Chapter 4 #2
The clinic was in a strip of offices behind a supermarket, and she picked it for that reason.
She filled out the form at the counter. Name. Date of birth. Emergency contact.
She sat with the pen over that line for a while. Then she wrote Frances Moreno and the number, and looked at it, and thought about the fact that she had just made a decision about her own life and told the person involved nothing about it.
“Any support person joining you today?” the nurse asked.
“No.”
“That’s completely fine.” The woman said it easily, without a flicker, and Celia understood that she said it forty times a week.
It took twenty minutes. Everything was where it should be.
There was a sound, fast and hectic and much louder than she had expected, and Celia lay on the paper with her hands folded on her chest and listened to it and did not cry, because she had gotten very good at not doing that in front of people, and then had to sit in the car for a while afterward.
She drove home the long way, along the river, in the flat November light.
Somewhere around Cold Spring she started laughing. Not at anything. At the size of it — at the fact that she was thirty-eight and pregnant and living over a hardware store with four hundred and ten square feet, a folding chair, and a lease in her own name.
It was not a happy laugh, exactly. But it was not a sad one either, and she noticed that, and filed it.
* * *
Frankie came on the Sunday with a cactus, a bag of bagels, and a folding chair, because Celia had said there were only two chairs and Frankie had decided this was a crisis.
“Four hundred square feet.”
“Four hundred and ten.”
“Ceel.” Frankie turned all the way around in the middle of the room with her arms out and did not touch either wall, which annoyed her visibly. “You had a boathouse.”
“I had a boathouse I renovated for a man who kept a boat in it.”
“Fair.” Frankie put the cactus on the windowsill, considered it, and moved it four inches. “Oh, God, I’m doing it. You’ve infected me.”
“It was better where you had it.”
“I know it was.” Frankie sat down on the folding chair she had brought, which put her a foot lower than Celia, which she immediately hated. “Okay. Say the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you tell me how you are and it’s a lie, so we can get it out of the way.”
Celia handed her a bagel. “I’m all right.”
“There it is.”
“No — Frankie, I mean it. That’s what’s strange.” She sat down across from her. “I keep waiting to fall apart and I keep not doing it. I sleep. I’m eating. I got up at six on Thursday for no reason and it wasn’t awful. It was just early.”
Frankie chewed and watched her.
“What?”
“I’m deciding whether to say something.”
“Say it.”
“You’ve got color in your face,” Frankie said.
“That’s all. You’ve had that gray thing for about three years and I never said, because what do you say — hey, you look extinguished?
” She shrugged. “You don’t have it this week.
In a hardware store apartment, on a folding chair. Make of that what you like.”
And Celia sat there with a bagel in her hand and the whole of it right at the top of her throat — I’m pregnant, I found out Thursday, there’s a test in that drawer eight feet from your left hand — and she felt the sentence come up and stop.
Because the second she said it out loud it would become a thing with other people’s faces around it.
Frankie’s first, and Frankie would be wonderful.
And then it would be a fact in the world, and facts move.
It would start traveling toward that house on its own, through nobody’s fault, the way everything did in that circle.
She wanted a few more weeks of it belonging to nobody.
“I’m going to get a real chair,” Celia said.
“There it is again,” Frankie said, but she let it go.
* * *
He came on the ninth of November.
She was at the window with a cup of tea when the car came down the street — that gravel-crunch engine, wrong for this street, absurd outside a hardware store — and stopped across from the outside staircase.
He did not get out for a long time.
When he did he stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his coat pockets and looked up at the wobbly rail and the four windows, and Celia stood well back from the glass in a dark room and looked down at him.
He had found her. Of course he had. It had taken him eight days, which meant he had made himself wait, which meant somebody had told him to.
Her phone buzzed on the table.
I’m outside. I’m not coming up. I know I’m not allowed to be here. Roslyn will have my head.
Then, a minute later:
The rail on that staircase is loose. I’m going to send someone. That’s all. That’s the only thing I came to say.
She stood in the dark and read it twice.
That was the trouble with him. That had always been the trouble with him.
He was not stupid and he was not cruel, and every so often he did something exactly like that — noticed one true small thing and did not make it about himself — and for a second the whole nine years reorganized around the possibility that she had gotten it wrong.
She typed: Don’t send anyone.
She looked at it.
Then she deleted it, and did not answer at all.
He waited fourteen minutes on a cold sidewalk. She counted them, standing in the dark with both hands flat on the sill, in a body he did not know had changed, holding the one piece of information in the world that would have brought him up that staircase in four seconds.
He looked up at the windows twice. He could not see her and he did not wave, and there was something in the way he stood there — a big man being rained on slightly, in a coat worth more than the building — that she had to turn away from.
Then he got in the car and drove away.
The next morning a man from a company in Kingston fixed the rail. He would not take money and would not say who had sent him, and did a genuinely excellent job.
Celia went up and down that staircase four times that day and did not touch the rail once.