17. Marisol
MARISOL
I am up before the house.
That's deliberate. I'm in the kitchen at six-fifteen with coffee already brewed and Isla's oatmeal already started and every single thing on this counter exactly where it belongs, because if I can control the counters, I can control the morning. That's the theory. I'm working on believing it.
The truth is I didn't sleep so much as lie still and stare at the ceiling until the dark outside my window went gray.
It won't happen again, Ms. Vega.
I add brown sugar to the oatmeal and stir.
I hear him before I see him — the specific weight of his footsteps on the hardwood, heavier than mine, unhurried. I don't look up when he comes in.
"Morning," he says.
"Oatmeal's almost done," I say. "Isla's appointment with Dr. Patel is at ten. I'll take her."
A pause. "I was going to?—"
"I've got it." I take the pot off the heat. "Your eight o'clock is on your desk. I sent the notes last night."
I feel him standing there — feel it the way you feel weather before it arrives — and I keep my eyes on the bowl I'm filling.
He's in his suit already, dark and pressed, all six-foot-three of him occupying the kitchen doorway like an architectural feature nobody asked for.
I know without looking. I have apparently memorized this man, which is its own problem.
"Marisol—"
"Graham." I set the bowl on the low tray. "We're fine. Everything's fine."
He doesn't answer. I pick up the tray and walk past him.
Isla is sitting up in bed when I knock, Gerald tucked under her chin, watching the door with those wide hazel eyes that catch everything.
"Oatmeal," I say, setting the tray on her table. "And you've got Dr. Patel today, remember?"
"The talking doctor."
"That's the one."
She slides out of bed and pads over to the table in her star pajamas, the ones she likes better, and sits down.
I pull her desk chair over and sit across from her the way we always do, and for a few minutes it's just the sound of her spoon against the bowl and the morning light coming through the window.
Then she says, without looking up: "Are you and Graham fighting?"
My spoon stops halfway to my mouth.
"Why do you ask that?"
"You didn't say good morning to each other." She pokes at a blueberry. "You always say good morning. Even when Graham does it wrong and it sounds like he's reading from a paper."
"He doesn't—" I stop. "We're not fighting, baby. Adults just have quiet mornings sometimes."
She considers this the way she considers everything — seriously, like she's cross-referencing it against existing data. "Gerald doesn't like when people are quiet-mad," she says. "He says it's worse than regular mad because at least regular mad is honest."
I look at this six-year-old and her stuffed elephant's philosophy of emotional transparency and I have absolutely nothing to say.
"Finish your oatmeal," I tell her. "We need to leave by nine-thirty."
The problem with avoiding Graham in his own house is that the house is full of him.
His coffee mug is in the drying rack. His jacket is over the back of the chair he sat in last night.
When I walk past his office to get Isla's coat, the door is open and he's at his desk with his reading glasses on — the ones he thinks no one knows about — and his dark head bent over a document, and I walk faster.
I put Isla in her shoes. I grab her backpack. I do not look toward the office.
"We're leaving," I call, to no one and everyone.
"Have a good appointment." His voice carries from behind the door. Even. Professional. Not quite normal.
Isla tugs my hand. "Say bye to Graham," she says.
"He heard us."
"You didn't say bye back."
I close my eyes for one second. Open them. "Bye, Graham," I say toward the office door.
"Bye, Marisol."
Isla looks satisfied. She opens the front door and walks out like she resolved something important, which she did, and I follow her into the morning air and tell myself the tightness across my chest is just the weather.
Dr. Patel's waiting room has the same soft rug, the same low bookshelves, the toys arranged by a person who understands that children need to feel like the room belongs to them.
Isla picks up a small puzzle and starts it immediately, which means she's comfortable, which means we're making progress, and I hold onto that.
While she works, I stare at my phone and compose a message to my brother Danny that I don't send. I did something stupid. Delete. I complicated something I need to keep simple. Delete. I think I'm in trouble. Delete.
I put the phone in my bag.
Danny would have opinions. Danny would show up at the house with his flannel shirt and his contractor's handshake and his deep suspicion of wealthy men in tailored suits, and he would look at me and say Mari, you already know what you need to do, and he wouldn't be wrong, and I am not prepared to hear it out loud yet.
We get home at noon. Graham's car is gone.
I notice this before I notice anything else, which tells me more than I'd like to know about where my head is at.
"He's at work," Isla says, already kicking off her shoes in the entryway.
"I know."
"He'll be back at four." She says it with the calm authority of someone reporting a fixed law of nature. "He always comes back at four now."
She disappears down the hallway toward her room and I stand in the entryway alone with that information, and I understand — with a clarity that lands somewhere uncomfortable — that Isla has been watching his schedule the way I watched it in Chapter One.
Tracking it. Counting on it. Building it into her definition of safe.
And I am the person currently putting distance between her and the man she's starting to count on, because I couldn't keep my own hands on my own side of the room.
I put away Isla's backpack. I start lunch. I keep myself useful.
At three fifty-eight, I hear the front door.
I'm at the sink. My back is to the hallway. I hear him set his keys down, hear Isla come tearing out of her room, hear the low register of his voice when he crouches to catch her — hey, how was the talking doctor — and her answering him in full sentences the way she does now, easy and unstoppable.
I rinse the glass in my hand and set it in the rack.
I don't turn around.
I want to.
That's the whole problem, sitting right there in the space between the counter and the doorway — not the argument, not last night, not Ms. Vega delivered like a door closing. Just this: the simple, inconvenient want of turning around.
"Marisol." His voice, from the doorway, quiet.
"Dinner's at six," I say. "Isla picked pasta again."
"Right," he says.
He doesn't push it. He takes Isla back down to her room, and I hear her telling him about the puzzle she finished in the waiting room, and his voice comes back low and steady and interested, and I stand at the sink long after the water's off.
Restraint, I tell myself, is not the same thing as distance.
I'm working on believing that too.