8. Lori
Lori
I lie in the dark in a bed that isn't mine, in a house that isn't mine. The baby, who also isn’t technically mine, chooses tonight, of all nights, to sleep through the night.
There is a pamphlet on the fridge that calls that a milestone.
Green marker. Milestone column. My name in the caregiver slot because the receptionist had a clipboard and I am not going to stand there in the fluorescent lights of a pediatrician's office explaining what has become of my life.
I check my phone again. Still no words from Ella.
Ella, just tell me you're alive.
That is the last voicemail I send her. Nothing comes back. Somewhere between the third voicemail and the eighth, I stop being the concerned sister and become the desperate one. I can hear the shift in my own voice.
For three weeks, I have a baby to hold. A bottle to warm. A 4:15 a.m. alarm clock that doesn't care about my feelings. You don't think about the rest of it when there's a baby who needs you right now, in this kitchen, in the dark.
Tonight, Junie sleeps. I have nothing in my hands and nothing to distract my thoughts with. And that bothers me more than the fussiness and not sleeping.
So I sit up. There's a flannel hanging behind the bedroom door, Carson's. I pull it on and step into the hall in my socks.
Cadie's door has the glitter sign. CADIE'S ROOM (NO BOYS).
Carson's door at the end of the hall stands closed. I don’t bother to check if he is awake or not. Tonight, I am not in the mood for shirtless encounters.
I don't turn on a light. The screen door is the loud one, so I lift it past the catch and ease it open, and the December chill finds my ankles.
The third board squeaks under my heel, but the house stays asleep.
I lower myself onto the swing. The chains creak.
I pull my knees up and put my forehead on them.
And it all arrives at once.
Ryan first, because Ryan starts the avalanche of this mess that is my life.
The apartment I come home to in August with the duffel bag gone and the savings gone.
Twelve thousand four hundred and sixty dollars that I built one tip jar at a time.
The sheriff's office in November, signing my name twice on a form about a man who maybe isn't even named Ryan.
Two years of my life, and I don't even get the dignity of knowing the real name of the man who took my money.
Then Ella, and the silence that has its own weight by now.
Countless voicemails I left for her. Her baby in a basket, on a porch the night I was supposed to be on a date, a note in handwriting I'd know anywhere.
My sister chose to leave her baby on my doorstep over calling me, and I still don't know if that says more about her or more about me.
Then Junie. Seven weeks old, give or take. Sleeping in a stranger's house. She drops her bottle and looks at me, and what I see in her face isn't accusation but trust, and somehow that is worse. She trusts me. She doesn't know enough not to.
Then Carson. That's the one I can't hold still long enough to look at.
He is the quiet under all of it. He is the roof I don't know I'm standing under until I notice I've stopped getting rained on.
In three weeks, he becomes what is keeping the rest of it from caving in, and I don't have a single safe place to put that down.
I won't even let myself get to the rest of it. The breadth of him in a doorway. The dark of his eyes when the joking stops. The want that sits low in me since the day he took my picture in the diner and called me Dream Girl. But I can’t go there.
Not when I have no money and a borrowed bed and a baby who isn't mine.
You don't reach for a good thing with empty hands.
You don't hand someone your whole sinking weight and call it love.
So I keep him at arm's length, where I keep everyone, and I tell myself it's for him.
And I cry.
Not the kind that makes noise. The kind I always do, which is silent, with my hands knotted in the flannel.
My mom teaches me and Ella this — when I am nine and Ella is twelve — without ever once saying so.
My breath fogs and dies and fogs again, and the pasture past the live oak goes on doing nothing.
Then the screen door opens.
I don't look up. I don’t want to show him my face right now.
The swing dips beside me. The smell of soap and the wet at the back of his neck tell me he showers after he gets in. Which means he's been up.
Part of me wants him to leave so I can fall apart alone, the way I always fall apart. The other part wants him to stay more than I want air.
He doesn't put his arm around me. He doesn't tell me it's going to be okay, and I am so grateful I could scream, because if he says those words I have to get up and walk inside and never look at him again.
He doesn't ask what's wrong, which is the question my whole life has been built to answer with nothing.
Since he doesn't ask, I don't have to lie.
His breath fogs and meets mine and dies between us. The porch light throws one warm square onto the boards. I notice he turns it on.
There are small sounds coming out of me now, and my cheeks are wet.
He shifts the smallest inch, his shoulder finding mine through the flannel, and stays. That's all. The warmth of him comes through two layers, steady and unhurried, choosing not to push.
He doesn't try to fix me. He just stays.
I don't know how long it goes on this way. The crying levels off, comes back, levels off. He doesn't move. He doesn't shiver, though he has to be freezing. The only thing I hold onto is his ribs rising against my arm and the fact that he hasn't said a word.
When he finally speaks, his voice is low enough not to wake the house.
"You don't have to carry this by yourself," he says.
Once. He doesn't explain it. He doesn't make it about him.
And the script I run my whole life — they leave you, everyone does — no longer applies now. Just like that.
I lift my head, turning my face toward his neck. I want the warm strip of him where his collar ends and the skin starts.
His hand comes up and finds the back of my head before I'm all the way upright.
Big and warm, rough at the heel of the palm, the leather ring cool behind my ear. His fingers go into my hair, and he gathers a handful at the nape and holds. He doesn't pull me in. He doesn't push me away. He just holds me.
My face goes into his shoulder, and the dam gives.
I cry properly for the first time since August. I let my whole weight come down against his chest, and he takes it, along with the tears.
His thumb moves once behind my ear. He doesn't shush me and he doesn't pat and he doesn't say anything at all.
And here is the thing that scares me worse than the twenty-six dollars in my account, worse than Ryan, worse than Ella's silence: he watches me come apart, all the way down to the studs, and he isn't looking away.
There is no brave version of me left. No dry joke.
He sees the whole mess. And he stays. Nobody ever stays for the mess, because nobody is ever allowed to be this close.
I cry myself out. The sound thins to quiet, and I stay with my forehead against his throat.
His pulse goes hard. I notice it once the crying is done and I only breathe him in. His throat is right there. If I tilt my chin up, my mouth is on his pulse. I can feel the heat of it against my lips without touching, and my whole body tightens.
I hold myself in place. His hand is still in my hair, fingers spread at the base of my skull, and if I turn a quarter inch his palm slides along my jaw.
I want him to. I want it the way I want water at the end of a double shift. The wanting isn't loud. It is huge and quiet and exact, and the only thing holding it back is the two of us, second by second, deciding it doesn't get to.
He doesn't lean down or tip my chin up. He can put his mouth on my forehead and I let him put it anywhere after that.
The screen door bumps in the wind. The barn light flickers and steadies.
I feel him swallow against my forehead. His chest rises against my cheek and falls, slower than mine, bigger. I press my thighs together and hold still.
I shift the smallest fraction and his hand closes once at the back of my head.
Just the way you hold onto something you're afraid to drop.
The tightening runs warm down the back of my neck and I close my eyes.
Then he eases it, one finger at a time, until he's back where he was, and the eased grip says everything a kiss would have.
He chooses my sleep. He chooses the morning I have to face, Junie at 5 a.m., Cadie at 6:30 a.m., the diner shift later, over the thing we both want at 3 a.m. on a porch in December.
His thumb strokes once more behind my ear, and I feel it in my chest and the small of my back and behind my knees. We stay until the cold isn't something a body can argue with.
He moves away from me. His hand slides out of my hair a strand at a time, and the cold finds the back of my neck where his palm was.
"You need to be inside," he says. His voice is like sandpaper. "Lori."
Not a question or a command. My name is there, used like a brake.
We both stand up. He waits while I pull myself together, and holds the screen for me.
I go past him at the door. He is close enough that the heat of him runs along my whole side, and he stays still, braced and deliberate.
He stays in the kitchen. I go down the hall, past Cadie's glitter sign, past the bathroom where my toothbrush lives in the holder for nine days now, and I close the guest room door behind me.
I sit on the bed, pull the quilt to cover my legs. I shake, and it isn't from the cold of the night. I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
I want men before. But none of those is like this.
This is the one where the man holds the back of my head for an hour at 3 a.m., watches me fall apart with nothing left to hide behind, and doesn't take a single thing he isn't given.
That's what gets to me. Not the wanting. The being seen.
And he chooses to stay anyway.
I pull my knees up under the quilt. Still wear his flannel. I press my forehead to my knees the way I did on the porch, and I say it under my breath, very quietly, like a hand on a door to my heart that I'm holding shut.
Not yet.
Not yet.
Not yet.