Chapter 5 – Emily
Emily
There's a particular mercy in the third mile.
By then the noise in my head has burned itself down to something I can live inside—the merger, the dinner, the sharp little click of Ben's fork against the china when he finally decided to defend someone and it was her, it was always her.
All of it renders down to breath and footfall by the third mile, and I run the loop harder than I have in weeks, past the Hendersons' topiary, around the lake where the swans are doing their morning theater, down the slope where I let myself pretend, and for twenty-eight minutes I am nobody's guest and nobody's furniture and nobody's disappointment.
I am just a woman with a working body moving through cool air.
And then I round the last curve, and the house comes into view, and there is a truck in my driveway.
Not a delivery van. A truck—one of the long white box trucks, ramp already down, back gaping open, and two men in matching polos are wheeling something wrapped in moving blankets up my front walk while a third stands on the steps with a clipboard, and there, framed in my own open front door in white linen with a coffee in her hand, directing all of it with the loose easy authority of a woman who has never once in her life doubted her right to direct anything, is Tara.
I slow to a walk without deciding to.
"Careful with that, it's the good one, the legs are teak—no, the wide door, the double, use the double—" She's gesturing with the coffee, sloshing it a little, laughing at something one of the men says, and I stand at the mouth of my own driveway with sweat cooling on the back of my neck and I watch two strangers carry an enormous flat wrapped rectangle—a canvas, I realize, an unstretched canvas the size of a dining table—into the house where I have lived for eight years.
"Tara."
She turns, and her face does the thing it does, the small recalibration, the warmth sliding up over whatever was underneath it.
"Oh—Emily, good, you're back. Doesn't this feel like Christmas?
I've been up since seven, they said between eight and noon and of course they came at the very start of the window, they never do that, I think somebody up there likes me.
" She sips her coffee. "You look flushed. Was it a good run?"
I don't answer that. I'm looking past her, into the foyer, where a young man is easing a drafting desk—pale wood, wide, the kind with the tilting top and the little brass ruler track along the edge—through the doorway and toward the stairs.
Behind him another one carries an easel folded down like a great wooden insect, and behind that, boxes.
Boxes and boxes stamped with the name of an art supplier I recognize, the expensive one, the one whose catalog I used to leaf through the way other women leaf through jewelers'.
"What is all this," I say.
"Isn't it wonderful?" She steps back to let the desk pass, flattening herself against the doorframe with a little laugh, one hand on the mover's arm as he goes by—mind the corner, sweetheart—and then she turns back to me, glowing.
"I'm setting up the studio. Ben's letting me have the east room.
The one right next to your little music room.
" She says it like she's handing me a gift.
"Isn't that perfect? We'll be right next to each other.
I'll paint, you'll play. Like a couple of girls at a finishing school.
" She laughs again. "God, he's a sweetheart.
Do you know he just—I mentioned, only mentioned, that I hadn't touched a brush since everything fell apart, that it used to be the thing that kept me sane, and he just did this.
He didn't even tell me the full extent of it, he said leave it to me, and then this morning the trucks. Can you imagine."
I can, actually. That's the thing.
I can imagine it very precisely—Ben on the phone in his study with that warm loose voice, the one that used to be for me, reading off card numbers, saying the best you've got, whatever she needs, don't spare it, the way he never spares anything for her and has learned to spare everything for me. I can imagine it down to the tone.
"The east room," I say.
"Mm."
"That's not a guest thing." I hear my own voice going careful, going full-to-the-brim careful, the way it does. "A canvas that size. A drafting desk. That's not something you bring for a visit."
"Oh, it's just to have somewhere to work." She waves the coffee. "You can't do anything real on a little travel set. Not properly."
One of the movers pauses at the base of the stairs. "Ma'am? Second floor, east side, you said?"
"East side, the room at the end, the door's open," Tara tells him, and he goes, and I watch my drafting desk—no, her drafting desk, a thing I have never once owned and could not have told you I wanted until this exact moment when I understand it is being carried past me to a room I was not consulted about—disappear up my staircase.
"How long are you going to be staying, Tara?"
It comes out quieter than I mean it to, and steadier than I feel. She hears the shape of it, though. I watch her hear it. Something ticks behind the blue of her eyes, quick, and is gone.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean this." I gesture at the truck, the ramp, the boxes, the men. "This looks like moving in. This isn't a woman recovering for a couple of weeks. This is easels. This is furniture. Ben didn't say anything to me about any of this."
And there—there it is, the little snag, the tiny hitch in her before she smooths it back down. She laughs, but it's the wrong laugh, a half-beat late and pitched slightly too high, the laugh of a woman who has been caught somewhere she hadn't planned to be caught.
"No?" she says. "He didn't mention it?"
"No."
"Huh." She looks down into her coffee like the answer might be floating in it.
"Well. You should—you should ask him about that, I suppose.
" And then, quickly, before I can, one hand coming up: "Though he's slammed today, you know how he gets, that call at nine and then the thing with the Osaka people all afternoon, he told me himself not to bother him with anything that isn't on fire.
So maybe—maybe not today. You know. Pick your moment.
" She smiles, and it's back to being her smile, warm and wide and closed like a door. "You know him better than I do."
You know him better than I do.
I don't think either of us believes that. I think that's rather the whole point of the sentence—to set it down between us like a coin she knows is counterfeit and watch me decide whether to pick it up.
"Watch the banister," she calls up the stairs, turning away from me, done with me, "there's a little curve at the top, don't let the corner catch it?—"
I stand in my own driveway a moment longer.
The third-mile mercy is entirely gone now; the noise is back and it's louder than it was, and underneath it, worse than the noise, there's a cold flat clarity I don't want.
Because I keep arriving at the same place no matter which road I take.
Ben bought this. Not Tara—she couldn't, she's between things, she's always between things, that's half of what makes her scrappy in his eyes.
Ben bought the canvas and the desk and the easel and the expensive-catalog boxes, and Ben told her leave it to me, and Ben arranged for it to be carried into the room beside the one place in this enormous echoing house that is supposed to be mine, and Ben did not think, in all of that, in any single minute of all of that, to say one word to me.
Right next to your little music room. As though he's given us matching lockers. As though we're two girls at a finishing school.
I go in through the side door, the way I did that first morning, quiet out of habit though there's no reason to be quiet now, the house is full of strangers and noise and the smell of cardboard, and I stand in the cool of the mudroom and I peel my phone out of the little pocket at the small of my back with fingers that aren't quite steady.
What's going on at the house? There's a moving truck. Tara says you gave her the east room for a studio. You didn't mention any of this to me.
I read it back. I delete You didn't mention any of this to me, because it sounds like the woman he thinks I am, the one who wants to be consulted while the world falls apart around braver people.
Then I type it again, because it's true, and because if I keep deleting the true parts of myself there won't be anything left to send.
I send it.
Upstairs something heavy sets down with a boom that travels through the floor and up into the soles of my feet, and Tara laughs, and one of the movers laughs with her, and the house does its trick, the one it's so good at, taking her sound and throwing it wide and swallowing mine before it leaves my chest.
I watch the little screen. The message sits there. Delivered.
I wait, standing in the mudroom in my running clothes with the sweat gone cold and clammy against my spine, and I keep the phone in my hand while the trucks unload the rest of her into my home one wrapped rectangle at a time, and I tell myself he's in the nine o'clock, that's all, he'll see it at the break, he'll call, he'll say God, Em, I meant to tell you, it just came together fast, and it will be a small thing, a scheduling thing, a nothing.
The three dots don't come.
They don't come at ten, when I've showered and dressed and can hear the easel being assembled through the wall of the music room where I've gone to sit with my cello across my knees and not play it. They don't come at noon, when the truck finally pulls out of the drive. They don't come at all.
They never do.