Chapter 9 Reece
NINE
REECE
I do not move for a while after he walks away.
I am still on the path. My bag is on my shoulder.
There’s a guy on a skateboard going past me a second time, the same guy, the loop he does between buildings.
I watch the back of his hoodie until he is small enough to be a different person.
Then I turn and walk in the direction Griffin went, except slower, except not really following him, except yes, following him for a block until I make myself stop and turn the other way.
Okay. I get to my apartment somehow. I do not remember the walk.
I remember unlocking the door, the door sticking the way it always sticks.
I remember thinking fix the door, and then realizing I have been thinking fix the door for eight months and have not fixed the door.
I am thinking about the door because I am not thinking about the thing.
I sit on the couch. I do not take my coat off.
The thing the thing the thing. He’s here.
He found me. What does that mean. It means he saw me.
That’s all it means. He saw me at the coffee shop.
The one I should not have been at. The one I told myself a year ago I would stop going to and then kept going to because it was the only one that did the cardamom thing right.
That is the level of stupid that has done this to me.
Cardamom. Now he is here. Now he knows I am here.
He looked thinner. Tired. Like himself but not.
Stop. Sit. Sit on the couch. Take the coat off.
I take the coat off. I put it on the chair.
I sit back down. My phone is in my hand.
I do not remember taking it out of my pocket.
The screen is on. I am looking at the contacts, scrolling.
There is one number in there I am scrolling for.
I am not going to call it but I am scrolling for it anyway.
Mendez. I look at the name. The thing about calling Mendez is that calling Mendez is the answer to this.
You call Mendez. You say I have been recognized.
A thing happens. The thing will be unpleasant for a few weeks and then I will be somewhere else.
Somewhere else. Somewhere not here. I look at the name.
My thumb is over it. My thumb is over it, not on it, which is a distinction my body is making before my brain is making it.
I lock the phone. I put it face down on the coffee table.
Not yet. I do not say not yet out loud but I think it loud enough that I can almost hear it.
Not yet. I can do this once. I can have this conversation once and then I can call. The clock can run for one evening.
I look at the time. It’s twelve-fourteen.
Eight hours. Eight hours is a very long time and a very short time and I am going to spend it sitting on this couch.
I do not sit on the couch the whole time.
I get up. I make food I do not eat. I take a shower that’s too hot.
I stand in the shower with my forehead against the tile and I let the water hit the back of my neck until it goes cold.
Then I stand in it cold for a minute longer because I’m someone who does that.
I get out and I dry off. I sit on the edge of the bed in a towel and I do not move.
What am I going to tell him. That’s the question.
I haven’t been asking it. I sit on the edge of the bed and I let myself ask it and the answer is bad.
The answer is as little as possible. The answer has to be as little as possible.
Anything I tell him is something he has.
Anything he has is something someone could get out of him.
I am not going to think about who. He is not safe with information.
That is the whole point of why we are here.
That is the whole reason for the last two years.
So I will tell him. I will tell him that I am alive — he knows.
I will tell him that I had to disappear.
That I had no choice. That I cannot tell him why.
I rehearse it standing at the window. I do not get better at it.
He’s going to ask the question. He’s going to ask the question and I’m going to deflect the question and he’s going to know that I deflected.
Griffin has always been good at knowing.
He’s the person who notices when you have changed something small in a room.
He’s the person who, if you lied to him, would not say so.
He would just store it away. That’s the part I cannot stop thinking about.
He’s going to store this. I get dressed at six-thirty.
I don’t know what to wear. It doesn’t matter.
I put on a sweater and jeans. I look in the mirror.
The person in the mirror looks like a person about to go to a funeral. I think I am about to go to a funeral.
I think that’s not funny. I am laughing a little.
Quiet. Just to myself. There is no one in the apartment to hear.
I leave at seven-thirty. I walk. The walk is forty minutes if I take the long way and I take the long way.
I take the long way because forty minutes is forty minutes I do not have to spend on his couch.
It’s forty minutes during which I can keep telling myself I am still going, I am still going.
And I am still going. I get to the address at eight-oh-three.
I stand outside the door of the building.
I look up at the second floor. The light is on.
I check over my shoulder. I do it without thinking.
Habit. There’s no one on the street. I go in.
The stairs creak in two places. He told me once.
No, he didn’t. I don’t know that. I don’t know how I know that.
I’m inventing things about his life. I knock on the door of 2B.
He opens it. He looks at me and I look at him and neither of us says anything for a second that is too long.
He is wearing a different sweater than this morning.
His hair is wet. He has showered too. The thought that we both showered for this is the worst thing I have thought all day and I have to push it away.
The smell that comes off him when I step past him into the apartment is the smell I have been trying not to remember for two years.
The green-label shampoo. The one I used to buy for him because he forgot to.
He’s still buying it. He’s still buying it himself, or somebody is buying it for him, and either of those is a thing I cannot do anything with.
“Come in,” he says.
I come in. The apartment is small and clean and exactly what I would have guessed if I had let myself guess.
There’s a desk by the window. A small coffee pot on the counter.
A chair with a sweatshirt on it that he has not moved and probably will not move, because that is where the sweatshirt goes.
I take all this in in three seconds and then I stop looking at the apartment because looking at the apartment is unbearable. I look at him.
“Sit down,” he says.
“I’d rather stand.”
“Sit down.”
I sit down. He does not. He stands across from me, by the desk, his hand on the back of the chair. He has not asked me anything yet. He’s going to in a second — he’s letting the silence go on because he wants to see what I do with it. I do nothing with it.
“I’m going to ask you questions,” he says. “You’re going to answer them.”
“Okay.”
“You’re alive.”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t dead.”
“No.”
“You were never dead.”
I swallow. There’s something in my throat that should not be there. “No.”
“Why.”
The whole question. He has reduced it to a word.
“I had to disappear,” I say.
“Why.”
“I couldn’t tell you. I can’t tell you.”
“Why.”
“It wasn’t… there were… I didn’t have a choice.”
“Why.”
“Griffin.”
“Why.”
I look at him. I look at his face and the face is not doing anything.
The face is waiting. The face is waiting for me to give him a word that will make this make sense.
I do not have a word that will make this make sense.
We are going to sit here and he is going to ask why until one of us cannot do this anymore. I think it’s going to be me.
“I can’t tell you,” I say.
“You can’t.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t tell me why you let me bury you.”
There it is. He has not raised his voice. He has not moved. His hand is still on the back of the chair and it is white at the knuckles. That is the only thing about him that’s doing anything, the hand, gripping the wood. I am looking at the hand because I cannot look at his face.
“I had no choice,” I say.
“You had no choice.”
“No.”
“You had no choice to call me.”
“No.”
“You had no choice to send a letter. A postcard. A sign. Anything.”
“I…“
“You had no choice for two years.”
The hand on the chair tightens. His voice does the thing it did on the sidewalk, the thing where it stops being level. I see him notice it and pull it back. The pulling back is somehow worse than the rise.
“Two years. Two years. Of nothing. Of me thinking… of me…“
He stops. He stops the way he stopped on the sidewalk, the way he closes his mouth when his voice has done something he didn’t authorize. I watch him do it. I watch him reset.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“Griffin.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say sorry. That isn’t… no. Not that word. Pick a different one.”
I do not have a different one. I sit on his couch in his apartment and I look at his hand on the chair and I do not have a different word.
He is waiting for one. The silence is going on.
I can feel him filing it. He’s going to remember, later, exactly what I said.
He’s going to remember exactly what I did not say.
He has not used my name once. I realize it now, and I realize I’ve known it the whole conversation.
He has called me you. He has not said Reed.
He has not said Reece. He’s not using a name.
I open my mouth. I close it. I do not say anything.