foyer.”
“Okay.” Jimmy turns and exits.
Alison remembers that is where she keeps the handgun. She goes after him. “No! Wait. I’ll get…”
Hank grabs her arm. “It’s not in there.”
“What?”
“The gun isn’t in there.”
Angrily, “Where is it?”
“I got rid of it.”
Furious, she yells, “Have you lost your mind?”
For a sour moment, they stand like that: Hank with his fingers harshly gripping her arm and Alison half-turned toward the door. The words she just spoke bang around the room. She knows what he is thinking. He thinks she has lost her mind. That is what he thinks. That is what everyone thinks. Too bad, I know what I know. I know it’s not over. I can feel he’s around.
“Hank, something strange happened out there between us.”
“No, we’re still the same.”
“Not you and me - me and him.”
“You and him! Now there’s a you and him? There is no you and him.”
“Something…some kind of animal thing passed between us and I’m trying to protect us.”
“You want to protect us? To protect our family? Give me back my wife! Give Jimmy back his mother!” They are squeezed in a fist of conflict. It is all so wrong. They know it is wrong, and they both want it to end, but they cannot see through the fog of the storm between them. They are both certain they are right and being so certain makes compromise untenable.
“I wish you understood.” She pulls her arm away. “But I can’t pretend it is not happening.” She walks toward the swinging door.
“Alison!” She stops never having heard that tone from her husband. There is danger in it; it feels like a tipping point. “It is not happening.” She does not feel quite as defiant as she looks when she spins around and pushes through the swinging door. Hank pushes his way out the back kitchen door. He shoves his hands into his pockets and walks around the frozen backyard in circles crunching the rigid blades of grass under fuming feet.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Four
The following morning the pacing continues unabated inside Doctor Cartwell’s office. Hank walks around with such concentrated power he has created an oblong-shaped discernible path in the freshly vacuumed carpet. Inside the office, with its cushy armchairs and dark linen drapes, Hank feels it is allowable to let go. A candle burns on the shelf of the bookcase soothingly scenting the air with lavender heightening the sensation of being in a meditative space, a place where it is okay to lift the burden from his shoulders and stash it by the door until he can pick it up on the way out. Hank oscillates between anxiety and wrenching sadness, but his most pressing emotion is his mounting anger, an anger that has begun to bleed through the reinforced borders of his façade His goodness is leaking.
Doctor Cartwell says, “I want to talk about you, Hank. What you’re feeling.”
“What I’m feeling? Okay. Sure. Let’s see. I feel infuriated beyond reason. The blood in my veins is angry, the hairs on my head are angry, my skin is cracked and itching because the anger has dried me out.” His voice grows louder as he rants. “I’m mad at the streetlights, at the clock on the stove. I’m mad at the food on my plate. I’m mad at a god I don’t even believe in! I feel like shaking someone to death! Yes, to death, that’s it! That’s how I feel like I want to shake and shake until I shake the life out of something and after all that shaking I know I will still be the same joke of a man I was before all the shaking.”
“You think you’re a joke?”
“The whole time, from the first moment at the camp, I’ve been worthless as a father, as a husband, as a man. I couldn’t protect my son. I couldn’t help my wife. I can’t control anything. I can’t fix anything. I’m useless.”
“You were tied up.”
“I’m not tied up now! She’s losing it and I still can’t help. I thought after a little time things would return to normal. The guy is dead. We have proof he’s dead. I thought she would feel safe again, safe with me, but the truth is she isn’t safe with me and now she knows that - she knows that for sure.” He is shattered. “And that really hurts, you know, for the woman you love to see you in that way. Isn’t there some kind of tacit social contract, or maybe it’s a