19. Margot
Margot
The envelope is in my mother's desk.
Not filed. Not shredded. Just there, in the second drawer under the compression socks and the tea and a note in terrible handwriting, with his signature on the last page.
Three weeks. The lawyer called once to ask if she should proceed and I said I'd let her know and she said, "Margot," in a voice she's never used on me, and I said I'd let her know.
He doesn't ask. Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday, he comes, he holds Nora, he goes.
He hasn't looked at me since he walked out after signing the papers.
It's not coldness. It's something else, something careful, like a man walking through a room full of glass he's already broken once.
I hate it. I hate that I hate it.
Week three, I get sick.
Not too badly. Just a fever and a throat like sandpaper and the kind of tired that goes all the way down.
Nora's fifteen weeks and she's decided nights are for talking.
My mother's in Portland at my aunt's, the first trip she's taken since the hospital. I told her to go, that I’d be fine on my own with Nora.
Day one I'm fine, Nora and I play and I give her a long bath.
I read her books and we go to bed at the same time.
Day two I'm not okay. By nine o'clock on day two I've been awake for thirty-one hours and I'm sitting on the bathroom floor with Nora screaming in the bouncer in the hall and my forehead against the cold edge of the tub, and I've stopped being able to tell whether the sound is her or me.
I get the phone out.
“Hey Mar, what’s up?”
"I need help.”
That's all I get out. He's already talking over them.
"I'm leaving now. Don't get up. Is the door unlocked?”
“Yeah, it is.”
"I've got the key. Don't get up."
He arrives in record time. I don’t count the minutes, I just hear the truck and then the door and then his boots in the hall. Then Nora’s screaming changes pitch because someone's picked her up, and I sit on the floor and put my face in my hands. I’m so exhausted I can barely cry.
He doesn't come to the bathroom right away. He gets her settled first. I hear him in the living room, that low, soothing, father voice. I hear her wind down from screaming to complaining to hiccups. Then the bathroom door opens, and I feel his hand on my back through my shirt, and I don't move.
"Okay," he says. “Let’s get you up.”
He does just that, helps me to my feet. He gets me down the hall. He puts me in bed like he's tucking in a child, careful and gentle. He pulls the blanket up and puts a glass of water on the nightstand and says, "Sleep. I’ll take care of Nora.”
I lift my head and say, "She needs?—”
"I've got her."
"The bottles are?—”
"I know where the bottles are. Sleep."
And I do. I sleep.
I wake at two in the morning.
The house is dark except for one lamp in the living room. It's warm. I lie there for a minute in the strange quiet with my throat still raw and I hear the dishwasher running, and under it, the sound of someone talking.
I get up and pad down the hall.
He's in the living room in his socks with Nora on his shoulder, walking.
Slow laps. The soup pot is on the stove, clean and upside down on a towel.
The bouncer's folded. There's a load in the dryer going around, I can hear it, and I know without checking that it's the burp cloths and the onesies because that's what was in the basket.
He's saying something to her. I can't hear it from the hall, it’s just the murmur I heard that drew me here. I come one step closer, in the dark, where the lamp doesn't reach.
"Shhh. Shhh. I know. Mommy's tired. We’re gonna let her sleep. We've got her."
We.
I stand in the hallway with my hand flat against the wall.
This.
This is what I needed in September. Not four thousand dollars. Not a promise on a porch. Not a man on his knees. I needed to come home from Harbor Street with my shoes in my hand and find this. A partner. Somebody who'd say we and mean me in it.
He walks another lap. Nora's gone quiet on his shoulder. He keeps walking anyway, the way he did the first night, because he doesn't trust that she won’t wake up the moment he sets her down.
I go back to bed before he sees me.
In the morning I feel a little better. Not quite healthy. Just better. He's asleep in the armchair with his boots off and his neck at an angle he's going to regret, and Nora's in the bassinet. There's soup in the fridge in a container and my stomach rumbles a little at the thought of it.
I make coffee. He wakes up at the sound and doesn't move for a second, just watches me from the chair.
"Hey,” he says at last.
"Hey,” I reply, my throat making my voice sleepy and gruff.
"How's the throat?”
“A little better."
He nods. He doesn't ask what he can do. He's already done it.
I sit on the couch with my coffee. He stays in the chair. We don't say anything. Nora makes a noise and I get up and he says, "I'll get her," and I say, "I've got it," and we both stop, and I look at him, and something in my face must do something, because he smiles.
It's the first time he's smiled at me since September.
We talk. For a while. It isn't about Becca. It isn't about the envelope. It's about nothing, about Dev's son and the fence and whether the pediatrician's receptionist is actually a robot.
"She said processing to me. Out loud. When I asked about the drops."
"She says it to everyone."
"She said it twice."
"Maybe she's got a script."
"Maybe she's got a charging dock in the back."
He tells me about a dog he saw on Alder that looks exactly like a councilman, and I tell him about the Boston lender who cried on a call, actually cried, over a rate lock, and he says, "You made a man in Boston cry from your mother's kitchen?"
I reply, "I make men cry from everywhere," and I hear it come out of my mouth and so does he, and there's a second where it could go badly.
It doesn't. He laughs. It's a real one, surprised out of him, and I've missed that sound so much I have to look at my coffee.
At some point he says something about the excavator, that he sold it to a guy who has twins, and I laugh, and he looks at me like I've done a trick.
I catch him looking.
"Stop looking at me."
"I'm trying."
"Try harder."
"I've been trying for months." He rubs his face. "I'm getting worse at it."
I don't know what I'm going to do until I've done it. I put the coffee down. I get up. I cross the room and I stand in front of the chair and he looks up at me and I put my hand on his jaw, on the stubble, and I kiss him.
He goes still.
Then he kisses me back, and it's not soft. Two months of uncertainty is in it. His hand comes up and stops in the air, not touching me, hovering, and I feel it there like heat, and then he pulls his mouth away.
"Mar."
"Don't."
"I need to know what this is.”
"Shut up and enjoy it.”
"I'm not going to assume. I'm not going to try and force anything.”
I take a fistful of his shirt. "Anders. Shut up and kiss me.”
He hesitates so I kiss him again, urgency driving me into his embrace even farther. His hand comes down. It finds my hip, the way it used to, the way it did every night for years, and I don't move away from him.
I don't move at all. I want him to touch me, I need him to touch me.
He leaves at noon because Nora's asleep and I'm better and he has a site. He stands on the porch for a second with his keys and doesn't say anything about what happened in the chair, and I don't either, and then he goes.
I'm in the kitchen when I realize my left hand is turning the bracelet on my right wrist, the way it did before Becca and Milo crashed into our lives and tested our loyalty to each other.
I look at my other hand.
It's bare.
I leave it that way.
Not yet.