Chapter 45
BELL
I give her a few days.
We spend the time on the couch watching TV, her tucked against me with her head pillowed on my bicep, my hand splayed on her stomach, or playing with Lilith on the floor or lying in bed while Birdie is almost entirely on my chest, like some kind of reverse weighted blanket.
She holds me tight, making small sounds of unhappiness whenever I shift or move like I’m about to get up.
We doze like this and sometimes we listen to an audiobook, and sometimes we listen to the full-size motor someone’s hidden inside our cat, and sometimes we talk.
Not about the last week but about our childhoods, about what we thought we’d grow up to be, how many babies we’d wanted to have and what we’d name them.
Sometimes she presses a kiss to my chest, and I roll us over and kiss her until breathing is a thing of the past. It hurts like muscle being pulled from bone to stop us from going further, especially when she’s reaching for me, wrapping her hand around me, pleading quietly in my ear.
But it’s too soon, too much like we’re just going to pretend the last week didn’t happen. That we’re going to bury the memory of her leaving and why she left and the day of the storm, and together we’ll jump right into make-believe.
I understand the temptation, because I also miss the domestic idyll we had before, flavored as it was with obsession and lust and creation. I just want her to know that this is real too.
So I’m scheming, just like I’ve done for the last nine years, with one difference—I’m trapping myself now. I’m not dragging her to the underworld; I’m crawling around behind her on the surface.
But what do you do when someone doesn’t believe that you love them? When telling them isn’t enough? When making an entire world of peace and comfort isn’t enough?
When they’re so used to fear that the fear has become a load-bearing, unmovable girder stretching the length of their soul?
For the first time since I was a child, I consider seriously that I might have something in common with God.
On Monday, she takes her rental car to pick up Busy and take her home.
“Do you want me to come with?” I ask.
“Yes.” She closes her eyes and leans against my chest. I hug her tight, somehow always feeling starved for her, hungry for her in my arms, even if she’s just spent hours there. “But I think I need to go alone. In case she wants to talk about anything. Also she hates you.”
I laugh a little. “She’s a good sister then. Text me when you start coming home or if you want me to meet you somewhere and drive you home. Helping you makes me happy. Spending time with you makes me happy. Don’t feel like you need to push yourself because you feel shy about asking. Okay?”
She nods into my chest.
“I trust you,” I say, kissing her hair and then resting my cheek on her head. “I’m trusting you with Birdie Cooper. But you have to take care of her because she’s my entire world.”
I don’t love the time apart, but I have an errand to run with my own rental, and I have a few things I want to get ready while she’s away. When she comes back, I’ve showered off the sweat, and I’m answering a few emails in my office. She’s pensive, but she comes right away to sit on my lap.
“She wants to do family therapy,” Birdie says after a minute without any prompting.
I kiss her shoulder. “Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. We tried it once, years ago.
It was ugly. She was angry, and I was angry too, only I didn’t know it, so instead I was silent.
We went three times, and then she skipped town again, and that was that.
” She finds the hand I have tucked around her thigh and idly runs her fingers over mine.
“It might be different. She’s doing better. I think she’d stick it out this time.”
“And you know you’re angry now,” I add.
A little closed-lipped smile. “That too.”
On Wednesday, I ask if she’d like to spend some time in the studio.
“I don’t know…” She’s on the couch, reading a horror novel I’d picked for her because I thought she’d like the religion and mushrooms. She’s been taking to horror far faster than I would have suspected.
Then again, she has carved saints in all kinds of contortions and torments, has outlined flayed skin and shaded the underside of plucked eyeballs. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
“You haven’t worked in there for almost a week,” I say, coming up and squatting in front of her.
“I can’t work,” she says, closing the book. “I’m stuck, remember? I have no idea how to start the last piece.”
I take the book from her and set it aside. “But I have an idea for you.” I stand up and then pull her to her feet. “Come.”
She comes, but reluctantly. I can tell that she thinks this is a waste of time, that she’s resisting coming in here and facing this statue that might as well be the rest of her life—unformed, waiting for the first kiss of a cutting edge…waiting for a choice.
She stops just inside the door as we walk inside and I prop it open so Lilith can go back and forth on her mysterious little cat errands.
“Ry,” she says after a minute. “What is that?”
I move behind her and wrap my arms around her middle, leaning forward a little to kiss her jaw. “You really don’t know? Even the Protestants know this one.”
Birdie sighs and I smile against her jaw.
“I know it’s a cross,” she says. “I just want to know what it’s doing in my studio.”
My studio. I love it when she says stuff like that. Like she knows it’s hers, like she plans to keep it.
“I told you I have an idea. I think you should try having a live model again, like you used to do.”
“But I don’t know anyone who could mod—oh.” She tilts her chin up a little, not in protest but to examine the cross, to imagine someone on it.
This is much better than an outright refusal, which is what I thought I’d be facing.
“You could be meaner to me than most of your models,” I purr into her ear. “You can pose me and twist me. Make me arch my back or strain my thighs. I’d be a very obedient god for you.”
“I don’t know if I believe that.”
“Why don’t we try it and see?”
She pulls forward, breaking out of my arms, and walks over to the cross. Her nose is crinkled—not because she dislikes the idea, I think, but because she’s considering it.
“It was a prop in a theater production a while back,” I explain as she nudges at the base of the cross and it rolls a little.
“The wheels lock. It’s lightweight enough that you could move it around on your own.
I felt like it would be a good investment in case you make more carvings like these in the future. ”
She stretches up to tug at a leather strap hanging from one side of the patibulum. There’s a matching one on the other side and then another around the vertical beam, near the wedge-shaped piece of wood where the feet should go.
“Kinky, right?”
I’m given a raised eyebrow for that. I grin back.
“I need to think about it,” she says and turns away, walking back into the warehouse.
I follow her, still smiling, and start cheerfully making us lunch. She glances at me mistrustfully as she settles back onto the couch with her book, as if I know something she doesn’t and I’m deliberately withholding it from her.
I do know something she doesn’t, but she’s the one withholding it from herself. Because I saw the way her eyes changed as she stared up at the cross, the way she moved around it, measuring it in her mind.
Like she could see something the rest of us couldn’t.
The next evening, she goes into the studio without a word. I don’t follow, just continue reviewing the door schedule for the skyscraper renovation. She stays in there for a long time but emerges when I turn off the lights in my office and get ready for bed.
The next morning, I’m making coffee for us both when she comes downstairs in her favorite work clothes, sturdy trousers and a buttoned shirt made of pale linen. Her sleeves are already rolled up to her elbows and her hair is twisted up with two pencils to hold it in place.
She stops in front of me and takes a breath.
“Okay,” she says, bracing her hands on the counter and looking at the studio door. “Okay.”