Chapter 29 Beckett #2
"And I'm not asking you to need me less," I said.
"I've watched you all year and I know what you think it costs you to need somebody.
I'm not going to be another person telling you to lie down.
I want to be where it goes. You need somebody at three in the morning.
You need somebody to hold the thing while you cut.
You need somebody to say the number out loud so you don't have to carry it in your head.
That's me. That's the only job I've ever wanted and I've been doing it since October without permission. "
The refrigerator hummed. Something moved on top of it and settled.
Tessa took her hands off her face.
"Right," she said, and her voice was not working properly. "Well, I practiced."
"You what?"
"I've been practicing this for three weeks, on the porch at night, like a lunatic. I could feel it coming and I wanted to be good at it." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "And I had a whole thing and I cannot remember one word of it."
"That's all right."
"It was good, Beckett. It had a bit about the clinic in it."
"Tessa."
"I love you," she said. "I never stopped either.
Not for a day. I've spent ten years telling myself the problem was that I stopped.
I built an entire adult life on top of that and it was never true.
I've loved you since I was twenty-one. I was still doing it in October when you came through my door at midnight with a dying dog in your arms and I hated you.
And I've been doing it in this house every single day since December, with a red clause on my own refrigerator telling me not to. "
I got up.
"Sit down," she said. "Beckett, sit."
"No," I said, and I went round the table.
She came up out of that chair before I got there. She got both hands in my collar and pulled. I went down to her, because I always do.
She was crying and laughing at the same time and doing both badly and telling me so. At one point she had her hands on either side of my face and made me say it again. Then she made me say it a third time with my eyes open.
I put her back against the edge of that counter with one hand in her hair and one arm all the way around her. I said it about nine times in a row in a low voice, against her mouth and her neck and the side of her jaw. She had to hold onto the counter behind her with both hands.
"Say it once more."
"I love you."
"Tessa."
"I'm going to make you do it about four hundred times," she said, "for ten years, so you may as well."
Willa, in the bouncer on the table, made a noise in her sleep and moved one hand.
And I stopped.
"Hang on," I said.
"Do not hang on."
"I need one thing off the table."
"Beckett."
I got the blocker.
There is a pocket in the lining where the wrist strap anchors, at the top. It is the deepest part of the thing. Everything else in there sits above it.
"There's one more," I said.
Tessa Reeves put her hand out flat on the counter beside her, which is what she does when she needs the room to stop moving.
"No, there isn't."
"It's been in here since the morning of the 2nd of May," I said.
"That's the morning after the porch. I bought it at ten o'clock in the morning on Sixth Avenue and I put it in here at two in the afternoon.
I haven't taken it out since. It has been in every game of that playoff run, including game six. "
"You…"
"It went out there with everything else," I said. "I couldn't say any of it, so I carried all of it."
And I got it out and I did not do a speech. There was not one left in me and she would have hated it.
"Marry me," I said.
She did not answer.
She stood there at twenty past four in the morning with her hand over her mouth and tears coming down. She did not say one single word. I stood there and let her have it. My heart was going like the end of a period.
Then Tessa Reeves walked past me.
She went to the counter. She picked up the marker.
She took the cap off with her teeth. She went to the refrigerator and got down under everything, under the seven clauses and the two amendments and the finding.
She went all the way to the bottom of the board, where there was about two inches of white left.
And she wrote, in that slanted hand, Approved. T.R.
And she put the cap back on.
"That's it?" I said.
"That's how it's done in this house," Tessa said.
"You could say a word."
"I've said all of them," she said. "And I'm not going to be able to do another one for about a minute. Give me your hand."
I gave her my hand. She was shaking too much to do it and I had to do it myself in the end.
She watched me do it. Then she held her own hand out flat in front of her at arm's length in the light over the stove.
She looked at it like a woman reading a chart and said, "Huh.
" That is what she said in a dark room on Wadsworth when a heart came in at a hundred and sixty-two.
Then she came at me hard enough that I had to put a hand back on the counter.
We ended up on the couch, because it is nearer than the bedroom. At some point Willa woke up all the way and had to be carried and fed and put in the middle of it. Neither of us was willing to leave the room.
That is where the light found us. It was twenty past five, going grey in the front window and then going yellow.
The board was full. There is not two inches left on it anywhere.
The blocker was on the kitchen table with the lining open and nothing in it. Everything that has been in it since October was out on that table in a line, where anybody in the house could see it.
Willa was asleep between us with one hand out flat on the side of my neck.
Tessa had her head on my shoulder and her left hand up on my chest, flat on the scar. She had not taken it off. I do not think she had noticed she was looking at it.
"Beckett. You're not asleep."
"No."
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing," I said.
"You're doing the arithmetic."
I did not say anything for a second.
"I've stopped," I said.
Down on the floor at the end of the couch, in his spot, Bear's tail came up about four inches. It came down once on the boards, hard, the way a man brings a hammer down when a thing is settled. Then he went back to sleep and did not do it again.