7. Greer
Greer
The brownstone is exactly the brownstone I was expecting.
For what seems like forever, I sit in my Subaru on Mount Vernon and do not move.
I am not, in this car, the woman Brennan used to call the bravest person I know.
I am not the woman Lena calls when she's done overthinking.
I am a third woman I do not yet have a name for, and she is not, yet, ready to ring the bell.
The street is asleep. The Christmas-light string at the corner has been doing the small slow blink it has been doing since I parked. The dark blue door is three steps up from the sidewalk and has a brass numeral above it.
I finally get up the nerve to get out of the car.
The bell is brass and old. It makes a sound through the door instead of an electronic chime — the deep, dull note of an old house.
Footsteps cross hardwood on the other side of the door. The chain comes off. The latch turns.
The door opens.
Kieran is in a charcoal sweater and dark jeans and the soft slippers people wear in their home.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi."
"I'm sorry. I sat in the car."
"That's okay."
He steps back.
I cross his threshold and I do not know what to do with my hands.
He takes my coat. He hangs it on the hook above the bench inside the door. In no moment of that small choreography does he look at me directly. The kindness in the not-looking is enormous.
"Kitchen is through there," he says, pointing. "Water. Tea. Bourbon, but I would not, in your condition, recommend it."
The professional matter-of-factness of in your condition almost undoes me on the threshold.
"Water."
"Water."
The cabinetry is white. The counters are pale stone.
The small lamp at the kitchen island is on.
There are no dishes in the sink. There is a single mug on the counter, empty, half-rinsed.
The fridge has one magnet on it — Center Ice Boston, Indie's logo.
Somebody with very good taste chose this room.
I sit on the stool he gestures to. The leather is cold. He puts a glass in front of me. He puts ice in it and fills it from the tap.
The water goes down. The ice clicks against my front teeth.
He sits on the stool across the island from me.
Not next to me. Across. The distance is, in a kitchen this size, four feet.
The distance is, in a kitchen at this hour, the entire negotiated weight of every other decision we are not yet making.
He does not say anything.
I do not say anything either.
He looks at me. The look is not him waiting for me to start. It is him telling me, without saying it, that he is going to wait as long as I need him to wait, because the cost of every word I am about to say will be paid by me and he is not going to make me hurry.
I say, into my own water glass: "Almost six weeks."
He does not say anything.
"Five and a half," I say. "Six the way they count it. Five the way I count it. I took the test on Saturday."
He does not, for a long moment, say anything.
His hands are folded loosely on the island. He is looking at the lamp, not at me. His face is the same face he wore in the suite at the Bellamy three weeks ago, just before he answered me — composed on the surface, something I cannot quite see rearranging itself underneath.
It takes him a long minute to come back.
When he does, the first thing he says is: "Are you safe?"
I don’t know if, in twenty-six years, I have ever been asked that question.
"Yes."
"Eating?"
"Trying."
"Sleeping?"
"No."
"Do you have a doctor?"
"Not yet. Lena gave me three names this morning. I have not called any of them."
"Do you have somebody who knows?"
"Just Lena. She's in Providence."
"Indie does not know."
"No."
"You have not told your mother?"
"No."
"Are you on anything for the nausea?"
"No."
He nods at each of them. He has, for the first time since the door opened, looked at me without looking away, and the looking is steady and not searching.
He is, in real time, making a list inside his head of the things he is going to put in place between this moment and the one in which I am not alone with this anymore.
The list is, somehow, audible in the air between us.
"Have you eaten anything today that stayed?"
"Some toast."
"Anything else been getting through?"
"Crackers. Ice."
"Cold things."
"Cold things."
He stands. He goes to a drawer. He comes back with a half-sleeve of saltines and a small green box of ginger candies that look as if they belong on the desk of somebody's grandmother. He sets them on the island next to my water.
"Take some now," he says. "Take the rest with you when you leave. The candies are because I had a forward a few years ago whose wife was sick the whole pregnancy and she said the candies were the only thing that worked. She gave me the box because I liked them."
The box is well-worn at the corners. The green is faded. The label is in a font from another country.
In no version of my thoughts as I sat in my car on Mount Vernon for the past hour, did I expect to cry over a half-empty box of ginger candies on a stranger's kitchen island at almost midnight.
I cry anyway.
The crying is small and contained and does not, mercifully, require any of his attention. He gives me none. He picks up his own water glass, looks at the lamp, and waits.
When the crying stops, three saltines and a ginger candy go down.
The saltines stay. The candy tastes like something my grandmother would have liked. It clears the last of the nausea from the back of my throat.
He says: "Thank you for telling me."
"You already knew."
"Yes. But you told me. That's different."
We sit in the quiet for a long stretch. He fills my water glass again. The candies sit on the island between us. At some point his hand goes flat on the stone, palm down, and the small fan of his fingers across the counter is the most expressive thing his body has done since he opened the door.
He says: "I am going to ask you one more thing tonight. You don’t have to give me an answer. I am asking because I want you to hear me ask it. I do not need an answer until you have one."
"Okay."
"What do you want to do?"
My mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
I sit on his kitchen stool with the man whose name is on my employment file and whose daughter is my best friend and whose baby is the reason my body has been doing what it has been doing and there is no answer in my head.
My head shakes, once.
He nods, once, the way a man nods when he has been expecting the answer.
"Greer. Whatever it is you decide. You don't do it alone. I'm not going to ask you anything else tonight."
I breathe in. I breathe out.
The air in my lungs is the first full lungful of air I have had in eight days.
He does not move. He does not lean toward me. He does not touch me. He sits on his stool with his hands folded loosely on the island, and he says it the way you say a sentence you have already decided to follow through on.
I believe him.
I have, in twenty-six years, not believed many people about anything that mattered. Lena is on the list. Indie is on the list. A third name is about to go on.
We sit in the quiet for what is probably ten minutes and feels like an hour.
The clock on the oven counts down to the morning skate.
The streetlamp two doors down still throws a thin yellow seam onto the corner of the kitchen island, the same seam it has been throwing the whole time we have been talking.
"Practice in two hours," I say.
"You should sleep."
"I'm not going to sleep."
"I should go home."
"I'm going to drive you."
"My car is on Mount Vernon."
"I'll drive you. I'll get a ride back here."
"That's a long Uber at this hour."
"No, not at this hour. I'll be home before you have the kettle off."
In the briefness of all of that, there is the negotiation of a thing neither of us is naming, which is that I am not, tonight, in any state to drive myself home. He has, again, given me the room to accept the offer without having to be the one to say I need it.
I accept.
He puts the saltines and the ginger candies in a little paper bag from his kitchen drawer and hands me my coat.
He drives me to my apartment in the South End in the small hours of the morning, in my Subaru, on streets that have been empty since the bars closed two hours ago. He does not turn on the radio. We do not talk.
When he pulls up in front of my building, he gets out only long enough to walk around to the driver's side, hand me the keys, and put one hand briefly on my shoulder.
He says: "Sleep if you can."
"You too."
"Eat the saltines."
"I'll try."
"Text me when you wake up."
"I will."
He looks at me one more time. The look tells me what it has been telling me, in different rooms, all day: whatever I decide and however I decide it, he intends to make sure I do not have to decide it alone.
The SUV door closes behind me. My building swallows me. The elevator climbs slowly to the third floor. The sweatpants I have been borrowing from Indie for three years are folded on top of the dresser where they always are.
Outside my window, the sky is the slow blue of late October before sunrise.
The clock on my nightstand says practice is in less than two hours.
Neither of us is going to sleep.
For the first time in eight days, I do not mind.