10. Adrian
— ? —
Adrian
The apartment makes sounds I never noticed when she lived in it.
The refrigerator cycling, the building settling. The particular hum the windows make when the wind comes off the hills at night.
For two years there was always a low undercurrent of her somewhere in these rooms, water running, a cabinet closing, that off-key humming she did over her sketchbook and swore she wasn’t doing. I built my concentration on top of it without ever knowing it was load-bearing.
Now the place is silent in a way that has weight, and I keep stopping in the middle of rooms to listen for a sound that isn’t going to come.
It’s been two days.
Maybe it’s been a day and a half. I’ve lost the exact count, because I haven’t really slept, and time does a strange thing when you don’t sleep, folds over on itself, so that it’s three in the afternoon and then it’s four in the morning and I’m standing at the window in yesterday’s shirt with a coffee I made and didn’t drink going cold in my hand.
I’ve called her nine times. I know it’s nine because I counted, the way you count things when counting is the only control you have left.
The calls go to voicemail after four rings, which means she’s looking at my name and deciding, every time, not to pick up.
My texts sit under her name with no reply and no little dots and nothing, a wall of blue going back two days that I keep opening and rereading like the answer might have arrived while I wasn’t looking.
Please talk to me. I know I don’t have the right to ask but please. I’ll come to you. I’ll come wherever you are. Just tell me where. Brooke.
Nothing.
I keep waiting for the door.
Some animal part of me is still braced for the sound of her key in the lock, still half-expects her to come in shaking rain off her coat and tell me it was a bad night, that she said things she didn’t mean, that we’ll figure it out the way she used to promise we would back when she was still the one doing the promising.
I catch myself listening for it a dozen times a day.
And then I remember she isn’t coming, and it goes through me again, fresh every time, like my body refuses to learn the thing my head already knows.
The papers came this morning.
A courier, a clipboard, a fat envelope with a law firm’s name embossed in the corner, and inside it the cleanest, most professional dissolution of a marriage you’ve ever seen, drawn up fast, faster than I would have thought possible, which is its own answer.
She isn’t stalling. She isn’t leaving a door open a crack to see if I’ll push it. There’s a little colored tab near the bottom of the last page, a small adhesive arrow with two printed words on it, sign here, pointing at a blank line where my name is supposed to go.
I’ve been carrying the pen around the apartment for hours.
I don’t know why. I’m not going to sign it.
I know I’m not going to sign it the way I know my own name, and still I can’t put it down, so I’ve just been walking room to room holding a pen over a thing I refuse to do, like a man guarding a door nobody’s trying to open.
I end up in the bedroom because I end up everywhere eventually, and I’m looking for a reason to be in here that isn’t just that it still smells faintly like her, and I open the drawer of her nightstand.
I don’t know what I expect.
Her reading glasses, a charger. The little hand cream she keeps everywhere.
What’s in there is her sketchbook.
She left it. I stand there staring at it for a second, because Brooke does not go anywhere without this sketchbook, it lives in her bag, in her lap, on the arm of the couch, and the fact that it’s here, that she packed a life into one duffel and left this behind, means she left it on purpose, and I don’t yet understand what kind of message that is.
I pick it up. The cover’s soft at the corners from handling. I’ve seen her draw in it a thousand times and I have never once looked inside, because it was hers, and I told myself that not-looking was respect, and I am about to find out what it actually was.
I open it expecting buildings.
Elevations, floor plans, the careful architectural hand I’ve watched her use, the woman who sees a stairwell and thinks about load and light. That’s what I brace for.
The first drawing is me.
I’m at my desk, in profile, head bent over a page, one hand in my hair.
She’s caught a thing in the line of it I don’t recognize as myself until I do, a kind of absorption, a man completely gone into his work, and the thing that stops my breath is how she drew it. Not quick. Not a doodle.
Every line considered, the way she draws the things she loves, the same care she’d give a building she wanted to stand for a hundred years.
She drew me the way she draws things that matter.
I turn the page.
Me again.
On the terrace this time, in the evening light, laughing at a joke outside the frame. Then me asleep, a book open on my chest, exactly the way I fall asleep, and I remember all the nights she must have watched me do it to know it that well, to render it that true.
Page after page of me, from angles I never posed for, in moments I didn’t know I was being seen. She was watching me this whole time. Studying me. Loving me in graphite while I sat ten feet away and never once looked up to catch her at it.
And then the drawings change.
The pages tip over into another thing entirely, and my stomach goes with them.
Tables. Dinner tables, drawn over and over, and it takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at, and when I do I have to sit down on the edge of the bed because my legs stop being reliable.
They’re set for two. Every one of them.
A plate of food and a plate across from it, a candle, two glasses.
And every single one of them has one chair pushed out and empty.
The food on the far plate untouched. The candle on the far side burned down to nothing while the near one stayed tall, because she sat there, night after night, and ate alone across from the place where I was supposed to be, and she drew it, because drawing it was the only company she had.
There are so many of them. That’s the part that takes me apart. Not one lonely night immortalized.
Dozens. A whole catalog of dinners I missed while I was out being brilliant, each one documented in her careful, loving, devastating hand, a record she kept without ever once showing me, without ever once saying, look what you’re doing to me, look at the empty chair.
I turn the pages slower now, because I’ve stopped being able to breathe right, and I get to the last section, and this is the one that finishes me.
It’s a house.
Not the penthouse. A real house, low and warm, drawn in full, lived-in detail.
A kitchen with counters long enough to work at and a double oven and a window over the sink.
A nook by a window with good afternoon light and a chair built for reading.
And out back, a garden, sketched loose and happy, tomato plants climbing up stakes, and beside them, in her handwriting, small, a little note to herself.
tomatoes (Dad’s)
The house she told me about on the terrace a lifetime ago.
The one I told her to build. The one I said we’d find the land for, and meant, in the easy weightless way you mean a thing that costs you nothing to say.
She went home after that dinner and she drew the whole thing, every room, the garden with her dead father’s tomatoes in it, a life for the two of us with dirt under it and light in it and a place to grow things, and she never showed me, because somewhere in there she stopped believing I’d ever actually build it with her.
I sit on the floor of our bedroom with her sketchbook open in my lap, and I finally understand the language she’d been writing in the whole time, right in front of me, in a book I decided it would be respectful not to read.
Brooke wasn’t quiet because she was content. She was quiet because she’d given up trying to say it out loud, and she’d been saying it here instead, in the only place left that would listen.
And I never looked. Not once.
For two years the truest thing in my house was ten feet from my desk and I congratulated myself on the restraint of not opening it.
I don’t know how long I sit there.
Long enough that the light in the room changes.
Long enough that my legs go numb under the weight of the book.
I keep turning back to the house, to the tomatoes, to the little note in her handwriting, and a feeling is rising in my chest that I don’t have a name for, that I’ve never had to name before, because I have never in my life wanted anything back this badly and understood so completely that I was the one who threw it away.
The intercom buzzes.
I don’t move. It buzzes again, longer, someone leaning on it, and then a voice I’d know anywhere comes crackling through the little speaker on the wall, clipped and certain and entirely out of patience.
“Adrian. It’s your mother. I know you’re up there. Open the door before I have the building do it for me.”
I buzz her up because there’s no version of events where I don’t, and I use the ninety seconds it takes the elevator to climb to do nothing useful, standing in the middle of the living room holding the sketchbook, until the door opens and my mother lets herself in with the key she’s had since the day I bought the place.
Alani stops just inside the door and looks at me.
She takes in the yesterday’s shirt and the two-day beard and the cold coffee abandoned on the counter and the man standing in the middle of a beautiful empty apartment clutching a spiral-bound sketchbook to his chest, holding onto it the way you hold the last warm thing in a cold house, and whatever she came here prepared to say, she sets it down and reaches for a different thing.
“Oh, Adrian.”
“Don’t.” My voice comes out wrecked, and I clear it and it doesn’t help. “Don’t be kind to me right now. I can’t take it.”