CHAPTER SIX
Terracotta
The last box was the heaviest, and it held books, and I set it down in the middle of the empty living room floor with a sound that echoed because there was nothing yet in the apartment to soften it.
Three weeks had passed. Three weeks of Jade's pull-out and Jade's kettle and Jade's careful, deliberate not-asking, and now there were keys in my hand that were mine, and a lease with my name on it and no one else's, and this small south-facing room with the late-afternoon light coming through the bare window exactly the way it had come through the day I signed.
The floors were scuffed. The walls were a landlord's white, flat and cheap and waiting.
And it was mine, every scuffed foot of it, in a way that the five thousand eight hundred square feet across the river had never once been.
"Okay," Jade said, dropping onto the one piece of furniture I owned — a velvet sofa the colour of old wine, secondhand, that we had carried up the stairs ourselves that morning, both of us swearing. "Okay. I'm not moving again until there's food in me. Non-negotiable."
"There's a Thai place. Two streets over."
"You had me at Thai." She tipped her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes, and I stood in the middle of my empty room and looked at her there, at my oldest friend flung out exhausted on the only chair I had, and something moved through me so quietly I almost missed it.
It was not a large feeling. It was the smallest possible version of a very large thing.
I was standing in a room, and the light was on the floor, and someone I loved was in it, and I was, for the first time in longer than I could name, entirely present inside my own life.
Not managing it. Not decorating it. In it.
We ate on the floor with our backs against the sofa, cartons between us, and Jade talked about a piece she was writing and a man she had stopped seeing and the landlord's cat that had already decided my fire escape belonged to it, and I laughed twice, real laughs, and the kilim rug we'd unrolled that morning was the only warm thing in the room and it was enough.
The pharmacy came the next day, and it came out of nothing.
I had gone out for ordinary things — a mop, dish soap, the mundane infrastructure of a life being built from zero — and the pharmacy on Smith Street had all of it, and I moved through the aisles with a basket filling up and my mind on nothing more than whether I owned a bucket.
It was in the aisle near the back, the one with the vitamins and the plasters, that I stopped.
I do not fully understand, even now, what stopped me.
My feet simply slowed and then halted in front of a shelf, and my eyes went to the boxes there, the pink and the blue and the clinical white of them, and something underneath my thinking, something that had been keeping a quieter count than the one I'd kept in my journal, went very still and very cold and very certain.
The dates were wrong. That was the thing that arrived, standing in the aisle with the basket cutting into my fingers.
The dates had been wrong for a while, and I had told myself it was the stress, the leaving, the upheaval, the way a body loses its rhythm when a life comes apart — and that was reasonable, that was true, that was surely all it was.
My hand did not think so. My hand had already reached out and taken a box off the shelf before the rest of me had agreed to anything, and I stood looking at it in my palm, this small ordinary box, and my heart had begun to go in a way that had nothing to do with mops.
I put it in the basket underneath the dish soap, where I would not have to look at it, and I paid, and I walked home the eight blocks with the bag against my hip, and I did not let myself think, not once, the whole way.
The apartment was quiet when I let myself in.
The light was doing its slow gold slide across the empty floor.
I set the bag on the kitchen counter and I took everything out and put it away — the soap, the mop, the sponges, arranging them with a care they did not need — until only the box was left, and then there was nothing else to put away, and I stood holding it.
The bathroom was small and white and mine.
I read the instructions twice, though they were not complicated, because reading them was a way of not yet doing the thing, and then I did the thing, and then I set the test on the edge of the sink and I did not watch it because I could not watch it, and I sat down on the cold tile floor with my back against the side of the tub and my knees drawn up and I waited.
The apartment made its small settling sounds.
A pipe somewhere. The landlord's cat on the fire escape.
The traffic on Smith Street a soft distant river.
I sat on the floor and looked at my own hands resting on my knees and counted my own breathing and did not look at the sink, and the two minutes were the longest two minutes I had stood inside in my whole life, longer than the eleven seconds in the lift, longer than the four minutes Lizbeth had read the prenup, longer than the eight hundred and forty-seven days.
When the time was up I did not move for another minute. Then I got up onto my knees, and I reached over, and I turned the test face-up on the edge of the sink.
Two lines.
I looked at them for a long time. I was still on my knees on the bathroom floor, and my hand was flat on the cold rim of the sink, and the two lines were as clear and as plain and as impossible as anything I had ever seen, and the first thought that came to me — I have never told anyone this, not even Jade, not even Dr. Nwosu until much later — the very first thought that rose up whole and complete in me was not fear and was not joy.
It was: Of course.
Of course. As though I had known. As though some deep tired part of me that had stopped being surprised by anything the world did had simply nodded, there in the small white bathroom, and said, yes, of course, one more impossible thing, why would it be otherwise.
I sat back down on the tile with my spine against the tub and I held the test in both hands in my lap and I looked at it, and the second thought came slower, arriving behind the first like a wave you see only after it has already started to break.
Now what.
Now what do I do. Not now what do I feel — I could not have told you what I felt, it was too large and too new and it had too many things inside it — but now what do I do, the practical unanswerable enormity of it, sitting on a bathroom floor in a seven-hundred-square-foot apartment I had rented to be free in, three weeks out of a marriage I had walked away from to save my own life, holding the plainest possible evidence that the marriage was not, after all, going to let me go cleanly.
That nothing about this was going to be clean now.
That the man across the river whose eighteen calls I had let ring, whose attorney's letter I was still waiting to receive, was tied to me now by a thing that no lawyer and no lease and no signed holding form could undo.
I thought of the night it must have been.
Two months before I left, when he had come home from a cancelled Tokyo trip, unexpected, at a reasonable hour for once, and something in the strangeness of him being home, being present, being briefly the man I married, had cracked us both open for one evening into something warm and unguarded and real.
I had let myself hope, the next morning.
I had lain in bed and thought maybe, and then he had been in the car to the office before I woke, and the maybe had died by lunchtime like all the others.
I had folded that night away with the rest and not looked at it again.
Here it was, looking back at me. Two lines.
My hands had begun, at some point, to shake — not badly, a fine tremor I noticed the way you notice something happening to someone else — and I pressed them flat against my knees to still them, and I stayed on the floor because I did not trust my legs yet, and the light in the other room went from gold to grey while I sat there, and still I did not cry, and still I did not smile, I only held the thing and breathed and let the enormity of it move through me and out and back again.
And then, without deciding to, I reached for my phone, which was on the floor beside me where it had fallen out of my pocket when I sat down, and I did not call the man in the tower.
I want that noted. He was the father of the thing in my two shaking hands and I did not, for one single second, think of calling him.
I opened the messages and I found the name I had found at dawn three weeks ago when I turned up on a doorstep with one bag, the name of the person my body went to now without asking my permission first, and I typed two words.
Come over.
The reply came in under a minute. On my way.
Jade let herself in twenty minutes later with the spare key I had already given her, calling my name from the front room, and when I did not answer she came looking, and she found me on the kitchen floor — I had moved there, I don't remember moving there, I was sitting with my back against the lower cabinets and my knees drawn up and the test still in my hand — and she stopped in the doorway and took it in, all of it, my face and my hands and the small plastic thing I was holding, and I watched the understanding move across her the way it had moved across Emeka the doorman at dawn, quick and complete.
She did not say oh my God. She did not say are you sure or how or what are you going to do.
She crossed the small kitchen and she lowered herself down onto the floor beside me, her shoulder coming warm against my shoulder, her back against the cabinets, and she reached over and took one of my shaking hands in both of hers and held it in her lap, and she sat.
We sat on the kitchen floor a long time without either of us saying anything at all. The light went fully grey and then began to go blue. The cat came and went on the fire escape. My hand steadied slowly inside both of hers.
And after a long while, into the blue quiet of the small mine apartment, I noticed a thing so ordinary and so absurd that a sound came out of me that was almost a laugh, the first sound I had made since she came in.
I was hungry. Ravenously, simply, insistently hungry.
I did not know yet how I would tell my mother.
I did not know what I wanted, which was the question Lizbeth had asked me and the question I still could not answer and the question that had just become immeasurably harder.
I did not know that across the river the letter from his attorney had been signed that afternoon and was already, at that moment, in the mail.
I only knew, sitting on the floor of the life I had just built to be free in, my best friend's hands around mine and two lines on a test in my lap, that everything I had just decided about my future had come loose again — and that I was, God help me, going to have to eat something first.