41. Margot
MARGOT
He gave me space, which, from a man who had spent eight months watching me, was the loudest way he knew how to say he loved me.
I didn't understand that at first. For the first day I mistook it for leaving, because leaving is the language I was raised in and I'm fluent in it the way other people are fluent in weather.
I kept waiting to feel him at the edge of things, a car across a street, a shape at the mouth of an alley, the particular prickle at the back of the neck that I'd spent a year and a half writing off as an author's paranoia and now knew for exactly what it had always been.
It never came. And somewhere in the second day it landed on me, slow and enormous, that the absence was the gift.
He was not watching. For the first time since a paperback with my invented name on it tripped a wire in a room I will never see, no one had eyes on me at all, and he'd done that on purpose, and it had cost him something I couldn't begin to measure.
I was staying above Mateo's cart, in the little apartment his cousin usually sublets to nursing students, because the shop was a wet black hole in the middle of the block and there was nowhere else that still felt like mine.
Birdie had installed herself on the couch within an hour of the fire and showed no signs of ever leaving.
"I made a spreadsheet," she announced on the morning everything in me still smelled like smoke.
She turned her laptop around with the flourish of a woman unveiling a portrait.
"Tabs. There's a grief tab, a rebuild tab, an insurance tab, and a tab that's just called Feelings, which is color-coded, because I refuse to be the kind of support system that isn't also organized. "
"Birdie."
"The Feelings tab has a drop-down menu."
"Birdie, it's nine in the morning."
"Which is why I've already been to the shop, and before you panic, I didn't go in, I'm not an idiot, I stood on the sidewalk and cried in a way I'd describe as productive.
" She said it lightly, but her eyes were pink at the rims, and I understood that the spreadsheet was Birdie doing exactly what I was doing, which is holding a very large thing by whatever small handle you can reach.
"Mateo's bringing up food. I told him you'd pretend you weren't hungry, and he said, and I'm quoting him, that you're pregnant and you'll eat what the block brings you or he'll be personally insulted. "
That was how I learned that the entire block knew. I had told Birdie, and telling Birdie a secret is a bit like telling the radio, except the radio at least has an off switch.
Mateo came up the stairs sideways, the way you carry a casserole dish you don't entirely trust, and he set it on the counter and looked at me for a long moment with the particular tenderness of a man who has decided you are family and is not going to make a speech about it.
"It's chicken and rice," he said. "My mother's recipe.
It's for grief, and it's also for the baby, and don't tell me it's too early to eat for the baby, because in my family you eat for the baby the moment you suspect the baby.
This isn't negotiable." He wiped his hands on the towel over his shoulder.
"The whole street's asking after you. Old Pham wants to know if you're rebuilding.
The twins from the bakery saved a box of books that blew clear across the road, and I have to tell you, they're extremely proud of themselves and the books are extremely ruined. "
"Tell them thank you," I said, and meant it so hard my voice went thin. "Tell them I'll take every ruined book they have."
"I already told them that. I know you." He hesitated at the door, and then he did the thing I had been bracing for from someone all week, because a block like ours cannot hold a man like Daniil in its midst and simply say nothing.
"I'm talking about your serious one," he said, "the man who pulled the cat out of the fire.
He's been paying Mrs. Okafor to leave a lamp on in the window of the empty unit next to the shop.
He does it every night. She thinks I don't know.
He doesn't go in. He just, I think, likes the block to look lived in for you. "
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I said nothing, and Mateo, who is wiser than the espresso he sells, let me not say it and went back down to his cart.
Here is the thing about grief that no one puts on the casserole dish.
It doesn't arrive in the order you expect, and it doesn't have the decency to take turns.
I grieved Josie and the shop as one animal, because they were one animal, the shelves she had built and the code she had hidden in the margins and the particular way the light came through the front window at four in the afternoon and made the whole place the color of weak tea.
All of it was gone in a single night, at the hands of a man who wanted a thirty-four-year-old secret to stay buried.
I sat on the floor of a borrowed apartment and I cried for a bookshop the way you cry for a person, and Hemingway, who had lost his kingdom and clearly held me responsible, eventually forgave me enough to sit on my feet.
"I keep thinking she'd know what to do," I said to Birdie that night, because the dark makes a confessional out of any room.
"Josie. She'd have some infuriating little saying.
She'd tell me the shop was only ever the shelves, and the shelves were only ever an excuse to keep the books moving, and the books were only ever an excuse to keep the people coming, so as long as I have the people, I still have the shop.
And then she'd make me tea I didn't ask for and be completely right and never once say so out loud. "
"So rebuild it," Birdie said, from the nest of blankets she had claimed as her sovereign territory.
"With what? It's ash, Birdie. The insurance is a maze designed by a sadist. I've got a baby coming and no income and a grandmother-shaped hole in my chest and a man I don't know how to think about."
"Ah," she said, sitting up, because Birdie can hear the real subject the way a dog hears a can opener three rooms away. "There he is. That's the actual thing. You've been circling him for four days like he's a pothole."
"He watched me for eight months." I said it flatly, the way you set down something heavy so you can look at it.
"He knew how I take my coffee before he knew my voice.
He built a whole file of me, Birdie, my bench, my routes, the book I reread.
Every sweet thing he ever did for me, he could do because he'd studied me like a subject.
How am I supposed to hold that in the same hand as the man who drove through gunfire for me and pulled that ungrateful cat out of a burning building? "
"I don't know," Birdie said, and I loved her for not reaching for the easy version. "That's genuinely a two-hands problem. But can I say the one thing, and then I'll go back to being decorative?"
"You're never decorative."
"Flatterer. Here's the one thing." She pulled her knees up.
"The watching was the worst thing about him, and it was also the only language he had.
Nobody taught that man any other way to love a person.
And the second you found out, he could have kept doing it.
He's very good at it. You'd never have caught him again, not really.
Instead he just, what, stopped? He went dark, left a lamp on and disappeared, and told you to call if you ever wanted him?
Margot, that's a man setting down the one tool he actually knows how to use, because you asked him to, in the dark, one time.
" She lay back down. "I'm not saying forgive him.
I'm saying that is not nothing. That's a man learning a second language at forty-one for an audience of one. "
I didn't sleep much that night, but for once it wasn't the bad kind of not sleeping.
In the morning I made myself return to the shop, not to go in, because there was no in to go into, only a scorched shell and a smell that got into your teeth, but to stand where the front window used to be and let it be as bad as it actually was.
Grief that you keep at arm's length just waits for you, patient as a creditor.
I have written enough sad endings to know you have to walk all the way into the room.
So I walked into the room. I stood on the wet gray sidewalk in front of the ruin of the only home I had left, and I put my hand flat on the one piece of brick that was still standing, faintly warm from a fire days cold, and I told my grandmother out loud that I was sorry, and that I was pregnant, and that I didn't know how to do any of this without her, and that I was going to try anyway.
A woman walking her dog crossed to the other side of the street to give me the decency of not being watched while I did it.
And that was the moment I understood, all the way down, what Daniil had given me.
Because I looked, out of eight months of trained habit I didn't know I had absorbed from him, for the one place a person would stand to keep eyes on this spot without being seen: the car with the wrong plates, the shape in a doorway, the lamp-lit window Mateo had told me about, where a man who could not stop protecting me had bought himself the right to make the block look safe and had then, deliberately, not sat down behind the glass to watch me grieve.
There was no one there. He'd left me alone with my dead, on purpose, when every cell in his body must have been screaming at him to stand guard.
He'd given me the one thing his whole life had never let him give anyone, which was the freedom to be unobserved, and he'd done it precisely because it was the hardest thing he owned to give.
"You're doing it again," I said out loud, to no one, to the empty street, to the man who was pointedly not in it.
"You're loving me by leaving the room. You infuriating, impossible person.
" And I laughed, alone, on a burned sidewalk, in a way that had tears in it, and it was the first laugh that had not hurt in four days.
The package came that afternoon. Birdie brought it up with the reverence of a woman who has read the return address and understood the assignment, and she set it in my lap and then, miracle of miracles, made herself scarce.
It was a box, and inside it were the things he had carried out of the fire.
None of it was valuable. There was no money, no jewelry, nothing a normal person saves.
He had gone into a burning building and saved the things that were mine: Josie's inscribed copy of the book I reread every year, its edges licked brown but whole; a photograph of her I thought I had lost; the absurd chipped mug I hated and would have wept to lose; and my backup manuscript, smelling of smoke, every page there.
And at the bottom, wrapped in a clean cloth the way you wrap something you consider holy, lay the slim book of my grandmother's poetry.
It was the one he bought the first night he ever let me see his face, in cash, and carried out into the dark before I could ring it up.
It was the first honest thing he ever gave me, back when I didn't know it was honest, and it had found its way back to me now that I did.
There was a note. His handwriting is exactly what you would expect, spare and certain and slanting slightly forward, like a man leaning into a wind only he can feel. It didn't explain anything. It didn't ask for anything. It said the truest small thing he has ever managed on paper, which was this.
I'll be wherever you decide. Watching over nothing but a phone, waiting for it to ring.
And under it was one initial, the whole of him folded into a single mark of ink: D.