16. Daniel
Daniel
"The Phone Call"
She calls on a Thursday night when I am standing at the stove making tea and thinking, with a specificity that has become characteristic of my evenings lately, about a particular Tuesday three years ago when we had driven to the lake on impulse, just because it was a warm day and neither of us had plans, and sat on the rocks and she'd drawn the skyline in her sketchbook while I read something forgettable and the afternoon light went sideways across the water.
I had been thinking of that afternoon because it is one of the last times I can point to where we were just two people in a place together with nowhere else to be, and I have been trying to count those times, those moments of pure presence, and I keep losing count because they become so sparse toward the end.
The phone buzzes. Her name.
My heart does something inconvenient.
I pick up. "Maya."
My voice comes out more controlled than I expected, which I am grateful for. What I feel, picking up this call, is the particular agitation of a man trying very hard not to want too much.
"I got your letter," she says.
The letter. The one I sent four days ago. The one about the sketchbooks and the miscarriage and the words I should have said when I should have said them.
"Okay," I say. What I want to say is: and? What did you think? What does it mean? Are you coming home? Do you want to talk? What I say is: okay.
She tells me she doesn't know what she wants yet. That she's not deciding anything. That she just needed to say she got it and she's glad I wrote it.
I grip the phone.
Thank you for telling me, I say. That's all. I keep everything else behind my teeth, which is the hardest thing I have done in recent memory and possibly in my entire adult life.
I set the phone down when we hang up and I stand at the stove for a while. The kettle has been singing for some time and I have not noticed.
I call Jonah.
"She called," I say.
"Yeah?"
"Just to say she got my letter. That she's not deciding anything. Just that she got it."
A pause. "How do you feel?"
"Like someone gave me a glass of water after a very long time and then took it away."
"But you got the water."
"For about ninety seconds."
"Daniel," he says, with the particular weight of my name in his voice that means pay attention to the next thing I say. "Don't do anything stupid."
"I'm not going to do anything."
"Good. That's what doing something stupid looks like for you right now — doing something. Don't call back immediately. Don't send another letter tomorrow. Let the phone call be what it was."
"Which was what?"
"A woman who was thinking of you," he says. "And let you know. That's enough for tonight."
I make the tea. I sit with it. I think about letting it be enough for tonight, and I manage, barely, to do exactly that.
The next morning I go back to the hiking group.
It is raining. There are only five of us, the diehards, walking the wet trail in the mud, and Angie the teacher talks for forty minutes about migratory bird patterns and no one minds.
By the end of my second month, I find myself looking forward to Saturday mornings in a way that has nothing to do with Maya, which Jonah would tell me is exactly the point.
I write in the journal I've started. Dr. Cross suggested it months ago and I resisted it for weeks, told myself I wasn't that kind of person, that writing about feelings was not something I did, that I was more of an action-based problem-solver.
Dr. Cross said: the problem you're trying to solve right now is yourself. Write.
I write. It is strange and uncomfortable and sometimes mortifying and it is, undeniably, doing something.
The letter I write that Thursday night is the best one yet.
The most honest. The most free of performance or strategy.
I don't send it right away. I put it in the drawer with the others and go to bed and lie awake for a while, not with anxious thoughts but with the particular, unfamiliar sensation of a life that is moving in a new direction.
I am not yet sure what that direction is. But it is forward, and it is mine, and it is the first genuinely new thing about me in a long time.