Chapter Twenty
The Choice
She left in April.
Not for London. Not in any dramatic sense.
She went to Atlanta for a week to see the city where her grandmother had lived and died, to walk the streets she hadn't walked since the funeral, to sit in the kitchen of the house her grandmother's neighbor had kept locked and waiting for family to sort through.
There was sorting to do. There had been sorting to do for two years and she had been putting it off with the procrastination of grief that didn't want to be finalized.
She told Jeremiah on a Tuesday. He put her on a Thursday flight — she didn't ask him not to, she had made her peace with the small machineries — and Marcus drove her to the airport and she boarded the plane with a carry-on and the crescent moon at her throat and the strange lightness of someone leaving a weight behind that they hadn't known they were carrying.
She didn't tell him she needed this to be alone.
She didn't need to. He already knew.
Atlanta in April was forsythia and red clay and the smell of something green being decided.
She stayed in a hotel because the neighbor's house wasn't yet hers to sleep in — the estate was still in process, the slow administration of a life that had accumulated over eighty-one years — and she walked her grandmother's neighborhood in the mornings and sat in the churchyard where Catherine Reeves was buried in the afternoons and let the grief be the size it actually was.
It was very large.
She had been managing it at a distance for two years, keeping it small enough to function inside, and here in the city where it had happened it expanded to its true dimensions and she let it, because her grandmother had taught her not to be afraid of the truth and grief was the truest thing she knew.
She called Jeremiah every evening.
Not because she felt she had to — because she wanted to.
Because his voice at nine o'clock had become part of the structure of a day, the way some sounds became structural, the way you didn't notice them until they were absent.
She told him about the churchyard and the forsythia and the neighbor, Mrs. Patterson, who had been feeding her grandmother's cat for two years and who had opinions about everything and who reminded her, in the sharpest possible way, of the woman she had lost.
He listened. He asked about the cat.
She laughed in a churchyard in Atlanta and felt the grief and the laughter coexist in the way they did when you were someone's granddaughter and they were gone.
* * *
On the fourth day she had dinner with a woman named Claudette, a friend of her grandmother's who had been in the same church circle for forty years and who had the precise warmth of someone who had known you since before you were interesting.
Claudette had also, it emerged over the second glass of wine, recently been set up on a date by her daughter.
The date had produced a man named Gerald who was a retired civil engineer, widowed, with two adult children and a vegetable garden he was proud of.
Claudette described him with affectionate exasperation and Ariah listened and laughed in the right places and somewhere in the middle of it had the experience of imagining, against her will, sitting across a dinner table from a man who wasn't Jeremiah.
Not Gerald precisely. Just — a man. An ordinary man.
A man who hadn't read her undergraduate thesis, who hadn't replicated her grandmother's necklace, who didn't know the camera angles of every parking structure she used, who hadn't engineered a fake stalker to move her into his building, who didn't have a room full of five years of her photographs behind a locked door.
An ordinary, uncomplicated man.
She turned the image over. Gave it every fair consideration her grandmother's precision required.
It was like trying to imagine being interested in a landscape after you had seen the Alps. Not an insult to the landscape. Just the honest result of a recalibrated scale.
Jeremiah hadn't merely raised her bar. He had removed the bar from the equation entirely and replaced it with something that didn't have a unit of measurement she could apply to anyone else. He wasn't better than other men in gradations. He was a different phenomenon.
She thought about how he always took the time to listen when she spoke about her grandmother for an hour in a snow-lit kitchen. About the index card in her nightstand drawer. About standing in the maze and feeling like the only warm thing in the geometry of the place was him.
She thought about Claudette's Gerald with his vegetable garden and his two adult children.
She finished her wine.
* * *
She called him when she got back to the hotel.
He answered on the first ring the way he always answered, which she had stopped noting because it had become ambient, the wallpaper of his devotion.
"How was dinner?" he asked.
"Good. Mrs. Claudette is — she's a lot like her. The warmth and the opinions and the distinct way of looking at you that makes you feel both seen and slightly accountable."
"You miss her."
"Every day. Today more than usual."
A pause. The value of his silence when he was holding something for her.
"Tell me something she said. Something you haven't told me yet."
She sat on the edge of the hotel bed and thought.
"She used to say," Ariah said slowly, "that the only thing worth being afraid of was a small life.
That smallness was the one failure she couldn't forgive herself.
She said most people shrank to fit the space they were given and she had decided, when she was young, that she was going to take up exactly as much space as she actually occupied. "
Silence.
"She knew," Ariah said. "She knew I was shrinking. Before I knew. She could see it. That's why she told me not to be afraid of the truth — not as a general principle but as a strict instruction for me. She was watching me make myself smaller and she was telling me to stop."
"And now?" he said.
She thought about the floor, the work, the meetings, the zoning variance at eleven-fifteen, the dinner with Volkov, the archive room she could stand in without vertigo. The index card. The freely given.
"Now I take up the space I actually occupy," she said.
She heard him breathe.
"Come home," he said. Quiet. Not a command — the closest he came to asking. The register of a man who had given her the exit and watched her not take it and was still, four days later, choosing to ask rather than arrange.
She noticed that. Filed it in the place where she kept the things that mattered.
"Three more days," she said. "I'm not done here."
"Three days," he agreed.
"Jeremiah."
"Mm."
"The cat," she said. "My grandmother's cat. Mrs. Patterson has been keeping her. Her name is Constance."
A pause. "All right."
"I'm bringing her back."
A longer pause. She could feel him recalibrating — the man who controlled everything, who had built the cage and the exit and every corridor between them, being informed that a cat named Constance was joining the household.
"All right," he said again.
"You said that already."
"I'm processing."
She laughed. In a hotel room in Atlanta, four days into the grief that was the size it actually was, she laughed at Jeremiah Youngblood processing a cat, and the laugh was her grandmother's laugh — she heard it, recognized it, felt the inheritance of it running through her chest.
"I'll see you in three days," she said.
"I'll be here," he said.
She knew he would. That was the thing about Jeremiah — whatever else he was, wherever the line between devotion and possession continued to move and shift as she learned to navigate it, he was always exactly where he said he would be.
She ended the call.
She lay back on the hotel bed and looked at the ceiling and thought about Atlanta and forsythia and a cat named Constance and a man in Manhattan who was processing.
She thought about the ordinary man with the vegetable garden she would never want.
She thought about Alps.
She thought: I'm a woman who takes up the space she actually occupies, and the space I actually occupy includes him.
All of him.
The monster and the man who handed her the exit. Both.
She was done being afraid of that.
* * *
She came home on a Sunday with a carry-on and a cat carrier and the grief processed to the size it could be carried at, and the elevator opened onto forty-eight and he was standing in the corridor.
Not waiting — there, the way he was always there, in the middle of some other purpose that had arranged itself around her arrival. Jacket off for once, sleeves rolled. He looked at the cat carrier.
Then at her face.
She crossed the corridor. Stood in front of him. Let him look at her the way he always looked at her, that complete and unhurried inventory that had terrified her in the beginning and now felt like the most honest thing anyone had ever done with their eyes.
"How are you?" he asked.
"Better," she said. "Sad. Better."
He nodded. Took the carry-on from her hand. Looked at the cat carrier.
"Constance," she said.
"Constance," he repeated, with the gravity of a man accepting terms.
She almost smiled. "She's your grandmother's cat now too. In a way."
He looked at her.
"Catherine Reeves's granddaughter's cat," she said. "That makes her yours in some chain-of-consequence way that I think you'll find acceptable if you think about it."
Something moved through his face. That enormous, old, unguarded thing.
"Come inside," he said.
She followed him through the door.
Home.
Still and always.
Home.