Swept Together

“Everything always has to be about you. Sometimes I wish you’d just show up without needing to make a spectacle out of it.”

Rebecca had the mug in her hand. She was holding it up near her shoulder, not like she was going to throw it at him, more like she was showing it to him. Her hand was shaking.

“Becks, please put it down.”

He made it worse by reaching for it. She stepped back and threw it down against the floor and it broke into four or five pieces. One of them skipped under the couch. Another one hit the metal leg of the woodstove and made a small ringing sound.

He’d made that mug. Years ago, in a pottery class, before he knew her. When they’d been dating a few weeks her dog got sick, and then the dog was gone, and she told him she needed to be alone. So he backed off. He left things, little gifts on her porch instead. A stuffed animal first, which was stupid, then flowers, then the mug. It was plain and a little uneven at the lip and it was the thing that made her call him. She’d carried it to every apartment since, every trip, every getaway.

“Why would you do that,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Why did you reach for it? You reach for the mug. But not for me. The mug.”

“You were about to smash it.”

“My phone’s at four percent, Adam. The power’s been flickering for an hour. Before we left, I asked you twice about the charger. Twice.”

“I know.”

“You don’t listen unless it’s your problem. The prescription. My work clothes sitting wet in the washer all night. My birthday, when you waited so long every place was booked and we ate at the place with the disgusting and sticky menus. It’s not just one thing, it’s a pattern, it’s the same thing over and over.”

The wind picked up outside and something loose on the porch knocked against the railing. He walked away from her, toward the kitchen, and kicked the overnight bag out of his path harder than he needed to. He put both hands behind his neck. Every time she came around into his line of sight he turned again, like they were on some slow ugly carousel.

“You turn every conversation into a trial,” she said.

“Because you treat every question like an accusation.”

They had both said these exact sentences before. They both knew it. It didn’t stop either of them.

She kept going. The charger became the reservation became the way he told stories about their life to his friends like it was already settled, like she’d signed something. She was pacing and her voice kept climbing and the rain was pounding hard at the windows now, loud enough that she was talking over it without noticing.

She stopped to breathe and he said, quietly, “I think you’re waiting for me to fail badly enough that leaving will feel justified.”

He’d been circling that for months. Little accusations about the ledger she kept, how nothing repaired ever stayed repaired with her. He’d never said it like this. So that’s why he said it the way you say something you’ve already decided is true.

His hands came down from his neck. His shoulders dropped. His voice had gone quiet but his body had gone quieter, and she recognized what it was. He’d stopped defending himself.

“I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t be in here with this.”

He took his coat off the hook. He left his keys on the counter.

“I knew you’d leave eventually,” she said.

He heard it. She could tell he heard it.

He didn’t look back. He always looked back, always paused with his hand on the door and gave her the chance to say something that would keep him in the room, and this time the door just opened and closed and the sound of the storm got loud and then muffled again, and her anger tipped over into something it’s never been before.

The rain went through the shoulders of her shirt before she was off the porch. She hadn’t grabbed a coat. She was in leggings and one of his old sweatshirts and the sweatshirt was soaked before she reached the path. It pulled heavily at her shoulders. Her hair came loose and whipped across her eyes and stuck to her mouth and she pulled it away and it came back.

She could see him, sort of. A shape moving away from the cabin with its head down. She couldn’t tell if he’d heard the door.

“You’re going to get yourself hurt!!”

He stopped and turned around.

She got within a few feet of him and bent forward with her hands on her thighs, trying to get her breath back. The wind was loud enough that everything they said for the next while had to be half shouted, which did something to the words. Everything came out at the same volume whether it deserved it or not.

He took a step toward her when she wobbled and she said “stay away from me” and he froze with one foot forward like a kid playing a game where the music stopped.

“Every time I ask what comes next,” he said, “you make me feel like I’m already halfway out the door. Do you understand that? I ask about next year and you look at me like I’ve served you papers.”

“Because you don’t ask. You inform. You’ve got the whole thing built already, the house, the kids, the version of me that goes along with it, and my job is to just move in.”

“That’s not…”

“Your family raised you to think a wife and kids is a report card. That’s what this is. You don’t want a life with me, you want to show your dad a photo.”

He stood there taking all of it on the chin. The rain running off his face.

“You want to talk about family,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“No wonder they don’t want you around. You show up when it’s easy. That’s it, that’s always it with you. Your mother was sick and you stayed here and everyone saw exactly what you are.”

She had reasons for that. She had reasons she’d laid out for him at two in the morning once, and he’d held her and said he understood, and now the same facts were coming back at her rearranged into a weapon, which meant he’d kept them loaded this whole time.

“You’d fall apart without me,” he said. “You know that? I’m the only thing holding your life together and you resent me for it. You’re going to grow old alone and miserable because you don’t actually care about anyone.”

“If you can’t handle me, how would you handle a child? You can’t even handle a Tuesday. You forget everything I ask you to do and then you want to be somebody’s father…”

“At least I want something.”

“The thought of having your child makes me feel trapped, it’s suffocating.”

It came out of her at full volume because everything was at full volume, but it would have landed the same as a whisper. Maybe worse as a whisper. He stood very still in the rain and the wind shoved at both of them and neither of them moved.

“You would make any child feel unwanted,” he said, “the second they became inconvenient.”

There was nothing after that for a moment. The storm kept on because the storm didn’t care what they’d said, and something in the trees behind the cabin cracked, a big wet splitting sound, and they kept standing there anyway.

“You want to chain me down,” she said. Her voice had gone hoarse. “And you’d be a terrible father anyway. Look how you treat people.”

“How I treat people.”

“You’ve been keeping score this whole time. My family, my mother. You saved all of it as ammo.”

“You gave it to me.”

His eyes went somewhere over her shoulder and his arm came up in front of his face and then the branch hit the ground beside them. She didn’t hear it land. A branch the size of a person coming down six feet away and the storm just swallowed the sound of it whole. It broke on impact and something flew off of it and Adam stumbled sideways and grabbed his forearm and she was still finishing her sentence, whatever her sentence had been, it was gone now.

“What,” she said. “What happened.”

He was looking at the branch. Half of it had come to rest across the spot where the path used to be visible. Above them the trees were moving in a way trees shouldn’t move, all of them, all at once, leaning together like they were being pushed by a hand.

He didn’t answer her. He looked up, and then at her, and whatever they had been doing to each other for the last ten minutes went somewhere else in his mind, filed away, not resolved, just set down, because his hand came up against the back of her head and he pulled her face into his chest and turned them both toward the cabin.

“I can get back myself.” Her voice was muffled against his coat.

He didn’t say anything. He walked them forward with his arm around her head and his shoulder taking the wind, and she slipped once in the mud and grabbed the front of his coat and caught herself against him, and after that she stopped making distance. She kept protesting in short bursts the whole way back. He never answered one of them. Most of the words went straight into the wind and neither of them would ever be sure what she’d said, and it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t really language at that point, it was just the sound of her refusing to be carried while being carried.

The porch light was flickering with the power. One twist of the handle and the door had blown open and rain had gotten in across the floorboards. He pushed her through ahead of him and came in behind her and put his shoulder against the door until the latch caught.

Something was wrong about the quiet back inside. Their breathing filled the room, hers fast and uneven, his heavier, dragged out of him by the walk back. The rain was still going but it was outside now, a sound instead of a thing. Water ran off both of them onto the floor.

He went into the kitchen and took the broom from beside the refrigerator and started sweeping the mug into a pile. His movements were stiff and mechanical, push, push, tap the dustpan, like he was operating himself from a short distance away.

She stayed by the door. One hand near the handle. She watched his back and waited for him to turn around and keep going, because that was what happened, the fight always had a second act, and she was standing there braced for it in her soaked clothes, dripping.

His hand slipped on the broom handle.

He adjusted his grip and looked down and there was blood coming from under his sleeve, across his palm, a thin line of it already at his wrist. He’d known something hit him. He hadn’t known this.

He stood there looking at it.

Her face did something when she saw it. It softened, the way it used to, and then he looked toward her and it closed like a door. She didn’t come over. She didn’t offer anything. She stayed beside the door. He looked at her once. She didn’t move.

He set the broom against the counter and took the dish towel off the oven handle. The same towel from dinner, from earlier, from the ordinary evening this was supposed to have been. There was still a grease mark near one corner. He wrapped his forearm and pulled it tight with his teeth and slid down against the refrigerator until he was sitting on the floor.

The trees stopped scraping against the side of the cabin. He noticed that. What was left was the rain, thinner now, and the refrigerator humming behind his head.

He sat there with his arm in the towel and thought about the future he’d built so many times, the house, the yard, the kid on his shoulders, and understood something he should have understood years ago, which was that Rebecca had never once walked into that picture on her own. He’d placed her there. Every time. He’d been furnishing a room she never entered.

The rain went intermittent. On, off, on. The wind dropped to something that only bothered a few loose things on the porch railing.

Rebecca was still standing. Still wet. She hadn’t sat down once since they came inside, hadn’t taken off the sweatshirt, hadn’t done any of the small settling things a person does when they plan to stay.

When the storm sounded moderate enough to drive in, she moved.

No conversation. She got her purse from the hook and her phone off the counter. The charger was beside her phone. She left it there.

Before the door she stopped for a second. She looked at the towel around his arm, then at the dustpan with the mug in it. Then she stepped over the dustpan and her shoe came down on a smaller piece neither of them had noticed, off by the couch, and it crunched, and she didn’t look down, and the door opened and closed.

Adam didn’t get up.

He heard the car door open and shut. Then nothing for several seconds, long enough that he found himself listening, long enough to wonder what she was doing out there in the drivers’ seat in the dark. Then the engine started, and the noise pulled out of the driveway and faded into the sound of rain.

The mug pieces sat in the dustpan beside him, swept together but still unmistakably broken.