13. “Connecticut”
“CONNECTICUT”
The week between Sunday’s library conversation and Friday’s train ride moved like something underwater. Every day was the same—work at the imprint, texts from Atlas every two hours at midnight, the careful performance of not thinking about what was coming.
On Wednesday, he sent: *three more days.* On Thursday: *are you packed.* On Friday morning: *I can’t wait to show you.*
I took the Friday afternoon train to New Canaan.
It left Penn Station at 3:47 p.m. The platform was full of people going home for the weekend.
Couples holding hands. Families with children.
I found a seat by the window and I watched the city slide away—the buildings getting smaller, the sky getting bigger, the whole thing feeling like I was moving backward in time.
Backward to something that had been waiting for me.
I had a manuscript on my lap.
A debut novel by a woman named Sumi Tan that the imprint had paid too much for and that we now needed to make worth the money.
I had been editing it for three weeks. The book was about a woman who moved to a small town in Maine and rebuilt her life around the local diner.
It was good. It was almost very good. It needed eighteen pages cut from chapter four and a single sentence added to the last paragraph of the book.
I was supposed to be working on it on the train.
I read the first sentence of chapter four eleven times.
Then I gave up.
I closed the manuscript and I put my forehead against the cold window glass and I watched the Bronx pass by and the small green parks and the long industrial corridor along the river and the fall trees holding the last week of their gold.
The conductor came through. He punched my ticket. He said *enjoy the trip, miss* in the small kind voice the Metro-North conductors used on Friday afternoons when they could see you needed it.
I had been on this train a thousand times.
I had never been on it going to a man I was in love with.
Backward to something that had been waiting for me.
Atlas was in the arrivals hall at New Canaan station, wearing jeans and a sweater that was not the gray one.
This one was darker. More forgiving. The kind of sweater that suggested he was about to take me somewhere casual and that the next forty-eight hours were going to be different from anything we’d experienced so far.
Underneath the sweater was a flannel shirt.
I had never, in twenty-six years of knowing Atlas Cain, seen him in a flannel shirt.
He looked, in flannel and jeans and the soft brown leather boots he had on under them, like a man I had not known I had also been waiting to meet.
He didn’t kiss me hello. He just took my bag and he looked at me like I was the realest thing in the room.
“Hi,” I said.
He smiled.
“Hi yourself. Ready.”
“For what.”
“You’ll see.”
We drove north out of the city.
The trees were beginning their October change.
Reds and golds and the particular orange that only happened in Connecticut in fall.
He didn’t talk much during the drive. He just held my hand on the seat between us and drove like a man who knew exactly where he was going.
His thumb traced circles on my palm. Small circles.
Patient. Like he was learning the landscape of my skin.
The roads got quieter. The houses got farther apart. The world got smaller.
We turned off the main highway onto a back road I had never been on.
The road climbed. The road wound. The road passed a stone wall that looked like it had been there since the Revolution.
The road passed a small church with white clapboard siding and a graveyard behind it that was older than my family.
The road passed a single mailbox at a long unmarked drive that he did not turn into.
The road passed a deer at the very edge of the woods that did not move when we passed it.
I watched all of it.
I had grown up in Connecticut.
I had not, until that drive, understood that there were parts of Connecticut that still looked the way Connecticut had looked in 1818.
At 6:23 p.m., we pulled into a driveway that led away from the main road.
The house appeared as we crested a small hill.
It was a barn.
A massive structure. All original wood and high ceilings and windows that looked out onto several acres of woods.
A porch on the back facing the trees. Stone chimney.
The whole thing restored to something that was both authentic and entirely beautiful.
It looked like a secret. Like a place where time moved differently.
“Welcome to my weekend,” Atlas said.
I got out of the car and I stood there and I understood why he’d been coming to this place alone for the last decade.
It was the kind of place that made you understand what quiet meant. What solitude meant. What it felt like to be completely alone with your thoughts and the sound of leaves.
The driveway gravel crunched under my boots.
The air smelled like apples and wood smoke and the faint sharpness that comes off a stand of pine when the temperature drops.
A wind chime made a single small note from the porch and went silent.
“Hawk rebuilt it for me,” he said. “When my marriage to Helena was ending. I needed somewhere to go that wasn’t the apartment.
Somewhere that wasn’t memories of being married to someone who deserved better than I could give her.
So I asked Hawk. He came out here and he spent about six months turning this barn into something that felt like home. ”
We went inside.
The kitchen was open. The living area was vast. There was a wood stove and a leather couch and a record player in the corner with stacks of vinyl.
The whole space smelled like wood and old books and the particular scent of a place that had been waiting for someone.
The ceilings were high—maybe twenty feet.
The light was golden as it came through the western windows.
“This is where I cook,” he said. “On Saturday mornings. It’s the only time I feel like a real person here. Like I’m not just hiding. Like I’m actually living.”
He showed me the back porch.
The porch ran the full width of the house.
It looked out over a small clearing that opened, ten yards out, into a long slope of mixed hardwoods.
There was an Adirondack chair. There was a small iron table.
There was a stack of split firewood under a tarp at the south end.
There was a kettle on a small outdoor wood-burning stove that he had apparently built himself.
“You built that.”
“I built that. With Hawk. I wasn’t allowed to do anything structural. I was allowed to do the cosmetic. He let me build the stove.”
Upstairs, a master bedroom and a second bedroom and a bathroom with a soaking tub.
He showed me the second bedroom—mostly bookshelves, as I’d somehow known it would be.
Atlas gestured to the collection like it was a confession.
All the same books, repeated in different editions.
Multiple copies of *Gilead*. Multiple copies of books on law, architecture, philosophy.
Multiple copies of things he’d loved enough to return to again and again.
“I read up here when I need to think,” he said. “Or when I need to wait.”
“Or when you need to wait,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Or when I need to wait,” he agreed. “For four years, this is where I came when I couldn’t be around you. This is where I read about love and patience and all the things I was too afraid to understand.”
The bookshelves were arranged the way a man arranged shelves when he had spent twenty years deciding what mattered.
The Robinson was on the second shelf, eye level.
The McCarthy was below it. The poets were on the top shelf, which suggested he stood on a chair when he wanted to read poetry.
Underneath the window was a small leather chair, much older than anything else in the room, with a quilt folded over the arm.
I touched the quilt.
“My mother made that,” he said. “Right after Caleb was born. She made it for me to read in. It was the last big thing she made before she got sick.”
“She knew you were going to read in this chair.”
“She knew I was going to read in some chair somewhere. She did not know where the chair would be. The chair has been five places. This is where it ended up.”
We came back down the stairs.
We cooked dinner together.
He had bought groceries—actual groceries, like a person who lives in the house. Not just bourbon and coffee and backup plans. Chicken and vegetables and fresh herbs from somewhere expensive.
“I didn’t know what you’d want to eat,” he said. “So I bought everything.”
We worked in the kitchen. He chopped onions; I chopped mushrooms. His hands were steady. Mine were shaking slightly.
I was shaking a little because I was happy.
I had not, in a very long time, been in a kitchen with a man who did not need me to perform a particular version of myself in order to be eaten with.
Tristan had needed performance. Tristan had needed the right wine.
Tristan had needed me to laugh at the right small jokes and hand him the salt before he asked for it.
Atlas had asked me one question — *what do you cook* — and when I had said *the kind of pasta my mother made* he had bought all the ingredients for that pasta and put them on the counter without saying anything about it.
The mushrooms were the only thing he had let me have control over.
I chopped them very carefully.
He chopped the onion exactly twice, in the very specific way a person chopped an onion when they had been taught to do it by someone who did it for a living, and I watched his hands and I thought: he will have learned this from his mother, who was a woman who had read me Beatrix Potter when I was three years old in the kitchen of my own house, and who had also, before she died, taught my mother how to make the chicken Mrs. Harris still makes today.