14. David #2
We stand near the wall with our cups. Erin doesn’t pretend to belong.
She just stands beside me and takes the room in.
I’ve liked that about her since October.
We watch Lito move between his three conversations, visibly happy in all of them.
Joan works her way down the gingerbread line, and Whitlock gestures once at something Hank has said and then goes quiet.
The music runs through a reel and into something slower.
We stand with our cups in silence. It’s easy in a way things haven’t been easy in a long time.
Two songs go by. Then a slow one starts.
"Dance with me."
She says yes. We find the same slow turn and stay in it, her hand in mine, my other hand at her back, and she settles against my collar and I can feel her exhale through my shirt, steady and warm.
"People said you don’t date," Erin says after a while.
"They’re right. I don’t."
"Because of your wife?"
I look at the middle distance over her shoulder, at the same room, the same faces, every December. "I just wasn’t sure it could happen a second time," I say. "That feeling."
She pauses for a few seconds and then asks, "And now?"
I look at her. "I think it’s possible. You make me feel it’s possible."
I tip her chin up. She turns her face back into my collar, her hand tightening once in mine. We keep the slow turn, and I don’t say anything further. The truth is what it is, and anything more will only be a meaningless attempt to fill space.
Later, against my collar, she says she wants to go home with me.
We drive home through the snow, the road empty, the headlights catching the falling flakes. We are both quiet as the heater runs. She props her boots on the dash. I told her she could once and she does it every time now.
The cabin lamp is on. Inside, Cleo is asleep in her room, Pip tucked under her chin, the quilt Laura had sent the year she was born pulled to her cheek.
Laura is at the kitchen table with a paperback.
She looks up, reads us in one glance, says goodnight, and is out the door in the time it takes to get both our coats off.
Her headlights sweep the window and disappear.
The cabin goes quiet. Erin looks at me across the room. "Cleo?"
"She’s had her meds," I say. "I made sure. She’ll sleep through."
Erin nods. She crosses to me, pulls me down to her, and I go. I kiss her once, slow and deliberate, and she reaches up and opens the first button at my collar and says against my mouth: Take me to bed.
I take her hand. For the first time in four years, I close the bedroom door.
The room is dark. I don’t turn the light on.
The window above the dresser is pale blue from the snow outside, and in it I can see her, the gray fall of her sweater as she draws it over her head, the pale fall of her hair.
The cord is at my throat, the ring against my chest. I’m aware of it, as always, completely, without making it a moment. I’m here. So is she.
She reaches for me and guides my hands, and I follow where she leads.
She’s warm everywhere. The room is cold in every place she isn’t, and I stay where she is warm.
She makes a small sound when I find the right place and I hold still and wait, and she reaches up and pulls me closer by the shoulder and I understand.
Four years is a long time. I know it now as a body fact, the difference between memory and a woman who is actually here.
She is here. She answers each touch, and somewhere in the middle of it my chest opens in a way I hadn’t expected.
Not grief lifting. Just the full grounded weight of this again, after four years of nothing.
I had almost forgotten. I let myself remember.
She makes a sound and catches it. I feel her raise her hand and press her palm flat over her mouth, holding herself in, and I know why without asking.
Cleo, down the hall, a door between us, and Erin knowing that without being told.
My chest goes loose and warm, a tenderness that arrives faster than the wanting and settles right beside it.
I lean close, my mouth near her ear, stay right there , and let her keep her hand where it is.
I watch her face in the dark, the crease between her brows, the held-in quiet, and when she goes still against me, all of her shaking into a held and silent release, her palm pressing harder to keep the sound in, I think, without meaning to: there’s my girl .
I hold her through it. I stay until the shaking eases and she drops her hand and turns her face into the side of my neck and breathes, slow and spent, against me.
I feel the tension go out of her. Shoulders, chest, the arm across me going heavy.
I hold it all. She folds into me. I fold around her. The rest of the world goes very quiet.
Afterward I lie on my back and she is against my side and neither of us speaks. The cord is still there at my throat. I put my arm around her, my hand settling in her hair. The window is pale blue. The snow is still coming down. Four years of held breath is, for this one moment, finally out.
I close my eyes.
Something wakes me. The room is still dark, the window the same pale blue. I listen. A small voice from down the hall. Not a cry, just a voice, which is worse.
“Daddy?”
I cross the hall in the dark and see my daughter. She is sitting up in her bed. Blood is running from her nose. Her pillow is soaked.