Chapter 9 #2
“You drove past the compound and then you drove to the power plant and then you sat in the dark trying to reconcile two versions of your husband. That is not curiosity. That is a woman who is reconsidering, and reconsidering is not a crime, but reconsidering with five weeks left on the clock is dangerous because this is when the heart talks the brain into things the brain knows are wrong.”
I finish my wine. The taqueria is filling up — a Saturday crowd, couples and families and groups of friends who are not having conversations about whether personal transformation is genuine or performed.
I watch them and I envy the simplicity of their evening and I know the envy is self-pity and I do not care.
“I’m not reconsidering,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying okay like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s a word that means nothing, which is exactly how Weston said it at Gage when I told him not to contact me. Like it’s the sound a person makes when they are surrendering to something they know they cannot change.”
Sable puts down her wine. She reaches across the table and takes my hand — the left one, the one with the scar — and she holds it and her grip is the same grip it has always been, firm and real and belonging to a person who does not perform.
“I believe you,” she says. But her eyes say she does not, and I do not blame her, because I do not believe myself either.
The worst part is not the doubt. The worst part is that five weeks is not enough time to resolve it, and too much time to avoid it, and I am going to spend every one of those weeks standing on the fault line between the woman who left and the woman who is wondering if she should have stayed.
She stays the night. We sleep in my bed the way we used to in school — her on the left, me on the right, the way we arranged ourselves during late nights in the studio when neither of us could drive home.
The apartment is quiet. Oak Cliff is quiet.
The steel casement windows catch the streetlight and throw patterns on the ceiling that look like blueprints for a building that does not exist.
“I love you,” Sable says in the dark. “You know that.”
“I know.”
“And I will support whatever you decide. You know that too.”
“I know.”
“But I will also tell you the truth, because you deserve the truth, and the truth is that a man who changes because he lost something is not the same as a man who changes because he sees something. The first one will revert when the crisis fades. The second one won’t.”
“How do you tell the difference?”
“Time. More time than five weeks.”
She is right. She is right and I am lying in my apartment in Oak Cliff with my best friend beside me and my power plant waiting for me on Monday morning and my divorce waiting for me in five weeks and somewhere in East Dallas my husband is sleeping in a place I have never seen, a place without a fountain, a place where the dynasty does not hum, and I do not know if the silence he lives in now is the same as the silence I live in, or if silence is the only thing we still share.
I close my eyes. I listen to Sable breathe — slow and steady, the breathing of a woman who sleeps with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she thinks.
I envy that. I used to have that. Before the island, before the hearing, before I drove past the compound and saw a sign on the gate that turned a certainty into a question.
The apartment is dark and still and the streetlight throws its blueprint patterns on the ceiling and somewhere in East Dallas, in a place I have never seen, Weston is sleeping or not sleeping and the distance between us is measured in miles and months and a single question that Sable asked and I cannot answer: if he changed, why did it take almost killing me?
I do not sleep for a long time. When I do sleep, I dream about hands resting flat on a walnut table, and the hands are steady, and I cannot tell if the steadiness is peace or just a better kind of control.
Sable makes coffee in the morning. She uses my French press and my beans and she does it wrong — too much water, not enough grounds — and I do not correct her because correcting Sable’s coffee technique is a losing battle I surrendered in 2016.
We sit at the kitchen counter in the gray Sunday light and we drink our weak coffee and we do not talk about Weston.
We talk about the power plant. I show her the mezzanine drawings on my laptop — the gallery viewing platform, the loading issue Greta flagged, the question of whether to reinforce the existing floor or build a new structural platform on top of it.
“New platform,” Sable says immediately. “Independent structure. Let the original floor be what it is — part of the history. Build the gallery on its own legs.”
“That’s more expensive.”
“It’s also better architecture. You don’t retrofit a power plant floor to hold galleries.
You build something new on top of something old and you let both be visible.
” She looks at me over her coffee. The metaphor is not lost on either of us.
“Let the old structure stand. Build the new thing next to it. Don’t pretend they’re the same. ”
“We’re not talking about the power plant anymore.”
“We are always talking about the power plant. And the power plant and the marriage. And the power plant and you. You are an architect, Anais. Everything you build is also about what you’re building inside yourself. That is not a weakness. It’s the reason you’re good.”
She leaves after lunch. I walk her to the Subaru in the parking lot and she hugs me — careful of the shoulder, which is healed but which she still treats as fragile, because Sable is a person who remembers injuries — and she gets in and she starts the engine and the loud muffler fills the Oak Cliff parking lot with sound.
“Call me,” she says through the window. “Before you drive past the compound again. Call me first.”
“I’m not going to drive past the compound.”
She gives me a look. The look says: you are going to do exactly what you are going to do and I cannot stop you and I love you anyway.
She drives away. The Subaru turns the corner and the parking lot is quiet and I am alone again, which is a condition I have worked hard to make feel like freedom and which today, for the first time in weeks, feels like something else.
I go inside. I sit at my drafting table. I pull up the mezzanine drawings and I think about Sable’s advice — new platform, independent structure, let the old floor be what it is.
Let the old structure stand. Build the new thing next to it.
I pick up a pencil. I start to draw.