Chapter 19
Audrey
Three knocks. Even, unhurried. The shape of his hand against the wood.
I was at the kitchen island with a coffee I'd made an hour ago and not touched.
Nova was in the bouncer by the couch. The robe I'd been wearing since yesterday was tied at my waist, and the apartment smelled like the candle I hadn't lit and the dishes I hadn't done, and his knock came through the door like a sound my body had been waiting for before my brain agreed to hear it.
I crossed to the door. Slowly. I stopped with my palm flat against the wood at chest height.
I could hear him breathing.
Quiet, even. The breath of a man standing still on the other side of a door, giving it one knock, and leaving the rest to me. I heard his weight shift once, the small adjustment of a boot on linoleum, and then nothing. He was waiting.
I pressed my forehead against the door. My eyes closed. I could feel my own breathing, shallow and wrong, and the distance between my hand and his body measured in two inches of pine.
"Aud."
His voice through the door. Low, close, like he was talking to the wood the same way I was leaning against it. My fingers curled against the paint.
"I'm not going anywhere. I just need you to know that."
My hand moved to the knob. The metal was cool and round under my palm, and my fingers closed around it. He was on the other side of the door, telling me he was staying, and all I had to do was turn my hand.
Then my mother's kitchen. The phone on the counter. The empty chair. The sound of a woman calling a man who said the same thing once and meant it at the time.
The fog pressed down. It came from the same place it came from at three in the morning when Nova was screaming, and the apartment was dark.
The place underneath the exhaustion, where every thought I'd had about myself arrived pre-weighted with the certainty that I was not enough, that the smart thing and the safe thing were the same thing, and the safe thing was the lock between my fingers staying exactly where it was.
I let go of the knob.
His footsteps went down the hall. Three, four, five steps.
Then a pause at the top of the stairs, long enough that I knew he'd stopped, long enough that I knew he'd turned back to look at my door one more time.
Then the stairwell door opened and closed, three flights down, and the building swallowed the sound of him leaving.
I slid down the inside of the door to the floor.
My back against the wood. My knees pulled up. The hallway on the other side of the door was empty now, and the emptiness was something I'd made.
I just did what my mother would have done.
The thought arrived in my own voice, plain and complete. My mother would have stood on the inside of this door with her whole body wanting to open it, and she would have let the man on the other side walk away because the wanting was the thing she was most afraid of. Not the man. The wanting.
The system just lost to a closed door.
I sat on the floor for an hour before I stood up.
The days after the door were the worst stretch since the bathroom floor.
The apartment held the shape of his absence in small places I kept finding.
The second coffee mug I hadn't put away.
The spot on the counter where he set his keys.
The rocking chair in the nursery that I sat in at three in the morning with Nova against my chest, the armrests worn smooth by someone else's mother's hands.
Nova was fed. Nova was clean. The mother was working. The woman inside the mother was not.
I put on real clothes one morning and took them off before lunch. I left the TV on at night because the silence had gotten louder. I answered Astrid's check-ins with two-word texts. I let my mother's calls go to voicemail.
By day six, I was on the couch in the robe I'd been wearing for three days. Late afternoon. My phone rang on the counter. I let it go. It rang again.
I picked it up.
"Hey." Astrid's voice, gentle. "How are you doing?"
"I'm fine."
"Yeah?" A beat. "Are you eating?"
"Astrid, I'm fine."
She was quiet for a second. I could hear the bungalow behind her, the faint sound of Moose's nails on the hardwood.
"Duke had dinner with us the other night," she said. Like she was setting something down on a table and watching to see if it would hold. "He and Easton. He's not doing well, Aud."
I didn't say anything. My throat closed first, then my chest, then my eyes, and the sound that came out of me was not a word.
"Aud." Quiet. "I'm coming over. Stay on the couch."
She hung up. I stayed on the couch until she knocked.
I opened the door. Astrid was in jeans and one of Easton's sweatshirts stretched over her bump. She looked at my face, and her arms were around me before I could say anything.
I put my face against her shoulder and broke. She held on, one hand on the back of my head, the other across my shoulders, and she stood in the doorway with me until the shaking slowed. She kicked the door shut behind her. She wiped my cheek with her thumb.
"Okay," she said. "I'm going to make coffee."
She walked past me to the kitchen and started the kettle. She made two cups without asking if I wanted one.
She set both cups on the island. She sat on the stool closest to the window. She patted the one beside her.
I sat.
Astrid picked up her coffee. She drank. She set it down. She looked at me over the rim.
I told her.
I told her about the email on Duke's phone, the morning in the kitchen, the speech I gave him about not wanting to be the thing he resented.
I told her about the “I love you” he said in the doorway, and the “I know” I gave back.
I told her about the knock four days ago, his breathing through the wood, my hand on the door. I told her I didn't open it.
Astrid listened. She drank her coffee.
When I was done, she sat with it for a beat. Then she set her mug down, and her hands went to her lap, and she looked at the counter for a second before she looked at me.
"I have to tell you something," she said.
I recognized what was on her face because I'd seen it on my own. A woman about to say the thing she'd been carrying.
"When Easton left for Queens," she said.
"I kissed him on the curb on Maple Avenue.
I told him I wasn't ready. I told him to go take the slot, do the thing he needed to do, be the firefighter he was supposed to be.
I told myself I was being noble. I told myself I was giving him what he needed.
" She paused. "The truest thing I said all week was the lie. I let him go because I was scared."
"That's not what I did," I said.
"I know." A beat. "I'm saying I almost lost everything because I thought letting him go was the brave thing. It wasn't brave. I was scared he was going to leave anyway, and I wanted to be the one who chose it first."
I looked at my coffee.
Astrid was quiet for a second. Then, she said plainly, "Are you sending Duke to Nepal because you want him to be free? Or because you don't want to be the one who needs him?"
I felt the question land in the place I'd been protecting for six days, the place under the not-opening of the door, the place where every reason I'd built for the morning kitchen was stacked. The question went through it.
My eyes were wet. I was looking at Astrid with the expression of a woman who had just been asked the question she'd been afraid of hearing.
"I don't want to be my mother," I said.
"Aud." Quiet. "You're not your mother. Your mother would have begged him to stay and then watched him go. You shut the door because you couldn't beg. That's not the same thing."
"Then what is it?"
"Fear. The version of your mother's wound your body learned. Different shape. Same wound."
The line landed hard. My face held, barely, the tears sitting at the edge of my lashes without falling.
She put her hand over mine on the counter.
"I'm not telling you what to do. I'm telling you what I did. I told a man I loved that I was letting him go, and I called it nobility." She looked at me. "You can look at the door you closed and ask yourself what it really was. Then you get to decide whether to open it."
I let my hand stay under hers.
She let me sit with it.
After a long beat, Astrid stood. She drained her coffee, rinsed the mug at the sink, crossed to where Nova was sleeping in the bouncer, and kissed the baby's head. She came back to me, hugged me with one arm around my shoulders, her chin against the side of my head. She let go.
At the door, she turned.
"Aud. Whatever you decide, I'm here. But if you don't open the door the next time he knocks, and he's going to knock, Audrey, you know he is, you're going to have to live with that for the rest of your life."
She left.
The door clicked shut behind her. I sat at the island with Astrid's question sitting in every corner of the room.
I didn't move for a long time. Then I got up. I went to the bathroom. I washed my face. I brushed my hair. I put on clean clothes for the first time in three days and looked at myself in the mirror.
I was making my face match a decision I hadn't named yet. But my body knew. My body had known since the floor at the door, since the thirty seconds with my palm on the wood and his breathing on the other side. My body knew what it wanted. I was the one who hadn't caught up.
Evening. The apartment was different with the lights on, real clothes on my body, and my hair down for the first time in a week. Nova was in the bouncer. A pot of soup was on the stove, the first real thing I'd cooked since before the morning kitchen, and I was hungry for the first time in days.
The knock came at seven-twelve.
My heart went fast, and my hands went still, and I was across the apartment before I could think about what I was doing. I walked to the door and opened it.
Duke on the threshold.
Jeans. A T-shirt I recognized. His hands in his pockets.
His face was the face of a man who had been driving to this building for days and not getting out of his truck, and tonight, he'd walked up the stairs.
His jaw was set. The circles under his eyes were dark.
He looked like he'd slept about as well as I had, which was not at all, and I could see on him what the week had cost, the same way he could probably see it on me.
He stood in the doorway, and he waited.
I stepped back. "Come in."
He came in. I closed the door behind him. He walked past me into the apartment, stopped in the middle of the living room, and turned.
"Aud."
I held up my hand to say let me go first.
He waited.
"I didn't open the door when you knocked," I said. "Four days ago. You were in the hallway, and I had my hand on the door, and I didn't open it. I've been telling myself it was about giving you space." I let the breath come. "It was about being scared."
I looked at him, and I let him see what was underneath.
"I'm scared you're going to leave. I'm scared you're going to stay and shrink.
I'm scared of needing you, and the version I'm most scared of is the one where you stay, and I let you, and it works.
Because if it works, then everything I've built my life around is wrong.
Every wall, every refusal, every time I told myself that not needing anyone was the same as being strong.
If this works, then all of that was just fear, and I've been living inside fear for sixteen years and calling it independence.
"I've been my mother's daughter for twenty-eight years, Duke. I don't know how to be anyone else. I'm going to have to learn." I swallowed. "I'm sorry. For the closed door."
I gave him what I had.
Duke listened. His jaw worked once. His hand came up to his face, his thumb and forefinger pressing the bridge of his nose, and it stayed there for a beat. When his hand came down, his eyes were bright and wet, and he wasn't hiding it.
Then he spoke. Plain. No grin. No charm. His voice.
"I withdrew from Nepal. The day after the morning in your kitchen. I drove to my parents'. My dad said something I needed to hear. I came home. I sat at my kitchen table at four in the morning and clicked the button. The slot is gone. It's done."
He looked at me.
"The mountain's still going to be there.
Next year, the year after. I can climb it anytime.
" His voice was steady, but I could hear what was underneath it, the hours of ceiling-staring that had put the words in that order.
"Nova's going to laugh for the first time.
She's going to stand up. She's going to say a word.
Each of those things happens once. I either see them, or I miss them, and I'm not missing them. "
A minute passed. His voice was quiet.
"I'm not telling you this so you'll feel guilty. I'm telling you because you needed to know."
He looked at me.
"You and Nova are not the thing I gave up. You're the thing I found."
I believed him. I believed him with my whole body, the way I believed a patient's vitals when the numbers were good. He was standing in my living room telling me the truth, and the believing was the door I'd been afraid to open.
I crossed the room to him.
I put my hands on his face. His jaw under my palms, the stubble rough against my fingers, his skin warm. His eyes closed for one second when my hands touched him, and I watched the week come off his face, the tension in his jaw releasing under my palms.
I kissed him.
Slow. Quiet. Decided. His arms came around me, and I felt his hands spread flat across my back, pulling me in, and the pull was sure. The patience in it broke something open in me that I didn't try to put back.
I pulled back. My forehead against his. His breath was warm on my mouth.
"I love you," I said. "I should have said it back."
He shook his head. "You didn't have to."
"Yeah. I did."
He kissed me again. His hand came up to the side of my neck, his thumb against my jaw, and I felt the whole of him against me, steady and warm and here.
Later, on the couch, Nova was across both of our laps, asleep, her fist curled against Duke's thigh and her feet warm against my stomach. Duke's arm behind my shoulders. My head on his chest. His thumb was moving back and forth along my shoulder, the small, absent motion of a man who was staying.
I didn't name it as forever. I couldn't, not yet. But I could name it as today. Today, I was the woman who had opened the door. Today, that was enough.
I closed my eyes and let myself stay.