Chapter 18 – Emily
Emily
I'm in the middle of the Elgar when the buzzer goes, and I let the phrase finish before I answer it, which is a small thing but a new thing, and I notice myself noticing it.
There was a time I'd have dropped the bow at the first sound, gone running toward whoever was asking to come in, apologizing before I'd even reached the door.
Now I let the note ring out into the room that gives some of it back, and then I set the cello on its side, and I press the little button, and Ana's voice comes crackling up eleven floors.
"It's me. I have the good kind of tea and a bag of the almond things. Buzz me up before I eat them all in the lobby."
I'm laughing before she's even through the door.
And then she's through it, and she stops.
I forget, is the thing. I've stopped seeing them.
You can stop seeing anything if you live beside it long enough—I learned that in a house made of glass—and the gifts have become a kind of weather I move through without registering, but Ana stands in the doorway with the tea in one hand and the almond things in the other and turns her head slowly the way you'd turn it in a museum you weren't sure you were allowed into.
"Emily," she says. "What in God's name."
Because they've migrated. That's what I don't tell her right away.
The second bedroom filled up and then it overflowed, and now the peonies—their fourth or fifth generation, fat and blowsy and already going brown at the edges the way the orchids always went brown—are on the kitchen counter, and the Casals is on the windowsill, and there's a case of wine by the door from a vineyard we visited once that I mentioned exactly one time, and a watch I haven't opened, and the record propped against the brick where I keep meaning to play it and keep not.
"He's thorough," I say. "You have to give him that."
"I don't have to give him anything." Ana sets the tea down and does another slow turn.
"This is a hostage situation. This is what a room looks like when a man is trying to buy his way out of a thing that can't be bought.
" She picks up the watch box, weighs it, sets it down like it's warm. "Is that a boat brochure."
It is a boat brochure. I'd almost forgotten the boat.
"He added a boat," I say. "And I think—I'm fairly sure—a better apartment.
There was a call from a broker I didn't take, and then a listing came, one of the ones on the park, the kind with a doorman who knows your dog's name.
So. A boat and a better apartment, or so he probably thinks.
A whole upgraded life, delivered flat-pack, some assembly required, batteries not included.
" I hear the edge in it and I don't sand it down, because that's new too, the not-sanding.
"He looked at the loft I chose for myself, the one I found and paid for with my own half, and his first instinct was that it wasn't enough.
That I'd settled. That a woman who leaves must be en route to something bigger, and if he just gets there first with something bigger still, I'll—" I stop.
"I don't know. Turn around, I suppose. Follow the smell of it. "
Ana fills the kettle. She knows where everything is; she's the only person who does.
"Are they working?" she asks. She says it lightly, her back to me, filling the pot, giving me the mercy of not being looked at, the way Connor gave it to me once at a window while the whole family reunited behind us.
"No."
"No?"
"No." And I feel it settle as I say it, flat and clean and true.
"The first one worked for about a heartbeat.
The peonies. He remembered the peonies and I felt the old thing lift, the—" I don't have to explain the old thing to Ana, she's watched it lift in me for eight years.
"And then I carried them up here and I set them down and by morning I understood I didn't want them.
That wanting them was a reflex. Like reaching across the bed in the night for someone who isn't there and hasn't been for a long time.
Your arm still goes out. That doesn't mean you've forgotten.
It means the body learned a thing the heart's already unlearning.
" I shake my head. "He's not sending me gifts, Ana.
He's sending me evidence. Look how well I know you.
Look how much I paid attention. And the terrible thing, the thing I can't get past, is that he does know me.
He always did. He just spent a season pointing all that knowing somewhere else and calling me a mood for minding. "
Ana turns around, and her face has gone to the fierce place it went in the café, the un-gentle place.
"Good girl," she says.
And I laugh again, wet this time, because there is no one else in my life who would say that to me, good girl, like I've done something difficult and correct, like refusing a boat is an achievement, and the awful truth is that for me it is.
The tea steeps. We take it to the wide bare window where the light comes in the morning, and we sit on the floor because I still don't have proper chairs and neither of us cares, and Ana breaks the almond things in half and hands me the larger piece the way she's handed me the larger piece of everything since we were nineteen.
The city hums its low electric hum below us. Nobody down there knows my name.
"So," Ana says, into her cup, in a voice I recognize, the voice of a woman sitting on something. "I have gossip."
"You always have gossip."
"Not like this." She takes a sip, drawing it out, enjoying it, and I let her, because she's earned it, because she's been carrying my grief for weeks and deserves a little theater of her own.
"You know Paula. From my building, works in-house marketing at Ben's company, does the thing with the—doesn't matter.
She freelances. And guess whose marketing floor she was on last week when it all went off. "
I go still. I know before she says it. Not the old-wound weather-knowing—cleaner than that.
"He fired her," I say.
Ana's face falls a fraction, robbed of her reveal, and then rearranges into something better, something proud.
"He fired her. In the corner office with the good light.
Paula heard the whole thing—the whole floor did, apparently, they all stopped pretending to type.
Something about a calendar? He found something of his in her drawer, something she'd hidden, and it—Emily, it came out of him like a dam going.
Told her to get out of the building. Off the floor.
Out of his life. Paula said the girl walked out with her chin in the air like she'd meant to leave all along and everyone just watched her go to the elevators and nobody said a word. "
The calendar. The planner. The fat leather book he trusts more than any screen, the covenant in ink.
I don't know how I know it's the anniversary, but I know it's the anniversary.
I know she took the date and buried it so he'd walk past it, and I know he walked past it, straight past me in the grey silk in the window while he texted about a party.
I set my tea down on the floor, gently, the way I set down the things that matter.
And what I feel—it surprises me, how uncomplicated it is.
"Good," I say.
Ana blinks.
"I mean it. Good. Good for him." And I do mean it, I turn it over and it holds.
"She's a snake. I said it to his face on the phone, I called her a snake, and he told me I wasn't being fair, and now he's seen it, and I'm—I'm glad.
For his sake. Genuinely. And for the company's, God, that woman with her hand on the marketing of a firm he built out of nothing, out of a laptop on somebody's floor.
He'd have woken up in a year and it would've been hers, an inch at a time, the way this whole house became hers an inch at a time while I stood in the corner holding a wine I was told to decant.
" I press my thumb to the rim of the cup.
"It's the right thing. He finally did the right thing.
I can be happy about it and it can have nothing to do with me.
I've only just learned those two things can be true at once. "
Ana is quiet a moment, watching me. Then she says, carefully, the way she asks the questions that matter, "And what about you?"
And there it is. The real one. The one under all the gossip.
Because I know what she's asking. She's asking: he's seen it now, he's cut out the rot, he's sending boats and better apartments and cellos in cases, and the woman who poisoned the well is gone, so—now?
Is it now? Is this the part where the story turns, where the man crosses the last of the distance, where I feel the old thing lift and this time I let it carry me back?
I look out at the city, at all the lit squares of all the lives I'll never see the inside of, and I go looking in myself for the answer, honestly, the way I've learned to go looking, all the way down to the quiet place where I used to keep everything I couldn't afford to feel.
"I don't know," I say. "That's the truth.
A month ago I'd have told you the whole problem was Tara, that if she were gone we'd—that it was her, that she was the weather and Ben was just the sky, blameless, weathered on.
And now she's gone and he's done everything right and I keep waiting to feel found and instead I feel—" I search for it.
"I keep doing arithmetic. Tara gone is subtraction.
It takes away the snake. It doesn't add back the eight years of a man who watched her do it and called me heartless for noticing.
It doesn't put the sound back in the cello.
It doesn't make him the kind of man who'd have set down his fork for me.
" I turn to her. "So I don't know if it's enough anymore, Ana.
That's the thing I can't say to anyone but you.
I love him. I think I'll love some version of him for a long time, the way you love a house that's been sold to strangers.
But I was so much lonelier there, at the far end of that table, than I've been for one single hour in this bare little room.
And I don't know if any boat in the world is bigger than that. "
Ana doesn't rush to fill the silence. That's her gift, the one she's had since we were girls—she knows when a thing can't be solved, only sat beside.
She just picks her tea back up off the floor, and holds it out toward me, and waits until I lift mine to meet it.
"Cheers to that," she says.
And the two cups touch, and the small bright sound of it goes out into the room, and some of it comes back, and none of it—not one note—gets swallowed.