21. The Pillow Barrier
Chapter twenty-one
The Pillow Barrier
Sterling
My bedroom is not small.
It is a converted warehouse space with ten-foot windows and exposed Douglas fir beams and enough floor to run a drill in, and at this moment it has roughly the breathable atmosphere of a submarine with a bad seal.
Mandy’s parents are in the guest room. Twenty feet of hallway and one sheet of drywall that the contractor put in as a formality.
Robert has been asleep for eleven minutes.
I know because I have been counting. The man snores like a diesel engine turning over in the cold, a long rattling pull, then a pause just lengthy enough that you start doing math about his airway, then another pull.
Carol has not made a sound, which is worse. Carol is the one who putters at six.
Mandy is on the far side of the bed holding her pillow against her chest like a riot shield.
She is in a navy silk sleep set that I have decided to have no opinion about.
Her glasses are still on. Her shoulders are somewhere in the vicinity of her ears.
She has been standing in that exact spot for ninety seconds without moving, and I have run enough scenes to know what I am looking at, which is a person about four minutes from a full stress response over a sleeping arrangement in a bed she has already slept in.
Twenty hours ago I had this woman in my shower.
I am aware of that. I am aware of it in the way you are aware of a live wire in standing water.
I have made a career out of walking into rooms where everyone is panicking and being the one who isn’t. I have a voice for it, low and slow and faintly bored, and I have watched it pull twenty points off a stranger’s heart rate in under a minute.
It has never once worked on Mandy Peterson.
So I go with the other thing.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m going to need you to stop holding that pillow like you’re about to be deposed.”
“I’m not holding it like anything.”
“You’re holding it like it’s the only thing between you and a subpoena.”
“My parents,” she says, in a whisper that has genuine structural tension in it, “are twenty feet away.”
“I’m aware.”
“My mother spent dinner deciding between June and September.”
“Also aware. I was there. I ate an entire steak during it.”
“Sterling.”
“I’m just saying that I was present and load-bearing for that conversation and I would like some credit.”
She makes a sound that is not quite a laugh but is at least in the same building as one, and her shoulders come down about a quarter inch. I will take a quarter inch.
I go to the bench at the foot of the bed and start collecting pillows.
“What are you doing.”
“Infrastructure.”
I line them up down the center of the mattress.
There are four, plus the two decorative ones Carol arrived with this afternoon and installed without discussion, which I now understand were a gift and a warning.
I build the thing carefully, seam to seam, and I narrate the process in the flat gravel of a man reading a incident report to a room full of people who would rather be somewhere else.
“Here we have the Great Wall of Hayes. Six units. Rated to withstand nocturnal drift, wandering limbs, and accidental elbow-to-rib contact. Load-tested. Fully compliant. There’s a plaque coming.”
“You are insane.”
“I’m a professional.” I pat the last one into place. “Do you want to see the permits?”
She is laughing now, properly, into the pillow she is still holding, trying to keep it under the volume of her father’s snoring, which is not hard. Something in her spine finally unlocks and she sits down on the edge of the mattress, and I feel about eleven percent better about the whole night.
Then I look at what I have built, and I decide to say it, because one of us has to and it is not going to be her.
“You understand this is a wall of pillows between two people who were in a shower together yesterday.”
She stops laughing. She looks at the wall. She looks at me.
“I was choosing not to think about that,” she says.
“How was that going.”
“Extremely well. Flawlessly. I hadn’t thought about it once.”
“Not once.”
“Maybe twice. In an academic way.”
“Academic.”
“Scholarly,” she says. “Detached. The way you’d think about a documentary.”
“Mandy, you have been standing in one spot holding a pillow for a minute and a half.”
“That’s my process.”
I get in on my side. The mattress telegraphs every shift, which is a design flaw I have never once noticed until tonight and now consider the single greatest failure of American manufacturing.
She gets in on hers. We lie there on our backs in the dark with six pillows between us like two people in adjacent hospital beds.
“This is objectively ridiculous,” she says to the ceiling.
“It’s a little ridiculous.”
“We slept in this bed last night. Actually slept. Your arm was numb.”
“My arm was fine.”
“You couldn’t feel your hand, Sterling. You told me it was a known hazard of the position.”
“That was a joke I made at four in the morning under duress and it should not be entered into the record.”
She laughs again and rolls onto her side toward the wall of pillows, and I turn my head and can just make out the shape of her in the streetlight coming off the lake, the glasses she still hasn’t taken off, the line of her shoulder under the silk.
“Okay, but why did you build it,” she says.
I think about lying. It would be easy. I have gotten alarmingly good at it over the last two weeks.
“Because you were vibrating,” I say. “And I’ve got about four moves for that and three of them require a medical bag.”
She goes quiet.
“You were doing the thing you do,” I add. “Where you stop breathing all the way down. You’ve been doing it since your mother said the word venue.”
“I hate that you can see that.”
“I’ve had six years of practice.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be comforting, it was supposed to be impressive.”
Something thumps onto the foot of the bed with the weight of a bowling ball and considerably less dignity.
Bowie, or Steve, depending on which of us is winning the naming war, which has never once been me, walks up the center of the mattress with the total unconcern of an animal who has never respected a border in his life.
He steps directly onto the Great Wall of Hayes.
He kneads it. He circles twice, claws snagging in the pillowcases, and then collapses full-length across the middle of it, flattening the entire northern section, and begins to purr like a small idling engine.
“The wall has fallen,” Mandy whispers.
“Six units,” I say. “Rated. Load-tested.”
“Compromised from within.”
“He’s been on their payroll since Tuesday. I should have seen it. He’s been sitting in your mother’s lap all night like he’s angling for a job.”
“He does not have loyalty.”
“He has a calico’s understanding of loyalty, which is that it is a thing other people do.”
She reaches over and scratches under his chin and he tips his head back into her hand, and the pillows are so thoroughly ruined now that there is nothing between us but a cat and about fourteen inches.
“Sterling.”
“Yeah, Sparkles.”
“The Roommate Rules.” Her voice has changed. It has dropped into the register she uses when it’s just us, no parents, no exes, no performance, and it does more damage than any of the last two hours. “Number seven. The one about not being weird.”
“What about it.”
“I think we might be failing it.”
“We are catastrophically failing it,” I say. “We failed it so hard that I would like it stricken from the document entirely. Rule seven is dead. We killed it. There’s a small service on Thursday.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
She is quiet for a second, and then: “Cereal.”
It is the word we use to reset, the one from the stupid list we wrote on the couch in week one, and hearing it now, in the dark, twenty feet from her sleeping father, hits me somewhere I am not braced for.
“Okay,” I say.
“No, I mean it, I’m calling it. Cereal. I need thirty seconds where nothing is a bit.”
“You’ve got it.”
She takes a breath. I hear it go all the way down this time, which is the first one that has.
“We haven’t talked about last night,” she says.
“No.”
“Not once. All day. We moved my entire life into your closet and we talked about hangers.”
“You had opinions about the hangers.”
“Sterling.”
“Sorry.”
“Are we going to?” she says. “Talk about it?”
And there it is, sitting in the fourteen inches of mattress between us with the cat asleep on top of it.
Here is the truth I am not going to say tonight, in this room, with her father snoring through the drywall: I have been in love with this woman since she put a double-shot latte down the front of my boots in a coffee shop six years ago, and I have spent every one of those years building a very good life immediately adjacent to that fact.
I know how to be her anchor. I know how to fix her sink and move her boxes and show up at two in the morning.
I have made an entire personality out of standing exactly close enough to be useful and exactly far enough to be safe.
And yesterday she put her hands under the water and washed a dead thirteen-year-old off my skin, and I have not been able to find the far edge of anything since.
“Yes,” I say. “But not with your dad forty feet away doing an impression of a chainsaw.”
“That’s fair.”
“He’s going to stop breathing at some point and I’m going to have to go in there, and I’d rather not have that conversation half-finished.”
“That is a horrifying thing to say.”
“I’m a paramedic. It’s a horrifying job.”
She laughs, and then it goes crooked halfway through, and I hear her breath catch, and I understand that we have arrived at the actual thing.
“He asked me about my intentions,” I say. “Your dad. While you were in the shower.”
“He did not.”
“He used the word intentions, Mandy. Out loud. Like a man in a period drama. And then he mentioned your grandmother’s ring, and I said something with the word ’serious’ in it, and I have no memory of the rest because I left my body.”
“Oh my God.”
“I want you to understand that I was fully prepared for questions about the pension. I had answers ready about the pension.”
She is laughing into the pillow again, but there is something underneath it now that has water in it, and I lie there and let her get to the end of it.
“They’re going to be so disappointed,” she says finally, very quietly. “When this ends. They’re going to be so disappointed in me and it’s going to be about me, it’s always about me, and you’re going to have to stand there while it happens.”
I move my hand.
I don’t make a thing of it. I reach across the ruin of the wall, past the cat, and find her hand where it’s resting on the sheet, and I don’t grab it.
I just put mine against it and leave the decision with her, the way I have left every decision with her for six years, which I am beginning to understand was never actually generosity.
Her fingers turn over and slide between mine.
“You keep giving me the out,” she says.
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather have you than be right,” I say. “I told you that on the kitchen floor and it wasn’t a line.”
Her hand tightens. I feel her thumb move once across my knuckle, and then she goes still, and the loft is very quiet apart from the diesel engine down the hall and the cat.
“Don’t let go,” she says.
“Wasn’t going to.”
Her breathing evens out four or five minutes later, the way it always does, the way it has done on my couch through half the movies we have ever started. I know the exact second she goes.
I lie there for a long time after.
Safe. That’s the word she used the night of the fire, standing on the curb in a borrowed jacket with her whole apartment going up behind her.
You always felt safe. It’s a beautiful word and it sits on my chest like a turnout coat full of water, because safe is what you say about a seatbelt.
Safe is a sturdy roof and a good smoke detector and a man who shows up when the alarm goes off and leaves when it’s over.
I have spent six years being the place she lands when things go wrong. I would like, at some point before I die, to be the reason she stays.
Somewhere in her inbox there is a job in New York with a deadline on it. Somewhere in the guest room there is a woman who has already called three caterers. In six hours I am on a twenty-four starting at 0800 and this whole loft will resume being a stage set.
I look at our hands on the gray sheet, dark and tangled and absolutely not part of any rehearsal.
I am trained to know when a structure is failing. I can read a ceiling. I can tell you, standing in a hallway with zero visibility, how much time a room has left.
I have no read on this one at all, and I find that I do not care, and that is the single most alarming piece of information I have gathered all day.
I get up at five-forty to start the coffee, because Carol putters at six and because Mandy will sleep another two hours if the loft smells like a morning she doesn’t have to perform in.
The cat follows me out. He does not respect borders, but he does respect a person walking toward a kitchen.