Chapter 17 Honey and One Sugar
Honey and One Sugar
Catherine
Three days after leaving the hospital, Catherine's apartment was immaculate. Not the ordinary cleanliness of a woman who kept a tidy home, but the kind that happened when there was nothing left to do with your hands.
The cushions were aligned to a degree that suggested a ruler had been involved. The kitchen surfaces held no stray crumbs, no unpaid letters, no evidence of anyone actually living there. In the music room, the fallboard was shut, and the door was closed. It had been closed since she came home.
She was at the kitchen table with a crossword she hadn’t been doing when the intercom buzzed.
"Miss Matthews." Frank's voice carried its usual measured courtesy, with an additional note underneath it that she recognized as professional distress. "I do apologize for disturbing you. There's a Mrs. Olivia Fieldman here for you. I explained you weren't receiving visitors, but she—"
There was a brief scuffle. The distinct sound of Frank's professional dignity losing a close fight. Then a different voice.
"Catherine." Liv's voice. Entirely unapologetic.
"I have been on a plane for eight hours. I haven’t slept.
My thong has been cutting into me since I was halfway over the Atlantic, and I did not come all this way to be turned away by a very polite doorman, however lovely Frank is.
" She paused. "Frank, you are lovely. Catherine, let me up. "
Liv had a voice that hadn't changed in thirty years: low, amused, and entirely immune to circumstance. Catherine could picture her at the front desk with one hand extended for the receiver, Frank having surrendered it with the polite helplessness of a man who had met his match.
Catherine pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead and braced herself. "Liv. You could have called."
"I did call. Several times, if you remember. You dumped me into your voicemail and texted me that you were fine."
"I am fine."
"Then say that to my face."
There was a beat of silence from downstairs, presumably Liv returning the phone.
Catherine looked at the crossword. Then at the closed music room door. Then at the ceiling, briefly.
"Frank," she said.
"Ma'am?"
"Send her up."
* * *
Catherine used the four minutes it took for the lift to arrive to make the apartment look less like a mausoleum.
She moved a book from the shelf to the coffee table and opened it to a random page.
Filled the kettle. Stood in the kitchen doorway surveying the sitting room with the eye of someone who knew it would be examined.
At the last second, she put a mug in the sink alongside a plate and a fork, then stood back, then added a second fork, then removed it, then stood there holding it, wondering what a person who had been eating normally would have done with a fork.
She was still standing there contemplating when Liv knocked.
The woman who appeared in the doorway was more or less the same as she always had been, shorter than Catherine remembered every time, dark-eyed, gray threaded through her curly black hair in ways that suited her, a camel coat and a scarf tied and retied, and a weekend bag that hit the floor the moment she saw Catherine's face.
Liv stepped through the door and hugged her before Catherine had finished deciding how to arrange her face.
One hand at the back of her head, the other around her shoulders, the grip of someone who had known her long enough not to ask first. Catherine stood stiff for a moment.
Then something in her shoulders dropped an inch.
“All right," Liv said, stepping back and holding her by both arms. She looked at Catherine's face in the direct way she'd had since their first year at the conservatory, the way that had always made Catherine feel simultaneously assessed and accepted.
Then her gaze moved past Catherine into the apartment. The aligned cushions. The gleaming surfaces. The closed music room door.
She said nothing about any of it and instead walked past Catherine and towards the kitchen.
“Show me where you keep the tea," Liv said.
In the kitchen, Catherine boiled the kettle and reached for the cups.
She opened the cabinet and stopped, just for a moment.
Theodora's mug was where it always was—the one she had presented to Catherine with great ceremony approximately two months after they'd met.
What would happen if a piano fell on you?
You would B-flat printed on the side in bold letters that suggested the designer had never encountered a font they didn't like. Catherine hadn’t laughed at the time.
Theodora had laughed brightly enough for both of them, and then, somehow, the mug had never left.
She reached past it for another and set it on the counter.
She made Liv's tea with honey and one sugar. She hadn't needed to ask since the winter term of 1982, when their housemistress had made it that way for Liv after having her tonsils taken out, and Catherine had taken over the duty and never stopped.
Liv was sitting at the kitchen island when Catherine set the cup in front of her. She wrapped both hands around it and looked down at it for a moment. When she looked up, something in her expression had given up on being composed.
"Do you have any idea," she said, "how worried I've been."
It wasn't quite a question.
"I'm sorry," Catherine said.
"The hospital rang me. Then you didn't answer, and I got one text telling me you were fine." Liv looked up. "What's the point of being your emergency contact if you go silent the moment there's an emergency?"
"I didn't want you to worry unnecessarily."
"I was already worried. That ship had sailed." Liv set her mug down. "Talk to me."
Catherine picked up her own tea. "I had a seizure. Breakthrough activity, they called it, which sounds worse than it is. The neurologist has adjusted my dosage, and I have a follow-up on Friday. The prognosis is straightforward—“
"Catherine."
“—And the practice is on the Upper East Side, which is convenient. I'm not restricted from traveling or driving, so daily life is largely—"
"Catherine." The single word carried thirty years of knowing exactly what she was doing.
Catherine took a sip of tea.
Liv let her. They sat like that for a moment, the kind of silence that didn't need filling. Then she asked, "Has your mother come to see you?”
"No."
“Does she know you were in the hospital?”
“Mhm.”
Liv watched her. Drank her tea. Said nothing, because she knew better.
"When do I get to meet Theo?" she asked, after a moment, her tone shifting to something gentler. "I've been practicing my 'if you hurt my best friend' speech the entire flight here."
Catherine looked at the table. "She isn't here."
Liv waited with a raised eyebrow as if to say, ‘duh, but when will she be?’
"We aren't—" Catherine stopped and exhaled slowly. "I ended things."
“What? Why?”
"It was the right decision."
Liv looked at her for a moment. “For who?”
“Both of us.”
Liv's thumb found her wedding band, spinning it once. Catherine recognized this as Liv deciding not to say the first thing that had come to her.
"Tell me what happened," she said.
So Catherine told her. Not the version she’d been composing for three days, the one that was orderly and made her sound like someone who had made a considered decision.
She told her the other version, the one where she had woken in a hospital gown with Theodora asleep in the chair beside the bed and felt something move through her chest, and then spent the next twenty minutes taking apart the best thing that had happened to her.
She told it without looking up, her voice level in the way it got when she was holding something carefully.
When she finished, Liv was quiet for a moment.
"Do you think she'd want to hear from you?" she asked.
"That isn't the point."
"What is the point?"
"That I made a decision that was difficult but the right one, and I'd rather not spend your entire visit examining it."
Liv looked at her. Then she reached across and covered Catherine's hand with her own, briefly. “Fine,” she said. “Then we won’t.” She sat back. "We'll watch Ferris Bueller and Dirty Dancing back to back, and I don't want to hear a single word about it."
Catherine looked at her. "I hated Dirty Dancing."
Liv pointed at her. “Liar. You cried."
"I did not."
"You absolutely did. Spring break first year of college. You thought I was asleep."
"Don’t you have a return flight booked?”
“Nope. I have a flexible ticket and a very understanding husband."
The corner of Catherine's mouth moved despite everything. "I suppose you can stay in my guest room for a few days,” she said.
"Good." Liv stood and picked up her glass. "Now. Order me something to eat. You're buying."
* * *
They ate at the kitchen table, too many containers between them.
Liv talked about the flight, the film she'd watched twice and cried at both times, the man in the middle seat who had fallen asleep on her shoulder before they reached cruising altitude.
Catherine listened and ate more than she had in three days without noticing.
They had moved to the couch with their wine when Catherine heard it. Footsteps in the hallway, the rhythm she had stopped consciously registering months ago. It had become part of the building's vocabulary, as familiar as the elevator chime or her lock engaging.
She went still.
The footsteps slowed outside 14D, just briefly, then continued to the elevator bay.
Catherine realized she had stopped mid-sentence. She didn't remember what she'd been saying.
"Sorry," Catherine said. "I—"
But Liv was on her feet before Catherine could finish, moving quickly toward the front door with a purpose that made Catherine's stomach drop.
"Liv—" She was off the couch before she'd decided to move, crossing the room and grabbing Liv around the waist from behind. "Don't you dare—"
"I'm not—"
"I mean it, if you open that door—"
"Catherine, I'm not—"
They wrestled with complete disregard for dignity back toward the couch, Liv trying to turn and Catherine not letting her, until they went down onto the cushions in a graceless heap, breathless, Catherine's wine miraculously unspilled.
There was a beat of silence. Then Liv started laughing.
"I was going to look through the peephole, you idiot," she managed.
Catherine stared at her. "What?"
"The peephole." Liv was laughing properly now, the kind that made her eyes water. "I just wanted to see what she looked like. There was no need for you to go all Hulk Hogan on me.”
Catherine opened her mouth. Closed it. Something released in her, sudden and involuntary, and then she was laughing too, the kind that arrived without warning and couldn't be managed, both of them on the couch with their wine listing at dangerous angles.
"You absolute—" Catherine couldn't finish the sentence.
"In my defense," Liv said, wiping her eyes, "you've been describing this woman for months, and I've never actually seen her. I was going to be very discreet about it."
Catherine put her face in her hands. The laughter kept coming, undignified and helpless, and she let it, because it had been three days and she had no defenses left for it.
When it finally settled, they sat side by side catching their breath, the apartment quiet around them.
"She has copper hair," Catherine said, after a moment.
"And green eyes that change shade when she's excited.
And a tiny scar just above her right eyebrow that she's never mentioned.
" She paused. "I never asked. I just noticed it. I always assumed it was from when she had chicken pox as a child. I kept meaning to ask her…”
Liv was still beside her. "She sounds beautiful," she said, and then picked up her wine and said nothing else.
From Liv, who had never kept an opinion to herself in thirty years, the silence said everything.
Catherine looked toward the elevator bay. She didn't answer. But she didn't disagree.
Later, when Catherine came back from the kitchen with their refilled wine, there was a folded piece of notepad paper on the cushion where Liv had been sitting.:
Dr. Florence Hardin
212-363-0819
Trust me, call her xx
She could hear Liv in the bathroom, running the tap. Catherine looked at the paper for a moment, then folded it once and put it in her desk drawer.
Out of sight. Not quite out of mind.