9. Tessa
TESSA
Afull week early, and the bedroom floor looks like a gear store exploded.
I know it’s ridiculous. The trip is seven days out and I’ve got both duffels open on the floor and everything we own spread around them in categories, because packing early is the closest thing I have to a religion.
Cal packs the night before, in nine minutes, by feel, like an animal. I lay things out in zones and adjust them all week like a general moving armies on a map. We are who we are. It works.
Music’s on—the upbeat playlist, the one he calls my “chore rave”—and I’m doing the little side-to-side dance while I work because nobody’s home to see it, singing the wrong words to the chorus with total confidence.
Hiking boots, mine, still creased from the store. I crack the soles back and forth a few times like the guy at the store said to, then do it a few more because it’s satisfying. Wool socks. The good beanie.
The sundress goes in flat, tissue paper over it, for the one nice dinner we’re doing at the lodge on his actual birthday—I found it on a sale rack two towns over, dark green, and when I tried it on I did that thing where you look at yourself in the fitting-room mirror and think, well, he’s going to have a heart attack, and bought it before I could check the price twice.
Sunscreen. Bug stuff. Bandaids, because one of us always needs bandaids and it’s always him. The paperback I’ve been pretending I’m going to finish for two months—it’s coming. It’s aspirational luggage. Every trip needs some.
His side of the duffel is my favorite part, honestly.
I fold his climbing shirts the way he never does—he balls them, animal-style, and then complains they’re wrinkled like the shirts did it—and I know which three he’ll want without asking: the gray one, the other gray one, and the salmon one he claims is “technically orange” and gets genuinely defensive about.
His sock situation: eleven hiking socks, no two matching, and I gave up on that in year one. Chaos socks. Fine. Live your life.
I know his sizes better than he does. That’s not a figure of speech—last month he tried to buy himself jeans a full size too big because he doesn’t pay attention, and I swapped them at the register while he was staring at a display of knives like a raccoon at a wind chime.
He wore them for a week before he said, “these fit good,” and I said, “wild how that happened.”
I love this. That’s the embarrassing truth of it, and the music’s loud and nobody’s home, so I can just stand here in my zones and admit it: I love knowing a man down to his sock chaos. I love the part that’s supposed to be the boring part.
Everybody talks about the falling—and the falling was great, the falling was fireworks—but the falling’s easy. Anyone can fall.
This is the part I never got to with anybody else, the part where you just know things. Where his shirts smell like him even clean, and I know which gray one is the good gray one, and there’s a man out there at a shop right now wearing jeans I secretly bought in the correct size.
I text my sister a string of cabin photos from the listing—the stone fireplace, the porch, the mountain sitting in the big window like it’s framed art.
THREE DAYS. NO CELL SIGNAL. PRAY FOR HIM, I type.
pray for YOU, she sends back. last time you were offline for 3 days you reorganized that man’s entire garage.
Fair. That happened. He still can’t find the zip ties and it’s been eight months.
Then, a second later: this is so good tess. you sound like you again.
I stand there holding that one a second, thumb hovering, the music still bouncing along without me.
You sound like you again. Again, meaning: there was a stretch where I didn’t. Meaning she heard something in my texts these last few weeks, some flatness I thought I was keeping out of them, and she never said a word until she could say it as a compliment.
My chest goes tight, one slow squeeze, and I look at the duffels and the zones and the tissue-papered dress like a woman doing a spot-check on her own happiness.
I could ask her. What did I sound like before? She’d tell me. She’d be sweet about it and dead accurate, which is the worst combination.
I don’t ask. I type back a heart and put the phone face-down on the dresser, and I turn the music up one notch, and I go back to zones.
The trip is going to fix the thing I’m not asking about. That’s the whole point of the trip, whether or not I let myself say so.
Twenty minutes on the book decision. The paperback plus which backup—because obviously the aspirational paperback needs a realistic understudy—and it comes down to the thriller with the dog on the cover versus my comfort reread, and I sit cross-legged on the floor holding both like the fate of the weekend hangs on it.
Thriller: new, dog might die, risky. Comfort reread: guaranteed, but I move my lips along with the good parts and Cal narrates over my shoulder in a fake accent until I hit him.
I weigh them. Physically, like a scale. It feels good. It feels like the biggest problem in my life, this decision, right here, and for a minute I let it be exactly that.
Both books go in. Executive decision. Zones adjust.
Last thing: chargers.
Cal’s phone charger lives in his gym bag, because his gym bag is his auxiliary brain—wallet overflow, protein bar wrappers, the good chalk, a multi-tool I bought him that he claims he doesn’t use and absolutely uses.
If I don’t extract the charger now, it rides to the mountains inside that bag or it doesn’t come at all, and then he’s rationing his phone battery all weekend like a doomsday guy, turning it off between photos, narrating the percentage at me.
The bag’s slumped by the closet where it always lands. I crouch, go into the side pocket, the zip one where the charger lives—and my fingers find the cable, and something else. Something also cable-shaped, underneath.
I pull out both.
Two chargers.
His, the white one with the fray at the neck he refuses to replace because “it still works,” held together with a sad twist of electrical tape. That one I know like I know his handwriting.
And a second one. Black. Braided cord, different brand, one of the nice ones. Coiled tight and neat—and that’s the detail my eyes won’t move off of, crouched there on the bedroom floor with the music still going.
Coiled. Nobody coils a cable they use. His is a bird’s nest on the best day of its life. You coil a cable that lives somewhere. You coil a cable that gets put away, in its spot, by somebody who keeps it there.
Tucked in the zip pocket underneath his, riding along quiet, like it’s had the address a while.
The music’s still bouncing. Upbeat. Ridiculous now, like a phone ringing at a funeral.
My mouth’s gone dry. That happens first, before any thought does—dry mouth, and my heartbeat showing up places it doesn’t belong, my throat, my ears, the backs of my knees where I’m crouched.
I sit back on my heels in the middle of my zones, his shirts folded soft in the duffel behind me, the tissue paper over the green dress, all of it suddenly looking down at me like a jury.
I turn the black charger over in my hands. Once. Slow. Like it might have a name written on it.
The braid of the cord catches on the dry pads of my fingers, and I can hear my own breathing over the music now, shallow little sips, and somewhere in the house the furnace kicks on and I flinch at it like a guilty person.
Me. Flinching. In my own bedroom, holding a phone charger.
It doesn’t have a name on it. It’s a charger. People end up with spare chargers. They multiply in drawers like hangers, everybody knows that, there’s probably three orphans in this house I couldn’t account for right now.
It’s nothing. It’s the—I do the count before I can stop myself, cold all the way down—the fifth nothing.
The name on his phone. The voice through the garage door.
The receipt in the junk drawer, twenty feet from where I’m crouched, under the takeout menus, still not thrown away.
The dark screen at the kitchen window at 2 a.m. And now a strange charger coiled neat in the bottom of his gym bag like a toothbrush in someone else’s cup.
Five nothings. At what number do nothings become a something? Nobody ever gives you the number.
And the first thought that goes through my head—before I can stop it, stupid, unfair, I take it back the second I think it, I actually shake my head like I can rattle it out—is whose is this.