37. Leap of Faith
Chapter thirty-seven
Leap of Faith
Sterling
Just say it badly.
Six years. Four minutes in a hallway. A blue spiral notebook that I have carried up three flights of stairs like it was evidence in a case I was bringing against myself.
Two thousand miles of my sister. A speech I composed three separate times on the Kennedy and threw out somewhere around Fullerton because every version of it was a document.
And she sits on a cardboard box four inches from my knees, in pyjamas with squirrels on them, with her hair doing something structurally unsound on one side, and tells me she doesn’t need it to be good.
“I love you,” I say.
It comes out flat and slightly too loud, like a man reading a number off a gauge.
“I’ve loved you since a Tuesday in September six years ago when you put a double-shot latte down the front of my boots and then tried to fix it with a napkin for ten minutes, and I stood in that coffee shop and thought, oh no.
Not, oh good. Oh no. Because I understood immediately that this was going to be the organising fact of my life and there was nothing I could do about it, and I have spent six years building a very well-run life directly next to it. ”
She has both hands over her mouth.
“I’m not finished. You said badly, so I’m doing badly.
” My voice is not working properly and I keep going anyway.
“I have been useful to you for six years. I moved your furniture and I fixed your sink and I came out at two in the morning about a spider, and I told myself that was love, and it was, but it was also a way of never having to ask you for anything. Because as long as I’m the one who shows up, nobody ever has to decide whether to keep me. ”
“Sterling,”
“And then your building caught fire and I got three weeks of the actual thing, and it was so much better than the six years that it frightened the life out of me. And when I finally said it, you didn’t answer, and instead of standing there for four more seconds like a grown man I went and did a twenty-four and then picked up another sixteen, and then I stood in my own kitchen for nine days telling myself a story about a woman who left me.
” I put the notebook down on the floor. “You didn’t leave.
I went to work. I want that on the record. ”
She is crying now, which I had rather hoped to avoid.
“That’s it,” I say. “That’s the whole thing. It was extremely badly done and I have nothing else prepared.”
Mandy takes her hands away from her face.
“Rule Seven,” she says.
“What?”
“Rule Seven. Don’t get weird.” Her voice cracks straight through the middle of it. “We’re in catastrophic breach of Rule Seven.”
And that is how I come to be sitting on a cardboard box in a rented one-bedroom in Lincoln Park at half past eight in the morning, laughing so hard I have to put a hand on the wall, with tears coming down my face, while the woman I have loved since I was twenty-two laughs at me from four inches away.
“Give me the notebook,” she says.
I hand it over. She flips it open on her knees and goes through it, and I watch her face do the same thing mine did on my kitchen floor last night.
“Bathroom schedule is sacred,” she reads.
“That was yours.”
“It was a good rule.”
“It was a great rule. We kept it for eleven days.”
“Groceries split, no ledger, no martyrdom.” She looks up. “You broke that one immediately.”
“I did not.”
“Sterling, you bought me a nine-dollar tea because I mentioned hibiscus once.”
“That isn’t groceries, that’s reconnaissance.”
She snorts, and turns the page, and then goes quiet. And I know exactly which page she has landed on, because I sat with it for a long time last night.
“You found it,” she says.
“I found it.”
Rule Twelve. He gets to have a bad day.
“When did you write that?” I ask.
“The night you came back from the call with the kid.” She doesn’t look up.
“You were asleep and I couldn’t be, and I went out to the kitchen and I found the notebook on the counter, and I sat there with your red pen and I wrote it in as small as I could so you wouldn’t see it, because I didn’t have the courage to say it to your face.
” She traces the line with her finger. “I’ve never told anybody that. ”
I take the notebook out of her hands, and I set it on the floor, and I get her off that box and into my arms in a movement I do not remember planning.
She comes up onto her toes and gets both hands in my hair and I kiss her, and it is not like the wall, and it is not like the shower, and it is not for anybody’s benefit, and there is no audience and no script and no arrangement and no expiry date bolted to the end of it.
It is just a Thursday morning in a half-unpacked apartment.
“Wait,” she says against my mouth. “Wait, wait.”
“What.”
“You said Tuesday in September.”
“What?”
“The latte.” She pulls back an inch, her glasses fogged and crooked. “You said a Tuesday in September six years ago. You know the day?”
“I know the day.”
“You know the day of the week?”
“Mandy,” I say, “I know what you were wearing.”
She makes a small wounded noise and pulls me back down, and for a considerable while after that neither of us says anything at all.
Some time later we end up on the floor of her living room with our backs against the sofa, because there is still no furniture and because standing up had stopped being realistic.
She’s got my jacket over her legs. Bowie has installed himself on my chest with the entitlement of a small landlord and I have decided not to fight it.
“I have to tell you something,” she says. “It’s stupid.”
“Go on.”
“I turned down another job on Michigan Avenue on Tuesday night.” She’s watching the ceiling. “Derek. A real one, a good one, at a firm on twelve. Senior. Better money than New York.”
I go very still under the cat.
“He offered you a job.”
“He offered me a job, and he was honest about why, which is the closest thing to growth that man has ever demonstrated.” She turns her head.
“I said no. Not because of you. I want that on the record too. I said no because it was the same offer he’s been making me for three years with a different wrapper on it, which is him deciding what I should want and arranging it before I’ve been asked. ”
“Mandy.”
“And then he said, you never used to interrupt me.” She laughs, a small tired sound. “Which is the only apology I’m ever getting, and I’ve decided to accept it.”
I lie there on the floor of her apartment with a cat on my sternum and think about standing in a doorway on Michigan Avenue sixty feet away, counting people out of a stairwell, watching a man in a good coat talk to her and not hearing one word of it.
“I saw him cross the street,” I say.
“I know.”
“I couldn’t go.”
“I know that too.” Her hand finds mine on the floor. “Sterling. I watched you not come. Do you understand that I watched you decide?”
“That was the worst sixty feet of my life.”
“That was the moment,” she says.
I turn my head to look at her.
“That was the moment I knew,” she says. “Not the dance. Not the dress. I was standing on the other side of Michigan in a blanket that smelled like a truck, and I watched you stay in that doorway with your hand out for the next person coming down, and I thought: he isn’t going to come and get me.
He’s going to trust me to handle it.” Her fingers tighten.
“Nobody has ever trusted me to handle anything in my life. Everybody’s always arrived. ”
And there it is. Six years of being the man who arrives, and the thing that finally landed was the one time I didn’t.
“I nearly came,” I admit.
“I know you did.”
“There was a probie on the door and a hundred people above the fourth and I was the ranking officer standing in that doorway, and I stood there and did the arithmetic on whether I could live with myself, and it was very close.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Good,” she says, and she says it fiercely. “Don’t. Ever. I don’t want the man who leaves the door.”
The radiator comes on somewhere with a knock and a hiss.
Bowie relocates to somewhere less structurally sound.
Outside, a garbage truck is reversing down her street, and it is Thursday, and I am going to have to be at the station at eight tomorrow morning and I do not care about a single thing in the world.
“I’m going to need a new rule,” I say.
“For the notebook?”
“For the notebook.”
She reaches over and gets it and finds the red pen, which she has apparently also kept, in a drawer, in a different apartment, for reasons neither of us is going to examine this morning.
“Go on then,” she says.
“Rule Thirteen.” I take the pen off her. “No expiry date.”
I write it in badly, because my hands are still not entirely steady, and she looks at it for a long moment with her chin on my shoulder.
“That’s not a rule,” she says. “That’s a lease.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
“Sign it, then.”
So I do.