A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [127]
“That’s always been my trouble. I want to believe in someone so much, I stop believing in myself. Gordon?” Her voice broke. “Tell me you understand. Or if you don’t, that you’ll think about what I’ve just said and at least try to understand?”
“Yes. Okay.” He opened the door. “Well . . . anyway, thank you for dinner.”
His face was all their faces, but his was the worst kind of insensitivity. His was willed, worked at, cultivated. He didn’t want to care or feel for anyone. Beyond his own suffering, he had no sense of other-ness. Everything began and ended with his crime. And always would. He needs his guilt, feels safe in its suffocating shroud. If he has nothing else, he has that. It gives him heft and substance. It’s the only way he knows to feel real and human. It fills the void, fills all that emptiness. Better to let him go. Without love, his heart had grown too small. And now it was too late. Such a waste, but it didn’t have to be. If he would only put the past aside and find the best he can in others, she was saying. “You’re so caught up in yourself, I mean, in what happened, that you can’t reach out to people. Someone does something wrong and that’s it? You’re through? You’re done? You just turn your back on everyone? Isn’t that what’s happened with Jada and Dennis, and now me? Gordon, you can’t keep walking away from people. We’re human. We make mistakes. You have to forgive us.” So that you can forgive yourself, she wanted to say but couldn’t.
“I have to go now.”
“You know something, I’ve done a lot of things I’m not very proud of, either because I was weak or lonely or stupid, but one thing I’ve never, ever done, and that’s turn my back on somebody who needed my help.”
“I’m sorry.” His struggle was painful, terrifying to witness. He couldn’t look at her, and when he did speak she could barely hear him. “I’m not who you think I am.”
“Yes, you are.” She reached to touch him, but he moved away. “The problem is you’re not who you think you are.”
CHAPTER 20
A dog was barking in the distance.
“Leonardo! Leonardo! Come on, Leonardo, come on, boy,” Jada called from her top step. Head down, Gordon hurried next door, not wanting to see the girl. Or anyone, for that matter. He had alienated the only people he cared about. Dennis blamed him because Lisa had taken the children and left. He hadn’t seen Delores in days. But how could he reconcile her affair with a married man while condemning his brother for the same sin? Delores said he didn’t know how to forgive because he had never forgiven himself. She didn’t understand. Acceptance was the greater struggle. Forgiveness was words, an easy chant to numb the sin, until with time the loss no longer really mattered or deserved its raw place in the heart.
He rang the bell with his good hand. The cut was healed, but the slightest pressure set it throbbing again. He had tried to get his job back, but the moving company had hired someone else. All he had left was thirteen dollars. He couldn’t even afford the newspaper, so every afternoon he went to the drugstore and copied the want ads from the classifieds. When Mrs. Jukas finally came to the door, she was all dressed up, cheeks rouged and her lipstick a bright red. Her ride would be here soon, she said. She had a nine o’clock appointment in Burlington with her cardiologist. “I’m out of everything.” A sinking feeling came over him when he saw her list. “See there?” She pointed halfway down the page. “Next to the eggs? See what it says? White. Remember that now—white! Last time you got brown.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Leonardo! Leonardo!” Jada’s plaintive call ended again in a piercing whistle. Now two dogs were barking.
“My God, she’s making it worse,” Mrs. Jukas groaned.
“Her dog’s lost,” he said. He had been missing for days.
“For good, I hope. Anyway, I should be back before you get out of work. One or two, probably, so I’ll pay you then, all right?”
“I need it now,” he blurted. “If that’s all right,” he added quickly. “I don’t have much money right now. I’m sorry.”
Suspicion