32. Dulcie
DULCIE
Eight days after Magnus goes home, I ask him to stay for tea after his visit with Kit.
He looks at the clock, then at me.
“If you have time,” I add.
“I have time.”
Kit has spent the afternoon discovering that a soft cloth can be grasped, dropped, and recovered by the nearest adult. Magnus appears willing to continue this experiment indefinitely.
When our son grows tired of it, I take him upstairs. I remain by the crib until his eyes close, then come down to find Magnus putting the kettle on.
“Your mug’s on the left,” I say.
“Is it?”
I realize what I said. There are only two mugs on the counter, but I have given one a place in a sentence without stopping to decide whether I should.
“Yes.”
He picks it up.
We sit at the table. The window is open a little, and I can hear a neighbor talking to somebody on the sidewalk. An ordinary day. I wanted an ordinary day for this, with no audience and no occasion to make the words sound inevitable.
“I want to try being married to you again.”
Magnus sets his mug down before he answers.
“Dulcie.”
“I mean it. I haven’t decided because you had a difficult week, or because Kit needs us under the same roof.”
“I know.”
“Let me finish.”
He nods.
“I could keep living here. We could keep doing the visits. I would have work and my parents and a life that isn’t waiting for you.”
My voice steadies as I say it. The alternative is real. It is around us, in the table and the key and the school bag hanging from the chair.
“But I want you in it,” I say. “I want to tell you things without arranging a time. I want to come home and find you there because we both live there.”
He closes his hand around the handle of the mug but doesn’t lift it.
“I want that too.”
“I know you do.”
A small smile reaches his mouth, then leaves it as he waits for the rest.
“I am keeping my job. My own money. Time with my parents that isn’t treated as an inconvenience. I don’t want every choice about my body or our house to become a conversation where you tell me you’ve already arranged the sensible answer.”
“I don’t want you to have to defend ordinary decisions from me.”
“You’ll sometimes think I’m wrong.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll sometimes think you’re impossible.”
“I’d assumed that would continue.”
I laugh, and the laugh makes my eyes sting.
“Not the same house,” I say.
“The brownstone?”
“I don’t want to move back into the spaces everybody else chose for me. I want us to choose somewhere.”
He looks around my kitchen, as if considering how carefully he needs to answer.
“Near here?”
“Near my parents and school. You can tell me what you need too.”
“I’d like a room with a door I can close when I work at home. And enough space for Giles to visit without having to hold his coffee above his knees.”
“He’d like that.”
Magnus smiles. Then he reaches across the table and stops short of my hand, leaving the last little distance to me.
I close it.
“I can’t give you an honest beginning after the fact,” he says.
“No.”
“I won’t tell you this makes what happened worth it.”
“It didn’t need to happen for us to have a family.”
“I know.”
I look at our hands. I have imagined forgiveness as a feeling I might wake up with one morning, complete enough that I would no longer need to think about the word.
What I have is less tidy. I am still hurt. I believe what he is doing. I love him, and I want the life we are discussing.
“I’m choosing you with what I know,” I say. “All of it.”
He lowers his head for a moment. When he looks up, his eyes are wet.
I don’t hurry to rescue him from that either.
The first house has a kitchen Magnus likes and a back step I dislike so much that I don’t need to see the upstairs again.
He stands looking at the step while I wait beside the stroller.
“It could be altered.”
“Every day until then, I’d be carrying Kit over it.”
He tests the distance with his foot, then looks back at me.
“All right.”
We leave without turning my objection into a challenge for somebody he can hire.
At the next house, I love the light and he points out that the room we were calling an office has no actual door. We stand beneath the wide opening and agree that a curtain would not improve his patience during calls.
By the third visit we have stopped pretending every possibility must work because we made an appointment to see it.
The house we choose is still in West Roxbury, a short drive from my parents and my school. It is larger than the rental and smaller than the brownstone. Magnus dislikes the front sitting room until I show him where his desk could go in the room behind it, with a door which shuts properly.
I dislike the kitchen shelf. He thinks it can stay.
“What would you put there?” I ask.
“Glasses.”
“I couldn’t reach them.”
He looks from me to the shelf. “Then probably not glasses.”
We agree it can hold the serving dish nobody uses often enough to resent needing a step stool. I put my hand on the counter and imagine breakfast happening without my body being the incorrect size for the room.
The owner is offering a long lease. We settle the money and dates with enough care that I understand them, then return to the question I want answered most: whether we both want to live here.
We do.
Then we have the keys, and a move date two weeks ahead.
Magnus waits outside with the empty stroller while I walk through once more. The rooms sound hollow. I open the cupboard beneath the stairs and find a forgotten blue cloth, then close it again.
There will be things to discover that neither of us has decided in advance.
I like that.
I ask for my wedding band that evening.
We are back at the rental. Kit is asleep upstairs, and Magnus has stayed to help finish dinner.
“Will you bring it tomorrow?”
He turns from the counter.
“Your band?”
“I don’t want the ring. You chose the ring for a wedding you’d already planned around somebody else. The band is the marriage, and I’m choosing that.”
He is quiet for a moment.
“I’ll bring it.”
The next day, he places it in my palm.
It’s the same small circle I worked over my swollen knuckle at his mother’s table.
“You kept it.”
“Yes.”
It lies against the crease in my hand. I turn it once with my finger, remembering how much it hurt to take it off and how certain I was that I had to.
“Choose me knowing the truth,” he says. “Only if that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
I put the band on myself.
It fits differently now. Not loosely, just without the effort of that afternoon. I close my hand and open it again.
“The engagement ring can stay wherever you’ve put it, or you can sell it. I don’t care which.”
He nods.
Then I step toward him. He meets me halfway, and we stand in the small kitchen holding each other while the kettle begins to boil behind us.
A few days before the move, I take the green duck book to the new house.
Magnus brings the little shelf I chose from the rental, leaving the other nursery things there until moving day. Kit sleeps in the stroller while we stand in the room that will be his.
“Here?” Magnus asks.
I look at the light from the window.
“A little farther along.”
He moves it. I step back, then shake my head.
“No. You were right the first time.”
He puts the shelf back, and I set the book on it with the duck facing the room.
The boots are still too large.
Magnus puts his arm around me. I lean against him, looking at the first thing we have brought home.