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But she was the voice in his head, even when she wasn’t there in front of him. The men are yours, Jess might say. But the women? She’d make that face meant to warn him not to be so sure. They might understand: her girlfriends, her mother, any woman who listened to her whole story and really took it in. They’d never admit it to their partners—no, they’d never do a thing like that, risk their families, risk their predictable lives, my God, what had she been thinking—but to each other? To themselves, in the privacy of their own thoughts? There were those who’d sympathize with following a temptation to its conclusion. There were those who would admire a woman who had a problem and did what she thought might fix it.
Was she relieved? He couldn’t tell. It was harder to read her than it used to be. She’d always been a doer, that was one of the things he loved about her. She was a worker, a problem solver. If someone got dumped, then she set them up with someone new. If someone needed a job, then she asked around until that person got one. She paid attention to how things were done so that she’d know how to do them herself. When they bought their house and had zero money to spare after the down payment, she took classes at Home Depot to learn how to tile, how to grout. When they were short on food at Siobhán’s baby shower, it was Jess who took everything to the kitchen, cut what they had in half, and rearranged it on more platters so it seemed as if it had doubled. “It was just like the loaves and the fishes,” Siobhán said when she recounted it for Malcolm later. “A miracle.” She felt stuck in her job, so she left. She felt stuck in her marriage, apparently, so she left that, too.
She went to the spice rack and removed this and that. She measured rice into a small pot, covered the rice with water. Never in a million years could Malcolm have looked at the random things she assembled and make his mind see a meal.
“Plenty here,” she said. Malcolm lit the pilot on the stove and in twenty minutes they had hot food. Just like the story of the baby shower, she’d made something out of nothing. When they finished their first bowls, eating in silence, they each had another. It was so elemental. Cooking. Eating. Washing up after with the water Malcolm had collected. Two white bowls left to dry on a worn kitchen towel. A cobalt blue sky beyond the window. It was an extravagance, thinking only about the present moment. There was Jess, next to him. He already felt warmer, his headache fading.
Whatever Jess might have said to object, she swallowed back. “Okay,” she said. What harm? He was different than he was before she left. She’d first noticed when they were in the basement of the bar. Something in the way he held himself apart from her. Something about the solemn way he listened as she spoke. And now she was seeing it again. Where was the guy who clapped a dozen backs when he walked into a room? The guy who parted the air just by walking through it? Where was the kid who sprang for ice cream cones for the whole neighborhood, without having the first idea what the tab would come to? Gone, as far as she could tell. Humbled. Crushed. By her and what she’d done, yes. She made herself acknowledge that fact. But also, the slow-motion failure of a dream. She’d seen that failure coming, but he hadn’t. She saw that it hadn’t just been denial; he truly had not seen. And then it hit her that it was the same for him when it came to her dream. He knew long before she did that she would never deliver a baby. But he’d stood aside and hoped she’d arrive at that conclusion on her own.
[...] She was divorced now, living in Toms River, and emailed to say that people having opinions about what happened even though they didn’t have the first clue would be the hardest part, but that Jess should just remember that they don’t know anything, it was no one’s business but hers.
“Jenny,” Jess whispered aloud when she read that, and it stopped her breath to think what she must have gone through to have gained that wisdom. And where had Jess been for her? Nowhere. Jenny had gotten pregnant so young. They’d drifted apart.
But what was it he was going to say? It was so hard to capture a feeling and then make it understood, even to Jess, even to himself sometimes. He remembered being a kid, all the things he felt capable of, all the streets and avenues that branched away from his body, all the possibilities. But in the end you can only have one life. One at a time, at least. You could turn, you could pause for a while, but you couldn’t go down two streets at once. The things they didn’t end up doing, the places and people they decided against, all defined them as much as anything else, in the way negative space defines a photo or a song. The lives they didn’t lead were there, too, always with them. Only recently did he begin to see the shape those choices had made.