30. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
October on Nantucket had a particular quality of light that I’d always loved.
The summer crowds were gone, the beaches empty, the streets quiet. The sky was a clear, crystalline blue, and the air had a sharpness to it that smelled of salt and falling leaves and the end of the season.
We were packing up the house to close it for the season, which meant Killian spent the first hour building a color-coded organizational system instead of putting a single item in a box, and Ivy and I spent the second hour dismantling it.
She patted his arm with the patient condescension only a five-year-old can manage and told him we should just put stuff in boxes, and he surrendered, outnumbered and outmaneuvered, muttering that he was being slandered in his own home.
We spent the rest of the morning actually packing, Ivy helping by putting things in boxes with enthusiastic disregard for any organizational principle whatsoever. Killian suffered through it with admirable restraint, only occasionally wincing when a fragile item got tossed in with heavy books.
The studio took the longest. I’d accumulated more in the past few months than I’d realized, research notes and equipment and the detritus of a career slowly coming back to life.
We winterized everything carefully, covering the equipment, storing the notes, making sure the space would be ready when we returned in the spring.
“Your paper’s been submitted?” Killian asked, watching me pack the last of my files.
“Submitted and under review. I should hear back in a few weeks.”
“It’s going to be accepted. Your methodology is airtight.”
“You haven’t even read the final version.”
“I don’t need to read it. I know your work. It’s going to be brilliant because everything you do is brilliant.”
“You’re biased.”
“Extremely. Also correct.”
“Priya wants me down there the first week of November,” I said. “Which means somebody has to be at pickup.”
“I’ll be at pickup.”
“You say that now. It’s November, Killian. November is when your quarter closes.”
“I’ll be at pickup,” he said again, “and the days I’m not, you get to say so out loud before dinner, and I don’t get to explain my brain at you. That’s the deal we made on a hallway floor and I intend to hold both of us to it.”
“That’s a very good speech.”
“I’ve had it ready since Tuesday.”
The pregnancy was healthy. We were well into the second trimester now, the baby growing on schedule, all the tests coming back normal.
Killian had attended every single appointment, sitting in the waiting room with his tablet full of questions, taking notes with the gravity he’d give the most important meeting of his life.
Because to him, it was.
***
By four the house was packed and organized and ready for our departure the next morning. We’d said goodbye to the family at a dinner the night before, with promises to visit for Thanksgiving and Christmas and any other excuse we could find.
He wouldn’t let me in the kitchen after four.
“It’s the last night,” he said, steering me out by the shoulders. “There’s a plan. The plan doesn’t survive contact with you.”
“That’s an insult.”
“It’s a risk assessment.”
So I sat on the floor of the emptied living room with Ivy and a deck of cards while my husband banged around behind a closed door, and at half past six the smell reached us, and I knew before I knew.
Ivy’s head came up like a dog’s.
“What is that.”
“That,” I said, “is your great-grandmother’s fish stew.”
“Why?”
“That is a question for your father.”
He brought it out in the good pot with a dish towel over his arm, entirely serious, and set it down on a table we had already packed the good cloth away from. There were three bowls. There was bread. There was, God help him, a printed card at each place with the name of the dish on it.
“I want to say a few things first,” he said.
“Killian.”
“I’ve been working on this since August.” He sat down.
“You make it from memory, and memory is a terrible instrument, so I did what I could. I found your grandmother’s parish cookbook through a library in Quincy.
I ran the version in the book against the version you make, and they aren’t the same recipe, which raises questions I didn’t want to open on our last night. ”
“What questions?”
“Whether your grandmother was following the recipe.”
“She was following the recipe.”
“The recipe doesn’t contain a full head of celery, Sabrina.”
“It might have.”
“It didn’t, and I have a photograph of the page.”
Ivy had lifted her spoon and was holding it above the bowl the way you hold a thing you intend to drop.
“Try it,” Killian told her.
“You first.”
“I have tried it. I’ve been trying it for seven years.”
He ate a spoonful in front of us both. I watched him do it, and I watched his face do absolutely nothing at all, and that was the moment the whole thing came apart, because I had been watching him do that at my table for years and had never once let myself see it.
I tried mine.
It was terrible.
It was so obviously, so undeniably terrible that I put my spoon down and sat back in my chair and heard myself say, out loud, in my own kitchen, for the first time in my adult life, “This is awful.”
Killian froze with the bread halfway to his mouth.
“It’s a good effort,” he said carefully.
“It’s a perfect effort. That’s what’s awful. You made it exactly right.” I stared into the bowl. “My grandmother was a bad cook.”
“I’m not going to be the one to say that.”
“She was a bad cook and everybody knew and nobody told her, and she made this every month for forty years and we all sat there and ate it and told her it was wonderful, and then she died and I started making it, and you sat there and ate it and told me it was wonderful.” I looked up at him. “I’ve been running a scam I inherited.”
“It’s a very traditional scam.”
“How much of it have you eaten?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Killian.”
“Once a month,” he said, “with a small number of exemptions for travel. And I want to be clear that I don’t regret a single bowl, because you always came out of the kitchen looking pleased with yourself, and that was the point of the exercise, and the stew was overhead.”
“The stew was overhead.”
“All relationships have overhead.”
Ivy, who had been following this the way a spectator follows a rally, chose that moment to put her spoon down with a clatter and deliver her verdict.
“It tastes like the beach,” she said. “The bad part of the beach.”
“Ivy.”
“The part where the seaweed is.”
“Thank you, Ivy.”
“I’m being honest. You said be honest.” She pushed the bowl away with one finger, delicately, the way you move something that might still be alive. “Can I have the bread part?”
“You can have the bread part.”
Killian was laughing by then, properly, with his head down and his shoulders going, and it set me off, and then Ivy started because we had, and the three of us sat in a stripped-down house at a bare table over a pot of my grandmother’s revenge and laughed until my ribs hurt and the baby kicked in protest.
“Okay,” he said, when he could. “Okay. New arrangement. I make it twice a year. Christmas and whenever you’re homesick.”
“Why would you make it at all?”
“Because it’s your grandmother,” he said, “and you loved her, and I never met her, and this is the only way I get to.”
I had to look at the ceiling for a second.
“You could have told me,” I said. “At any point in seven years, you could have said, Sabrina, this is inedible.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because you were happy for the length of one dinner a month,” he said, “and there was a stretch in there where that was the only dinner a month I was getting right.”
The wind came up outside and moved something loose against the side of the house. Nobody said anything for a while. Ivy ate her bread.
“Tell me the other things,” I said finally.
“What other things?”
“The other things you’ve been swallowing for seven years and putting on a list instead of telling me. There have to be more than four.”
He considered the pot.
“You tell the same story about the Amtrak conductor twice a year and it changes every time,” he said.
“It doesn’t.”
“He’s been from three different states. Also you say you’ll be five minutes and you mean twenty, and I’ve built my entire relationship with time around that conversion, and if you ever start meaning five I will be late for the rest of my life.”
“That’s two.”
“You hum when you’re reading a paper you disagree with. It’s tuneless and it’s constant and I find it unbearable.” He paused. “I would also like it on the record that I have listened to it through a closed door twice this week on purpose.”
“That’s not a complaint.”
“No,” he agreed. “It appears I’m bad at this.”
“Keep practicing.”
“I intend to. I’ve started a list.”
“Of course you have.”
Ivy, who had eaten all of the bread and none of anything else, wanted to know whether Uncle Clank was coming back to the city with us, and whether Sir Squishington needed a seat on the ferry, and whether we could leave the studio unlocked over the winter so that if the hermit crabs came back they had somewhere to go.
We negotiated. Uncle Clank stayed. Sir Squishington got a seat.
The hermit crab question was tabled to a later session.
Then she asked whether we were coming back in the summer, and asked it lightly, in the voice she uses when she has already decided what the answer had better be.
“We’re coming back in the summer,” Killian said.
“Everybody?”
“All four of us.”
She did the arithmetic, arrived at the baby, and looked extremely satisfied with herself for the rest of the evening.
I carried the pot to the sink after she went up. Killian took it out of my hands and poured the whole thing away without ceremony, and rinsed it, and set it upside down on the rack, and neither of us said anything about that either.
Ivy was already asleep, exhausted from the day’s activities and the emotions of leaving a place she loved. She had gone up satisfied, which is not a thing I would have bet on that morning.
I found Killian on the porch, sitting on the swing that he’d finally fixed properly after two summers of promising to get around to it.
“Room for one more?” I asked.
He shifted over and held out his arm. I settled against him, tucking myself into the warm space at his side, and we rocked gently together.
The night was clear and cold, stars scattered across the sky, the distant sound of waves a constant backdrop. The ferry would take us back to the mainland tomorrow, and then the car to the city, and then real life would resume. Jobs and routines and the ordinary business of existence.
But for now, there was just this. The two of us, on a porch swing, looking at the stars.
His hand found my belly, resting on the curve that had grown more noticeable in recent weeks.
“You know this doesn’t get easy, right?” I said quietly. “We go back to the city, you go back to work, I’m going to be dealing with a newborn in a few months. Life is going to get complicated.”
“I know.”
“You’re still you. You’re still going to hyperfocus on things and lose track of time. I’m still me. I’m still going to shut down when I’m hurt instead of talking about it.”
“I know that too.”
“So what makes you think we can make this work? In the long run, I mean. With all our patterns and problems and the million ways we’ve failed each other before.”
He didn’t answer right away, his palm resting warm on my stomach.
“Because we know now,” he said finally. “We know what happens when we don’t pay attention, when we take each other for granted, when we let the distance grow. We’ve seen how bad it can get. And I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of ever going back there.”
“That’s optimistic.”
“I prefer realistic. We’re going to screw up. We’re going to have fights and bad days and moments where we wonder why we ever thought this could work. But we’re also going to show up. We’re going to do the work. We’re going to choose each other, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”
He turned to look at me, his face shadowed in the dim light.
“Good,” he said.
“Good what?”
“Good that you’re still you. Good that I’m still me. I fell in love with the difficult version of you, Sabrina. The one who challenges me and calls me out and refuses to let me coast. I don’t want an easy relationship. I want a real one. With you. Exactly as you are.”
My throat tightened with emotion. This man. This impossible, over-engineered, deadly serious man who made spreadsheets about snacks and lists about love and flew across the country when our daughter called in a panic.
“I love you,” I said, because it was the truest thing I knew.
“I love you too. Forever. Through all the difficult parts.”
“Even my fish stew?”
“That’s pushing it. But yes, even that.”
I laughed and leaned my head against his shoulder. We rocked together in comfortable silence, the swing creaking gently, the stars wheeling slowly overhead.
The baby shifted inside me, a flutter of movement that still took my breath away every time. Killian’s hand pressed slightly firmer against my belly, feeling it too.
“Hi, kid,” he said softly. “Your mom and I are going to be okay. I promise.”
“Don’t make promises to someone who can’t hold you accountable yet.”
“I’m making promises to both of you. You can hold me accountable when they can’t.”
“Deal.”
The wind picked up slightly, carrying the scent of salt and the last of the autumn roses that grew along the porch rail. Somewhere in the distance, a lighthouse beam swept across the water.
We sat together and watched it turn, marking time, marking the end of the season and the beginning of whatever came next.
And for the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t afraid of what that might be.