7. Delia
DELIA
I started shaking in the car. Not crying. Just shaking. My hands wouldn’t hold the wheel steady and I was cold all the way through even though the heater was running. I white-knuckled it home and sat in the driveway for a minute trying to breathe normally. It didn’t work. I gave up and went inside.
The house felt enormous. Every light I’d left on that morning was still burning. I walked through the living room and the kitchen and up the stairs and nothing looked different. Everything was exactly where I’d left it. I couldn’t stay there.
I pulled a duffel bag out of the closet and started packing. I didn’t think about what I was taking. I just opened drawers and grabbed things. Jeans. A sweater. Socks. Underwear. My toothbrush.
I yanked open the drawer where I kept old T-shirts and workout clothes and pulled out the first things my hand landed on. One of them was soft and I didn’t look at it. I shoved everything into the bag and zipped it. Then I walked out and locked the door behind me.
Roz lived twenty minutes away in a neighborhood that looked nothing like ours.
Older houses. Trees that met over the street.
Porch lights and uneven sidewalks and the kind of quiet that came from people being asleep, not from being thirty floors up.
I parked and sat there for a second with the bag in my lap. Then I texted her. I’m outside.
The porch light came on. Roz opened the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt with her hair pulled back. She looked at me and didn’t say anything. She just stepped back and held the door open.
I walked in and the warmth hit me first. Not just temperature. The house was warm the way old things are warm. Wood floors that creaked. A radiator under the window that knocked softly.
A couch that sagged in the middle. A blanket draped over the arm. A mug on the coffee table. Everything looked used and loved and like it had been there forever. It was the exact opposite of the tower. The exact opposite of glass and steel and thirty floors of nothing soft.
Roz closed the door behind me. I heard the latch click and something in my chest loosened. I was inside. The door was closed. I didn’t have to hold myself up any more.
I dropped the bag on the floor and sat down on the couch. Roz went into the kitchen and I heard the kettle go on. She came back with two mugs and handed me one. I wrapped both hands around it until my palms held the heat, then pressed them flat against my cheeks.
“You want to tell me what happened?” she said.
I put the mug down and reached for the duffel.
I unzipped it and started pulling things out.
Jeans. A T-shirt. Socks. A sports bra. My toothbrush.
I laid everything on the couch next to me.
This was what I’d grabbed. This was who I was.
A woman who ran with a duffel bag and didn’t pack a phone charger.
The last thing I pulled out was a sweater. Navy blue. Soft. I held it for a second before I realized it wasn’t mine.
It was Grant’s.
I stared at it. I hadn’t meant to take it. I’d just opened the drawer and grabbed what was there. I lifted it to my face without thinking and the smell of him hit me like a fist. I couldn’t breathe. I slid off the couch onto the floor and pressed the sweater against my chest and I couldn’t breathe.
Roz was on the floor next to me. She didn’t try to take the sweater. She didn’t say anything. She just sat there with her hand on my back while I fell apart.
When I could talk again I told her. Not all of it. Just enough. I walked into his office. I asked him for one hour. He was laughing. Corinne was standing there with her hand on his collar. He didn’t step back. I saw it. I saw exactly what I was to him and what she was and I couldn’t do it any more.
Roz stood up. She walked to the kitchen doorway and back with her fists closed, and when she turned around her face was red.
“Seven years,” she said. “Seven years you’ve been asking that man for scraps, and some consultant in a nice blazer gets to fix his collar in the middle of the afternoon. And you had to stand in a hallway and watch it. I could put my car through his lobby. I mean that. Don’t test me on it.”
She wasn’t performing. She was furious, all the way through, on my behalf, and she hadn’t asked me a single question first.
Then she sat back down and took a breath.
“Okay,” she said. “First, no. Second, I want to be very clear that I’m not going to ask you whether you’re sure, because I don’t care whether you’re sure. Third, you’re staying here as long as you need to.”
I started crying again. Not because of what I’d seen. Because of what she’d just done. She believed me. She didn’t ask what exactly I’d seen or whether I might have misunderstood or whether I’d tried talking to him first. She believed me instantly. Completely. Out of all proportion.
And it broke something in me, because it was the exact opposite of what I’d had at home for seven years. At home I had to build a case. I had to have evidence. I had to say things three times and still not be heard.
“I don’t hate him,” I said. My voice cracked. “I want him back. I want my husband back. I want the man who showed up at a rink at six in the morning just to see what I did. I want the man who asked me questions and listened to the answers. I don’t want out. I want him back.”
Roz put her arms around me and didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say. I was in love with a man I couldn’t reach and I’d left him and I still wanted him and none of that made sense but all of it was true.
I pulled away after a minute and wiped my face. “If he calls you,” I said, “tell him I’m safe and I’m not coming home and I need time. That’s all. Don’t tell him where I am. Don’t tell him I’m okay because I’m not.”
“He has your number,” Roz said.
“I blocked it.”
She nodded. “Okay. What about email?”
I pulled out my phone. My hands were steadier now. I opened my email and started a filter. Anything from Grant’s address went straight to a folder I didn’t have to see. Then I did the same thing on the rink account. I wasn’t hiding. I was defending. There was a difference.
I almost texted him once. I had my finger on the blocked contact screen and I almost unblocked it just to say something.
I don’t know what. Maybe just his name. But then I remembered Corinne’s voice in the hallway.
It must be so satisfying, work like that.
No pressure at all. And I put the phone down.
By five I was awake. I hadn’t slept. I got dressed in the dark and picked up the sweater from where I’d left it folded on the chair.
I held it for a second. Then I put it in my bag.
I didn’t take it by accident this time. I took it because it was his and because I wanted it and because I was keeping it.
Roz was still asleep. I left a note on the counter. Went to open the rink. Thank you.
The drive to the Ashbury was quiet. No traffic.
No lights. Just me and the dark and the road I’d driven a thousand times.
I parked in the loading zone and unlocked the back door and turned on the lights.
The building hummed to life around me. Walt had been running the plant overnight and it was already cold. He’d gone home. I was alone.
I walked out onto the concrete and looked at the sheet. It needed flooding. Thin layer, let it take, thin layer again. You couldn’t rush it and you couldn’t do it in one go. Every layer had to freeze before the next one would hold. I turned on the hose and started.
The water spread thin and even and I watched it settle. I waited. Then I laid another layer. And another. I didn’t think about anything. I just worked. My hands knew what to do. The ice knew what it needed. I gave it what it needed and I didn’t ask it for anything.
When the last layer was down I turned off the hose and went to the bench. My skates were there in my bag, where they’d ridden since Monday. I sat down and unlaced my boots and pulled the skates on. The fit was perfect. They always had been.
I stepped onto the ice I’d laid. In the building I’d saved. At five in the morning. With nobody watching.
I pushed off.
The first stroke felt like breathing. The second felt like waking up.
By the third I wasn’t thinking any more.
I was just skating. On my ice. In my rink.
Because I’d decided to. Not because anyone asked me to.
Not because I was trying to prove anything.
Because I wanted to and because I could and because it was mine.
I wasn’t asking anyone for permission any more. Not for an hour. Not for anything. I was taking back what was mine and I was standing on it.