Chapter 14 – Emily
Emily
The loft has no echo.
That's the first thing I noticed, the first night, standing in the middle of the bare floor with the movers gone and the city humming its low electric hum eleven stories down—that when I set down a box, the sound of it stopped where it landed.
It didn't travel. It didn't get thrown wide and folded into anything.
It just was, and then it wasn't, the way a sound is supposed to be, and I stood there in the dark with my coat still on and I understood that I had spent eight years living inside an instrument tuned to swallow me.
I didn't go to Ana's. That's the thing I keep returning to, turning over the way you'd turn a stone you found in your pocket and can't remember picking up.
Everyone expected Ana's—Ben expected Ana's, I could hear it in the texts I didn't answer, the whole architecture of his certainty built on the assumption that I'd gone somewhere temporary, somewhere with a couch and a friend and a bottle of wine and a return date.
A woman who packs a bag goes to a friend.
A woman who packs a bag is sending a message and waiting to be answered.
But I didn't want to be answered. I wanted a floor with no echo.
So I called the bank first, in the parking lot of Falconer's, with the grey silk still on and Marco's second glass of Barolo warm in me, and I moved half of what was in the joint account into an account with only my name on it, and my hands did not shake, and the woman on the phone called me ma'am and asked if there was anything else she could help me with today, and I said no, thank you, you've been very kind.
And then I called a woman Ana knows, who knows buildings, and by the end of the week there was a loft with tall windows and old brick and a wide bare room that faced east, and light came into it in the morning the way light is the enemy of old varnish, and I did not care, because the cello it would have hurt is ruined now, splashed cobalt and gold and mounted like a trophy in a room full of strangers, and I have only the workhorse left.
The one that doesn't matter. The one I can play in the light.
I play it now.
I've played it every day for six days, hours at a stretch, until my fingers remember things they'd forgotten they knew, and the sound goes out into the room and comes back to me, some of it, off the brick, off the glass, and I sit in the middle of my own space and I make a noise that nobody arranged for me, that nobody flew in, that nobody bought, that nobody can shove into a corner or ask me to stop for the sake of a headache, and it is the first thing in longer than I can measure that is only mine.
The phone rings on the seventh day.
I know before I look. Not the way I used to know—the old-wound weather-knowing, the barometric dread—but simpler than that, cleaner.
If he's calling instead of texting, he's seen the money.
The texts were the assumption. The call is the account.
A man like Ben can ignore a missing wife for six days and tell himself a story about cooling off, but he cannot ignore a number on a screen that has gone down by half, because numbers are the one language he's never once mistranslated.
I let it ring three times. I set the bow down first, gently, across my knee. Then I answer.
"Where are you." No hello. No Em.
"I'm playing music," I say, "in a room that's mine."
Silence on his end, the particular texture of it, the sound of a man recalibrating a scene he thought he understood.
"Because you made sure," I go on, and my voice fills the loft and stays there, doesn't get swallowed, "that there was no room like that in my own home. So I bought one."
"You bought—" He stops. I can hear him deciding not to say the thing.
I can hear him choosing, in real time, the reasonable voice, reaching for it the way he reaches for a hand extended to someone standing too close to an edge.
"Okay. Okay, Emily. You've made your point.
I hear it. You took the money, you packed your things, you've had your—your week, and it was loud, and I heard it.
Everybody heard it. So come home now and let's be adults about this. "
And I laugh. It surprises me, how easy it comes.
"You don't want me to be an adult, Ben."
"That's not?—"
"You want me to be a rug." I say it plainly, the way Ana would say it, the way I could never say it before, and there's a thrill in it that I'm not proud of and won't apologize for either.
"Something soft on the floor that stays where it's put and doesn't make a sound when you walk over it.
That's what being adult has meant, in that house, for years.
It's meant quiet. It's meant don't insist."
"You took half the account."
"I did."
"Half, Emily." And there it is, the crack in the reasonable, the temperature coming up. "Do you have any idea how that looks? You emptied?—"
"I took my half. Not yours. Mine." I keep my voice level, full to the brim and not spilling.
"I was there, Ben. I was in the first apartment with the burned pasta and the cereal for dinner.
I proofread the pitch decks at two in the morning.
I sat across from investors and made them like you when you were too tired to be liked.
Any divorce lawyer in the state is going to look at eight years and say that half is mine, at least that, at the very least that.
So I took it before you could make me ask for it.
Because I've spent eight years asking, and I'm done asking. "
"I don't care about the money." He says it fast, and I believe him, actually, which is somehow worse. "Christ, Emily, I could buy that loft a hundred times over, I don't—that's not what this is about, that's not what I have a problem with."
"Then what do you have a problem with?"
"You left." And under the anger, just for a second, there's something else, something young, something that sounds almost like the man in the study doorway with the phone against his ear.
"You disappeared. You didn't say anything, you didn't—you just took a bag in the middle of my—of our party, and you humiliated me in front of a hundred people, and then you vanished, and I've been?—"
"You've been what, Ben?"
He doesn't answer that. Of course he doesn't. He hasn't been anything. He's been finishing the party and reasoning at an open closet and waiting for a certainty that didn't come, and some part of him knows I know it, and the silence between us fills with all of it.
"Come home," he says finally, quieter now. "We'll talk. Properly. Without an audience."
I look out the tall window at the city, at all the lit squares of all the lives I'll never see the inside of, and I feel the thing rise in me that I've been carrying up from very far down all week, and I let it come.
"I'm not coming back," I say, "as long as Tara is in that house."
The line goes so still I can hear the room he's in. I can hear the house.
"And maybe not even after she leaves," I go on, because now that it's moving I can't stop it and I don't want to.
"If she leaves. If you ever grow enough of a spine to see the snake you brought under your own roof.
Because that's what she is, Ben. She's not grieving.
She's not scrappy. She's a snake, and you opened the door and carried her in yourself, and I stood there and watched you do it and told myself I was imagining the weather. "
"That's not fair." His voice has gone hard and tight.
"That's not—Emily, what she did with the cello was a mistake.
A terrible one. She knows it. She's sick over it, she's barely eaten, and she is ready to apologize to you, properly, if you'll just—if you'll come and hear it.
But she's vulnerable right now, she has nowhere to go, her whole life fell apart, and I am not going to throw a broken woman out into the street to make you feel better. "
"And I'd never dream of asking you to."
He starts to say something and I talk over it, and my voice does not shrink, and it does not climb into hysteria either, it just stays, level and clear and mine.
"I would never ask you to choose, Ben. I know better.
But the fact remains. I will not be in that house while she is in it.
So you've already chosen. You made the choice weeks ago, and you made it again tonight, and you'll keep making it, because you're good at that.
" I close my eyes. "You're so good at that. "
"Emily—"
"Goodnight, Ben."
I hang up before he can find the reasonable voice again, before the dots of him can come and go and come. I set the phone face-down on the bare floor, gently, the way I've learned to set down the things that hurt, so I can feel the whole weight of them going.
Then I pick the bow back up.
And I play into the room that's mine, and the sound goes out, and some of it comes back to me, and none of it—not one note of it—gets swallowed.