Things We Didn't Say - By Kristina Riggle Page 0,4
my dark blond hair is hanging in a ponytail. I’m holding a baseball bat, glaring with mock concentration at the invisible pitcher, but my eyes are smiling and I know that the minute the shutter clicked I snorted with laughter. I don’t remember the exact joke, but it didn’t take much to get me started back then. I know I kissed him as soon as I put the bat down. Michael had added text to the picture before printing it out. It says, “Casey at the bat,” in the blue sky behind me.
The ring snags on my knuckle, biting into the skin as I try to pull it off. My hands are puffy. I yank again, letting it bang again into the existing scrape, which is now blooming with a line of red.
Against my will, my mind flashes to the moment Michael slid this ring on my finger, almost a year ago, on New Year’s Eve. Mallory had the kids that night, and we sat on a rug in front of the living room fireplace. The house was then a place I only visited, a place we had to ourselves when Mallory managed to keep to her visitation days. I’d never seen its dustiest corners, never hauled the smelly trash to the curb. I knew but did not yet grasp this bit of history: it was not just a pretty house, but had been the Turner family home since Michael was a kid, and then the very home where Michael and Mallory had settled in as newlyweds. I still use the mixing bowls they got as a wedding gift to stir the pancake batter every Sunday.
That New Year’s Eve, amber firelight wavering across his face, he whispered, “I never thought I’d do this again.”
I gasped. He must have thought it was delight and surprise. It was more like a falling dream; a sickening plunge. A stepmother? Me? I thought of myself drunk at the bottom of a stairwell or puking my guts out in a smelly bar bathroom.
That wasn’t the girl he wanted to marry. He never met that girl at all, never knew she existed.
It was me he wanted, the new me, the one who played board games with his kids and didn’t even like the taste of alcohol. He made me chicken soup when I was sick and taught me to play euchre and told me dumb jokes until I laughed when I was having a bad day. He loves me, I thought. And that will be enough. So I said yes.
The ring still won’t come off. I clench my bloody knuckle and resign myself to leaving it on, for now. An unwelcome loose end. I walk out of the room, no longer my room, and it wasn’t ever, really.
I pause at the front door with my hand on the knob, holding my breath, allowing myself to feel this tearing away, doubting myself. If it hurts this much to walk out this door, does that mean I should stay?
But vaccinations hurt, too. Surgery hurts. Exercise hurts. Sometimes pain is necessary.
I yank on the knob. It comes open hard, as if resisting me, but that’s just fancy. It’s a sticky old wooden door, is all.
I almost sprint down the porch stairs, my bag slapping against my hip.
I’m halfway down the block when I realize I don’t have my phone. Also, I should probably leave the key. I’ll have to get my books and things later, but I’ll do that at some appointed time, and Michael will open the door to let me in. Or maybe we can meet at a neutral location.
And I’ll have to return the ring, once I get it off.
The house grows larger in my view, again with its surprised-looking front windows. It’s disorienting to have turned around. Just minutes before when I crossed the threshold it had felt so final and momentous. For a moment I stand on the sidewalk in front of the house and consider leaving my phone there, too, maybe leaving it all there, forever.
The house already seems to me like it belongs to a stranger. A pretty wood house among other pretty wood houses, painted a soft gray-blue like a dawn sky before the sun has gathered full strength, a rounded, half-moon window and a wraparound porch morphing into mere details, as if I hadn’t seen Dr. Turner and Michael carefully painting every spindle of that porch just last spring.
I can always get new books. I could turn around again.