6. Adrian #2
Standing at the sink at midnight, I think, with a small surprising ache, that I should bring it up again. That I should find that piece of land she’d love and put it in front of her and say, you were serious, weren’t you, so let’s be serious.
After the launch, when I have my life back, the first thing I’ll do is give my wife a house that isn’t this cold glass box she’s never once called home.
It’s a good thought. It’s the best thought I’ve had all week.
I decide I’ll tell her tonight. I even build the sentence while I set up my desk. I found us a way out of the glass box. Tell me where you’d build it.
Wyatt calls before I get the chance.
I’m at the desk with a scene that won’t close, the apartment dark except my lamp, and the phone lights up with his name at nearly ten and I answer it already tired.
“Tell me it’s not on fire,” I say.
“It’s a little on fire.” Wyatt, wide awake, because Wyatt is always already awake. “The venue moved the load-in up two days. Whole back half of the week collapses. I need you on the new grid tonight or we lose the photographer, and we do not lose the photographer.”
“It’s ten o’clock, Wyatt.”
“And yet here we both are, being successful. Pull up the grid.”
So I pull up the grid and I’m forty minutes into rebuilding three days of my life out loud, phone wedged against my shoulder, “move the photographer to Wednesday, push the radio hit, no, before the reading,” when I feel the sentence I fell asleep planning to say quietly leave the room.
The house, the land, the way out, not decided against.
Just gone, the way a dream is gone once you’ve found your shoes. I don’t chase it. There’s a call in my ear and a week to save, and a man with this much on his desk doesn’t stop to mourn a thought he can’t fully remember having.
The bedroom door opens somewhere in the middle of it.
Brooke stands in it in the half-dark, in my shirt, arms crossed against the cold, and for a second I think she’s going to come sit on the edge of my desk the way she used to, back when the middle of the night was ours. I hold up one finger. One minute. She waits. I keep going with Wyatt.
By the time I hang up she’s still there, leaning in the doorframe, watching me.
“You’re still up,” she says.
“Almost done. This whole schedule just collapsed.” I rub my eyes. “Sorry. Go back to bed, you don’t have to wait up for this.”
“I wasn’t waiting up.” A beat, and then her voice changes, drops into a register more careful. “Adrian. Can we talk? Not about the schedule. About us. It’s important, I’ve been trying to find the right night for a while and there isn’t one, so. Now. Can we talk now.”
And I hear it. I hear the word important, and Brooke doesn’t use that word lightly, Brooke is the least dramatic person I know, and some part of me sits up and knows I should close the laptop and turn the chair around and give her the thing she’s asking for.
She takes a step into the room.
Just one. In the lamp light I actually look at her and there’s a look in her face I don’t have a name for, a weight that’s been building in a room I haven’t been going into. Her arms are still crossed. Her jaw is set the way it sets when she’s about to say a hard thing she’s rehearsed.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” she starts, quieter now.
“For weeks. And every time, you’re either not here or you’re…
” She gestures at the desk, the screen, the whole glowing apparatus of the launch.
“Here but not here. And I keep telling myself after the launch, after the launch, but Adrian, I don’t think there’s an after anymore. I think we’re…”
This is the moment. I know it’s the moment even as it’s happening, I can feel the size of it, the way you feel a scene turn under your hands. She’s giving me the door. All I have to do is walk through it. Close the laptop. Say talk to me.
But the fix is right there. The sentence that’s been fighting me for six hours, I can feel the exact shape of the word that closes it, and it’s the kind of thing that comes once and leaves if you look away, and my whole body stays angled toward the screen, pulled one direction and one direction only.
“Can it be tomorrow?” I say. “I’m this close on this scene, and whatever you need to say, I want to actually be present for it, not half in a chapter. First thing in the morning. I promise. We’ll do it right.”
She stops. Whatever she was three words from saying, it dies in her throat, and I watch her face go quiet and final in a way I don’t understand and don’t stop to read.
She looks at me for a long second, really looks, the way you look at a thing when you’re making up your mind about it. Whatever she carried out here to say, I watch her fold it back up and put it away, maybe for good.
“Sure,” she says.
The door clicks shut. And I turn back to the page, because the page is loud and she is quiet, and I have always, always answered the loud thing first. The scene closes ten minutes later. It’s good. It’s the best thing in the chapter.
I don’t come to bed for two more hours, and when I finally do she’s turned toward the wall, and I fit myself carefully against nothing and stare at the ceiling and tell myself I’ll make it up to her tomorrow.
At the back of my mind, somewhere I don’t look, I know it’s a bad habit I just cannot break.