25. Marisol
MARISOL
I do it on a Tuesday afternoon while Isla is at therapy and Graham is at the office and the house is as quiet as it ever gets.
I pull a bag from the top shelf of my closet — not my full luggage, just the canvas weekender I use for overnight trips — and I set it open on my bed and I stand there looking at it.
Then I fold a sweater and put it in.
That's all I'm doing. Folding a sweater.
Testing the weight of a thing before I commit to carrying it.
I fold two more, add a change of clothes, my toiletry case.
I don't pack everything. I don't pack with any urgency.
I just want to know what it feels like to have a bag on my bed that means I could leave instead of a bag on my bed that means I live here now.
It feels terrible, for the record.
I zip it halfway, push it to the back of the shelf, and go start dinner.
Graham gets home at four. Isla gets home at four-thirty, still carrying the small paper turtle she made in the waiting room at Dr. Patel's, which she presents to me at the door with the gravity of someone delivering an important document.
"For you," she says.
"She's beautiful," I say, and mean it.
"It's a he," Isla says, already kicking off her shoes. "His name is Gerald Four."
"The Gerald family continues to grow."
"They're a dynasty," she says, completely seriously, and disappears down the hall.
I set Gerald Four on the windowsill above the kitchen sink where the light hits it in the afternoon, and I don't think about the bag on my shelf, and I start the pasta.
Dinner is normal until it isn't.
We're twenty minutes in, Isla working through her bowl with the methodical focus she brings to food she likes, Graham across from me with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and everything is fine, and then Isla puts her fork down and fixes me with that wide gaze that has never once failed to see directly through whatever I'm doing.
"Will you be here tomorrow?" she asks.
The question drops into the middle of the table like something heavy.
"Of course," I say. I keep my voice easy. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"You had a different face today."
"I have the same face I always have."
"No." She picks her fork back up but doesn't use it. "It was the thinking-about-leaving face. Danny makes it when he's about to go home after dinner."
I feel Graham go still across the table. Not visibly — he doesn't do anything as readable as that — but the quality of his stillness changes, the way a room changes when someone stops breathing normally.
"I'm not going anywhere tonight," I say. "Eat your pasta."
"But tomorrow?"
"Isla." I keep my voice gentle. "Tomorrow we're going to walk to school and you're going to tell me everything about whatever happens in art class, and then I'll be here when you get home. Okay?"
Her eyes stay on mine for that runs longer than a six-year-old should be able to sustain without blinking. Then she picks up her fork. "Okay," she says, but the word doesn't quite settle the way it usually does when she closes a subject.
She follows me after.
I'm in my room putting away the clean laundry I'd left folded on the chair, and I hear the soft pad of her feet in the hallway, and then she's in my doorway in her star pajamas, Gerald tucked under her chin, watching me.
"Hey," I say. "You're supposed to be getting ready for bed."
"I know." She doesn't move from the doorway.
"Isla—"
"I don't want you to go."
I stop with a folded shirt in my hands. "I'm right here."
"Now," she says. "But you're thinking about it."
I set the shirt down on the bed and crouch to her level, and she crosses the room immediately, and before I can say anything her small hands are wrapped in the fabric of my cardigan, not grabbing, just holding, and she tips her forehead against my shoulder.
"Hey," I say, softer. "Hey. I've got you."
"Promise you'll be here tomorrow," she says, into my shoulder. "Not just tonight. Tomorrow."
I wrap both arms around her and I feel the terrible, specific weight of a child who has already lost one person she counted on, who has rebuilt herself around a new set of people, who is six years old and smart enough to read a face and scared enough to hold onto a sweater.
"I'm going to be here tomorrow," I say.
She pulls back and looks at me, evaluating. Then she holds Gerald out.
"She can sleep in your room tonight," she says. "So you remember."
I take the elephant carefully, the way you take something that matters. "I'll take good care of her."
"I know." She wipes her eye with the back of her hand — quick, decisive, the crying portion of the evening officially concluded. "Can we do the breathing thing? From Dr. Patel?"
"Yeah, baby. We can do the breathing thing."
I get her back to her room. We do four rounds of the slow breath Dr. Patel taught her — in for four, hold for four, out for four — and by the third round her grip on my hand has loosened and by the fourth her eyes are closing.
I sit with her until the breathing goes even, until her face goes soft and unguarded the way it only does in sleep, and then I pull her blanket up and set Gerald in the crook of her arm because she'll want her when she wakes.
I stand in her doorway for a moment.
Then I go back to my room and I open my laptop.
I tell myself I'm just looking. That looking isn't deciding. That researching apartment listings in my own price range in my own city is something any reasonable person might do on a Tuesday night, and it doesn't mean anything, and it certainly doesn't mean I've already made up my mind.
I tell myself all of that while I open four tabs and save two addresses and stare at the photos of empty rooms that have never had a chalk birdhouse on the counter or an elephant named after a giraffe or a man in rolled sleeves reading to a six-year-old in the dark with a grumpy bear voice.
The bag is still on the shelf in my closet.
I don't unpack it.
I don't add anything to it either.
I close the laptop and turn off the light and lie there in the dark listening to the quiet of a house that has somehow, without my permission, started sounding like mine.