Page 127 of Roadrunner

Now

Riley came home a little after midnight, and I knew before he was all the way through the door that something was wrong, because he came home a little after midnight so rarely that I’d stopped keeping a mental file on what it meant when he did.

I was on the couch with a magazine I hadn’t been reading. I heard the truck. I heard the engine cut off a half-second too fast, like he hadn’t let it idle down the way he always did out of some mechanical courtesy I’d never asked him to explain. I heard the front door.

Then I saw him, and the magazine went onto the floor without my deciding to put it there.

His shirt was dark down one side, stiff in a way cloth doesn’t get from anything ordinary. His knuckles on his right hand were split open, swollen, dried dark in the creases. There was a line of it along his jaw he hadn’t found yet, or had found and hadn’t cared about it enough to wipe it away.

“Riley.”

“I’m fine,” he said, before I’d asked the question that mattered. He said it the way you say a thing you’ve said before, to yourself, in the truck, on the way home, until it started sounding true enough to hand to someone else.

I was up and across the room before I’d decided to move. I put my hands on him, his chest, his arms, patting the way you pat down a fire, looking for the part of him that was actually hurt underneath all of it.

“Where,” I said. “Where are you hurt.”

“I’m not,” he said. “None of it’s mine.”

I stopped with my hands flat against his ribs.

“None of it’s yours,” I repeated.

“That’s right.”

I looked at his shirt. At his hand. At the line along his jaw that had gone from wet to tacky sometime on the drive home.

“Whose is it,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him build something in real time, the way I’d once watched my own father build a case in a kitchen a lifetime ago, except this wasn’t a case. This was a door, closing, carefully, so it wouldn’t slam.

“I need a shower,” he said. “Can we do this after.”

“Riley—”

“Please,” he said. Quiet. Not cold. Just closed. “Let me get this off me first.”

I let him go because I didn’t know what else to do with a man standing in my kitchen covered in someone else’s blood who was asking me, politely, to be left alone for twenty minutes.

I heard the water run for a long time.

He came out in sweatpants and a clean shirt with his hair still wet, and he sat down across from me at the kitchen table like a man reporting for something he’d rather not be reporting for, and I understood, watching him arrange himself into the chair, that whatever came out of his mouth next had already been chosen, edited, and approved before he sat down.

“Everybody’s okay,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters tonight.”

“That’s not the only thing that matters to me.”

“I know.” He looked at his hands. At the split knuckles. “I can’t tell you the rest of it, Alex.”

“Can’t or won’t.”

“Both,” he said, and at least he had the decency not to pretend there was a difference. “There’s things that happen in this life that aren’t mine alone to hand out. If I tell you, I’m not just telling you. I’m telling everybody who was there tonight that what happens to them can end up on my kitchen table because my girl asked nicely.” He held my gaze, and there was nothing hard in it, just tired. “That’s not how it works. That’s not how it’s ever worked.”

“I’m not just your girl,” I said. “I’m about to be your wife.”

“I know that too.” He reached across the table and put his hand over mine. “And in a few years, when Arthur’s old enough to really ask, I’m going to tell him the same thing I’m telling you right now, which is that some doors in this life you don’t get to open just because you love the person standing behind them. You get to trust that they’re not lying to you about what matters. Nobody got killed tonight. Nobody’s going to jail. That’s the whole truth I’ve got room to give you.”

I sat with that for a while. The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere down the hall Arthur’s door stayed shut, and I was grateful, in a small ugly corner of myself, that he’d slept through all of it.