right around the corner.”

“I know where it is.”

It stood on Shelter Island, an enormous round building with views on one side of the San Diego Yacht Club.

“It’s far from perfect right now; it’s packed with an old person’s furniture—I bought the place from an elderly woman moving into a nursing facility—but it’s a place, and it means Katie will have her own bedroom when she visits.”

It sunk in. He had planned this. The whole time he was in the hospital, while she sat by the edge of his bed. While they talked about how the light fell on San Diego harbor and the exact timbre of their daughter’s laugh. He’d been working with a Realtor.

“Lots of kids wind up going between two houses. It’s not ideal, but it’s not the worst thing, either.”

Dissolving into sparkly bits! The big candy-colored house with the granite counters and the security gate. Evaporating into air! The three of them climbing, skipping the stairs to some phantom life where Mommy and Daddy lived in the same bedroom and Katie was down the hall and everybody ran in slo-mo in fields of daisies like some personal hygiene commercial. Fragmenting into pieces! The dream of laughing around the kitchen table ha ha ha and having the only silences be good ones, not the lethal kind that took years of explaining and apologies and therapy to sort out.