Chapter 34
RAQ
The door closed behind my brother, and for a moment neither of us moved.
Then Caterina stood up from the table, steadied herself on the back of the chair, and looked at me the way a judge looks over her glasses.
"I'm going to bed," she said. "You live on the couch now."
She went into the bedroom. She came back with a pillow and the afghan — the ugly one, the one the color of margarine and old rust that her grandmother's sister crocheted before I had a name for either of them — and she threw both at my chest from six feet, hard, and I caught them, because letting them fall seemed worse.
"Caterina—"
"No." She held up one finger. "You don't talk tonight.
Tonight you're furniture." She got to the bedroom door and stopped, one hand on the frame, and did not turn around.
"Your — what, your brothers, your family — are coming to my street, and I can't look at you.
Figure out how you managed that. You've got all night. You don't sleep."
The door shut.
I stood in her kitchen holding a pillow and the ugliest blanket I have ever been sentenced to, and I sat down on a couch built when the bridge was new, for people five feet tall, and I began my sentence.
Her house breathed. The boiler two rooms away, cycling.
The refrigerator. The bones of the building settling off the day's heat, tick by tick, joists older than the neighborhood.
Above it all, two heartbeats behind one door — hers, slowing by degrees as the anger banked itself into sleep, and under it the quick light running one, the sound that had rearranged every century I had left.
I do not sleep. She knew that. The couch was never about sleeping.
The couch was about the door. She put a door between us and gave me a station on the far side of it, and the sentence was exact, and I lay on my back with my feet hanging over the armrest into open air, under a blanket that reached my sternum, and served it.
At two in the morning she turned over and said something to the dark that was not words.
At three she said a name that was not mine — a man's, old-country, nobody I have ever been told of — and settled.
At four the small heart stumbled once, a skipped step in the rhythm, and I was standing in the middle of the room with no memory of moving before it caught itself and ran on, steady, fine, nothing — and I stood there in the dark with the afghan around my ankles like a shackle and my pulse doing something I have not permitted it in a very long time.
I picked the blanket up. I folded it. I sat back down.
In the morning she came out dressed, moving carefully, and did not look at me while she filled the kettle.
"The doctor said walking is fine," she said, to the kettle. "Short. Flat. No stairs, no lifting, no standing all day at the bench. In case you were planning to have opinions."
"I was not."
"You were. I could hear you having them through the door." She got down one cup — one — and then stood there a moment, and got down the second, and set it on the counter hard, like it had argued. "Sit at the table like a person."
I sat at the table like a person.
She poured for both of us and put a cup in front of me and sat down with hers, and we were at her table, the two of us, the morning after my brother emptied both barrels into her kitchen, and she wrapped both hands around her coffee.
"Here's how this goes," she said. "You're here because of what's coming.
That's the whole reason. When it's passed — when your brother says it's passed — we revisit.
Until then you're a security system with a face, and you live on that couch, and you don't get to be sorry at me, because sorry is for things you'd undo, and we both know what you'd do again. "
"Yes."
"Yes what."
"Yes to all of it. The couch. The terms. The thing I would do again.
" She opened her mouth and I kept going, because if I stopped I would not start again.
"The couch is fair. The silence is fair.
And none of it is the punishment. The punishment is the door.
" I set the cup down. "I have stood watch on walls, Caterina.
Cities. Borders. Once, a garden. None of it prepared me for a door with you on the other side of it. "
She looked at me a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes and did not surface.
"Good," she said, and took her coffee to the studio.
That night I crossed the studio to close the window she had left open, and had it halfway down when she spoke behind me.
"I had it open on purpose."
"It is thirty-nine degrees."
"It's my window."
I straightened and turned. She stood in the middle of the studio with a brush still in her hand, and something was arriving in her face that had nothing to do with the window — had been circling all day, through the treaty, through the silence, waiting for a place to land.
"You want to talk about temperature," she said. "Okay. Let's. You were twenty minutes away."
I went still.
"The whole time. Queens. You told me at this table — twenty minutes, seventeen days.
And you know what I had on this end? Nothing.
Not a fight, not a goodbye, not an address — you don't have an address, I never had anywhere to even look.
A note and a lie and then the world with you subtracted from it.
" Her voice didn't break. It went the other way — flatter, harder, the work voice, the one she uses on things that have to be said exactly.
"I called the number. Did you know that?
The insurance number, off the card, like an idiot.
And it was dead. Disconnected. Eleven seconds and a recording. "
"I know."
"You know?"
"I disconnected it." The truth, whole, because half of it would have been another theft. "The first hour. Because if it rang, I would have seen your name, and if I heard your voice I would have come back, and I did not trust myself to—"
"Don't." Her hand came up. The brush was in it, forgotten.
"Don't make it sound like discipline. You want to know what it was, on this end?
I grieved you. Not like a breakup. I've had breakups; they leave a person, somewhere across town, being an idiot in a bar.
You were gone. Gone like the Gowanus. No body, no wake, no place to put anything, and I stood in this kitchen with a dead phone against my ear and it was exactly — it was exactly like after Nonna, when I kept — when I'd reach for the phone to call her because the pot boiled over or the Mets did something, and I'd have her number half dialed before I—"
And there it cracked. Not her voice. Her breath — one ragged inhale that she caught and held and refused to let become anything, standing in the middle of her studio with her chin up and her eyes flooding and not one tear allowed down.
"You made me grieve you like my dead," she said. "And you were in Queens."
The room was very quiet. The boiler cycled, far away, in a house where nothing was wrong.
I have been alive since before her species buried its dead in the ground, and I have no memory of any sentence landing on me the way that one landed.
"Caterina." My voice came out wrong. I let it stay wrong. "I planned for your anger. I did not plan for grief."
"Why not."
"No one has ever grieved me." The words were true and I had never said them. "I did not know it was possible. And I would have written the note anyway, because I believed it was your life. But I would have known what it cost. You would not have paid it in the dark."
She stood there breathing, brush trembling in her hand, tears held at the line by pure Fontana spite.
"Awesome," she said. "You'd have known. Not not done it — known. While I dialed my dead." She laughed, one syllable, nothing in it. "You should hear yourself. You think that's better, Raq. You actually think that's better."
She turned back to the bench, and I understood I was dismissed, and I went back to my couch, and neither of us said goodnight.
The next day, at ten past two, the studio was still silent — no water running, no kettle, no chair scraping back. The doctor's schedule was taped inside the cabinet in Nina's handwriting, three exclamation points after EAT, and the eleven o'clock plate had happened and the two o'clock had not.
I did not go in and say so. A man on a couch has no standing to schedule meals.
I made the plate instead. The soft cheese she had been favoring, the good crackers, the pear cut the way she cuts it — eighths, cored, skin on — and I carried it into the studio while she was deep in the lamp and the varnish, and set it on the bench's far corner, where the light would find it, and left without one word.
At two-twenty I heard the plate slide toward her. Then, to the child, conversational, over the tape's hiss:
"Your father thinks he's subtle."
I stood in her kitchen holding a dish towel I had no use for, grinning at a wall, and put neither the towel nor the grin down for some time.
On the third night she was at the sink and I was drying — she allowed this now, the dishes, wordless, a border town where our two countries traded — and she handed me the pot and did not let go of it.
"Was any of it real?"
I stood very still, both of us holding the pot.
"The beach," she said. "Before. When you knew and you didn't tell me. You lay there next to me in the dark and let me be happy. So I need to know what I was next to. Was it real, or was it you managing me?"
"It was the realest hour of my existence."
"Don't—"
"You asked. I am answering." I did not let go of the pot either.
"I lied about one thing on that beach. One.
Do not let it eat the rest. The cold sand was real.
Your laugh was real. The thing you said about the horizon was real.
" Her chin came up; she knew what she said about the horizon.
"Take those from yourself and I have stolen twice. "
She looked at me with the water running, and her eyes were bright and furious and something else.
"I hate that you say things like that," she said, "from the couch."
"The couch is fair."
"I know it's fair. I decided it's fair." She let go of the pot and shut off the water, and stood there gripping the sink's edge.
"That's not — God. You want to know the worst part?
I'm standing at my sink wanting to be held by the person I'm furious at, and both of those are true at the same time, all day, every day, and nobody warns you about that.
Nina didn't warn me. The nuns certainly didn't warn me. "
"Caterina."
"Don't come over here."
"I am not moving." I was not. Every separate part of me was voting and I was not moving. "But say the first thing again."
"Which."
"The wanting." My voice came out lower than I run it. "Say it again."
She turned around. She looked at me down the length of her kitchen — flushed, chin up, hospital bracelet finally off her wrist that morning, her hand rising without her permission to the base of her throat — and for four full seconds the kitchen was the temperature of the day I met her.
"Dry the pot," she said, and walked to the bedroom, and shut the door.
And then, through it, muffled, furious:
"—and I have half a mind to make you live outside in the cold. In the doghouse. Only without the house. The dog would come inside."
I stood in her kitchen holding a wet pot, grinning at a shut door like a fool of one century instead of a hundred, and from behind the door, quieter, almost lost in the pillow:
"Goodnight, Raq."
"Goodnight, Caterina."
I dried the pot. I folded myself onto the couch. I pulled the ugly afghan up to my sternum, and lay in the dark listening to two heartbeats settle behind a door that was one night closer to opening, and I kept the watch, and it kept me.