26. Erika
— ? —
Erika
Days pass, and I can’t stop thinking about the balcony, the look on Kai’s face when I said he was married to his company, the way he didn’t argue or defend himself, just stood there looking down at the party with an expression I’d never seen on him before, like he was watching his whole life rearrange itself in front of his eyes.
I can’t sleep. The words I said keep replaying in my head, and I wonder if I was too harsh, if I finally pushed him away for good, and I can’t write either.
Every morning I sit down at the typewriter and roll in a clean sheet and look at it, and every evening I roll the same clean sheet back out, and on the third day I get one sentence down before I stop, he stood at the rail and didn’t argue, and I look at it for a full minute, and it isn’t the book, it’s him, it’s a thing that happened to me two nights ago wearing a stranger’s dress, and I pull the sheet and roll in a clean one and leave it in there, blank, like a note I’m not ready to send.
Tessa calls about the second book and I tell her it’s coming, and she says “Erika” in the voice she uses when she can hear a lie down a phone line, and I tell her it’s coming again.
It isn’t coming. Nothing is coming except the sound of my own kitchen at two in the morning and the ache of a thing I said out loud on a balcony that I can’t take back and don’t want to.
Finally, on a Thursday evening after another useless day at the typewriter, I do the only thing that makes sense. I drive to Dora’s.
The Spanish bungalow hasn’t changed, bougainvillea climbing the walls, the garden still hung with the extra strands of lights from her birthday party, the party Kai threw, the party I helped plan back when I was still pretending I could keep him at arm’s length, and I pull into the driveway and sit in my car for a while, watching the light spill from the kitchen window, trying to rehearse what I’m going to say.
The last time I was in this driveway without a crowd between me and that kitchen window, I was pulling out of it with a plate still on the garden table and his voice in my ears. I make myself get out.
Dora opens the door before I can knock, like she was expecting me, in a cardigan and reading glasses with a dish towel over her shoulder.
“I wondered when you’d show up,” she says, ushering me inside, and she doesn’t ask why, and she doesn’t ask if I’m all right, and she doesn’t look at my face any longer than it takes to see what’s on it. “Tea?”
“Please.”
The kitchen smells like rosemary and baking, and it hits me how much I’ve missed this room, how much I’ve missed her, because Dora was the closest thing I had to a mother for four years, and for months I told myself that walking away from Kai would mean walking away from her too, and it turned out she wasn’t going anywhere.
I’ve seen her since, at the party, in the garden with the party between us and a necklace at her throat that she called too flashy every time someone admired it.
This is different. This is her kitchen table and two mugs and nowhere to hide.
We sit, steam rising from our cups, and I try to find words for the mess inside my chest.
“I don’t know what to do,” I finally admit.
“About what?”
“About Kai. About all of it.” I wrap my hands around my mug. “I keep telling myself it’s over. That I made my choice. But then I see him, and I think about him, and I can’t…”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t stop loving him.” My voice breaks on the admission, and it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, to anyone, including myself, and it comes out of me the way the words came out on that stage, like they’d been waiting years for permission.
“I hate that I still do. After everything. After all of it. But I do, Dora. I still love him, and I don’t know what to do with that. ”
Dora doesn’t look surprised. She doesn’t reach for my hand, either, and I’m grateful, because I’d break if she did. “I know, sweetheart. I’ve known for a while.”
“I don’t know if love is enough. Not after four years of feeling invisible. Not after everything he put me through.”
“It’s not.”
I look up at her, startled by the bluntness.
“Love is never enough,” she says, her voice gentle but firm. “It takes work. Commitment. Choosing each other every single day, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”
I sit with that. It’s the least comforting thing anyone has said to me in months and the only thing that’s felt like the truth, and I understand, sitting at her table, that she’s not telling me to take him back and she’s not telling me not to.
She’s telling me the price of either door, and letting me look at the price.
“How do I know if he’s capable of that?”
“You don’t. That’s the terrifying part.” She turns her mug a quarter turn on the table, an old habit, and I’ve watched her do it a hundred times and never once known what she was deciding when she did it.
“I’ll tell you one thing and then I’ll stop, because it’s not my marriage and I’ve said too much about it already.
Nobody’s capable of it until they are. Your husband wasn’t.
His grandfather wasn’t. Nobody is, right up until the day they’d rather do the work than lose the person, and you can’t know which day that is from the outside. You can only watch and see.”
We sit in silence, the question hanging between us, and outside the string lights in the garden sway gently in the breeze, casting patterns on the window, and Dora lets the silence be a silence, which is a thing she’s good at and I’ve never learned.
We talk for a while longer, about safer things, the party and how she wore the necklace all night after telling every single guest it was too flashy, a new book she’s reading that she thinks I’d like, whether the roses on the back fence are going to make it through the summer.
A car in the driveway. I know the engine before I know I know it, four years of listening for that exact sound at eleven and midnight and one, and my whole body goes still the way it used to go still, and I hate that it remembers, and Dora watches me hear it and doesn’t say a word.
Footsteps on the porch. We both look up.
Kai is standing in the doorway, frozen mid-step, in a suit, jacket slightly rumpled, tie loosened like he’s been pulling at it, and he’s shaved, and it makes him look younger and more tired at the same time, and his eyes find mine, and surprise crosses his face, and then a thing more complicated than surprise.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he says. “I was on my way to a thing at work tonight. I wanted to see Grandma first.”
“It’s fine.” I start to stand. “I should probably go anyway.”
“No, stay.” He holds up a hand. “I won’t be long.”
He crosses to Dora and bends and kisses the top of her head, and she reaches up without looking and pats his cheek, and it’s such an ordinary thing, a grandson and his grandmother, that I have to look at my tea.
He doesn’t push into the room or cross to the table, he just stands there in the doorway keeping his distance, like he knows that’s what I need, and Dora doesn’t get up either, and the three of us stay exactly where we are like a photograph of a family that isn’t sure it’s still one.
His eyes go to the mug in front of me, then to the empty chair across from Dora that used to be his on Sundays, and back to me, and I watch him understand where I’ve been sitting and for how long, and he doesn’t ask.
“Are you okay?” he asks quietly.
“I don’t know.”
A pause. The air between us feels heavy with everything we’re not saying.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“I will be.” His eyes hold mine. “Whatever you decide.”
A thing passes between us that I don’t know what to call, understanding, maybe, or acknowledgment, the recognition that we’re both standing on the edge of the same drop and neither of us knows how to jump.
He turns to go.
“Kai.”
He pauses, hand on the doorframe.
I don’t know what I want to say, only that I don’t want him to leave like this, with all these words unsaid between us, and I look at him standing there with his hand on the frame the way he stood in a doorway in Silver Lake once with a pile of boxes at his feet, and I don’t say any of it.
“Goodnight,” I manage.
“Goodnight, Erika.”
He disappears through the door, and I listen to his footsteps fade down the porch, his car door opening and closing, the engine starting, and I keep listening after there’s nothing left to listen to, and when I look back at Dora she’s watching me with knowing eyes.
“The boy you married is gone,” she says quietly. “Either way. Decide about the man.”
Decide about the man. She says it like a thing you could just do, like choosing the beef without the sauce, and I sit there and think that I’ve spent months deciding about the boy, weighing every year of him, and I never once let myself look at the one standing in the doorway.
I stay for another hour. We finish our tea and she sends me home with leftovers, and at the door she holds my face in her two hands for a second, the way she did the first Sunday I ever came here, and says nothing at all, and I drive through the quiet streets of Los Angeles with the windows down, letting the cool air wash over me, and I don’t turn the radio on because I want to hear myself think and then I don’t want to hear it at all.
I’m almost home when my phone erupts.
The screen lights up with notification after notification, news alerts piling on top of each other faster than I can read them.
KAI CHANNING STEPS DOWN.
RESIGNATION ANNOUNCED AT COMPANY EVENT TONIGHT.
brEAKING: CHANNING HEIR WALKS AWAY.
I pull over to the side of the road, and my hands are shaking as I read the headlines, once, twice, three times, trying to make the words make sense.
There’s a photo under one of them, blurry, taken from the back of a room, a man at a podium with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled, and I know the set of those shoulders from across a ballroom, from across a bookstore, from across a restaurant with an empty chair at my table, and I sit on the shoulder of the road with cars going past me and look at it until the screen dims.
He resigned. Tonight. While I was sitting in his grandmother’s kitchen drinking tea and talking about whether love is enough, he was standing in front of his entire company and walking away from everything he’d built.
A thing at work tonight. Wanted to see Grandma first. He stood in that doorway with his hand on the frame and asked how I was doing, and he was on his way to do this, and he didn’t say a word.
I pick up my phone and call Albie.
He answers on the first ring.
“Mrs. Channing.” He doesn’t sound surprised. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
“Where is he?”
“Still at the building. Everyone else has gone home. He’s still up there.”
“I’m on my way.”