Chapter 16 – Emily
Emily
The gifts begin the way weather begins—first a single thing, easy to mistake for nothing, and then a front moving in.
The concierge downstairs is a young man named Devon who has learned, over three weeks, that I like to take the stairs and that I don't want help with anything, and who has started, despite this, to keep a little apologetic smile ready for me because the packages have made his desk their home.
The first one is flowers. Peonies, the fat blowsy ones that were in my bouquet, that I mentioned to Ben exactly once, nine years ago, in a florist's window in the rain.
I stand in the lobby holding them and I feel the old animal thing lift under my sternum before I can stop it—he remembered, he remembers, there you are—and then I carry them up eleven floors and set them on the counter and by morning I understand that I don't want them, that wanting them is a reflex I'm trying to unlearn, like reaching across a cold bed.
I put them in the room I've started calling the package room, which is really just the second bedroom, empty, the one I haven't decided what to do with yet. I set them on the floor. I don't throw them out. I don't quite give myself credit either.
Then it becomes a pattern.
A first edition of the Casals memoirs, the good one, the one with the plates.
A recording I've hunted for years, an out-of-print pressing of the Elgar—not the manuscript facsimile, Connor already gave me that, but the record, the actual vinyl, the exact one my father wore soft, tracked down through God knows how many dealers in God knows how many countries, the way you'd track down a cello over a year of quiet emails in a language you don't speak.
Ben knows how to do this. That's the thing that undoes me a little, standing in the package room in my socks.
He knows exactly how to do this. He always did.
He just spent a season doing it for someone else, and now that the account has gone down by half and the house has gone loud, he has turned the whole terrible engine of his attention back toward me, and I am supposed to feel found.
I feel handled. There's a difference. I've only just learned there's a difference.
The latest comes with a text.
I'm on my third mile—I've found a loop here too, along the river where the joggers nod at each other in the grey early light and no one knows my name or my house or my husband—and the phone buzzes against the small of my back, and I stop under the bridge with my breath clouding and I read it standing there.
She moved out.
That's all. Three words. And I stand there and I wait for them to do something to me, wait for the lift, the there you are, and it doesn't come, and I understand as I'm standing there that I've been braced for this text for weeks, that some part of me thought this was the whole equation—Tara gone equals Emily home—and that Ben thinks so too, that he's sent me three words the way you'd hand over the last piece of a contract, there, it's done, now sign.
But it isn't the whole equation. I do the arithmetic again, right there under the bridge with the river going by grey and patient, and it doesn't balance.
Tara leaving is subtraction. It takes away the snake he carried in.
It doesn't add back the eight years of a man who watched her do it and called me petty for noticing.
It doesn't put the sound back into a cello that light is the enemy of.
It doesn't make him the kind of man who'd defend my name across a dinner table instead of hers.
She moved out. And I find I don't want to go home.
That's the thing I turn over the whole rest of the run, the whole way back up the river in the thickening light.
Not I want to punish him. Not even I'm afraid.
Just—I don't want to. I have peace here.
I have a floor that doesn't echo and a bed that isn't cold on one side because there is no side, it's all mine, and I wake up and there is no weather to read, no barometric dread, no listening for a laugh that isn't for me.
I have coffee I make wrong and love anyway. I have a river.
I miss him. God, I do—that's the part no one warns you about, that you can leave a thing and grieve it in the same breath, that the missing lives right alongside the peace and doesn't cancel it out.
I miss the man in the study doorway with the phone against his ear.
I miss being looked at. I catch myself at strange hours reaching for the shape of him in the dark, the way you'd probe a tooth that's been pulled.
I love him. I think I'll love him in some diminishing way for a long time, the way you love a house you grew up in that's been sold to strangers.
But I was lonelier in that enormous glass-and-stone house, sitting at the far end of my own table where the least was asked of me, than I have been for one single hour in this small bare loft where nobody asks anything of me at all.
That's the whole of it. That's the thing it took me eight years and a river to learn. It is less lonely to be alone than to be beside someone who has decided you're furniture.
—
The last delivery is waiting when I come up, and it takes Devon and another man to bring it, and I know what it is before they've got it through the door because of the shape of the case.
They set it in the package room because that's where I point, wordless, and they go, and I stand in the doorway of the room full of the front that's moved in—the peonies gone brown now at the edges the way the orchids used to go, the Casals, the record, and now this—and I look at it.
A cello. A new one. New in the sense of new-to-me; it's old, I can tell even from here, from the color of the varnish going amber under the window light he'd tell me was its enemy.
There's a note propped against the case in his slanting hand, the same hand that signed the birthday cards I apparently used to sign for him, and I cross the room and pick it up and read it, standing over all of it.
Please come home.
That's all. No reasoning. No case built for the defense, which is almost worse, because it means Connor got through to him, means somewhere in that loud house Ben sat down and understood that the reasonable voice was the problem and stripped it away and had nothing underneath it but the true thing, small and plain.
Please come home. Two words with a whole man behind them.
I read it twice. Then I fold it, and I sigh, and I carry it to the kitchen and I drop it in the bin, gently, the way I've learned to set down the things that hurt, so I can feel the whole weight of it going.
I leave the rest. The flowers, the books, the record. I don't want any of it. Wanting it is the reflex I'm unlearning, the reaching across the cold bed, and I am done reaching.
But I get as far as the bedroom, as far as pulling my running shirt over my head, before the cello starts working on me from the other room the way a live thing would.
Because it isn't the flowers. It isn't a record.
It's an instrument, and I left mine—my real one, the Cremona—shut in the dark and precious and guarded and it got poured over with cobalt and gold anyway, and I know now, I learned it the hard way, that the things you keep untouched in this world get ruined by other hands regardless.
And here is another one, sitting alone on a bare floor beside dying flowers, in a room I don't even have a name for, waiting.
I stand in the doorway a long time.
Then I tell myself I'll give it away. That's the deal I strike, standing there in the cold with my arms crossed over my sports bra.
A conservatory, maybe. A scholarship kid with bleeding fingertips and a stubbornness no one gave her.
Someone who'll play it in the light and not be afraid of it.
Because it isn't mine. That's the thing I say out loud, to the empty room, to the amber curve of it under the window.
"It's not my cello," I tell it.
And I close the door on it, quiet, the way I close everything, and I go take my shower, and I do not go back in and open the case to hear what it sounds like, because if I hear what it sounds like I will not be able to give it away, and I have only just, after eight years, learned how to keep the things that are mine.
It's not my cello.
I say it again in the shower, under the water, where the sound stops where it lands and doesn't travel and doesn't get thrown wide and doesn't get folded into anything.
It's not my cello.
I almost believe it.