6. Elise
— ? —
Elise
The pouch is dove gray velvet and it’s gone soft at the corners from being handled, and I bought it from a woman at a craft market who wrapped it in tissue paper and told me it was a lovely thing to give someone.
I know what’s inside before I open it.
I open it anyway. Because there’s a part of my brain that’s still functioning and it’s telling me there are a hundred explanations, that half the jewelry in the world is silver, that I am standing in a house full of a dead woman’s belongings and of course there’s jewelry in it.
The necklace pools into my palm.
A thin chain. A small silver rabbit, mid-leap, one ear slightly longer than the other because the woman who made it did them by hand and I’d asked her to.
She collects them. Rabbits. She has this whole shelf of little ceramic ones and she calls it embarrassing but she isn’t embarrassed at all.
I said that to a stranger at a craft market two years ago while she wrapped this in tissue paper.
“Elise?”
Rowan’s voice, from a long way off. The kitchen is doing something strange, tilting slightly, the black window and the drying rack and his shape at the counter all going soft at the edges.
“Elise. What is it?”
I can’t make my mouth work.
The contact in Simon’s phone. Four months of my life spent turning that word over.
Bunny. A pet name with a little rabbit emoji next to it and no phone number attached, and I have spent four months constructing women out of nothing.
A woman from his office. A woman from the gym.
A stranger. Somebody I’d never met and would never meet, faceless, easy to hate, a hole in my life shaped like a person who didn’t exist.
She sat on her couch with a blanket around my shoulders and let me cry on her.
She has been texting me every day for four months. Thinking of you. How are you holding up? That’s what best friends are for.
“It was Lilia,” I say.
The words come out perfectly flat, which is not how they feel.
“What?”
I hold it up. The rabbit turns on the chain in the kitchen light, catching it, throwing a small bright spot across the wall.
“I had this made. Two years ago, for her birthday. The woman at the market did the ears by hand because I asked her to.” My voice keeps going, level and reasonable and entirely disconnected from anything happening in my chest. “It’s in a box. In this house. Which means she was here.”
Rowan has gone very still.
“He called her Bunny,” I say. “In every single message. For over a year. And I sat there for four months trying to work out who Bunny was, and she was on the other end of the phone telling me I’d get through this.”
***
I don’t remember going up the stairs.
I remember the door hitting the wall, and Simon coming up off the bed with his phone in his hand and his face doing something complicated, and the light from the hallway falling across the mattress that’s the only made bed in the house.
“What the hell…”
I throw the necklace at him.
It hits his chest and drops onto the blanket and he looks down at it and I watch it happen, I watch the exact half-second where he understands, and it is worth every part of the last four months to see it.
“Elise…”
“Say her name.”
“Let me…”
“Say her name, Simon.”
He picks the necklace up. He holds it in his fist and doesn’t look at me.
“Lilia,” he says.
The room does something. Goes very small and very clear, everything in it sharper than it needs to be, the water stain on the ceiling and the pile of his clothes on the chair and the exact number of days between the last time I trusted anyone and now.
“How long was she coming here?”
“It wasn’t…”
“How long?”
“Twice.” He’s still looking at the necklace. “Three times. Last summer, when you were at your sister’s, and once at…”
“In this house.”
“Elise.”
“In your grandmother’s house.” My voice is going up and I don’t stop it. “That you’re making me clean out. That you dragged me four hours up a mountain to sort through, knowing what was in it. Did you know that was in there?”
“No. God, no. I didn’t know she’d…”
“She left it here.” I’m laughing, and it isn’t a laugh. “She left it in a box. She took a necklace I had made for her and she left it in your grandmother’s house like it was nothing, and you drove me up here to find it.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s your defense? That you’re not that organized?”
He sits down on the edge of the bed with the necklace in his fist and puts his other hand over his face, and there was a version of me that would have gone to him. Four months ago. Maybe even four days ago. There was a whole architecture of a person who would have crossed that room.
She isn’t here anymore. I checked.
“She held me,” I say. “In her apartment. The night I found out. She put a blanket on me and made me tea and told me I deserved better, and she’d been in bed with you that week, hadn’t she.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Hadn’t she.”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” I nod. I keep nodding, which is apparently what my head does now. “Okay.”
“Elise, please, if you’d just let me…”
“You know the part I keep getting stuck on?” I’m at the door.
“It’s not you. You’ve been a disappointment since about year two, and I made my peace with that a long time before I found your phone.
It’s that I had one person. One. And you took her too, and then you let me keep going to her for four months, and you never said a word. ”
“What was I supposed to say?”
I look at him for a second.
“Nothing,” I say. “You were supposed to say nothing. You did great.”
And I pull the door shut behind me.
***
I get halfway down the stairs before my legs stop working.
I sit down on the third step from the bottom in a dark stairwell in a house I hate, and I don’t cry, which surprises me. What happens instead is a kind of shaking that starts in my hands and moves outward until I’m holding on to the banister with both of them.
Rowan is at the bottom of the stairs.
He doesn’t come up. He doesn’t say anything. He stands there with his hands at his sides and waits, and eventually I get up and come down the last three steps, and then I’m against him with my face in his shirt and his arms around me and neither of us has said a word.
He smells like dust and dish soap and, underneath it, himself.
“I’m not crying,” I say, into his chest.
“I noticed.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to be understood right now, Rowan, I want…”
I get a fistful of his shirt.
I don’t have to explain the rest. I tip my face up and he understands exactly what I’m doing, and for about four seconds it works, his hand coming up into my hair and his mouth on my jaw and everything in me going quiet with relief at the simplicity of it.
Then he stops.
Both hands on my shoulders. Putting a foot of air between us.
“No,” he says.
I stare at him.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“You had your hand under my dress yesterday morning with him four feet away.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “You had your mouth on me in a parking lot. And now you’re going to be principled?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He lets go of my shoulders. He puts both hands on the banister behind him and grips it, and his knuckles go white, and that’s the only part of him that isn’t perfectly controlled.
“Because an hour ago you found out your best friend has been lying to you every day for four months,” he says.
“And you came down those stairs shaking, and the first thing you reached for was me. And I want that. I want it so much I can barely stand here. But I’m not going to be the thing you use to get through tonight. ”
“That’s not what this is.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Then look at me and tell me you’d be doing this if that box hadn’t fallen over.”
I open my mouth.
I stand in a dark stairwell at eleven at night with a dead woman’s dust on my hands and my best friend’s necklace upstairs in my husband’s fist, and I open my mouth to tell him yes, absolutely, and nothing comes out.
Because there’s a piece of it he’s right about. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But there’s a piece, and I know exactly which piece it is, and it’s the piece that had me halfway across the kitchen before the box ever went over.
“That’s what I thought,” he says.
“Don’t.” My voice is wrecked. “Don’t stand there being right at me.”
“I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to still be here on Sunday.”
He picks his jacket off the newel post where it’s been hanging since yesterday and puts it over my shoulders, which is such an absurdly gentle thing to do that it almost finishes me off.
“There’s tea in the kitchen,” he says. “I’ll be up in a while.”
And he turns and goes back down the hall, and I sit on the stairs in his jacket in the dark for a long time, and I am so angry I can feel it in my teeth.
I don’t know yet if I’m angry at him.