31. Sloane
Sloane
Vivienne finds me at the callboard outside the scene shop, which tracks, because Vivienne has a sense for the exact wrong moment the way other people have one for rain.
“Sloane.” She says my name like a small gift she’s decided to hand me. “I looked for you Thursday. I really did look.”
I don’t know what Thursday is yet, so I set it down somewhere I can find it later. “Finals,” I say. “I’ve been under a rock with a script.”
“God, haven’t we all.” She pulls her coat closed, cream cashmere, the kind that doesn’t pill.
“But you weren’t there. The regional. I assumed you of all people would’ve—” She stops, and her face arranges itself into sympathy with a smile holding the frame up from underneath. “Oh. You didn’t get the email.”
There’s a particular drop your stomach does when a stranger knows the shape of your bad news before you do.
“Which email?” I keep my hand off the strap of my bag, where it wants to go.
“They moved the whole regional up. Professor Aldous took a directing contract in London that starts in January, and he chairs the Yale panel, so it was either cram the tour in before break or push the entire cycle a year.” She tips her head, and the sympathy slides off like it was never load-bearing.
“It went to the department list two weeks ago. The audition was Thursday. I almost missed it myself. Thank God for the listserv.”
I take my phone out, because not taking it out would tell her more than I’m willing to give.
The email is there. It’s been there twelve days, sitting under a fire-restoration invoice and a final rubric and a text from Danny that only says landed — buried in the worst week I’ve had since I was a kid, the week I learned you can carry your whole life eleven blocks if you don’t set it down.
NORTHEAST REGIONAL — DATE CHANGE — ACTION REQUIRED.
I read every word of a thing that is already over.
“They take two from the region to the final callback in New Haven.” Vivienne examines her own nails, because she did not come all this way to leave the best part on the table. “I’m one of them.”
“Congratulations.” I mean it the way you mean the word at a funeral, which is to say it costs me nothing, and that is the first sign that something is wrong with me, though I won’t understand it for another hour.
“Mm.” She studies me, weighing whether there’s enough blood in the water to be worth the swim. “I always did think the two of you were a strange fit, if we’re being honest. You’re so — intense. Men like that want easy. Restful.”
“I’d have said they want whoever isn’t bored of them yet.” I keep my eyes on the callboard. “But you’d know the easy end of the market better than me.”
Her mouth tightens precisely one degree, which on Vivienne is a slammed door.
“It’s a big school, Sloane, but news travels fast around here,” she says, which means she’s heard about the rest of it too and is hoping I’ll bleed for her.
I spent years learning not to give people the bleeding they came for.
Eventually the not-getting-it bores her, and she squeezes my arm like we’re friends, tells me to enjoy the break, and her cashmere disappears down the hall toward the green room and whatever audience she’s got queued up next.
I stand there until the hallway empties. Then I delete the email, which changes nothing and feels like the only door left I’m allowed to shut.
I’ve got a shift at the shop until close, so I take the long way and let the cold do what the cold does.
Yale is the plan. Yale has been the plan since I was sixteen and worked out that the fastest way out of a town is a train, and the fastest way onto a train is to be too good to leave behind.
I built a whole person around the leaving.
I took a name out of a playwright at eighteen, dropped my consonants, scrubbed the flat vowels out of my mouth, and turned myself into someone Yale would want — and on Thursday, while I was carrying a box up Margaret’s back stairs, Yale wanted Vivienne Wood instead.
I keep waiting for it to land.
It doesn’t land. I check the place where the grief is supposed to be the way you check a pocket you already know is empty, and there’s only lining.
Margaret’s Books is warm when I let myself in, paper and beeswax and the radiator going, and I shelve the new Munro face-out and price a box of somebody’s dead uncle’s Penguin Classics and wait to start mourning the only future I ever drew myself. Nothing comes.
What comes instead is smaller and worse and follows me around the shop all evening: I keep turning toward the door.
Every time the heat kicks on, every time a car slows on the street, some part of me that hasn’t gotten the memo lifts its head and looks at the door like he might come through it with two coffees and an opinion about whatever I’m reading.
He is not going to come through the door.
I’ve reached for my phone four times today to send him nothing — a billboard, a sentence, the kind of nothing you send a person when you’ve stopped keeping score of who goes first. Then I remember and set it down. The body’s slow to learn.
My phone goes off at five-thirty on the dot, the one appointment in my life that has never once moved. Danny. Wednesday. Half eleven where he is.
“Still alive?” he says.
“Still alive.” I tuck the phone against my shoulder and keep pricing, because if my hands stop he’ll hear it. “How’s Germany?”
“Cold. Gray. The food’s better than they tell you.” A pause, and then the thing he does, listening through the line. “You sound tired, Sloanie.”
“It’s finals.”
“It’s always finals with you.” He lets it sit. He’s the only person I know who can let a thing sit without turning it into a question I have to answer. “You’d tell me? If it was more than finals?”
“I’d tell you,” I say, which is the lie I tell him most often and the only one he lets me keep, because he knows I won’t and he calls anyway. The not-pushing is the whole language we have.
“Sloane.” His voice changes, drops into the flat register he keeps for the things he flew across an ocean to say in person and couldn't, so he's saying them on a Wednesday instead. “It came down Tuesday. The thing with Dad.”
I stop pricing. My hand stays on the spine of the O'Neill like it's the only thing holding the shelf up. “And?”
“Guilty. Aggravated assault.” A breath on his end, half eleven at night and an ocean away.
“Renata's cheekbone and broken arm made it serious bodily injury, so it went felony, and with the DUI riding along on the same night the judge wasn't feeling generous.
Two to five, state. He's parole-eligible at the two if he keeps his nose clean inside, which—” The dry thing he does, the one piece of him we both inherited and neither of us asked for. “Well. You've met him.”
Two to five years. I do the thing I'm good at, which is hold a piece of news at arm's length and turn it over a few times before I let it near me, and the part I won't tell Danny is that when I finally let it near me, it doesn't land.
I keep waiting for the floor of it. I've been waiting for the floor of my father my whole life, and it turns out the floor is a sentence read out in a county courthouse two hundred miles away while I priced a dead man's books, and it arrives the way Yale arrived this morning — which is to say it doesn't, which is to say something in me has gone quiet about all of it except the one thing I walked away from twelve days ago.
“You okay?” Danny asks, because he's the only one with the clearance to.
“I'm okay.” Two words. True, even, which is the worst part of it.
We talk about nothing for nine more minutes. I don’t say I lost Yale today. I don’t say I left someone two weeks ago and I can’t stand in a kitchen. I say the food’s better than they tell me, and he laughs, and we hang up, and the shop is very loud with quiet after.
A man comes in at a quarter to close looking for something for his wife.
He doesn’t know what she reads; he only knows that she reads, which he says like an apology.
I walk him to fiction and put the new Emily Henry in his hands, because the new Emily Henry is what you give a man who doesn’t know what his wife reads but loves her enough to ask a stranger in a bookshop at closing.
He’s grateful in the helpless way of a man who married up.
I ring him out and wish him a good holiday and mean it, and the wanting-it-for-him — the small domestic version, a man and a book and a wife who’ll be glad — goes through me like cold water and is gone before I decide what to do with my face.
Here’s the thing that surfaces around nine, pencil in my hand, a 1962 Long Day’s Journey I’m trying not to underprice: I lost Yale today and it feels like losing a coat I never liked. I lost Beau twelve days ago and I still can’t be in a room with a door without my whole body pointing at it.
That’s the data. I don’t want the data. I price the O’Neill and put it back in the box with the dead man’s books, because the shop closes at six for everyone but me, and I am not finished not feeling things yet.
Evan is leaning on the railing outside the library the next night when I come out at nine, and the thing about Evan is that he is always leaning on something, like furniture is the only thing keeping him upright, like he learned his whole body off a beer commercial.
“There she is.” He pushes off the rail. He’s bigger than the rail. He’s bigger than most things, and he’s spent eight months making sure I know it without ever once having to say it. “Heard about you and the hockey guy.”
“Did you?” I keep walking. He falls in beside me, which is its own message, and the cold does the thing it’s done in my chest since I was nineteen and learned what his hand felt like when the charm ran out.
“Don’t be like that. I’m being nice.” Warm, even, which is the worst register he owns. “I came to check on you. Old times.”
“You can stop.”