Chapter 13 #2
"Why did you try to do it yourself? You can't — you know you can't—"
"I can take out a bag of garbage, Nora."
"You're on the floor."
The silence after that is the first real silence. No more polite hum, no gentle nothing of two people who have agreed not to say anything that matters. This silence has edges.
I'm standing over him. He's looking up at me. The angle is wrong — I'm tall and he's not, and it's the inverse of everything, and I don't step back but I don't kneel either. I'm stuck at this height, vibrating.
"You keep doing this," I say. And my voice has changed — it's not the emergency voice anymore, not the I'm on my way voice. It's thinner. Closer to me.
"Doing what."
"Pushing me out. Every time. The bandages — I can do it myself next time. The coffee — you stopped asking me to make it. That day with your boots you sat there for ten minutes trying to reach them instead of asking me to hand them to you, and I was right there, Ethan, I was six feet—"
"I didn't want to bother you."
"Bother me?" The word cracks open in my mouth. "You told me I don't have to come every day. You — you gave me your reasons. My projects. Derek. The proposal. You made it sound like you were being considerate—"
"I was—"
"You've been pushing me away! Every day, a little more, and I keep — I keep pretending I don't see it—"
It comes out louder than I meant. The kitchen absorbs it — the walls, the counter, the window with its flat winter light, the element she knows Camille uses, the one on the left, the better one.
Ethan is still on the floor. He hasn't tried to get up. His face is tight — that line I've seen in the hospital, in the doorway, in the examination room. The line of a man who is holding something in his mouth and if he opens wrong it will fall out.
"You have been pulling away from me for weeks," I say. "And I keep — I keep showing up, and doing the pills, and packing the bag, and you — you're so — you won't even argue with me. You just get quieter."
The word lands in the kitchen and I hear it echo back to me off the counter, off the window, off all the surfaces I've wiped and organized and touched. He's looking at me with his jaw clenched so tight I can see the muscle jump, and for one second I almost stop. Almost.
But I don't.
"Like you're waiting for me to figure out that I'm not wanted here."
The word wanted hangs in the kitchen. Not needed. Wanted.
He looks at me. Really looks. And for one second the mechanism is gone — the deciding, the rearranging, the choosing which version. For one second he is just a man on a floor looking at a woman who said the word wanted and is trying not to cry.
"You think I don't want you here."
"What am I supposed to think? You eat soup you didn't ask me to make and you close doors and you say I can do it like it's a policy statement—"
"Because every time you help me I can see you filing it.
Every single time." His voice is different now.
Tight. He's not shouting — Ethan doesn't shout.
He's doing the thing that's worse, which is saying true things very quietly.
"The pills — you sort them, and then you step back.
The bandage — you wrap it perfect, perfectly straight, and you say There and you stand up and you take one step back.
One. Always one. Like if you stayed close for one second longer you'd — what? Catch something? Like I'm—"
He stops. His hand is flat on the floor. I watch his knuckles go white.
"From your first morning in this apartment, you've been performing," he says. "The makeup at 6 AM. The meals that looked like magazine food. The way you talk to my mother on the phone—"
He stops. His jaw works. Like saying these things out loud — things he's been watching, logging, carrying — costs more than he expected.
"The professional voice. I see you do it, Nora. I've been watching you do it every day."
A weight shifts behind my ribs — deep, slow, the kind of thing that doesn't make noise until it's already moved.
"So what?" I whisper. "So I try. So I make an effort. That's — that's what you do when—"
"When what? When you're —" He swallows. The word comes out like he didn't choose it. "When you're playing a part?"
It hits low. Below the ribs. In the place where the real things live.
"That's not what I'm—"
"Then what are you doing? Because I have been watching you perform for three weeks and I do not — I don't know which one is you. The one who organizes my fridge at 7 AM or the one who cries on my floor at midnight. And the part I can't—"
He stops. He presses his palms against the floor. He's trying to sit up. The effort costs him — I can see it in his face, pain reorganizing itself to make room for something worse.
"The part I can't stand," he says, "is that the one on the floor is the one I—"
He stops again. His breath is short. He's sitting now — not standing, just sitting, his back against the cabinet, his legs in front of him, his face doing what it has never done in front of me before.
Nothing. His face is doing nothing. No joke. No deflection. No I'm fine. Just — open.
And I break.
Not the way I broke on the kitchen floor — not smoke alarms and tears and the cat as witness. The quiet kind. The kind where a wall you've been holding for so long you forgot it was a wall just — stops. Stops being held. Stops being a wall.
I sit down.
Without grace, without the correct distance. I sit on the kitchen floor, across from him, close enough that our knees are almost touching, and I'm crying but it's not the loud kind, it's the kind that just — happens, like rain, like gravity.
"I thought you called Camille to cook because I ruined it," I say. My voice is small. Too small for this kitchen. "I thought you looked at me trying to make dinner and decided — she can't even do this. She can't even—"
"I called Camille because I was scared you were going to burn yourself.
" His voice cracks on the word scared. Not much.
A hairline fracture. "You were exhausted.
You'd been working all day and taking care of me and you hadn't slept and you walked into that kitchen like you had something to prove and I was on the couch and I couldn't get up and I thought — if the oil pops, if the element — I can't—"
He swallows.
"I can't protect you from my couch."
The sentence sits between us. Neither of us picks it up.
Bagel walks over. He steps between our legs and sits down in the small space, tail curled, looking from him to me as if this is a meeting he convened and he's waiting for the minutes.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. My mascara is on my knuckles. Of course it is.
"That girl," he says.
I look at him.
"On the floor. With the smoke alarm. Telling Bagel to shut up.
" He's looking at me the way he looked at the X-ray — at something healing that he didn't have control over.
"I got there too late to stop it, and I watched you fall apart, and all I could think was that whatever you were trying to say to that cat was something you should have been able to say to me, and you couldn't, and I couldn't tell you that—"
He breathes.
"That was the best version of you I've ever seen."
The words fall out of him like words he's been carrying too long in the wrong pocket. Plain. Clumsy. Not meant for a kitchen floor, but that's where they land.
I stare at him.
"You — what?"
"The flour on your face and the burnt pan and you, just you, without the — without all the—" He gestures vaguely. At everything. At me. "And I sat there and I didn't say anything because if I said it then it would be real and if it was real then you could take it away."
I can't get air. Or I'm getting too much. One of those.
"I thought you were here because you felt guilty," he says. "About the accident. And I thought — if I tell her I want her to stay, and she's only here because she thinks she owes me, then I'm—"
"A burden," I say.
He looks at me.
"You think you're a burden," I say. And my voice breaks on the word, really breaks, the way a thing that has been holding weight for too long finally stops.
He doesn't answer.
"Ethan."
"Yeah."
"I put on makeup at 6 AM because I thought if you saw me without it you'd know."
"Know what."
"That this isn't casual for me. That I'm not — I'm not here because of the accident. I'm here because—"
I press my palms against my eyes. The words won't line up.
"Because your cat purrs when I walk in. And your fridge needed labels. And you eat cereal for dinner when no one is watching. Because you saw the version of me I try to hide, and you didn't — you didn't ask me to make it prettier. And I—"
I stop. I wipe my face again. Mascara, tears, whatever. It doesn't matter. The wall is down and the wall isn't going back up and he's sitting three feet away from me on a kitchen floor and his face is doing nothing and I have never seen anything more clearly in my life.
"I thought if you saw the real me you wouldn't want the real me," I say.
The kitchen is quiet. The baseboard heater clicks once and goes still. Somewhere outside, a car starts and drives away, and the sound fades, and then it's just us.
Ethan reaches forward. Not far — he can't reach far, the hip won't let him. His hand lands on the floor between us, palm down, next to Bagel's tail. Not on me. Not pulling me closer. Just — there. Present. An open hand on a cold floor.
I look at his hand.
I put mine next to it. Not on top. Next to. Two hands on a kitchen floor, close enough that the warmth crosses the gap.
Neither of us moves.
Bagel purrs between us, low and steady, the frequency of a small creature who has been waiting for the humans to stop being stupid and is satisfied, at last, with the preliminary results.
The light through the window has shifted. Late afternoon. The particular amber of a Montreal winter day giving up, the sun already behind the buildings, the sky the color of cloth washed too many times.
We're on the floor. There is a garbage bag next to us. There is a cat between our knees.
The apartment is very quiet.
I don't know what happens next.
Neither does he.
But neither of us is getting up.