17. Sloane #3
But I can feel him holding the new fact, the way I’m holding the exits-fact, and we sit there on his floor side by side each privately aware that we know almost nothing real about the other — that the whole intimate-looking thing we’ve built is intimate-looking and not intimate, a relationship with no foundation under the performance — and the awareness is its own kind of closeness, which is a paradox I’m too tired to take apart tonight.
He knows nothing about my family, I think. And I know nothing about his.
Which is the part I can’t tell him. Because it isn’t true.
It isn’t true, and the reason it isn’t true is sitting in a bookshop on Main Street being smug about it.
I know everything about Beau Sorensen’s family.
I know it the way you know things you didn’t ask to know, absorbed over two years of afternoons with Margaret, who talks the way a river runs — constantly, in one direction, wearing grooves in you whether you meant to let her or not.
I know his mother is Annika and does something with interiors and is, per Margaret, “too good for that family by a wide margin, present company included.” I know his father is Erik and was a defenseman and casts the kind of shadow you measure yourself against your whole life.
I know about the twins, Liv and Britta, that he’d walk through a wall for.
I know he was reading on tape long after the other kids had moved to books and that Margaret was the only one who ever said the word dyslexia out loud in that family because everyone else preferred to call it Beau taking his time.
I know more about the shape of his childhood than he knows I know, and I have known it the entire time we’ve been doing this, and tonight, on his floor, while he privately mourns how little we know about each other, I am carrying the lopsided truth that the ignorance only runs one way.
It should feel like leverage. It doesn’t. It feels like the opposite of leverage. It feels like I’ve been reading a book over someone’s shoulder that he doesn’t know is open, and the longer I don’t tell him, the worse the telling will be.
Margaret did it on purpose. I’m sure of that now.
The four hundred mentions, the you should hear how he talks about his sisters, the that boy reads more than anyone gives him credit for, he just does it with his ears — she was building him in me before I’d ever spoken to him, laying the foundation she clearly intended me to one day stand on.
She’s known what she was doing since before I did. She always does.
“What?” Beau says, beside me, catching whatever’s moved across my face.
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t a nothing face.”
“It was a thinking-about-your-grandmother face. They’re adjacent.”
He huffs a laugh, the real one. “What’d she do now?”
She told me your whole life, I don’t say. “She tried to put a QR code on the new arrivals wall. It links to a playlist. I don’t know what’s on the playlist. I’m afraid to scan it.”
“It’s show tunes,” Beau says. “She’s been making it for a month. She asked me how to do a QR code and I had to find out, which means I now also know how to do a QR code, which is a thing I didn’t need to know.”
“You did that. For her.”
“She asked.” He says it like that’s the whole answer, like she asked is a complete and sufficient reason to learn a thing you’ll never use, and it is, for him, and watching him not understand that it’s remarkable is the most dangerous thing that’s happened to me all night.
Margo drives us — most of us — home eventually, the night winding down the way the good ones do, in stages, and at the door Beau hands me my coat and there’s a beat, the tier-one inch, the careful air.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. “To the — logistics thing.”
“We didn’t do any logistics.”
“No. We didn’t.” A pause. “We never do, do we. We schedule a thing and then we just—”
“Don’t,” I say, because I can hear where the sentence is going and I’m not equipped for where it’s going, not tonight, not with the exits-fact and the family-fact and the playlist sitting in my chest like swallowed stones.
“It’s late. We’ll do logistics another time. There’s a list. We’re very organized.”
“We’re the least organized organized people I’ve ever met.”
“Speak for yourself. I have a list in pen.”
“Yeah,” he says, and looks at me a second too long, the look that has nothing to do with the plan and no audience to justify it. “I figured you would.”
And I go out into the cold with Margo’s hand at my elbow and the night air sharp in my lungs, and I do not look back at the door, and the not-looking-back costs me more than it should, and somewhere on Cobble Street I admit the thing I’ve been not-admitting all evening, the thing the warm room and the easy noise and the Sondheim and the exits I stopped checking have been circling all night:
I know his whole family. He knows nothing of mine.
And the gap between those two facts is exactly the size of everything I’m not telling him — about the town with no name, about the father who doesn’t call, about the rule in pen that I’m getting worse at obeying, about the playlist of show tunes a dying woman is building because she decided, two years ago, that I belonged to people I hadn’t met yet.
Margaret knew before any of us.
I’m starting to think she was right, which is the most frightening sentence I’ve thought in months.