Chapter 15

Stupid Ryan. Stupid, stupid Ryan.

She’d thought this would be so easy—to keep the private and public personas separate. Touch in public. Truth in private. Lie in public. Silence in private. One touch from him and she was a mess. One whole-hearted smile in her direction and she felt giddy. She felt stupidly welcome.

That press conference had been more difficult than she’d imagined, owning up to those things in her past that brought her such embarrassment, that despite the years between now and then she couldn’t quite shrug away and say, “Well, I was just a kid.”

And then afterward, in his office.

I’ve never had anyone by my side before.

He’d said that and she knew it was the truth of him. But then he had to run away behind his wall of cold indifference.

They stopped in front of a small two-story building that was obviously old but had been refurbished lately. The front steps were painted white. The red brick had been blasted clean. The sign out front covered in bright-colored children’s handprints said “The Carthright School.”

“What are we doing here?” she asked. Beside her, Harrison was back to being cold. Indifferent. Glued to his phone.

“We’re going to visit the kindergarten class. It’s a new full-day program that the charter school is trying out, and we’re hoping it might be a viable program for public schools.”

She nodded. “Will there be press?”

“A few.” He really wasn’t giving her anything to work with.

“What should I do?” she asked, pointedly. Finally, he looked up from his phone.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll see the classroom. I’ll talk to the principal and the teacher, and the kids will probably give us some kind of program.”

“No remarks?”

“No remarks.”

How hard could it be? she wondered. Tour a school. Watch some kids do … whatever kids did.

“That should be easy.”

The kindergarten room was chaos. Even worse than happy hour that day when the Yankees won the Series and the refrigeration unit went on the fritz.

Those CNN shots of Oklahoma after that tornado—the kindergarten room kind of looked like that. Debris. Lots of debris.

And it was loud. All the kids in the room were yelling at the top of their voices. The kind of loud that pierced her eardrums and pounded behind her brain.

One boy ran past in a dragon costume, another behind him with a fake wooden sword over his head like he was going to bring it down and cleave the kid in half.

Mrs. Tellier, the principal, a small black woman with thin braids and serious eyes who had been giving them a tour and explaining the program of child-directed, play-based learning, plucked the sword from the boy’s hand.

“As you can see, the kids go from station to station at their own discretion.”

Discretion, she thought, watching kids dumping water from a bucket into a table filled with sand, creating an ungodly mess. What discretion?

Mrs. Sawicki, her kindergarten teacher at All Saints Catholic School, who used to make her sit in the corner when she refused to color inside the lines, would have had someone’s hide for that.

After the quiet of the hallways and the other classrooms, where kids were studiously bent over desks, raising their hands to ask questions, the bright, sunny kindergarten room seemed like total anarchy.

A tower of blocks collapsed to the floor with a loud rattle and bang.

“Oh my God,” she breathed before she could stop herself. And that earned her a surprised look from Mrs. Tellier.

“Is it always like this?” Ryan asked, her nerves fraying.

“Some days more than others,” Mrs. Tellier said with a nod and stepped farther into the room where a woman—the teacher, Ryan guessed, or perhaps warden? Or prisoner?—was sitting at a table with three children working on … Ryan couldn’t even tell what they were working on. Writing their names? In Greek?

Beside her a boy dumped out a bin of Legos, the sound making her jump. There were now roughly seven thousand pieces of Lego on the floor.

Who is going to clean that up?

In the corner there were two girls standing next to a garbage can filled with shredded tissue paper. They were putting it on each other’s head, handfuls of the stuff falling down on the floor.

A boy walked out of the bathroom, pulling up his pants. His hands dripping wet.

Please let that be water.

Was this the kind of stuff kids did? She realized she actually didn’t know any children. Not one. When Olivia was born she’d been too wrapped up in her own life to give a shit. Nora had been the babysitter. The one who cared.

“You all right?” Harrison asked.

“Fine,” she lied. She thought she might pass out.

Mrs. Tellier caught the teacher’s eye, and the young teacher managed to get all the kids over onto the carpet by singing a little song about putting their hands on top of their heads and being quiet.

Astonishing.

There was a reporter with them—Maynard, the guy from the Journal-Constitution—and a photographer who was on Harrison’s payroll, who took pictures of Harrison and Mrs. Tellier, talking about how full-day kindergarten helped mothers get back into the workforce. Ryan crept closer to the carpet, fascinated by the scene as all the kids listened to Mrs. Knight telling a story.

How did she get all of them to listen? To sit still? It was like watching someone tame lions.

Half of them had their fingers in their noses, but at least they were quiet.

“Hello, Mrs. Montgomery,” Mrs. Knight said when Ryan got close enough. Mrs. Knight had the whole teacher thing down pat. Kind-seeming and borderline frumpy, she wore sensible shoes and a cardigan sweater with lambs’ heads as pockets. She was the sort of person Ryan imagined that kids liked. That they felt comfortable around. The kind of woman that kids threw their arms around because they could.

No kids had ever thrown their arms around Ryan.

In fact, every kid on that carpet was staring at Ryan like she was an alien right off the ship.

“Hi,” Ryan said, giving the blinking, gaping children a sort of half-wave.

“Who are you?” one kid asked.

“I’m Ryan,” she said.

“That’s a boy’s name.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Is that your husband?” A girl pointed toward Harrison behind her.

“He is.” She barely managed not to say, Can you freaking believe it?

The look on the little girl’s face was far from impressed. In fact, she looked like Harrison gave off a stink.

“We’re reading The Kissing Hand,” Mrs. Knight said, “about a raccoon who is going to school for the first time and is a little scared and misses spending the day with his mom.”

Looking into the crowd of kids, she could practically tell who the book was supposed to help. The girl with her thumb in her mouth, the boy with the red-rimmed eyes, and another boy sitting far away from the group in the corner pulling strings from the edge of the carpet.

“Would you like to read it?” Mrs. Knight asked. Her expression had grown more baffled than friendly, and Ryan realized she was just standing there, not saying anything.

Because she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to do any of this. How to be a politician’s wife on a tour of a school and more terrifyingly, how to be around kids.

And she was going to have one.

Soon.

Behind her, Harrison was still deep in conversation with Mrs. Tellier, and Ryan thought, Why the hell not?

“I’d love to,” she said, and Mrs. Knight handed her the book, standing up from her seat so Ryan could sit down.

“I don’t want her to read the story,” a boy complained.

“Me neither,” another kid agreed.

“Too bad,” Ryan said on instinct, which made them open their eyes real wide, but they shut up.

Ryan tried to situate herself in the chair, which was too sloped, and her skirt was too short, and the whole thing was unbelievably awkward.

“I can see your underwear,” a girl in front said, and Ryan snapped her legs closed and tried to tuck her knees sort of under her while sitting on the very front of the seat. “They’re blue.”

One little boy put his hand—sticky and hot, and she wondered where the hell he’d had it that it was so sticky and hot—on her leg. “I can’t see the picture,” he said.

“I haven’t started yet,” she said with a wide fake smile.

What a super idea, Ryan. Just super.

“The Kissing Hand,” she read, and opened the first page.

“You have to say who wrote it,” a little girl took her thumb out of her mouth long enough to say.

“Why?”

“Because it’s important,” a little redheaded boy nearly yelled at her. “Mrs. Knight always reads who wrote it.”

“Okay, okay,” she breathed, and started again.

By page three most of the kids had crept closer, and the kids in the back had gotten up on their knees so they could see.

“I can’t see,” one kid whined.

“Everyone needs to sit on their butts.”

As a unit they gasped. “You said ‘butt,’ ” the peeping Tomette in the front row whispered, scandalized down to her Barbie shoes.

“I meant …” What was an acceptable butt substitute? “Tush.”

She started reading again, but by page five she’d lost them and she glanced up to see what they were looking at.

Harrison, standing at her shoulder, smiling.

Not real, she told herself, because she wanted so badly to bask in the false warmth of that smile. She wanted to smile back and maybe even reach up to touch his hand, lace their fingers together.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he murmured.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“I saw her underwear!” shouted the girl in the front row.

The corners of Harrison’s mouth flattened with suppressed laughter and she felt herself blushing.

“Keep reading,” a chorus of kids chimed in.

“Jonah’s touching me!” one kid shouted.

“Jonah,” she said. “Stop touching people. Where I’m from you get arrested for that.”

The little boy Jonah pulled his hand back into his lap.

“Go ahead,” Harrison said. “I’ll just listen.”

And then, to her amazement and dismay, he sat down right next to the boy who was plucking at the corner of the carpet. Harrison stretched out his legs and leaned back against the wall, all of his attention on Ryan, but the boy next to him was staring at Harrison.

Ryan kept reading, but she was distracted by Harrison. Two kids fell away from the group to pick up other books from the shelf, but Mrs. Knight herded them back toward her.

One boy in back lay down and fell asleep.

I am going to be a great mother, she thought sarcastically.

In the back row, Harrison was leaning over so the boy could whisper in his ear. Whatever it was, it seemed serious, and Ryan put more effort into reading so no one else would look back there.

When she finally closed the book, Ryan was relieved. She’d never expected reading to twenty kindergarten kids would be so stressful. She was sweating a little.

And how discouraging that she was so bad at it.

“Let’s say thank you to Mrs. Montgomery,” Mrs. Knight said, stepping in.

“Show us your underwear again!” one of the kids yelled, and Ryan gratefully jumped up from the wooden chair and gave Mrs. Knight her spot back. Ryan retreated to the back of the room to stand next to Mrs. Tellier.

Harrison put his hand on the little boy’s head he’d been talking to and gave it a little shake. Which made the boy laugh. Beside her, Mrs. Tellier made a low noise of surprise.

“Michael has had a rough time of it lately,” she whispered. “His father is still in Iraq, and home life has been difficult.”

Harrison approached and Ryan forced herself not to take a step back, not to keep the distance between them that would give her the illusion of emotional safety. Instead she reached for his elbow, tucking her hand inside, smiling as he pulled her closer.

“Give this to Michael’s mother, would you?” Harrison asked, giving Mrs. Tellier a business card. “VetAid helps the families of military personnel in these situations. I think we can help with the custody arrangement.”

“I’m sure that would be a relief,” she said. They left the classroom to a chorus of kids saying goodbye.

“I’ll send you our enrollment numbers,” Mrs. Tellier said. “And we can discuss the ramifications of a charter school in Fulton.”

There were a few more pictures, and then Ryan and Harrison were back in the car.

As soon as they were pulling away from the curb, Ryan undid the top few buttons of her suit and kicked off her shoes.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That was so … loud.”

“I didn’t think it was that bad,” Harrison said.

“Not that bad? It was like a war zone. Did you see that mess? That teacher is going to be there for hours trying to clean up that sand table. Who gives kids sand? And water! Indoors? That’s nuts!”

“I’ll drop you at home,” Harrison said, chuckling, “and then head back to the office.”

Exhausted, Ryan nodded and leaned her head back against the headrest.

“You did a great job,” he said.

“I showed them my underwear.”

“Well, they seemed to like it.”

“They were just so … intense.”

“I understand that’s generally the way kids are.”

She swung her head sideways to look at him. “Do you like kids?”

He shrugged, which was a terrible answer, and she knew it was a terrible answer because if asked three months ago if she liked kids, she would have done the same thing.

“We’re going to have one,” she whispered.

He arranged his tie and pulled his phone from his pocket. “Truthfully, I haven’t given the child much thought.”

“Because of the election?”

“Because you made it very clear that night in your apartment that the child was yours.”

Right. So she had. But she doubted that had any bearing on what he thought about their child.

“That’s a bullshit answer,” she said. “You’re telling yourself that to make it easier for you not to care. You should just say you don’t care.”

“It’s not that I don’t care … it’s that I honestly haven’t thought about the baby as anything besides a problem to solve.”

A problem to solve? Who says that about a person?

“I don’t want the baby to be born into a place so cold.”

“Atlanta—”

“Your loft,” she said. “Your family. This charade between us. I don’t want the baby to feel that cold.”

“I doubt an infant understands anything about his or her parents’ relationship.”

“When did you understand your parents?” she asked. He was still looking at his phone and she could hear the whooshing sound of emails being sent to the trash can. The silence went on so long that she didn’t think he was going to answer her and she closed her eyes, letting the car rock her toward sleep.

“I was young,” he finally said. “A kid, I guess, when I knew my family wasn’t like other families. That my sister and I were props more than people.”

“My child won’t be treated that way,” she told him, willing him to look at her. Willing him to understand how important this was to her. For two years or two minutes, her child would not know a second of what he’d known his whole life. “Harrison,” she said when he wouldn’t look at her.

“You are a Montgomery now,” he said. “And considering how well you’ve done today, I don’t know that you’ll have a choice.”

He went back to his phone and she went back to staring out the window, her hand over her belly as if she could already protect the baby from the chill of her husband.