LENA
SEVENTEEN
Opal’s presentation is on the water cycle. I don’t remember doing projects this complex when I was five, but times change, I guess.
This is the topic she has been assigned by Ms. Callahan, and it is, according to Opal, an excellent topic, because she already knows a lot about weather, and this will only make her know more.
She has been saying this for three days, along with spouting off random weather facts she’s been learning for the presentation.
We are now in the living room with poster board, colored markers, and a printed diagram of the hydrological cycle that Opal can’t pronounce but has annotated in red pen with her own observations.
Dario sits on the floor to help, but he’s lousy with tape.
Dario Spinelli, the doctor whom I have watched receive grown men with knife wounds with the bedside manner of someone doing paperwork, is sitting cross-legged on the living room floor next to my daughter while holding her note cards.
He’s been relegated to card duty since the tape nearly ended up in Opal’s hair.
He’s reading them back to her in a voice of such profound academic gravity that Opal is already starting to lose it.
“The water cycle,” he intones, in the voice of a man delivering a papal address, “also known as the hydrological cycle, is the continuous movement of water—” He pauses for effect.
“Within Earth and its atmosphere.” He lowers the card and regards her over an invisible pair of spectacles.
“Miss Swan. Please define precipitation.”
Opal, who has been holding it together admirably for about eight seconds, collapses into laughter so complete that she has to put her head on her knees. She laughs the way she does everything—with her whole body, full volume.
He waits. He maintains the professor expression with perfect seriousness, which only makes her laugh harder, which I can tell he knows. It’s why he’s doing it.
I’m on the couch, reading through the logistics of my new job’s onboarding materials in theory.
I’m not reading them. I’m watching my daughter and this man on my living room floor, and I’m feeling something so large and so warm and so complicated that I don’t have a proper container for it. I just feel it.
What catches me off guard is not the silliness itself—I’ve seen him be gentle with her before. Also patient and kind and attentive in the way that matters.
What catches me off guard is how genuine it is. There’s no fakery in it. He’s not doing it because it’s what you do with children, not executing a protocol for appropriate adult-to-child interaction. He has dozens of protocols, ways he fakes humanity to the rest of the world. This isn’t that.
He thinks Opal is funny. He’s delighting in her. It comes off him the way warmth comes off sunlight, just there, available to whoever is standing in it.
He loves her. I don’t know when that happened. I don’t know exactly when I knew it. But sitting here watching him hold her note cards and wait for her to collect herself, I know it with complete certainty.
Opal finally gets herself together enough to attempt precipitation. “Rain!”
“Aye, that’s one kind of precipitation. Name another.”
“Snow!”
“Very good. Now, Miss Swan, name one more, and you might attain the cookie of infinite wisdom.”
She giggles. “Hail!” Then she turns to me. “I didn’t say the bad word, Mama.”
“I know, baby.”
He shifts out of the professor voice and into something more genuine and direct. “Excellent work. Now for the evaporation round…” He knows what parts she has down cold and what parts are shakier, and he steers her toward the shakier parts without making her feel tested. He’s a good coach.
He’s better at this than he would ever admit to being.
They go through the whole cycle twice. The second time, she does it in a normal voice with only minimal prompting. When she gets through condensation without needing help, he gives a single, approving nod and says, “You have this,” in the flat, certain tone he uses for facts.
Opal sits up straighter. “One more time?”
“You don’t need it. You know it. Go to sleep so you’re sharp tomorrow.”
Opal regards him for a moment—the weighing look she does, the one that takes a full three seconds—and then, “You’re right. I have it.” She gathers her note cards. She lines up her colored markers in color-spectrum order, her nightly ritual, orange to violet, very serious.
“Goodnight, Mama,” she says as she kisses my cheek. Without notice, she also kisses Dario on the cheek before she goes.
He goes completely still. He has the same response every time she does this—this brief, total stillness, like a man who has been surprised by something and is taking a moment to verify that it happened.
Then it passes, and he nods once, formally, as though they have concluded a meeting. “Goodnight, Opal.”
She disappears down the hall. I look at him. He looks at his wineglass.
By the time Opal is in bed, the apartment settles into the particular quiet of a late weeknight in late spring. Dario pours two glasses on the kitchen counter and carries them out to the balcony without asking, which I’ve learned is his version of an invitation, and I follow.
The city spreads out below us the way it does at this hour—all lit up and indifferent, the low continuous hum of a city going about its evening.
Somewhere below us, a car horn, then silence.
The air still carries the warmth of the afternoon, but has a slight edge to it that says night is settling in.
I sit in one of the balcony chairs, tuck my feet up under me, hold my glass, and look at the fading skyline.
A sick twist settles in my body. It’s not just my gut—it’s the whole thing.
I can’t stop thinking about tonight, and how there will probably never be another like it.
As much as I love seeing the two of them goof around and study together, I hate the thought of never seeing that again.
He’s quietly staring over the skyline too.
I wonder if he’s thinking the same thing.
“Three months was never going to be enough, was it?”
It comes out without inflection because it isn’t really a question. I’ve known it for a while. I’ve been carrying it around in the pocket of every decision I’ve made in the past month, this small, nonnegotiable fact. Three months was never going to be enough.
Not from the moment Opal called him our person over cereal. Not from the first time he read her a medical textbook in Latin. Not from the night I walked into his room, not because of any arrangement but simply because I wanted to.
He doesn’t answer immediately. Dario has never answered immediately when a real answer is required, and I’ve stopped expecting him to. I wait.
“No.”
Just that. No. One syllable, flat and certain. The word sits between us in the warm night air, and neither of us moves to pick it up or put it back down.
After a moment, he says, “Text Ed. Tonight. Let’s finish strong.”
I know what he means. I’ve been sitting on Ed’s number since Dario handed me the envelope and the instructions.
The cash, wrapped the way Dario specified, to be handed over at a place Dario specified, at a time that Dario worked out without explaining how he worked it out.
Every detail calibrated to make it look like it came from me—from a side job, a loan, my mother—and not from him.
I take out my phone. I sit with it for a moment.
“I’m still not sure.” Not about doing it—I trust his read on this, I trust his competence in this, the way I’ve trusted few things in my life. What I’m not sure about is what comes after.
Whether Ed takes the money and walks away, or takes the money and decides there’s more available, or something in the transaction—some detail I can’t see—somehow points back to Dario. And if it points back to Dario, what does Ed do with that?
But I take a leap of faith anyway. I text Ed. I keep it brief, the way Dario told me to. Just the logistics.
I set the phone face down on the arm of my chair. Dario watches the city. I reach over and find his hand with mine, feeling for his fingers in the dark until they’re interlaced with mine, and he lets me—doesn’t make a thing of it, doesn’t pull back or lean in, just lets me hold on.
“It’ll be okay, baby.” His voice is quiet, but it’s the same quality it has when he’s telling me something he knows, not something he hopes. “I can handle Ed.”
I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, once.
I believe him. I do believe him. But believing someone doesn’t mean you stop being afraid for them, and the fear is still there, a low-grade heat underneath everything, and I don’t let him see it because I don’t want it to be one more thing he has to manage.
He manages enough in the world. The man keeps other people alive all the time. I’m sure he can do the same for himself.
So I hold his hand in the dark and look at the city and let the evening be what it is, which is the two of us on a balcony, absorbing the relative quiet.
I just wish I knew what comes next.