Elizabeth #2
I sat at that table and could not find the angle to make it work, and not finding one was a kind of free fall I had no practice at, because I had never once let myself be the person without the answer.
I have always had the answer. That was the whole deal.
I hand out the answers and the coffee and the jokes and I do not, ever, sit at a table with my hands shaking and nothing in them—and I could feel the whole thing coming up my throat now like water topping a dam, faster than I could think, and there was a single clear thought under the rising panic and it was not here, not in this house, not where she’ll hear.
I made it outside before I came apart. That much, at least, I managed—and only just.
I got my coat off the hook and my feet into the boots by the door, fingers clumsy on the zipper, my breath sawing now, and went out into the rain and the dark, down off our little porch and out between the pumpkin rows, far enough from the house that the sound of me losing it wouldn’t reach an upstairs window—because the walls in our little house are thin, and my mother was up there trying to sleep off a headache she’d half earned worrying about everything.
I don’t cry in front of people. This is a policy, not an accident. People come to me to feel better—that’s who I am. So I lose it out here, when I lose it at all, alone, in the rain, between the rows, where the only witnesses are several hundred pumpkins, and they have seen worse from this family.
The pumpkins didn’t say anything. They sat in the dark in their cold dignity while I stood among them with my hands over my face and finally, quietly, came apart—over the farm, over how my grandmother looked so small and frail in her hospital bed, over the bone-deep terror that I was going to be the Starling who failed, who let a hundred years slip through her hands during her turn running the festival, who promised an old woman and then couldn’t deliver—and the rain soaked through my coat and I let it, because being cold and wet was at least a feeling I could explain.
I didn’t hear the truck. That’s how far gone I was.
What I heard was a door closing, soft, and then boots on the lane taking their time, and then nothing, and I spun around with my heart going and my face a disaster, and Matt Hartford was standing at the edge of the pumpkin patch in the rain with his collar turned up and a folder in one hand going soft at the corners.
He had stopped a respectful ten feet off, and he was just looking at me, and his face—
His face—no alarm in it, no scrambling to get away, none of the oh no, what do I do that sends most people lunging for a paper towel or a platitude. He looked at me getting rained on, and took in the whole picture, and I watched him understand it and decide not to say a single word about it.
“I came to drop off the talent-round papers you gave me,” he said, finally, quietly, lifting the soggy folder a half-inch. “Saw the light. Saw you come outside.” He waited a beat before continuing. “I’ll go, if you want me to go.”
Every other person in my life, if they’d found me out here, would have rushed me, hugged me, asked what’s wrong, what happened, what can I do—and I would have had to manage them, had to assemble a face and a joke and a no really, I’m fine, and walk them back from my ledge by the hand, because that’s what happens when you let people see you fall.
The crying turns into one more party you’re hosting.
Matt just stood in the rain and offered to leave.
“Don’t,” I said. It came out cracked. “Go. Don’t go. I mean—” The joke wasn’t there. I reached for it, and the shelf was empty, swept clean. “I don’t actually want to be alone out here. I just didn’t want anybody to see.”
He nodded, like that made complete sense, like it was the most reasonable distinction in the world, the wanting-company and the not-wanting-witnesses, and maybe to him it was.
And then he didn’t rush, and he didn’t fuss, and he didn’t ask me what was wrong.
He walked over, looked at the wet ground between two rows of pumpkins, and he lowered himself down and sat in it.
In the mud. In the cold, in the dark, in the rain, he sat down on the wet ground like a man settling in, and he looked out at the black fields the same way I look at them, and he didn’t say anything at all.
So I sat down next to him. Because what else do you do?
The ground was freezing and soaked and immediately horrible, and I did not care.
We sat there in the rain between the rows, not touching, a careful few inches apart, and we looked out at the dark shapes of the corn maze and the hills, and somewhere down by the hives an owl asked its one question over and over, and Matt Hartford didn’t try to fix any of it.
He didn’t tell me it would be okay. He didn’t ask what was wrong.
He didn’t reach for me. He just sat in the cold mud beside me and let me be a person who was not, at that moment, fine, and stayed.
It cracked me open almost worse than my worry about the farm did.
“The math doesn’t work,” I said, eventually, to the dark.
I don’t know why I said it. I never say it.
“The festival. I ran it three ways. Even the good way doesn’t—” My voice went, and I let it go, and didn’t apologize for it, which was new.
“I promised her. I sat by her bed, and I promised her, and I don’t know if I can do it, and I can’t tell her that, because she’s supposed to be resting and not worrying, so I just—” I gestured at the rain, the rows, my soaked and ridiculous self.
“I come out here and tell the pumpkins.”
He was quiet a moment. The rain ran off the ends of his hair.
“My sister used to think I never slept,” he said.
Not looking at me. Looking out at the dark, offering it sideways, the way you hand something to a person who can’t take it face-on.
“When she was small. Our parents were—not around, mostly, in the ways that count. So I did—a lot. Checked the doors. Sat up nights with her when she couldn’t sleep.
She thought I just didn’t need a lot of sleep, like it was how I was built, and I let her think that, because the alternative was telling my little sister that one of us had to stay awake and it was going to be me. ”
He turned his head then, and looked at me through the rain, and his eyes were steady and dark and saw straight through the floor of me to what I keep underneath.
“I know what it is, Elizabeth. To be the one who stays awake. To decide everybody else gets to sleep because you’ll handle it. I know exactly what that is.”
I sat there in the mud with my throat closed and understood that Becca had been right, in the Stop & Go.
We were the same kind of broken. He’d just shown me his to prove he could read mine, laid it down in the mud between us like a man showing his hands to say—see, empty, I’m not going to manage you either.
I didn’t make a joke. After a lifetime of careful deflection, that surprised me. I sat in a freezing pumpkin patch in the rain next to Matt Hartford, and I did not deflect or try to hide. I just let myself be seen, all the way down, for the first time in longer than I could remember.
Our hands were on the cold ground between us.
Close. Not touching. An inch, maybe less, his and mine, side by side in the wet earth, and I looked down at that inch and felt it humming, the whole of me narrowed down to the small dark distance between his hand and mine, and I thought about closing it, and I thought he was thinking about closing it too, but neither of us did, because some inches you don’t close in the rain when one of you has been crying. Some inches you just let sit there.
“It’s going to wreck your coat,” I said, eventually. My voice was almost steady. “Sitting in the mud.”
“Coat’s seen worse.”
“It really hasn’t. It’s a very nice coat.”
And there it was, the joke. It was weak, and it came out soft and late, and Matt huffed a low breath that might have been a laugh, and didn’t move his hand, and didn’t move away, and we sat in the cold a while longer, not fixing anything, the inch between us holding, until I was steady enough to stand.
He told me goodbye, and he’d talk to me soon.
I watched him leave. And the whole time, under the terror and the cold, something else had quietly moved into me and taken a seat and refused to leave, and it took me until I was back inside, peeling off the soaked coat with my heart still going, to put a name to it.
I’d let him stay.
That was the tell. Mine. I’d been so afraid of what it was, and it turned out to be simple. I’d let him stay, and I’d wanted him to.
I was, I realized, standing in my dark kitchen dripping on the floor, in very serious trouble.
And for the first time, I wasn’t entirely sorry about it.