27. Kieran
Kieran
The brownstone is quiet the way it has been quiet since Indie moved out of the upstairs bedroom seven years ago.
I have, in seven years, made my peace with this quiet.
The house is large for one person, four floors, the study on the second, the kitchen Cara had the contractor open up before she died so you could see the garden from the island, and for a long time after Indie left for Beacon Hill, I went through the rooms in the evening turning lights on for reasons I did not examine too closely.
That habit passed. The house has been, for the last five of those seven years, a place I sleep in and leave from, and I have not, on most nights, minded.
Tonight I mind.
The team flight from New York landed at Logan at eleven-fifteen.
The game was a loss, and it was a loss the way that Game 5 losses in a series this close always are — the game we gave away.
The kind the tape room will show us tomorrow morning in specific, unhelpful detail.
The kind my assistant coaches are, right now, already halfway through dissecting on the flight home in the seats behind mine, because that is the job, and the job does not stop because I need twenty minutes of silence on a Tuesday night.
I drove home from Logan in the franchise SUV with the radio off.
The street is empty at half past midnight. Inside, the front hall. The stairs. The study I will not be using tonight. The kitchen at the back with the island and the garden window Cara was still describing the tile for when she went into the hospital for the last time.
I do not, most nights, notice the tile but tonight for some reason, I do.
I make a cup of tea I do not want and stand at the island with it until it is cold.
Upstairs, Indie's bedroom is the way it has been since she moved out; the same narrow bed, the same desk under the window, the framed photographs on the wall she left when she bought better frames for the Beacon Hill apartment.
She was twenty, when she left. I did not, the morning I carried the last box down, go back into the room and close the door.
I left it open the way she had left it, and it has been open since, and I have, for seven years, glanced at it every time I pass and felt something I have not had a good word for.
I carry my cold tea to the foot of the stairs and look up at the open door.
I have, in twenty-six years of fatherhood, done all that I could.
I did not miss her school plays. I did not skip the hospital stays.
I did not, when Cara died and left me alone with a nineteen-year-old who had also just lost her mother, choose the job over my child.
I know fathers who chose the job. I know what their kids look like at twenty-six.
Indie does not look like that. I have been, on the evidence, a present and trustworthy man.
And then I was not.
The distinction that matters to me is not that I did not know who Greer was.
The distinction the careful, reasonable man I have been for seven years wants to make is: I did not set out to hurt her.
That is true. It is not, standing at the foot of the stairs at half past midnight in the kitchen light, very useful.
Indie is not speaking to me because of what I did.
That gap is where I am standing tonight, and no version of the last six weeks of reckoning makes it smaller.
I chose Greer. I would choose her again. The two things are both true and they do not cancel each other out.
The tea is cold. I pour it down the sink.
What I find myself wanting, at half past midnight in this kitchen, is the thing I have been wanting intermittently for seven years, which is to ask Cara what she thinks.
This is not something I believe in, in any organized way — the idea that she is somewhere available to be asked things.
I did not ask her in the cemetery in November.
But the impulse is there regardless, the way bad habits are there, and tonight it has arrived with a specificity I do not usually allow it.
Cara liked Indie's friends. She had opinions about all of them, running tallies she kept updated on the walk home from Indie's school events, filed under useful and not yet useful, and we are not inviting her back.
Greer would not have been hard for her. Greer is warm and sharp and capable of sitting with silence, which were the three things Cara valued in a room above everything else.
She would have, I think, liked her very much.
What she would have thought of me is less clear.
The window over the sink faces the garden, which is dark and not yet April enough to have come back to itself.
The tile is pale green, the color Cara picked from a sample card she brought home the October before she was diagnosed, the October she spent in this kitchen with two contractors and a set of plans, redesigning the room for a life we were going to live in it.
She did not get the chance. I have lived in it for eleven years since, in the version she designed. The tile has been here the whole time.
I put my mug in the sink.
I have called Indie three times in the last six weeks.
Voicemail, all three. The messages I left were short, same as what I would have said if she had picked up.
I am not going to ask you to forgive what I cannot undo.
Whenever you're ready. I love you . It is not, as far as these things go, enough, but it is what I have that she needs to hear.
What I do instead is stand in the kitchen of the house she grew up in for a few more minutes, letting the specific silence of the place do whatever it is going to do with me tonight.
There is the creak of the third stair, the one Cara and I used to listen for when Indie was fifteen and thought she was subtle.
There is the pilot light on the stove, the same pilot light that has been here since the year Indie started high school.
There is the garden in the dark and the pale green tile and the cold island and the four floors of a house that has always been too large for one person.
The difference, tonight, from the seven years before it: at the end of this week, if I have done the thing I am going to do, Greer will know what I decided. And then the house will not be large for one person much longer.
That part I am sure of. The weight of it is not the part I am uncertain about.
The part I am uncertain about is whether Indie will be in the family section when the horn goes in Game 5.
I do not know the answer. She has, in twenty-six years, never made a decision about a person she loved before she was ready to make it, and she is not going to start tonight on my account. That quality she did not get from her mother. She got it from me.
The kitchen light is still on. The study is dark. The door to Indie's room at the top of the stairs is open, the way she left it, the way I have left it since.
I turn off the kitchen light and go up to bed.
The stair creaks on three.