Things We Didn't Say_ A Novel - Kristina Riggle [5]
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.
But no. My mother will call, and then she’ll worry, and that wouldn’t be fair, considering what she’s been through already.
I rush back up the porch, and suck in a sharp breath as I turn the key in the lock and shove the heavy wood door open with my shoulder.
My phone is in the kitchen, and I’m just picking it up when the house phone rings. I look at caller ID: the high school. I let it ring three times before I resign myself to picking up. After all, there could be something wrong.
Chapter 2
Michael
I yank open the heavy metal employee entrance door at the Grand Rapids Herald newsroom, my head already full of yesterday’s story and this morning’s last-minute edits.
The scent of fresh ink clings to the building, though the presses moved to a facility miles away more than two years ago.
Every morning as I walk this hall, I recall a full, bustling office, the police scanner fizzing with static, the television on to the morning news, reporters already working the phones, editors squinting at their screens.
Reality hits me when I round the corner: half the seats are now empty, the computer terminals removed and redistributed to other papers in the company. Here and there a coffee mug sits, ringed with the brown remnants of mugs swilled on deadline. There still should be a buzz of activity. But a malaise has settled on the survivors. The loudest noise is the muted clacking of keys.
I sit down and punch the button to fire up my terminal, glancing about for Aaron. I see he’s already busy with Tina, so I pull out my notes.
Gerald used to sit next to me. His computer is gone, as is his stuff. But there’s still a photo print on his low workspace wall, snapped by one of our photogs during a candid moment. Gerald is scowling at his screen, his glasses on the end of his nose like something out of Dickens. The caption reads: “I am smiling, dammit,” which became a famous Gerald-ism, uttered in response to an unbearable intern who exhorted him to smile. On deadline.
The terminal across from me, where Amanda works, has a note taped to the screen: Just on vacation! Don’t vulture my stuff.
Now that my