Page 130 of Roadrunner

I did not know what to do with any of it. It would be easy to say I sat on that step and reasoned my way calmly to the right answer. That’s not what happened. What happened was that I sat there paralyzed, unable to walk out the door and unable to carry the bag back upstairs, caught exactly between the woman who left at twenty-two and the woman I had spent four years in Arizona trying to become.

There was no evidence yet, at one-thirty in the morning, about which one was going to win.

The porch light was off. The desert outside the window was the total dark it only gets when far enough from any city. There was no moon that night, just the shapes of the mountains against a sky so full of stars it looked unserious. Like it was something painted for effect.

I put my head against the banister and closed my eyes and waited for what I couldn’t have said, except that some part of me already suspected the answer wasn’t going to come from inside my own head. It had never come from there before, not once. Not at nineteen and not now. In the end it had always come from someone standing in a doorway who refused to let me disappear quietly.

I just didn’t yet know which doorway, or who.

Headlights swept across the front window a little after two.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Alex

Now

Della’s car door shut with the soft click of someone trying not to wake a house, which meant she already knew, before she’d even come up the walk, that this wasn’t a visit where noise belonged.

I didn’t get up. I heard her key in the lock of the front door. She’d had one since the second month I lived in Riley’s house, an arrangement none of us had ever discussed out loud, the way most of the important arrangements in that family got settled without a conversation.

The door opened and she was standing there in a coat thrown over what was clearly a nightgown, looking at me on the bottom step with a suitcase at my feet like she’d been expecting to find exactly what she had found.

She didn’t say anything at first. She closed the door behind her, quietly, and came and sat down on the step beside me. She looked at the suitcase for a long moment the way you’d look at a stray animal you weren’t sure yet whether to approach.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said finally. “Had a feeling.”

I sighed. “You always have a feeling.”

“Most of the time I do,” she agreed. “Doesn’t make it less true tonight.”

We sat there. The house ticked around us. Somewhere upstairs a pipe knocked once and went quiet.

“You going somewhere?” she asked, eventually, nodding at the bag.

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the first true thing I’d managed to say out loud all night. “I packed it. I got as far as here. Almost to the door.”

“But not through it.”

“No.”

She went quiet for a moment, like that answered something she’d been thinking about on the drive.

“Riley tell you what happened?” she asked.

“No. Price didn’t either. Brisco told me I wasn’t allowed to know, more or less, and then told me why. I understood the why. I still hated it.” I looked at my hands. “I keep telling myself it’s not the same as my father. That this is different. Love keeping a door shut instead of control keeping it shut. But sitting here at two in the morning I couldn’t make myself believe there’s actually a difference, and I didn’t know who to ask, because everyone I’d ask is on the other side of the same door.”

Della was quiet for a while. When she spoke again her voice had dropped into a register I’d rarely heard from her. Not the commanding kitchen voice, not the loud, delighted one from Sunday dinners. Something quieter. Older.

“I sat on a step like this one myself,” she said. “More than forty years ago now. Different house. Same kind of night.”

I looked at her.

“Antonio came home at four in the morning once, first year we were married, with a busted lip and a story that had more holes in it than a screen door, and I did exactly what you did tonight. Packed a bag. Got as far as the porch.” She looked out at the dark yard. “I sat out there until the sun came up, trying to decide if I’d married a man or a mystery, and somewhere around five o’clock I understood those weren’t actually different things. Every man worth marrying is part mystery. The question isn’t whether you get all of him. The question is whether the part you don’t get is being kept from you out of love or out of contempt. Those feel identical at two in the morning. They are not identical.”

“How did you know which one it was?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “Not that night. I found out over forty years, one Sunday at a time. You don’t get the answer in one sitting on one step. Nobody does. I just decided that night that I’d rather spend forty years finding out than spend one night deciding I already knew.” She glanced at me. “That’s the part nobody tells you when you’re young. It’s not a decision you make once. It’s a decision you keep making. I made it again the week he died, if you want to know the truth. Furious at a man for leaving me with a bag I never got to unpack, after more than forty years of choosing him every single day. Grief will make you want to run from a life the same as fear will. They’re closer cousins than people let on.”