Chapter 31 #2
I sat down and opened it to the first page and my hands started before I decided anything, because that is what hands do, and I drew the saints.
I don't even believe in the saints.
I drew them anyway.
All eleven. In order, left to right as they hang, from the door around to the window — Anthony first because he is first, then Lucy with her plate, Rita, Jude in the middle where Nonna moved him the winter she got scared, all the way around.
I got the crack in Rita's frame. I got the way Lucy's gilt is worn at the bottom corner from sixty years of somebody's thumb.
It took most of the afternoon. When I finished I tore the pages out one at a time and taped them to the stone wall with medical tape from the kit under the sink, spaced right, at the right height, in the right order.
He saw them that evening through the window. I watched his eyes go down the row, one to eleven, and stop.
He came to the door.
"You put them in order."
"That's where they go."
"Anthony first."
"Anthony's always first. He finds things." I taped down a corner that was already down. "The last thing he found for me was you, so his record's mixed."
He looked at the wall for a while.
"There is no Saint Caterina on it," he said.
"She's not in Nonna's house. Nonna didn't like her."
"Why."
"Because she argued with popes and got herself killed young, and my grandmother said she should have known when to shut her mouth." I looked up at him. "You want to say something about that, go ahead."
He didn't say anything about that.
"Thank you for the pencils," I said, in the flattest voice I own, and turned my back on him, and after a minute the door closed.
Good.
On the third morning it was raining ice and I walked anyway.
I got about a mile and a half. That's the honest number.
The cardigan went through in the first ten minutes and after that the cold was just a fact, in my hair, down my collar, in my shoes, and the road went on being gravel and the gravel went on being wrong under thin soles, and behind me, ten paces back the whole way, he carried my coat and said nothing.
Somewhere past the first mile my legs started arguing.
Not tired — something else, something lower and heavier, a dragging weight where no weight had been the day before.
I told myself: cold. I told myself: hill.
I told myself a great many reasonable things in about ninety seconds, and then my knee buckled and I caught myself on it and stood bent over in the sleet with my hand up so he wouldn't touch me.
The something low pulled once, hard.
I stayed bent over until it let go. Then I stood up, and wiped my face, and looked at a man standing two feet away in freezing rain holding my coat like a butler at the end of the world, and I made the first decision I had made in three days that had nothing to do with him.
"Take me back to the house."
He carried me back. I let him. I put my face in his shoulder because I was cold and shaking and out of principles, and I hated the warmth of him the entire way, and I took every degree of it.
Took it the way you take something you're owed — my cheek against the heat of his neck, his heart going slow and enormous under my ear, my whole frozen body leaning into the one thing on this island it wanted and the one thing I would not let it have.
Two truths, carried a mile and a half in the same arms.
He set me down inside the door and I went into the bedroom without looking at him and shut the door, and peeled off everything soaked, and stood there shivering, out of options — and pulled the gray sweater off the shelf. Soft. Warm. My size exactly.
My size exactly, and something in me went over on its side. He knows my body to the inch. He has had his hands on every part of me and apparently he was taking measurements, and I stood in a stone room holding the proof that he thinks of everything, and I would rather freeze.
I put it back folded. I stripped the rest of the way and climbed into the bed bare and pulled the blanket to my chin, and lay there shivering myself warm on principle, and the principle and I fell asleep together.
The rain kept on against the stone roof. My hands hurt from the road, my feet hurt from the gravel, and something low in me hurt in a way I did not have a name for — a pulling, faint, deep, like a cramp that couldn't decide if it was a cramp.
I put my hand down. I breathed.
It passed. Or I told myself it passed. It came back an hour later, or a minute — I wasn't counting anymore — and I pressed my palm flat against my stomach and held still and said nothing, because saying it makes it real, and as long as I didn't say it, the pulling was just a muscle, just the cold, just the road.
I slept. I don't know how long. When I woke the rain had stopped and the light was different — later, grayer, the sun already past the window — and I lay still for a second in the quiet, bare under the blanket, and felt fine, and I sat up, and I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and I looked down.
Red. Bright. On the sheet, not a lot — a smear, a streak, the size of a handprint — and the whole world went very small, and very slow, and very specific.
I dressed in his clothes without one thought about it. The jeans, the gray sweater, the wool socks, fast, hands steady — pride is for women who aren't bleeding — and I was decent in under a minute.
I stood up. I opened the door. He was at the window, turned the wrong way, and he turned around, and I watched his eyes go where they always go first — my face — and then down, and the blue came up in them so fast it was like watching a fuse blow.
"Raq," I said, and my voice was perfectly steady, the steadiest thing in the room, because the baby needed it steady. "We need a hospital. Right now. Carry me."
He crossed the room in one step and picked me up, and this time I put both arms around his neck and held on.