"Yes."
He sat with it. It was a hard thing to sit with. He felt it pull at something deep in his chest, an old sense of being wronged, of being ganged up on, of a woman deciding something about his son without him. And under that, deeper, something quieter and more honest, which was the knowledge that she had been right to be ready to do it. That he had given her eleven years of reasons to believe he would choose his mother’s version of the story over hers. That if their son had been a different child, a quieter one, one who had not run down the driveway barefoot, Marcus might have walked into that kitchen, and looked at those legs, and said, She’s from a different time, Dani. She didn’t mean anything by it. Let me talk to her.
"I’m still here," Danielle said.
He looked up.
"I’m still here," she said again. "We’re still here. The suitcases are still in the car, because I couldn’t face carrying them back up. But I’m still here."
He put the passport wallet down on the coffee table. He got up out of the armchair and came around and sat down on the floor in front of the couch, with his back against it, beside his son’s drawn-up feet, and after a moment he felt Danielle’s hand come down onto the top of his head and rest there. Heavy and warm. For a long time.
He thought of his father on the edge of the bed in Ensley. He thought of the hand on his head in the dark. He had always remembered it as comfort. He understood now, for the first time, that it had also been an apology, from a man who had stood in a hallway and done nothing, and who had not known any other way to say so.
The welts faded over the next ten days, the way welts do, from red to purple to a sallow yellow-green and then to nothing, to faint lines that you could only see in certain light, and then not even then. Caleb wore long sleeves to school on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday Marcus carried the suitcases back up to the loft and Caleb unpacked his own green stegosaurus bag, slowly, putting each thing back in its place, the pajamas and the underwear and the toothbrush and the paperback about the Apollo missions. When he was done he zipped the empty bag closed and put it in the back of his closet, and then, a moment later, Marcus saw him take it out again and put a flashlight in it and a granola bar and Rex’s old baby blanket, and zip it closed, and put it back. Marcus did not say anything. He stood in the hall and watched his son make himself a go-bag and then went downstairs and stood in the kitchen with both hands on the counter for a while.