Chapter 26 #2
"Okay," she said finally, not okay at all. "You're doing this. Fine. You know where I am when you stop." And she put the leftovers in my hands and went back inside without kissing me goodbye, which in that family is a slammed door.
I walked the six blocks home with my level voice and the procedure and nobody left to use either one on.
A week went by like that, and then most of another one, and somewhere in the second week the lie moved in for good.
It didn't feel like drowning. It felt organized.
It walked me through the file like I walk clients through underpaint: look, right there — your father, your brother, the parish, everyone you fix.
It was always under the surface. You of all people should have seen it.
The evidence was excellent. The evidence is always excellent; that's how you know it's a con, Sal would say.
I didn't call Sal, and I didn't call anybody.
And the worst part was how familiar it felt. Alone in this apartment, working, not asking anybody for anything — I'd lived that way for two years before him. I knew every corner of it. He'd been the strange part, the year that didn't match the rest of my life.
This was just going back.
Twelve days after I woke up to the note, I stood in the shower doing the calendar, and the calendar didn't come out.
I did it again with my hair dripping on the bathmat, counting backward on my fingers like a girl, and it still didn't come out, and I stood there in the towel looking at myself in the mirror over the sink — the same face, the exact same face — and said, out loud, to the only witness:
"Oh, you're kidding."
I bought the test at the pharmacy on 86th, along with shampoo I didn't need and a birthday card for nobody, camouflage, like the cashier was going to alert the parish.
I put it on the counter and the cashier, who has known me since I bought lip gloss there in seventh grade, said nothing with tremendous volume.
Three minutes is a long time. I've timed varnish, I've timed solvents, I've stood over reactions where thirty seconds was the difference between saving a painting and stripping a saint's face to the gesso, and I have never felt three minutes like those three minutes, sitting on the edge of the tub in my grandmother's bathroom with the timer going on the stove because I didn't trust myself to count.
Two lines.
I read the box again. I read the lines again. I did what I do — I checked the result against the reference, twice, like it was a pigment match — and then I sat there for a while with the thing in my hand, and the house was very quiet.
A baby.
His baby, which — no. Stop. His words came up before I could stop them, up off the beach with the blankets and the stars and the steam: I can never have a child, Caterina. None of us create. That was never in us to begin with.
He'd said it in the flat voice, the one he uses for the true things, and I'd believed him. I'd put my hand on his chest and felt sorry for him. The asshole. I'd felt sorry for him —
I looked at the two lines.
Somebody in that conversation had been wrong, and it wasn't the test.
I called Nina, and she picked up on the second ring, fast and low, mother-reflexes.
"It's me," I said. "Can you come."
She didn't ask one question on the phone.
That's Nina. Twenty minutes, and she came down my stairs with her coat over pajamas and a container of something because her hands don't leave the house empty, and she found me at the table with the test standing on it like a little white monument, and she stopped.
She looked at the test. She looked at me.
She looked around the kitchen — at the one cup in the rack, at the rolling pin on the counter, parallel to the edge, back on duty — and I watched my best friend since second grade read the whole file in four seconds, no loupe, and her face went through fury and landed somewhere that scared me more, somewhere quiet.
"How long has he been gone," she said.
"Two weeks tomorrow."
"Two weeks." There was the fury; it just needed a number. "Two weeks you sat in this basement with the voice, doing the — the swab thing, the little jars — Caterina. Two weeks. I stood on my stoop and I let you walk home."
"You didn't let me do anything. Nobody lets me."
"That's the problem," Nina said. "That has been the problem since second grade," and her voice broke on it, and that was it, that was the crack, and she crossed my kitchen and took hold of me, and I came apart, everything I hadn't let out in fourteen days, all of it at once, ugly, into her shoulder, into pajamas that smelled like her whole warm house, and she held on and said terrible loving things about men over my head until I could breathe.
Then she put me in a chair and heated whatever was in the container and stood over me while I ate it, and that is also a procedure. The other one. Hers.
"Eat all of it. You're eating for—" She stopped herself. Looked at the ceiling. "I was going to make the joke."
"Make the joke, Nina."
"No. It's too soon and it's not funny yet." She sat down across from me and put both hands flat on the table, her gavel move. "Okay. Committee's in session. Talk."
So I told her what could be told: he was gone, he'd left a note. "Saying what," she said, and I gave her the part I could say out loud: "That he decided to go." I told her about the calendar and the two lines.
I did not tell her about the beach, or grace, or the name in the gold downstairs. Nina has always known there are rooms in this story she isn't shown, and she asked nothing I couldn't answer.
She just moved in. Not literally — better than literally. By midnight there was a schedule on my fridge in her handwriting, next to the rules, under the grocery list I couldn't take down: who called when, which days she'd come, what I ate.
At the door, with her coat on, she stopped.
"He decided," she said, like she was spitting out a seed. "Men love deciding. It's the staying they can't commit to." And she kissed my forehead, hard, and went home to her sleeping house.
I sat back down at the table with the test and the note in front of me, side by side, and I read the eight words again, and then — because the house was quiet, and the coffee was long gone, and there was nobody left to perform for — I finally did the thing I'd been too flattened to do for two weeks.
I went back over the beach.
All of it — the blankets, the stars, the whole conversation, word by word, because I have every word; you keep the words from nights like that.
And it held up. The grace, the door, the nuns, saved-gets-you-in — everything he told me out there has checked out against everything that came after.
He doesn't lie. It's the one thing I'd still swear to.
Except.
I can never have a child.
I sat with that sentence a long time.
He didn't say we can't make one. He didn't say it's impossible.
He said have. I can never have a child — and that's true, isn't it.
That's true the way everything he says is true.
A thing that has to leave can't have anything.
He could father a child and still never have it, and the sentence covers both, and he knew the difference when he built it, and he laid it down in the middle of all that truth where a woman feeling sorry for him would swallow it whole.
My whole job is finding what's under a surface somebody wanted kept. And he handed me a covered-over sentence in the dark and I never even picked up a light.
I put my hand flat on my stomach and said it to the empty chair:
"You lawyered me."
The refrigerator hummed. The saints kept it to themselves.
"You knew. You knew it could happen, you knew what it would be if it did, and you couldn't lie to me — you can't, it's on the pad — so you built me a true thing with a hole in it and let me grieve for you.
You let me feel sorry for you." My voice didn't crack.
"And then you decided. For both of us. For all three of us, you enormous coward. "
I picked up the note. Eight words, careful hand, squared pen.
I didn't burn it. Burning is for things you're done with.
I folded it once and put it in the drawer with the saints' things — the relic, the Lourdes water, the objects of unanswered prayers — and I shut the drawer, and I stood in my kitchen with my hand on my stomach, on the thing no clause had priced, and I said the last entry of the night out loud, to him, wherever in the dark he was standing his ridiculous watch:
"You're going to want a better lawyer."