13. Kai
— ? —
Kai
Two weeks. Fourteen days since she walked out of our house with her bags and a look on her face that I’ll never forget, fourteen days since I stood in the doorway like an idiot watching her taillights disappear down the driveway, fourteen days of absolute fucking hell.
I’m parked outside her new building now, in Silver Lake, a neighborhood I’ve driven through maybe twice in my life, full of coffee shops and vintage stores and people who don’t recognize my face.
She rented this place with her book money, the prize from the award and whatever the book has earned her since last spring, and that’s the part that guts me.
Not the address, not the neighborhood, not the fact that she’s living in a walk-up instead of our estate.
It’s that she paid for it herself, with money she earned from words she wrote while I was too busy to notice.
The building is three stories, pink stucco, iron balconies, bougainvillea climbing the walls, and her apartment is on the second floor.
I know because I’ve been here four times already, and each time she’s either refused to buzz me up or pretended she wasn’t home, and once I stood at the intercom for twenty minutes pressing her number every ninety seconds like a man who’s forgotten what dignity is for.
Today is different. Today I brought everything.
Albie helps me unload the car, box after box wrapped in paper that cost more than most people’s rent, and the building manager watches us stack packages in the small lobby with barely concealed suspicion and then goes back to sorting mail.
“You need help carrying those up?” Albie asks.
“I’ve got it.”
“She know you’re coming?”
“She will.”
He nods once and heads back to the car, and I grab the first armload and start up the stairs.
By the time I’ve made three trips my arms are burning and there’s a small mountain of gifts outside her door, and I stand back, surveying my work, and realize how pathetic this looks, a billionaire sweating through a designer shirt, surrounded by wrapped boxes in a narrow hallway that smells like someone’s dinner two floors up.
This is what I’ve been reduced to, and the worst part is that I’d do it again tomorrow, and the day after, and I’d carry the boxes up three at a time if I thought it would get her to open the door six inches instead of three.
I knock, and there’s nothing, and I knock again. “Erika. I know you’re in there. Your car’s in the lot.”
Silence.
“I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
More silence, then footsteps, the scrape of a chain, and the door opens three inches, and there she is, hair piled in a messy bun, no makeup, wearing leggings and an oversized sweater that swallows her whole, and she looks tired and lovely and so far away that my chest physically aches.
“What is all this?” She’s staring at the boxes.
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Erika, please.”
“I said no, Kai.” Her voice is flat and tired. “Whatever this is, you can say it from the hallway.”
I take a breath. “These are for you.”
“I can see that.”
“I’ve been thinking about everything you ever mentioned wanting.
Things you said in passing, things I should have remembered, should have gotten for you years ago.
” I gesture at the pile. “The first edition Jane Austen you saw at that estate sale. The cashmere blanket from that shop in Carmel, the blue one you kept touching. The vintage typewriter from San Francisco. The trip brochures for Iceland, for the Northern Lights, because you said once that you wanted to see them before you died.”
She’s staring at me now, really staring.
“I heard you, Erika. Every time. I just didn’t do anything about it.”
“So you’re doing something now.”
“Yes.”
“Because I left.”
The words hit like a punch. “Because I finally understand what I lost.”
She laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “You understand now. That’s convenient.”
“I know it’s too late. I know these don’t fix anything. But I needed you to know that I heard you. That I wasn’t completely oblivious, I was just too wrapped up in my own bullshit to act on it.”
“Kai.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “This is exactly the problem. You think you can buy your way out of this.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Isn’t it?” She nudges one of the boxes with her foot. “How much did all this cost? Ten thousand? Fifty? More?”
I don’t answer, because the truth is embarrassing.
“You heard everything,” she says quietly. “Every little wish, every passing comment. You filed it all away somewhere in that brain of yours. And you did nothing. For years, Kai. Years.”
“I know.”
“You just never listened when it mattered.”
The words slice through me, because she’s right, she’s absolutely fucking right.
“I’m listening now,” I say.
“Now doesn’t count.” She starts to close the door. “Take your gifts and go home.”
“Erika, wait.”
“What?”
“Just keep one thing. Please. Anything. I need to know that something I did mattered.”
She hesitates, looks at the pile, and then she bends down and picks up one of the larger boxes, the heavy one I’d struggled with on the stairs, and unwraps it slowly, deliberately, like she’s making me wait on purpose.
It’s the typewriter, mint green, a 1960s Olivetti, the exact one she’d stopped in front of at that antique shop three years ago, when she ran her fingers over the keys and said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and I nodded and checked my phone and we walked out without it.
She holds it for a while, and runs her thumb across the space bar the same way she did in that shop.
“This doesn’t change anything,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’m keeping it because I want it. Not because of you.”
“Okay.”
“And you need to leave now.”
“Can I at least help you carry the rest inside?”
“No.” She steps back, typewriter clutched to her chest. “Goodbye, Kai.”
The door closes, and I stand there like an idiot, surrounded by rejected gifts, staring at a door that has nothing to tell me. A minute passes, then two.
I’m about to start gathering the boxes when footsteps echo in the stairwell, and a guy in a uniform rounds the corner, clipboard in hand, a logo on his shirt that I recognize instantly. Meridian Pictures.
“Delivery for E.C. Hart?” He’s looking at the apartment numbers, then at me, then at the pile of gifts blocking the hallway. “Uh, is this the right place?”
“Yeah.” My voice sounds strange. “This is it.”
He knocks. The door opens again, and Erika’s face appears in the gap.
“E.C. Hart?”
“That’s me.”
“Package from Meridian Pictures. Sign here, please.”
She signs and takes the manila envelope, and the courier disappears down the stairs, and she’s about to close the door again when she notices I’m still standing there.
“You’re still here.”
“What’s in the envelope?”
“None of your business.”
“Erika.”
She sighs, tears it open, pulls out a stack of papers, and starts reading, and I watch her face change, the exhaustion fading, replaced by surprise, then wonder, then a light I haven’t seen in months, the woman I fell in love with, the one who used to dream out loud about all the things she wanted to accomplish.
“What is it?”
She looks up at me, and for a second, just a second, she looks like she wants to tell me, and then her face closes off again.
“Dean Calloway’s production company wants to option my book.” She says it flatly, like she’s telling me the time. “For a film.”
Dean Calloway, the actor who presented her award, the one who handed her that trophy while I was somewhere else entirely, too stupid to know I was destroying my own life.
“That’s incredible,” I manage. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“You deserve this. You’ve always deserved this.”
She looks at me, and there’s a look in her eyes I can’t quite read, pain, maybe, or anger, or both.
“I have a lot to process,” she says. “You should go.”
“Erika, wait. Can we just talk about this? About us? I’m not asking you to forgive me, I’m just asking for a chance to…”
“There is no us, Kai.” Her voice is quiet and final. “Not anymore.”
The door closes, and this time I hear the deadbolt click.
I sit down on the top step. I don’t decide to, my legs just do it, and I sit there in the narrow hallway with my back against her neighbor’s wall and the boxes all around me and the smell of somebody’s dinner, and through her door I can hear her moving, the scrape of a chair, the small clatter of the typewriter being set down on something, and then nothing, and then, faintly, the sound of paper.
She’s reading it again. The thing from Dean Calloway’s company.
She’s on the other side of a door I’m not allowed through, reading about the life that’s about to happen to her, and I’m on the floor of a hallway with a first-edition Austen and a blanket and a stack of brochures for a trip we’re never going to take.
I gather the rejected gifts slowly, mechanically, stacking them back in boxes and carrying them down to the car one armload at a time, and Albie watches me load them into the trunk without a word. When I slide into the backseat he doesn’t start the car right away.
“Home?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
He pulls out of the lot, into traffic on Sunset, because of course there is, and I stare out the window at all those lives happening in all those buildings, people going about their evenings like the world isn’t ending.
She’s going to be somebody, a real writer with a real film deal, and I’m on the outside of it, watching from the street like a stranger.
Albie catches my eye in the rearview mirror but says nothing.
He’s been with me since before Erika, he’s seen me at my worst and my best, and right now I’m somewhere below worst, and we both know it.
Halfway home, at a red light on Sunset, he says, “She looked well, Mr. Channing,” to the windshield, and I know what he’s telling me, that she’s fine without me, that he saw it too, and I know he means it kindly, and it’s the cruelest thing anyone’s said to me in two weeks.
At home I carry the boxes into the guest room myself and stack them in the corner, the Austen on top of the blanket on top of the brochures for a trip she’ll take with someone else now, and I stand there looking at them in the room where she slept for two nights before she left, the bed still made the way she left it because I told the staff not to touch it, and I close the door on all of it.
Maybe she’ll want them someday. Probably not.
I pour myself a scotch and sit in the dark living room, staring at the pool lights reflecting on the ceiling, the same pool where months ago I told her I’d been distracted lately and she told me we were okay, and I let her.
I don’t turn on a lamp. The house doesn’t need light to remind me it’s empty.
She kept the typewriter. She unwrapped it slowly to make me wait, and she told me it was for her and not for me, and she held it against her chest the way she held that trophy in the driveway, and she carried it inside. That has to mean something. Doesn’t it?