Chapter 25
CATE
Saturday morning he stood at the stove with the spatula, and I sat at the table with my coffee, and he said, "What do you want from the day?"
"Nothing."
He turned around. "Nothing."
"A whole day of nothing. Laundry. The studio. You in that chair." I pointed my fork at him. "Maybe a movie where things explode and nobody we like dies. Can you sit through a movie? Actually sit? No corners, no windows, no reading the room?"
"I can sit through a movie."
"We'll see."
He put eggs in front of me and toast I hadn't asked for, and stood there until I ate the toast.
By late afternoon the light had crossed the studio floor and gone up the far wall, and my treatment report was four pages of flat clean language, and the radio was on low — allowed again, now that the letters were done — and when I looked up from the bench he was watching me from the chair with something in his face too big for a woman doing paperwork.
"What."
"Nothing."
I looked at him a second longer. Then I let it stand, a nothing for a nothing, because it was Saturday, and we were rich.
That evening I made us spaghetti aglio e olio, Saturday food, and we ate it at the table with the radio still going, and I ran through tomorrow while we ate.
"Bread first thing, before the line gets stupid. Semolina, two loaves — if the second one survives the walk home it's a miracle and we bring the miracle to Nina's." I twirled the fork. "And Gina's saving you the seat again, so pace yourself on the questions. Last week she had a list."
"The questions are good questions."
"I know they are. That's the problem, there's no end to them.
" I got up, found the pencil, and wrote the list on the pad's clean page — bread, semolina x2 — wine — sfogliatelle for the monster — and tore it off and stuck it to the fridge under the magnet, next to the rules, our whole government on one appliance.
When I turned around he was still standing there with the dish towel in his hands, looking at the fridge.
"It's a grocery list, Raq."
"I know what it is," he said.
The movie had explosions. Nobody we liked died.
I had my feet in his lap and the blanket from the back of the couch, and somewhere in the second act I caught him — caught him watching the movie, both eyes, actually in it, no corners, no windows, not one glance at the door the whole night.
"Look at you," I said. "Off duty."
"Yes," he said, and his hand closed around my ankle, warm as a bath.
I meant to see the ending. The last thing I got was an explosion, orange on the insides of my eyelids, and the weight of his hand, and the thought — right at the drop-off edge, half a thought, gone before I could sign it — that I couldn't remember the last time the house had felt this safe.
Raq
She surfaced when the credits ran, walked herself to bed with her eyes half shut, and was under again before I turned off the lamp.
At eleven I did the circuit.
Both corners. The alley. The laundromat step, cold a third night. The block was empty. The watchers had seen what they came to see and gone. Whatever happened next would not happen here — that was the whole point of what I was about to do.
I came back in and threw the bolt and stood in the dark of the kitchen listening to the house — the refrigerator, the radiator, Donnie's television murmuring through the ceiling — and under it all, down the hall, the slow tide of her breathing, twelve to the minute, the metronome I have set my nights by for a season.
There was no argument left to have. The argument had ended on a boardwalk with her cold nose against my jaw. Everything since had been logistics.
I went down the hall and stood in the door of our room and memorized her.
The streetlight came through the blind in stripes. She had taken the whole bed the moment my side went empty — a woman raised to fill abandoned territory — one arm thrown across my pillow, holding it the way she holds my arm, like a thing that might be reassigned if she loosens her grip.
I stood in the door and I took the inventory.
The scar through her eyebrow, from a fence she went over at nine, the year of the crash, the story she tells as comedy.
The crease between her brows that never fully leaves, even sleeping.
Ochre at the second knuckle of her right hand; she scrubs her hands like a surgeon and the ochre survives everything; I have come to believe it is not paint anymore but pigment gone native, part of the skin, the trade become the body.
Her breath, twelve to the minute.
The small sound she made when she shifted, half a word, no word, gone.
My memory does not drop things. That has been the one reliable cruelty of my existence — everything keeps.
Except that since her, something has been surfacing that I do not remember owning.
Hands, in water. A grief with no name attached, coming up at the worst moments and gone before I can close on it.
It never happened in all the years before her; I asked Sar, straight out, whether any of us were missing pieces, and Sar remembers everything, every year of it, whole.
Whatever is gone is gone from me alone — and it only started speaking when I started being happy.
I stood in the doorway filling myself with her — her face, her weight in the bed, the exact geography of a sleeping woman in a stripe of orange light — and it frightened me, for the first time, properly: something was taken out of me once, so cleanly I lived whole ages without feeling the seam.
And I never knew it. And I never felt it go.
Not her. Whatever was taken before, whatever comes. Not her.
I did not go in. I did not touch her hair. I did not press my mouth to her temple one last time, because I knew, the way falling is down:
If I touched her, I would stay.
The kitchen, then. The last of it.
I took nothing. Everything I own in this world fits in a coat, and half of it was hers by adoption — the cup in the rack, the chair by the door, the razor she bought me at the pharmacy because "guests get toothbrushes, you get a razor, figure out what that means.
" It means what everything in this house means. It stays.
The pad hung on the refrigerator, under the St. Anthony magnet, where the law of us lives. Her handwriting, pressed hard. The first rule, the serious one, the one with the period like a nail head:
No disappearing. If you go, you say you're going. Even one word. I've done the other kind.
I stood in front of her constitution for a long time.
Then I took the pad down, and sat at her grandmother's table, and picked up the pen from where she leaves it — crossways, mid-thought, a woman using it — and I turned to a clean page.
I am good with words. I have negotiated with empires; I have written clauses that outlived the languages they were drafted in.
I sat with the pen over the paper for longer than any of those took me, because every sentence I owned was either a lie or a door, and I had promised her the truth and could not afford the opening.
She would wake to this page. She would stand where I was sitting, in my shirt, probably — she wears them now; she says ownership is nine-tenths — and she would read it in the work voice inside her head, the flat one, testing every word. Two sentences, both true, neither one whole:
I decided. I will not tell you to run.
I read it back once. The first rule, kept — one word required; I had left her eight. The one rule of mine, laid down unused beside them: I would not order her out of her own home. She stays. Everything stays. The threat is the only thing leaving.
I set the pen down on top of the pad. Squared to the edge.
I looked at it, squared, and left it that way, because she would read that too — she reads everything — and I wanted her to know the writing was not done in haste. Let her be angry at a careful man.
I stood on the stoop in the last dark before the earliest trucks, and put the collar of my coat up wrong, and did not fix it.
Nobody left to fix it. She would have caught it before I reached the gate — she has fixed that collar in doorways, on corners, once on a moving bus, her hands doing it before her mind signed off, the oldest gesture she owns. The collar stays wrong now.
The stoop light burned on its timer, faithful, guarding nothing.
Above me, Donnie's window was dark. Down the block, the Espositos'. Her window, dark, with her in it, warm, breathing at twelve, dreaming whatever a keeper dreams — and tomorrow there would be lamb at Nina's, and an end seat empty, and a twelve-year-old looking at the door.
I went down the steps at human speed, and I walked, at human speed, the whole length of Bay 50th Street, past the laundromat and the dead trace and the corner, and I did not look back at the house, because I have stood watches since before the alphabets, and I know what a man turns into when he looks back.
At the avenue I stopped.
The el went over, and the street held its one breath under the iron, and let it out.
Somewhere behind me, under muslin, a buried name stood uncovered in five-hundred-year-old gold.
Somewhere behind me, a woman slept in the middle of a bed with her arm across my pillow.
Somewhere above me, the whole patient sky, watching me finally, finally do the correct thing — remove the target, unpaint the door, return the threat to the dark it came from.
I told her on the beach that no one can take her grace, and it was true.
It lights her from the inside. I have watched it across a kitchen, across a bed, across a room where she stood over four hundred years of someone's grief with her sleeves rolled — the deciding kind, the grown kind, the kind that is a door.
When she goes, she goes through. Her grandmother is on the other side of that door, and her mother, and her father, and one day everyone she has ever fed.
And I will be standing outside it. Forever is not a figure of speech to me. I am the one creature in her life who can say that word and mean it exactly.
Deciding was never what they took from me.
I decided once, all the way, with my whole rank — I looked at this world and I fell for it.
What they took was the door. Every year she spends on me is a year spent loving a thing that cannot follow her home, and the parting at the end of it is already written, and it is total, and I would spend her whole life reaching the same goodbye.
And that is if she gets her fifty years.
A woman alone gets them — grows old in her house, restores her saints, dies in her own bed with her people around her, the whole mortal fortune paid out in full.
A woman standing next to me is a woman standing next to the one thing in this borough that every eye above it and below it has turned to look at.
They do not have to touch her. They only have to be near, and near me is where the shortening happens.
She gets the years. All of them. That is the whole term, and I am the only one who can pay it, and the price is that I am not there to see them.
Better now. Better me. Better one winter of grief than fifty years walking toward it holding hands — and better fifty years without me than what her life could come to standing beside me.
I turned north, with my collar wrong, into the dark between streetlights.
I told myself it was mercy.