The Push, Ashley Audrain [popular novels TXT] 📗

door, so soft that I almost didn’t get out of bed to answer it. I slipped on my robe and walked carefully down the stairs in the dark. I opened the door. Nobody was there. But there was a large bubble-wrapped package with a note taped to it. I opened it on the cold floor. The painting. Sam’s painting. The note was from Gemma.

You deserve to have this. It’s been hanging in Violet’s room since Fox gave it to her, but she took it down this afternoon. The frame is cracked. And she punctured the canvas. I’m sorry for that.

I didn’t know how much it meant to you.

Please, give her space.

I hope you understand.

Merry Christmas.

Gemma

You hadn’t yet made it back to your car. I would recognize the shape of you anywhere, the round of your shoulders, the slight lift in your elbows while you walked. I didn’t think before I called your name. You didn’t think before you turned around. And so there we were, staring at each other. Strangers, family. I waited for you to turn away toward your car. But instead you came back. To the porch you rebuilt, to the home you had loved. The home we still shared on paper. You looked up to where the trim around the door had spliced, a shard of wood jutting out like a blade.

‘You should get that fixed.’

‘Thank you. For bringing this back.’ I gestured behind me to the painting, half unwrapped in the entryway.

‘Thank Gemma.’

I nodded.

‘You can’t call my wife anymore. You have to move on with your life. You know this, right? For the good of everyone.’

I knew. But I didn’t want to hear it from you.

You turned away from me, and I thought you might leave then. I stared at the side of your face, trying to decide what I felt for you now. It had been so long since we’d been near each other. You didn’t feel real to me, you felt like a character in a life that had never been mine. I wanted to reach for your chin, to touch you, to see how you felt between my fingers now that you loved someone else, now that you were a father to a child who was not ours.

‘What?’ you asked, feeling my eyes on you.

I shook my head. We shook our heads at each other. And then you closed your eyes and you started to chuckle.

‘You know what, I thought of something on the way over here.’ You took a seat on the top stair and spoke toward the road. I sat next to you and wrapped my housecoat tight. ‘There was this thing I never told you about.’ You chuckled again and let your shoulders fall. I had no idea what you would say.

‘Do you remember that time, just after Sam was born, when all of your nice clothes from the closet disappeared? And we couldn’t find them anywhere?’

‘It was that cleaning service you hired, that stupid discount place.’ I scoffed. I remembered. I thought I was going crazy; all of my nice blouses and sweaters had disappeared at some point. I had lived in my oversized sweats for months after his birth, so I couldn’t say for sure when it had happened, but their disappearance was the strangest thing. We had done a trial with a new cleaning company in the neighborhood and it was the only possible explanation I could think of. I was too tired and preoccupied to care much at the time. You told me not to worry, that we’d replace everything.

You hung your head and began to laugh. ‘Well, one day’ – you squeezed the bridge of your nose between your fingers and your shoulders shook – ‘one day I went in your closet to get a sweater you asked for, and –’ You couldn’t finish. You were in tears. I hadn’t seen anyone laugh so hard in years.

‘What? This is annoying, just tell me!’

‘I opened your closet door and everything was … it was all cut up.’ You could barely spit the words out. The tears spilled down your face. You shook your head and wheezed. ‘The arms, they had all been snipped and the shirts were cropped. I touched one thing after another and thought, What the hell?’ You wiped your face with the back of your hand. ‘And then I looked down, and there Violet was, hiding under the bottoms of your dresses, holding out one of those modeling knives from my desk. She’d done it. She’d just gone to town like Edward fucking Scissorhands. So I threw the clothes out and never told you.’

My jaw fell. My clothes. She’d massacred my wardrobe. While I sat downstairs on the couch feeding the baby, she’d been up there slicing every nice thing I owned. And you covered up for her.

‘That is fucked up.’ It was all I could think to say. You looked at me and laughed again, delirious. You were infuriating. I shook my head and called you an idiot under my breath. You shouldn’t have found it funny.

But then I cracked a smile. I couldn’t help myself. I started to laugh, too. It was absurd. You still had that pull on me, that way of making me want to be like you. We howled like a pair of old dogs in the night. At the thought of such a strange thing to do, at the ridiculousness of hiding it from me. At the idea that after everything, we could be there, that night, on the cold porch, together.

‘You should have told me.’ I wiped my nose on my housecoat and let the laughter settle.

‘I know.’ You were calm by then and something changed in your face. You looked me in the eye for the first time in years. We sat there together in the heaviness of everything we would not say. I had to look away. I closed my heavy lids and thought of our son. Our beautiful son. I thought of Elijah,