Chapter 10
APRIL
The Day After the Fire
AFTER ICE CREAM THE FAMILY disperses, and Josie and I start dishes.
Mom and Dad take nightcaps out back, while Cameron follows Rachel, who walks around locating every single childhood photo of him.
Leo takes the kids up to bed. This time last night, he was saying he wants a divorce, and I was hurrying out of the kitchen distracted, the back burner still on.
For a second, I forgot that I burned down my house.
I suddenly realize how exhausted I am. My head has a dull ache, and my eyes sting.
With a sink full of suds in front of me, I look around this kitchen: the dark wood floors, the Tiffany chandelier, Dad’s fiddle-leaf fig in the alcove under the stairs.
I can’t help but think, Better there than here.
My house was on fire long before that fateful pot of noodles.
“I like her.” Josie is initiating the obligatory assessment of our brother’s girlfriend.
“Yeah.” I hand her a bowl to dry. “Me too.”
“I think she’s got spunk under that shy exterior.”
“Shy?” I yawn. “Is that fair? Look what she got thrown into today.”
“True.”
I hand her a bouquet of forks. “Not everyone can be as comfortable in their own skin as Josephine Russo.”
Josie rolls her eyes because her name is not and has never been Josephine.
The five letters of her name are typed in Courier on the creased blue of her birth certificate.
But someone once assumed her name was Josephine, so Cameron and I latched on, grinning like villains.
At the time, she had been calling us Ape and Cameraman for years, so she was due.
When we’re done with the dishes and girlfriend commentary, Josie drops into downward dog.
Mom and Dad return with empty glasses, nonplussed about Josie’s bottom sticking up in the middle of the kitchen.
Mom hands Dad a battery of vitamins, like she’s done for as long as I can remember. More pills now, though.
Cameron materializes with two empty wineglasses and a quiet, irritated tone. “So, did you all forget I was bringing her tonight?”
Josie slinks from downward dog to cobra.
Cameron faces Dad, gesticulating with a wineglass in each hand. “We talked about Rachel like two hours before I brought her over. I made sure it was still okay, you know, with everything.” He glances at me before looking back to Dad. “Is it so hard to remember—”
“Enough.” Mom’s voice slices his sentence like a knife. “You’re done.”
Our eyebrows all lift. Cameron stares in surprise at Mom before blinking downward. He moves to rinse the wineglasses, his words clipped. “Are the couch blankets in the normal place?”
“Yes.” Mom takes Dad’s hand and turns to leave the kitchen. “You kids don’t stay up too late.” Good nights are muttered as she and dad exit stage left and Josie shifts to butterfly.
Couch blankets? I frown as the explanation drops inside me like an anvil. Rachel drove in from her parents’ place in East Texas. So she’ll sleep here, of course. On the couch. Which means Leo is probably already in my bed.
Cameron stalks out of the kitchen. Josie arches from cat to cow. And I twist my ring, looking up at the ceiling as if to x-ray it.
In my bedroom, the pink lamp on my desk glows dimly.
The ceiling fan spins on low with its slight rattle.
Otto sleeps in the playpen, while Sadie is on a floor pallet with Bear Bear smushed to her chest. Leo is in bed, facing away and covered by my old comforter with the lilac pattern.
So many breathing bodies I never could have conjured back when I sat in this room penning a list of reasons why my parents had to get a dog, and biting my lip over whether it was Labrador or Labradoor.
Or when MeeMaw died, and my father wept, and I stayed awake all night wondering if heaven is real.
Or when I got my first period, a brown-red constellation dotting the bedsheet.
I click off the lamp and slide beneath the lilacs, wondering if Leo is awake.
It’s been a long time since we’ve shared a bed, and my body recognizes the distance—and the closeness.
Nighttime does what it does, making me think about everything and think through nothing.
I’m suddenly ravenous for every night we’ve ever shared, and so I curve my body to fit his, inhaling the light musk of him.
My arm wraps around him, my hand finding the solidity of his chest.
He doesn’t move. Nothing but his heart pumping beneath my hand.
Gravid with want, I’m struck through with the violation of it. Pierced with the bullet of awareness that Leo is no longer mine. So I recoil, ashamed.
But then there’s movement.
I hold my breath as he turns in the halftone dark, whispering my name.
I reach out, but he stops me. “Why the book?” His voice is raw.
“What?”
“Why did you get my book from the house?”
Seventh City is a novel Leo self-published.
I helped him revise it for months and months, my reading strip sailing across sentences to keep the letters straight.
Every evening, we would disappear into his imagined world the way people disappear into Netflix.
My copy of his book was the sole possession I grabbed in the fire, in that split second when survival dangled and my feet moved of their own volition.
“I don’t know,” I say.
His breath wavers, a tell of emotion. Leo hasn’t expressed sorrow or even anger in so long. Only apathy. Inertia. With another labored breath from him, our history racks me like withdrawal pains. I push past the hand that stopped me, and I kiss my husband.
He resists, but there’s no strength in it.
So I pull his bottom lip between my teeth until he weakly turns away.
I had begun to think he didn’t care, to doubt whether he ever had.
But there’s a ripple in the mirage now. Here he is in my childhood bedroom, hurting for the loss of me.
His pain is an overdue gift and a staggering wound.
I slide my hand down him in a plea, desperate to comfort and be comforted. “It doesn’t have to mean anything,” I whisper. “A swan song.”
He jerks away. “It always means something.”
The realization flares: he is thinking of Cody. He is always thinking of Cody.
I stare angrily at his back, his broad shoulders, the bulk of his silhouette.
And this is how we remain, stone-still and draped in lilacs, two pillars of a ruined temple.
In the morning, Leo is gone.