Chapter 7 #2
The night after that he asked what the girl’s name was, and Scarlett told him. And the night after that he asked, “Did Destiny ever make it to the buoy?”
Scarlett turned her back to him and looked out the kitchen window at the dark bay until she was sure her voice would work.
“Yes,” she said. “She swam all the way out. She screamed when she touched it. The whole beach screamed.”
Behind her, quietly, Ryan laughed. Not at her. The way a person laughs when something is good and they are glad to have heard it.
“Of course she did,” he said. “She had you.”
* * *
On the ninth day she decided to beat the shower.
She was tired of washing her hair in the bath with a plastic cup like a child. She was tired of the handheld hose and the careful little sprays. She had been standing in water her whole life. She was not going to let Alexis Burke take this from her too.
She turned the water on hot. She put the handheld sprayer back up in its bracket, pointed straight down, so the stream would come over her head the way a real shower did. She stepped in.
She lasted four seconds.
The water hit her face, and she was in the black, and she was gone. She came to herself on the bath mat on her hands and knees with the shower still roaring behind the glass, choking on air.
She stayed there a long time.
Then she got up. She pulled on her robe. She went to the bedroom door and opened it and looked down the stairs, and Ryan was in the hall at the bottom, halfway to the kitchen, frozen, looking up. He had heard.
“Come up,” Scarlett said. Her voice was raw. “Please.”
He came up. He stopped at the line on the top step, the way he always did.
“I need you to sit in the bathroom,” she said. “On the floor. Facing the wall. Don’t look at me. Don’t turn around. I just—I need someone in there. And I need you to talk.”
“About what?”
“I don’t care. Anything.”
* * *
He sat on the tile floor with his back to the glass shower and his face to the wall.
Scarlett let the robe fall. She stepped in behind the glass. The water was still running hot. The steam had fogged up everything. She stood just outside the stream with her whole body shaking.
“Okay,” she said. “Talk.”
So he talked.
He told her the Marlins had lost again. He told her that Troy had called to ask how she was and had said, in his whole long gruff speech, maybe fifteen words, and nine of them were tell her.
He told her about the terrible grilled cheese sandwich.
He told her about their first apartment, the one on the fifth floor with the broken elevator, and how he used to carry her up the stairs after late dinners and pretend he wasn’t dying.
“You were not a small woman,” he said to the wall. “You had those shoulders. I was pretty sure I was going to have a heart attack on the fourth floor every single time.”
Scarlett laughed. It came out of her in a surprised burst.
And while she was laughing, she stepped into the water.
It came down over her head. It ran over her face. Her breath went short and her chest seized, and she put one hand flat on the fogged glass and kept her eyes on the blurry shape of her husband sitting on the floor on the other side.
“Keep talking,” she gasped.
“The fifth floor,” he said, and his voice was steady, and she could tell he was making it steady on purpose. “Mrs. Sosa on four. The one with the parrot. Remember the parrot? The parrot that said hurry up every time we went past?”
“Hurry up,” Scarlett whispered, and she put her face up into the water, and she breathed, and she did not go into the black.
* * *
She washed her hair. All of it. Properly. With the water running through it.
And then, because the danger was over and her body didn’t know what to do with everything that was left in it, something else happened.
She became aware of him.
Not as a voice. As a man. As her husband, sitting on the floor six feet away, on the other side of a pane of fogged glass, while she stood naked in the hot water with her skin flushed and her hands in her hair.
The steam was thick and warm. His voice was low in it.
His voice in the steam was a sound she knew.
She knew it from years ago, from the first apartment, from early mornings in a tiny shower where there hadn’t been room for two people and they had never once cared.
Her body remembered before she could stop it.
It remembered his hands. Big and warm and slow.
It remembered his mouth on the back of her neck under the water.
It remembered the way he used to say her name against her skin like it was the only word he knew.
It remembered her own back against the cold tile and her hands in his wet hair and the sound he made, low in his chest, when she pulled him closer.
Heat went through her so fast and so hard that she had to put her hand on the wall.
She was furious. At him. At herself. At her body, which apparently didn’t care about two months of phone calls, or ten minutes, or a sky deck, or a salon couch.
Her body only knew that the man on the other side of that glass was hers, and it wanted him, right now, with a force that made her knees weak.
She shut off the water hard.
“You can go,” she said. Her voice came out rough. “Thank you. Go.”
He got up without turning around. He walked out with his eyes on the floor. He shut the bathroom door behind him gently.
Scarlett stood dripping in the fogged glass box with her forehead against the tile and hated him, and hated herself, and wanted him so badly she could barely breathe.
* * *
She had the dream again that night.
It was the hand this time. Just the hand. Flat on her back, warm through her dress, and a calm, calm face. She woke up with a sound like a sob stuck in her throat, and the room was not dark, because the thin white curtains let the dock lights in, and the landing light was on under the door.
She lay there shaking.
After a minute she got up and opened the door.
He was there, on the carpet, against the wall, with the couch pillow. He looked up at her. His eyes were tired and open. He had not been asleep.
“Come sit,” Scarlett said. “In here. On the floor. By the bed. Just for a while.”
He came in and sat down on the carpet with his back against the side of her bed. She got back under the covers. She lay on her side facing the edge of the mattress, facing the back of his head, the gray coming in at the crown that she had never noticed before.
Neither of them said anything. After a long time she heard his breathing change.
She thought about telling him to go. She meant to. She closed her eyes to think about it.
* * *
When she opened them, it was morning.
The sun was coming through the white curtains. She was lying on top of the covers, not under them. She was warm. There was something under her head that wasn’t her pillow.
It was his arm.
Ryan was lying on the bed beside her, on top of the covers too, in his T-shirt and sweatpants, fully dressed, asleep on his back. His arm was stretched out under her neck. Her face was against his shoulder. Her hand was on his chest. She could feel his heart under it, slow and steady.
She didn’t remember moving. She didn’t remember him moving. She didn’t remember deciding anything at all.
She lay still and looked at her own hand on her husband’s chest, rising and falling, and did not take it away.