The Humming Is Ambient
Chapter Eleven
The Saturday Vera was sewing, I woke to an empty bed and followed the sound of off-key humming to find her cross-legged on the living room floor, surrounded by a clutter of fabric swatches and ribbon and an antique sewing machine that looked like it had survived several decades specifically to assist her.
She was in my faded Army t-shirt and the sleep shorts she'd worn to bed, violet glasses on, pink tongue just visible at the corner of her mouth in concentration.
The morning light was coming in at a low angle through the yellow curtains and landing on her the way it always landed on Vera. She looked almost angelic.
I was so gone. I was so completely, irreparably gone on this woman.
I loved her.
The thought arrived fully formed and sat down in my chest like it had always been there and had simply been waiting for me to notice. Not the tentative, almost-thought I'd been navigating around for weeks. Not the I'm getting there I'd been telling myself. The whole, complete, unqualified thing.
I loved her cross-legged on the floor in my t-shirt.
I loved her in the library in her Antique Bridal Whisper cardigan.
I loved her standing in front of my crew with a jar of Nielsen-Massey vanilla and printed recipe cards in a font that was legible but charming.
I loved her in Powerpuff Girls pajamas holding up a mystery key.
I loved her in the crew-chief's seat of La Jefa going white-knuckled on the door frame and then saying show me the harness anyway.
I loved her, and she'd almost written it on a piece of pink paper, and I was standing in the doorway of her living room at eight in the morning having a complete internal reorganization about it.
"Morning," I managed, voice still thick with sleep.
She jumped and nearly stabbed herself with a needle. "Oh! You're awake. I was trying to be quiet."
"You were humming."
"I'm always quiet. The humming is ambient." She patted the cleared space beside her. "Come sit. Don't step on the blue fabric, that's the bodice."
I stepped carefully around the textile minefield and sat down beside her. "What's all this?"
She held up something that currently resembled three pieces of blush fabric with aspirations. "A new dress. From scratch."
"You're making a dress."
"My grandmother taught me. She saved all her patterns.
" She held up a pattern envelope. "McCall's 1954.
Authentic vintage." Her voice went quiet the way it did when she talked about her grandmother.
"When I was little, she'd let me play with her button box for hours.
I'd sort them by color, by size, make up stories about where each one came from.
" She held up a pearl button. "Her wedding dress.
And this one—" a bright red button "—first date with my grandfather. "
"You're using her actual buttons."
"Just for special things." She threaded a needle with the ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times. "I like making things. There's something satisfying about starting with raw material and ending up with something that fits exactly right."
I watched her hands work and thought about all the words I was not yet saying, and wondered, with some urgency, how much longer I was going to maintain this particular strategy.
"Can I watch?" I asked.
She looked up, genuinely surprised. "Watch me sew? It's not very exciting."
"I like watching you do things you're good at."
She blushed that blush she had when I said something she hadn't expected. Throat first, then upward. "Okay. But I'm not responsible for you falling asleep."
I did not fall asleep.
I sat beside her for two hours, close enough that our shoulders touched, and neither of us moved away.
She explained things as she went: French seams and the philosophy of her grandmother's construction methods and the satisfaction of appliqué work done by hand—and I listened with the full attention I gave to things that mattered, which was the same attention I gave fire behavior briefings and rope inspections and Vera talking about literally anything.
At a certain point she held up the bodice to show me a seam, leaned across me to reach something, and the vanilla-coconut smell of her hair was briefly very close to my face. I looked at the wall. I looked at the wall for several seconds. I was a person with self-control.
She did not appear to notice, but she was probably noticing.
"Can I help?" I asked, when I'd recovered.
"Do you know how to sew?"
"No."
"Then yes," she said, "I'll teach you."
She taught me to sew on a button. It took an hour. Her hands over mine, her voice patient through the third and fourth time I stabbed myself, until I produced a button that was crooked and lumpy and, technically, attached.
She examined it with a very diplomatic expression.
"You're terrible at this," she said with genuine affection in her voice.
"Years of training to rappel from helicopters, undone by a—a button."
"Different skill set." She kissed my cheek; a quick, warm press of her mouth that made the button entirely worth every drop of blood it had cost me. "Can I keep it?"
"I was going to ask if we could keep it."
She looked up at me. "Yeah?"
"First thing I ever sewed." I felt suddenly embarrassed. "That's stupid, probably."
"No." Her voice went thick. "It's really not." She wrapped it carefully in tissue paper, tucked it in the small box with her grandmother's buttons, and I watched her do it and thought I love you directly at the back of her head.
It continued to not result in her hearing it, because that was not how things worked.
But I was running out of time to say it the real way. I could feel it.
Soon, I told myself.
Very, very soon.
It was a Tuesday. Grocery store. Produce section. A man in his mid-forties was blocking the aisle, and had, apparently, opinions about my Station 19 shirt and what women who wore it were and weren't capable of.
He got about twelve words into those opinions.
Vera stepped in front of me.
I had never, in my life, heard the voice that came out of her next. It was not the library voice, patient and redirecting. It was not the crew-visit voice, warm and curious. It was something colder and more definite, the voice of someone who had decided on a target and had excellent aim.
"She's a helitack crew forewoman," Vera snapped rapidly. "She rappels out of helicopters into active wildfires. She's saved more lives before breakfast than you will manage in your entire existence. So unless you have something intelligent to contribute, I suggest you move."
"Listen, lady—"
"She's saved entire communities from burning to the ground. What exactly is it you do again? Besides take up space in the produce section?"
He left, and a small crowd cheered.
I had never been more attracted to anyone in my life. Including the first time I saw Vera in that hallway in a flower-print dress. This was a new ceiling. This was a reclassification of the ceiling.
She turned back to me, still vibrating slightly with righteous energy. "Are you okay? God, the absolute—"
I kissed her. Right there in front of the stone fruit display and all the people who cheered again, I pulled her against me and kissed her like the words I kept not saying had to go somewhere.
When we broke apart, she was flushed and breathless and her grocery list was crumpled in her hand.
"What was that for?" she asked.
I love you, I thought. I love you so much it sits in my chest like a second heartbeat, and I cannot believe I am in a grocery store failing to say it.
"For being exactly who you are," I said.
She beamed. Maybe I'd said the right thing. Just not all of it.
That night, with the cool desert air drifting through her open window and her fingers tracing the phoenix on my ribs, she said, "Tell me about this one."
I'd been waiting for her to ask again. The first time she'd asked, I'd promised later. She'd let it be later without question, because Vera understood that later was a real time that existed.
Later, it turned out, was now.
"After Afghanistan," I said. Her hand was warm and still on my ribs.
"I was pretty destroyed when I came home.
Couldn't sleep, couldn't adjust, still operating like I was in a combat zone.
The firefighting helped eventually. Gave me somewhere for the adrenaline to go that didn't hurt anyone.
" I swallowed hard and tried to clear my throat.
"This tattoo was me trying to tell myself I could be more than what the war made me. "
She was quiet for a moment.
"Thank you for telling me," she said.
"Thank you for asking."
She kissed the tattoo. Pressed her lips to the phoenix's wings. Then she looked up at me with the most tender expression I'd ever seen on her face.
"You know what I see when I look at you?"
My throat closed up, but I forced myself to talk. "Tell me."
"Someone who keeps choosing to rise." Her thumb traced my jaw. "No matter how many times. Someone worth holding onto."
The words pressed against my lips with so much force I was surprised she couldn't feel them.
I love you. I'm in love with you. I have been in love with you since you guessed my name in a hallway and sang Etta James off-key to a complete stranger and made me feel like something I didn't know I'd been waiting for had finally arrived.
I've been carrying it for months. I almost said it over soup.
I almost said it in the grocery store. I almost said it seventeen times during the cookie afternoon and once specifically when Miller texted you his grandmother's recipe and you just received it like it was normal, like of course he did, like you'd known all along that he would.
I kissed her instead. Tried to put all of it into the press of my mouth against hers, into every breath between us in the dark.
She fell asleep with her face against my collarbone, her fingers curled into my shirt, her breath slow and even.
Soon, I told the ceiling.
Because she deserved to know I'd fallen so completely, so early, so irrevocably that there wasn't a version of events in which I climbed back out.
And I was almost, nearly, very close to being ready to stop being afraid of that.
Almost.