Think of the Children

Wyatt came back in June, eleven months after the summer he had taught her to swim, and he came to the little house off Coliseum instead of the house on Esplanade, which told her that he had asked somebody where she lived and had been told.

He stood on the stoop. He was browner than she remembered and thinner, and he had the particular look of a man who has been rehearsing a sentence.

"Mérida was good," he said.

"Was it."

"Hot. The hotel's fine. They want me for another year."

She waited. The fig tree dropped something onto the tin roof.

"Marin——"

"Not on the stoop."

He came in then, and he did not touch her, and that was the worst of it, because in the whole of the previous summer he had not touched her either, and the not-touching had become between them a thing with its own furniture and its own rules. She made iced coffee because there was nothing else to do with her hands. He sat at the table with the paint smell in the room and said the sentence he had been rehearsing.

It was not a good sentence. It was: "I don't think I can be the person who did this to you."

"Did what to me."

"You know."

She said, quite calmly, "Nobody did anything to me. I did it. You were the weather."

It was unfair and she knew it. He took it the way a man takes a slap he has been expecting since March.

He left at four. He stood in the doorway — and she would think afterward that his whole life with her had been doorways, the front hall on Esplanade and this one — and said, "I'm going back in August."

"To Mexico."

"Yes."

"Wyatt."

He shook his head.

And then, because he was twenty-eight and because the modern world has no good-byes in it, he texted her two hours later from a supermarket parking lot on Claiborne Avenue:

I love you. I'm going. Because I love you.

She read it seven times. She did not answer it and she did not delete it, and she understood that this was the closest he would ever come and that it was also, functionally, nothing: a sentence in a telephone, arriving with no voice in it. In another century, she thought, the man at least had to hand you the paper.

Camille's baby came three weeks early, on a Tuesday in July, and Marin was in the room because Camille had asked her to be and because nobody says no to Camille.

Marc was down the hall with the three boys, who had been scrubbed and were eating dry cereal out of a bag. Camille had done her hair before they left the house. Marin sat beside the bed for eleven hours and held her hand and thought the thing she had been taught to think, which was: this is what women are for.

It hurt. Camille, who never complained about anything, complained, and then apologized for complaining, and then said, at the worst of it, with her face turned to the ceiling and her hand crushing Marin's:

"Think of the children. Think of them. Oh — think of the children."

They told her afterward that she had said it perhaps a dozen times. Camille was embarrassed by it later — I don't know what came over me — but Marin knew exactly what had come over her, because it was the true thing, and it was the only true thing that had been said out loud in the whole of that year.

The baby was a girl. Camille wept with relief, and Marc came in with the boys, and there was the ordinary beautiful exhausting mess of it, and Marin stood at the foot of the bed and felt nothing at all where she had been told she would feel everything.

She walked out into the corridor. Dr. Broussard was there, drinking the hospital's coffee with the expression of a man who disapproves of coffee; Marc had called him, as Marc called him for everything, being a man who believed in having a physician in the room for any event of consequence.

"You were here the whole time."

"I've sat through four of these with her. She's the only patient I have who apologizes to me, and she did it between contractions."

They went down together and out into the heat, which in July in New Orleans is not weather but a wall. He walked her the six blocks to Coliseum without being asked, and she understood that he had decided to, and that this was his version of tenderness.

"I saw Savoie's car," he said.

"I'm sure you did."

"I'm not going to tell you what to do."

"No," she said. "You never do. That's why I keep coming to you."

He was quiet for half a block.

"Are you in love with him?"

"No."

"With the boy in Mexico?"

She thought about it. Then she said, "No. That's the terrible part. I don't think it was ever him."

He stopped at the corner in the shade of somebody's live oak and looked at her the way he had looked at her in his office in December — the way you look at a problem you have decided not to solve.

"Then what is it you want."

"I don't know."

"Mm." He said it without irony. "You know what I'd say if you were thirty years older and had done something you regretted? I'd say take up gardening. As it is——"

"As it is."

"As it is," said Dr. Broussard, "there is a very old and not very useful fact, which is that a person who wakes in the night in a house where everyone else is asleep has nowhere to go and no one to tell, and the only thing that has ever helped anybody in that position is time, and time is not a treatment. I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

He touched her shoulder — a formal, dry, little touch — and went off toward Napoleon Avenue with his hands behind his back, and she stood in the shade and thought: he is the only person in this city who has understood me, and he has given me absolutely nothing.

She went into the little house. The paint smell, the tin roof, the fig. She stood in the front room with the curtain drawn against the afternoon and thought about Camille saying think of the children, and she knew — with the cold, clear, unarguable knowledge she had been walking toward all year — that she did think of them, and that she would not do it. That she loved Noah and Theo as much as any woman had ever loved anybody, and that she would not give herself up for them, and that there was no version of that sentence which came out sounding like anything but a confession.