16. Margo #2
He’s quiet a while, his hand still combing through my hair, and when he speaks it comes out lower than usual, stripped of all the boardroom in it.
“What if I’m not good enough for it,” he says.
“The company. My father built something the size of a country and I’m meant to carry it, and some nights I lie here certain that they’re all going to realize I’m just a man playing at it.
That I’ll be the Austen who dropped the thing.
” His hand pauses in my hair. “I’ve never said that out loud to anyone. ”
I lift my head so I can see his face in the dark, and I lay my hand along his jaw, and I feel him lean into it like it steadies him.
“Listen to me, because I’m only saying this once and then never again so it doesn’t go to your head.
” I stroke my thumb along his cheekbone.
“You are the least likely person I’ve ever met to drop the thing.
You’re going to be so annoyingly good at it that I’ll have to keep you humble myself, personally, as a full-time job.
” I feel him smile under my hand. “You’ll do it, Sebastian.
And on the nights you’re sure you won’t, I’ll be right here to tell you you’re wrong. ”
He turns his head and kisses my palm, then my wrist, then pulls me up the length of him until I’m looking down at him, and there’s a thing in his eyes I have never once seen on a man who owns the road.
Someone who believes me.
“Marry me and mean it,” he says, “and I’ll never be afraid of anything again.”
“Ask me properly on a beach,” I tell him, “and we’ll see.”
The house is the last of it.
The first time we pull up to the place that’s meant to be ours, married now, rings and all, I actually laugh out loud, because it isn’t a house, it’s a small stone country pretending to be one, all pale walls and tall windows and more rooms than two people could ever need.
In the city, above the harbor, ours when we aren’t on a ship somewhere.
“You’re joking,” I say.
“I am not joking.”
“People live here. On purpose. As a family.”
“That is the general idea, yes.”
He carries me over the threshold because he’s ridiculous and I let him because I’m in love, and he sets me down in an entrance hall that echoes, and we stand there in the enormous quiet of it, two people who met over a spilled coffee, somehow married, somehow here.
“I’m going to get lost,” I say. “I’m going to need a map. I’m going to wander into the east wing and simply perish.”
“I’ll come find you.” He wraps his arms around me from behind and rests his chin on my head and I feel him breathe me in. “I’ll always come find you, wherever you get to in this house. That’s the whole deal. That’s the vow behind the vow.”
And I believed him. That’s the part that guts me now, standing on a ship years later with a photograph in my hands. I believed him completely, in that echoing hall, when he promised he would always come find me.
For a while, he did.
And then the house got quiet in a different way, and the coming-to-find-me got slower, and then it stopped, and I learned to get lost in all those beautiful rooms without expecting anyone to look.
The frame is still in my hands.
I set it down, gently, exactly where it was, and I wipe my face with the back of my wrist, and I make myself keep walking through this ship he’s filled with the ghost of who we used to be.
I move through the rest of the ship in a daze, finding piece after piece of myself waiting in the quiet.
Sandy has discovered the library, a small cozy room lined floor to ceiling, and she’s pulling books off the low shelves with abandon while I stand in the doorway and understand, slowly, what I’m looking at.
These aren’t decoration. Every book I’ve ever loved is here. Novels I mentioned once and forgot I’d mentioned. The poetry I used to read in college, dog-eared editions, not pristine ones. The battered copy of Jane Eyre I lost in a move years ago and mourned like a friend.
He remembered. He remembered all of it.
I keep walking because I don’t know what else to do with my hands or my face.
The galley is stocked with the food I actually like, not the food his mother thought I should like. The bathroom holds the cheap drugstore shampoo I’ve used since I was nineteen, the kind Dorothy used to replace with expensive bottles that gave me headaches.
There’s a sound system, and when I brush the screen it wakes to a playlist of songs from before, from the apartment, from the years when he was still a man and not an institution.
And in the master cabin, on the nightstand, there’s a basket.
Full of pomelos.
I sink down onto the edge of the bed with the basket in my lap, and the wall I have been holding up for weeks, for months, for the better part of five years, finally cracks straight down the middle.
He learned what it meant.
Somebody told him, my mother most likely, or maybe Wallace, that I stopped eating the fruit I loved because it made his mouth itch.
That I quietly deleted a thing from my own life to make room in it for his comfort, and never said a word, and never expected to be thanked, because that’s what disappearing looks like when you do it slowly enough that no one notices.
He noticed. Too late, but he noticed. And he filled a basket with the proof.
Sandy finds me there with tears running down my face and a pomelo cradled in both hands like it’s spun from glass.
“Mommy, why are you crying?”
“Because your daddy did a very kind thing.”
“Is it the sad crying or the happy crying?”
“I honestly don’t know, baby. Maybe both at once.”