Chapter 15 #2
She watched him do it — watched him take in the table by the good windows and the bed through the doorway and the two chairs and the folding one, and the drawings pinned to the wall over the table, and the cactus, and the whole four hundred and ten square feet of a life she had built with no help from anybody.
“It’s small,” she said. “Everybody says that. The ceiling’s nine-six, that’s why it works.”
“It’s the best room I’ve been in in ten years,” Lawrence said.
He said it flatly, looking at the windows, and it was not a compliment to her and it was not a line, and she believed him completely.
“Sit down.”
* * *
She did not do a speech.
She had drafted one at five o’clock and had thrown it away at six because it was a speech, and instead she sat down opposite him, laced her fingers together on the table, and said:
“The decree came through this morning.”
“I know.”
“And four documents released. The boathouse, the trust, the foundation deed, and a letter you wrote to your own lawyer in April.” She watched him. “I’ve read all of them.”
Lawrence sat very still.
“Right,” he said.
“The boathouse was November.”
“Yes.”
“Three weeks after I left. While you were still sending flowers to Frankie’s stairwell.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looked at the table for a long moment.
“Because I was very frightened,” he said, “and I did not know how to do anything, and the flowers were me being an idiot in the way I knew how to be an idiot. And in the middle of all that I had one clear thought, which was that whatever happened to me, you should not lose the boathouse, because you spent a whole winter on it and it was the only thing on that property that was yours.” He shrugged slightly.
“It wasn’t noble. It was about four minutes of clarity in a bad month.
I’ve had a lot of time to be honest about the size of it. ”
“And the letter to your lawyer.”
He was quiet.
“That one I want you to say,” Celia said.
“Which part?”
“Say what it does. Out loud. In this room.”
Lawrence looked up at her.
“It stops me,” he said. “It’s a letter that means that if I’m ever the man who tries to use a child against you, my own counsel has to put a piece of paper in front of me with my handwriting on it and make me explain what changed.
” His jaw moved. “I wrote it eight days after I found out. Because I’d sat in a conference room and said all the right things out loud, and then I went home to that gatehouse and I thought: you have said the right thing out loud before. ”
The room was very quiet. Below them, the shutter came down. The two notes. The truck.
“I didn’t trust myself,” Lawrence said. “That’s the whole of it. So I put it somewhere I couldn’t reach.”
* * *
Celia sat back in her chair and put both hands on the arms of it.
She had one thing left to do and she had known since noon that she was going to do it, and she had been carrying it around all afternoon like something hot.
“I want to tell you something,” she said, “and I want to be precise about why, because it isn’t a reward and it isn’t a door opening.”
“All right.”
“You’ve known since the end of March. You found out from Roslyn’s letter and a photograph on a website, which is the worst way it could possibly have happened, and I have been carrying that around for two months and I want you to hear this from me now instead.”
She put her hand flat on the table.
“It’s a girl,” Celia said. “I found out in April. I said I wasn’t going to and then I did, because I was frightened after the file came out and I needed to know one true thing.
She’s due on the twenty-fourth. She turns over at nine o’clock every night like clockwork and I’ve spent four months talking to her about a building. ”
Lawrence Hollister put one hand over his mouth.
He did not move for a long time. She watched him not do six or seven things — not stand up, not come around the table, not reach for her hand, not say thank you, not say I’ll do anything, not offer her one single thing she would then have to refuse.
“A girl,” he said, finally, into his hand.
“Yes.”
He took his hand away. His eyes were wet and he did not do anything about that either.
“What do you need?” he said.
Celia looked at him across a small table in a small room, at half past eight in the evening, three weeks out from the end of everything.
Nine years. Nine years, and a birthday party, and a garden, and a stairwell, and a website, and a loading dock in the sun.
And that was the first time — she checked it, twice, carefully, the way she checked a dimension — that he had ever asked her that question and then stopped talking to wait for the answer.
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
“Okay.”
“That’s not a no. That’s genuinely — Lawrence, I don’t know. I’ve got six days and a building and I can’t see past any of it.”
“Okay,” he said again. “Then that’s what it is.”
And he did not ask a second time, and he did not fill the silence, and at nine o’clock he stood up and thanked her for the tea he had not drunk and went down the outside staircase without touching the rail, and Celia stood at the good window and watched him get into a gray sedan and sit in it for a full four minutes before he drove away.