11 You Don’t Have to Say It

11

you don’t have to say it

Alexander

Through this whole separation process, every couple of days I get a wave of emotion that I don’t know what to do with. It’s fear. It’s like my stomach drops to the ground, I start shaking, my brain turns to mush, and the only thing I can think to do is go for a run. But I’m on kid duty now so I can’t go charging for the hills. Dani would hate that I’m thinking of this single parenting thing as a chore. I’m really not, I’m just not used to it. What is this new life I’m supposed to live? The unknown is giving me unrelenting anxiety.

Some single friends I know act like being single is a personality trait. Maybe I even used to think that. There are relationship people and then there are the people who can’t be tied down. Now where do I fall?

Am I really still folding clothes?

Noah walks past the doorway. “Are we going to dinner?”

“Yeah, give me ten minutes,” I tell him.

“I’m starving. ”

I turn around and glare at him. “Go jump on the trampoline.”

“We haven’t jumped on that thing in forever,” he says.

“Why?”

From the other room Ethan answers, “Mom said not to! She said the gardeners messed it up or something.”

Why didn’t she tell me? I walk to the window of Dani’s bedroom…our bedroom…and look out into the backyard. “It’s fine!” I say, irritated. “I can’t believe I’m still doing laundry!” I yell. “Give me ten minutes. Go jump and let me finish this up.”

Noah shrugs. “Okay. Yeah, Mom always complains about the laundry too.”

“You guys should be doing your own laundry,” I snap back.

“She says that too.”

“Then why don’t you?” I say as I sift through a pile of mismatched socks.

He shrugs again. Ethan enters the room. “We’ll start doing it, okay?” He pulls on Noah, “Let’s go jump.”

Because Dani was often home with the boys, she always did the laundry. Even before we had kids, it was her thing. She never asked me to do it and she’d fly off the handle when I’d start a load and not finish it, or forget clothes in the dryer. She’d say, “Either do it right, or just leave it and I’ll do it.” She always folded the clothes when they were still warm, and I thought she was an anal-retentive maniac because of it. Now, as I’m hanging wrinkled clothes on hangers and unable to find a single matching pair of socks, I get it.

I can hear the boys arguing again about something. For a moment it occurs to me that they sound like Oscar and Felix from The Odd Couple, and then I realize, no, they sound like me and Dani.

“Shut up, Noah,” I hear Ethan say. A moment later there’s a very loud, piercing scream but I can’t tell who it’s coming from .

Running as fast as I can, I make it downstairs, then go slidingthrough a puddle of water on the kitchen floor before falling on my ass. It’s Noah; I can now hear him screaming, “Ow, ow, ow!”

I pick myself up and dart into the backyard, where Noah is lying on the ground and Ethan is kneeling next to him.

Ethan looks up. “I think he broke his arm,” he says. I notice the trampoline, including the safety net, is on its side. “See, Dad, Mom was right. The leg is unhinged on the trampoline or something.”

“Oh my god,” I say under my breath. Noah is crying on the ground. “What is it, Noah? What hurts?”

“My arm,” he cries.

I’m frozen. What do I do? I’m examining his arm and trying not to move it. Ethan is staring at me, waiting for me to save the day. His eyebrows are arched like he’s just asked me a question and is waiting for the answer.

“What, Ethan? Jesus!”

“Want me to call Mom?”

“No!” I bark. “Sit up, Noah.”

Noah sits up while I hold his arm in place. I move it just a little and he screams, “Ow!”

“Calm down.” Just by looking at it I know that it’s broken, somewhere around his elbow, but I won’t tell him that. I’m a physical therapist, for god’s sake, and I’m kneeling on the ground looking like a deer in headlights.

“It hurts,” he whines.

“I know, Noah, I’m sorry. Ethan, go get the ACE bandage. I’ll wrap it up and we’ll take him to the ER. So, what actually happened?”

Noah stops crying abruptly and looks up at me, “Obviously, the trampoline is broken!” He looks exactly like Dani in this moment. His expression derisive and demeaning. The implication is that I’m a fucking moron, clearly.

“I’m sorry.” I do feel horrible. Ethan returns with the bandage. I wrap up Noah’s arm to stabilize it to his chest. We stand and I guide Noah inside onto the couch. “Where’s the insurance cards and stuff?” They both look at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. “I need to call your doctor. I need to figure out where to take you. Where did Mom take you, Ethan, when you got the stitches on your ear?”

“Verdugo. Remember, you were there?”

When you don’t have to remember things, you don’t try to. Dani is going to blow a gasket. “Ethan, call your mom and ask her where the insurance cards are.”

“She’s gonna freak out!”

“I know, just call her,” I say.

“There goes baseball,” Noah says to himself. He’s calmed down a lot. It looks like he’s not in as much pain, so much as he’s just disappointed in me.

I can hear Ethan talking in the kitchen, but there’s a wall blocking him, so it’s difficult to understand what he’s saying. Lip-reading has become a talent of mine since I lost my hearing in one ear. If Dani knew how much I relied on lip-reading…Who am I kidding? Dani knows. When we were still together, she told me once that intimacy between us was hard because she felt like she couldn’t speak softly, be soft, when she was talking to me. I wonder for a second if that’s true or if she just liked pouring salt in my wounds. The deafness isn’t my fault anyway, and it’s just cruel of her to criticize it.

“Dad!”

“What?” I say to Ethan, who has come into the room.

“Mom wants to talk to you.” He holds the phone out.

I hesitate. “Hello? ”

“How bad is it? Ethan said Noah’s stopped crying,” she says. “I’m at the hair salon currently, sitting with bleach in my hair. Do I really need to come home?”

“No…” I’m at a loss for words. I want to ask her why she has bleach in her beautiful dark hair.

“Hello? So he’s okay?” she says. Several seconds pass. My mind is spinning. “Oh my god, hello, Alex? Just let me talk to Noah.”

“I’m here. I’m sorry. I need to know where the insurance cards are.”

“They’re in the drawer under the toaster. I’m so pissed at those boys. I told them not to jump on the trampoline until we got it fixed,” she says.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did. Remember when I was writing the gardener a check and I made the joke about deducting the trampoline cost from it?”

It hit me. The whole conversation came back to me. Shit.

“I told them to go jump on it. I forgot it was broken,” I say. I know my voice is weak…and penitent.

Silence.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, but it is precisely my fault. “Can I just talk to Noah?”

I look at Noah on the couch, staring at me. He’s completely calm but his elbow is swollen. I know I need to take him to theER.

“Alex!” she yells. “Let. Me. Talk. To. Noah!”

I hand Noah the phone.

“I’m fine, but it still hurts,” he says to Dani. “Okay. Okay. Love you too. I’ll call you from the ER. Okay. Bye.”

He pushes End on the phone and looks up at me. “She said to tell you if the wait is too long at the ER, then to just wrap it well and she’ll take me in the morning. She also said to remind you that the ER gets crowded late at night and to park in the south parking lot, because the front entrance will be closed.”

Even though I work at that hospital, teaching a class one day a week, I would never remember those details about the ER. Again, when you don’t have to remember the minutiae, you don’t try to.

I’m confident everything will be fine. Looking at Noah now, I’m guessing it’s probably just a very small fracture, maybe even a sprain. The level of anxiety I felt has diminished, but the one thing still nagging at me is why Dani is bleaching her gorgeous hair, and why she decided after so long to finally show me some grace by telling me it wasn’t my fault, when it unequivocally was.