Chapter 14 — WHY SHE COULD NOT HOLD HIM
I went to see Corinne in March.
Not through the lawyers. She was staying at Judith's, in the house she grew up in, off Rock Quarry Road, and I drove out on a Saturday and knocked on the door and Judith opened it and looked at me and then went and got her daughter and did not say a word to me either way.
We sat on the back steps.
It was fifty degrees and neither of us had a coat.
"I got the test," I said.
She did not ask which test.
That is the answer, right there, and it came in under a second.
"When," she said.
"Two weeks ago."
She put her hands between her knees.
"Are you going to file it?"
"I don't know."
"Okay."
We sat there.
"I want to ask you something and I want you to actually answer it," I said. "Not the lawyer version."
"Okay."
"Why couldn't you hold him?"
Corinne looked out at the yard.
Judith's yard has a swing set in it that has been there since Corinne was six and that nobody has taken down.
"Because every time I picked him up," she said, "I knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I'd done it."
She said it flatly, like a woman reading a number off a meter.
"For the first three months I thought maybe. Maybe it's fine, maybe he's yours, maybe I get to just — keep going. And then his hair came in dark and he got long and I would be holding him at two in the morning and I would look at him and there wasn't any maybe left."
"So you stopped picking him up."
"I picked him up when people were watching."
I did not say anything.
"You want me to say I don't love him." She shook her head. "That's not it. That's what everybody thinks it is, and it's not it. I couldn't be alone in a room with him because when I was alone in a room with him I was alone in a room with what I did."
"So you gave him to a seven-year-old."
"Yes."
"For six hours."
"Yes."
"Corinne, she has bruises on both shoulders."
"I know."
"She told you her back hurt and you told her she was being dramatic."
Corinne put her face in her hands, and I watched her, and I did not feel what I expected to feel.
"Does Grant know?" I asked.
She laughed, once, with no air in it.
"Grant has known since I was nine weeks pregnant."
I turned my head.
"What?"
"I told him at nine weeks. In his office. I was crying and I thought — I don't know what I thought. That he'd be scared. That he'd tell me to fix it." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "He was happy, Daniel. He was happy. He sat back in his chair and he smiled and he said good."
"Good."
"That's what he said."
"Why would he say good?"
And Corinne looked at me with an expression I had not seen on her in a year, which was not guilt and was not fear.
It was bewilderment.
"I've been trying to work that out for eighteen months," she said.