CHAPTER FOUR
The Morning She Leaves
My eyes opened at twenty-eight minutes past five, two minutes before the alarm I had never set, and the room was still the blue-black of before-dawn, and beside me, for the first time in weeks, he was there.
He had come to bed after all. Sometime in the small hours the Tokyo call must have ended and he had chosen the bed over the study sofa, and now he lay on his side facing me, one arm thrown across the space between us so that his open hand rested a few inches from my hip.
Not touching. Near. His face in sleep had lost the thing it wore in daylight, the readiness, the calculation, and what was left was younger and unguarded and terribly familiar, the face from the first year, the face I had married, and I lay very still and looked at it in the grey light and let myself, for one held breath, remember.
His lashes. The small scar through his eyebrow from a boyhood no one had ever told me much about. The particular way his mouth softened only when he was too far under to keep it hard.
My chest ached in a way I had no defence against, and I understood that this was the danger, that a face could do what eight hundred days of argument never could, that if I lay here much longer I would find a reason, and the reason would be love, because the love had never actually been the problem.
That was the cruelty of the whole thing, lying there in the dawn.
I did not leave because I had stopped loving him.
I loved him exactly as much as I ever had.
I was leaving because loving him had turned out to cost me myself, and the bill had finally come due.
His hand was inches away. I did not take it.
Moving was the hard part. Not the decision, which was made, but the body's small betrayals — the mattress shifting as my weight left it, the whisper of the sheet, each sound enormous in the silence.
I sat on the edge of the bed with my back to him and put my feet on the cold floor and waited to hear his breathing change.
It did not. Deep and even, the sleep of a man who did not know the ground had already gone out from under his life.
The clothes I had set out the night before were on the chair.
Jeans. The London jumper. My hands found them in the dark and I dressed with my back to the bed, and every few seconds I stopped and listened, and every few seconds the even breathing went on, and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my wrists.
The bag was where I had left it by the wardrobe.
I lifted it slowly, testing the weight against noise, and the strap settled over my shoulder, and I stood in the doorway of the bedroom with the whole of my real life on my back and looked at him one last time.
The shape of him under the duvet. The hand still open on my empty side of the bed, palm up, as if even in sleep it had gone looking for me and found the sheet cooling where I'd been.
I nearly went back. I want that on the record, because I have never told anyone how close it was — how I stood in that doorway with tears standing in my eyes at last, the crying I had not been able to do for two years finally arriving now, at the worst possible moment, and I pressed the back of my free hand hard against my mouth and did not make a sound, and I turned, and I went.
The kitchen. The envelope on the island, pale against the dark stone, his name in my hand.
I did not touch it. Touching it would have been checking, and checking was the beginning of undoing, and I walked past it and past the copper coffee maker gleaming faintly in the under-cabinet light and I did not stop.
The private lift. The button. The eleven seconds, counted again, downward this time.
The lobby at that hour was empty but for the night doorman, a young man named Emeka whose people were from Enugu, who had once, months ago, told me shyly that his mother made the same egusi mine did, and whose face when he saw me now — the bag, the hour, the something in my expression I could not hide — went through a small quiet understanding before he smoothed it away into professional blankness.
"Ma," he said. "You need a car?"
"Just a taxi. Thank you."
He walked me to the doors. His hand held one open against the February cold.
On the threshold he hesitated, and then, so low that no camera would have caught it, he said, "Safe journey, ma," and the two words in his particular accent, the accent of home, the accent of the woman I had been before all of this, nearly finished me on the pavement. I got into the cab before he could see.
"Where to?" the driver said.
The bridge lights were coming on gold across the black water as we drove, and the sky behind Brooklyn had begun the faintest lifting toward grey, and I gave him Jade's address in Fort Greene and then I sat back and let the city carry me away from the tower and everything in it, and somewhere on the bridge, halfway across, suspended over the river between the life I was leaving and whatever came next, I finally let the tears come.
Not loud. Just steady, running down and off my jaw and onto the London jumper, the whole two years of them arriving at once, and the driver, God bless him, said nothing, only reached back without a word and handed me a paper napkin from somewhere, and I took it, and we drove on.
Jade opened her door at a quarter past six in a sleep shirt with a headscarf half off, one eye shut against the hall light, already talking — "girl, do you know what time" — and then she saw me. She saw the bag. She saw my face. And the rest of the sentence died in her mouth.
She did not ask. That is the thing about Jade, the thing I would have died without in the weeks that came.
She stepped back and pulled the door wide and I came in out of the cold, and she took the bag off my shoulder with one hand and put the other flat between my shoulder blades and steered me to the sofa the way you steer someone who has been in an accident, and she put the kettle on, and she sat down beside me, and only then, into the steam and the small yellow light of her kitchen, did she say anything at all.
"I left a letter," I said.
The kettle ticked toward boiling.
"Okay," Jade said. Just that. She did not say good, or finally, or what did it say, or are you sure.
She said okay, and she put her arm around me, and I turned my face into her shoulder in the ordinary print of her sleep shirt and I stopped being steady, all the way, for the first time, and she held on and let me and did not try to fix a single thing.
I slept after that. She made up the pull-out and I lay down on it in my clothes at seven in the morning and went under exactly the way I had gone under the night before, deep and total, and I did not dream, or if I did I have never remembered it.
Seven hours. I woke at two in the afternoon to grey light and the smell of something on the stove and a note on the coffee table in Jade's slanting hand — Back at 5.
Plate in the fridge. Text if you need anything.
Anything, N. — and beside the note, my phone, which I had not looked at since the taxi.
The screen, when I turned it over, was a wall.
Eleven missed calls. Then, as I watched, a twelfth arrived and rang out silently in my palm, his name filling the screen — Cal — and I sat on the edge of the pull-out with the phone buzzing in my hand and did not answer it.
The buzzing stopped. A voicemail notification.
A text bloomed beneath the others: Naomi.
Please call me. And under that, from an hour later: Please.
And under that, nothing, a gap, and then the calls resuming.
My thumb hovered over his name. The grief was enormous, sitting there — not doubt, I want to be precise, it was never doubt, I did not for one second want to go back to the tower — but grief, vast and specific, for the man asleep with his hand open on my empty side, for the face in the dawn, for eleven calls from a person who was only now, with the bed cold, discovering that I had been a person all along.
I did not call him. I put the phone face-down on the cushion.
The plate in the fridge was jollof, still warm enough, and I ate it standing at Jade's counter looking out at the Fort Greene street, the ordinary loud living afternoon of it, a man walking a dog, two kids in school coats, a woman laughing into her phone, and I ate every grain of it because I was, to my own great surprise, hungry, ravenously and simply hungry, my body insisting on itself even now.
Jade came home at five. She looked at the empty plate in the sink and something in her face eased.
"My neighbour's moving," she said, hanging up her coat, not making it a big thing, laying it down light between us the way she laid everything that mattered.
"One-bed, downstairs, faces south. Landlord's decent, I know him.
It's small." She filled the kettle again.
"You could see it tomorrow. If you wanted. No pressure. Just — it's there."
The phone on the cushion buzzed once more across the room, his name lighting and dying.
I looked at it. Then I looked at Jade, at her careful open face, at the kettle, at the small yellow kitchen that had taken me in at dawn without a single question, and I felt something turn over in my chest that was not quite hope, hope was too big a word for it yet, but was in the family of hope, was hope's quiet younger cousin.
"Okay," I said. "Tomorrow. I'll see it."
Jade nodded and did not smile too much and got down two mugs, and outside the window the February dark came down over Brooklyn, and across the river in a tower I could not see from here my husband was learning the shape of an empty flat, and his eighteenth call had not yet come.
But it was coming. And when it came, in the morning, I already knew — sitting there with my hands warming on Jade's chipped mug — that this time I was going to answer it.