Chapter 4 #2
“To my house. A hundred dollars’ worth of peonies with a card that said ‘I don’t know where you are but I’m looking.’ I gave them to the fish market. Linda put them on the counter. They look nice.”
I should have felt something. Guilt, maybe, for the systems I’d left running without an operator.
Or satisfaction, for watching him scramble.
What I felt was neither. I felt the specific neutrality of a woman hearing weather reports from a city she no longer lives in.
It was happening to him. It wasn’t happening to me.
The distance was new and clean and I held onto it the way you hold a bandage against a wound — not because it’s comfortable but because the alternative is worse.
I sat on the bed and looked at the harbor through the window and felt, with a clarity that was new and sharp and painful, the shape of what I’d built in Boston and what it had cost me.
The foundation gala had no run-of-show because I was the run-of-show.
The board couldn’t find the insurance certificates because I’d filed them in a system only I understood.
The donors’ event was falling apart because the donors’ event had always been mine — every call, every reservation, every small accommodation that kept the machine running — and the machine had no manual because I’d never written one. I was the manual.
He was discovering, for the first time in six years, that his empire had an engine and the engine had a name and the name was the woman he’d said he wasn’t sure about, and the engine had left.
That night I lay in the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the harbor — the clank of the rigging, the lap of the tide, the occasional groan of a hull against the dock.
The sounds were nothing like Boston. No sirens, no traffic, no hum of a furnace system I’d had serviced twice a year.
Just the water and the wind and the house settling on its old foundations, and inside me the baby adding cells in the dark.
I thought about the Spencer gala. I’d been planning it since October — the run-of-show was forty pages, every minute accounted for, every contingency mapped.
The caterer, the AV team, the florist, the valet service, the gift bags I’d assembled myself because the fulfillment company had botched them last year.
Forty pages of invisible work, stored in my head and on a laptop that was still in the townhouse study.
Without me, the gala was a venue reservation and a guest list. Without me, it was a room full of rich people with no one to tell them where to sit.
Good, I thought. Let it burn. Let every carefully built system I’d maintained for six years fall apart one piece at a time, and let him stand in the wreckage and look around and notice, finally, who’d been holding it up.
I went back to the studio the next afternoon and painted the harbor again. The fourth attempt. It was still bad — the water was wrong, the light was wrong, the composition was off — but the brushstrokes were getting stronger. More certain. The hand was remembering. The eye was waking up.
The painting wasn’t good. But I could see what it wanted to be, the way I used to see what a canvas wanted to be before the brush touched it, that flash of the whole composition arriving in the mind like a key turning.
I hadn’t had that flash in six years. It arrived in the middle of a bad painting of a harbor in Rockport on a cold afternoon while the baby grew inside me and a man in Boston sent flowers to a woman who’d already given them to the fish market, and it was small and quiet and mine, and I held onto it the way you hold onto a thing that might disappear if you look at it too hard.
The morning sickness arrived that week. Not the dramatic kind — not the kind that sends you running to the bathroom in the middle of a conversation, which would have been inconvenient in the old life and was simply part of the rhythm in this one.
It was a low nausea that lived in the background, a constant queasy presence like seasickness on dry land.
I ate crackers before getting out of bed.
Andie left ginger tea in a thermos outside my door each morning, which was the most maternal thing she’d ever done and which she would have denied if I’d pointed it out.
The baby at ten weeks — ten weeks now, time moving — was the size of a strawberry.
I’d looked it up on the library’s shared computer because my phone was still in the drawer and because looking things up on a public library computer felt like the kind of thing a person does when they’re building a life from scratch.
Fingerprints were forming. The spine was visible on ultrasound.
The heart was fully divided into four chambers, doing its work without instruction.
The baby was building itself the way I was building myself: one piece at a time, in the dark, without anyone’s permission.
I cleaned the brush. I put the painting on the drying rack next to the other three failures, and the rack looked like a timeline — the first one tentative and washed out, each subsequent one a little bolder, a little more willing to be wrong. None of them were good. All of them were mine.
I walked home through the February dark with paint on my hands — acrylic, blue-gray, dried into the creases of my knuckles and under my nails the way it used to be at RISD when I’d paint through the night and show up to morning critique with color on my skin like a visible pulse.
The first time paint had been on my hands in six years.
The cold air off the harbor stung my cheeks and the boats rocked in the tide and the lights in the co-op went off behind me and I thought: this is the beginning.
Not the beginning of something easy. The beginning of something honest. A nine-weeks-pregnant woman with a bad painting and a drawer full of unanswered texts and a view of the harbor and the first faint return of the thing she’d given up for a man who’d taken it and never known its name.
I went inside. I ate the soup Andie had left on the stove — potato and leek, the kind she made in bulk on Sundays and portioned into jars that lined the fridge like soldiers.
I washed the bowl. I stood at the kitchen window and watched the harbor lights reflect on the black water, each one a small trembling point, and thought about how light on water was the first thing I’d ever learned to paint and the last thing I’d tried to paint today and how the distance between those two facts was the distance between the girl at RISD and the woman in this kitchen.
I put my hand on my stomach and felt nothing, because at ten weeks there was nothing to feel, but I held my hand there anyway in the warm kitchen with the wood stove ticking and the harbor outside the window, and for the first time in ten days I thought about what came next without the word “Beckett” in it.