Chapter 25 #2
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to.
He wasn’t surprised into a different person by any of it.
He was the same male who’d charmed her mailman.
He was still going to reach for a joke the second he felt something too big to say.
Fatherhood had not swapped him out for someone else.
It had simply turned a light on in a room that had always been there, but she hadn’t been perceptive enough to see.
The party thinned around seven, in a slow tide of coats and half-hugs and someone finally claiming the slow cooker. The slow cooker turned out to be Jensen’s after all, which explained nothing, since Jensen had left before it arrived.
Brogan hadn’t meant to stay.
She knew this because Brogan had said so, on arriving, in four words—”Twenty minutes.
I ate”—and had then stayed for the better part of an hour.
He’d spent most of it in the armchair in the corner, with Charlie asleep against his chest, one small fist buried in the heavy silver-shot beard, and his back half-turned to the room so that no one could see his face.
No one even mentioned it, because it was Brogan.
He handed her over now, transferring her sleeping weight to Rognar like something breakable and expensive. He collected his coat, and then he stopped at the door.
He looked at Rognar for a moment. Then he looked at the wreckage of the room behind him—the glasses on the mantel, the jersey drying over a chair, the baby, and the woman. The life that had not existed eight weeks ago.
“You were always like this,” Brogan said. “Nobody looked.”
Seven words, and then he was out the door and gone. Rognar stood holding his daughter with his mouth slightly open and watched him go. She watched him try to find a joke and fail, which meant that Brogan’s words mattered to him.
“He likes babies,” he said finally, to the closed door.
“He does not like babies. He’s extremely clear about that.”
“He held her for an hour.”
“He’d tell you that it was a hostage situation.” She took the empty glasses off the mantel because her hands wanted something to do. “You should sit down before you fall down. You’ve been vibrating since George’s office.”
“I don’t vibrate.”
“You’ve been vibrating like the second dryer at the laundromat. The one with the note on it.”
The last of them went. Fen went loudly, calling something back about the newsletter.
Korvash went quietly, pausing only to grip Rognar’s shoulder and look at him a moment too long.
It was the way a married male of seven years looks at a male who has recently been diagnosed with the same condition.
Then the house was just theirs again, warm and disordered and smelling faintly of chili.
Charlie went down in the crib Rognar had built in a panic eight weeks ago.
The monitor was on the windowsill with the volume up.
There was nothing left to clean that couldn’t wait.
Rognar was on the back step when she found him.
The two houses stood dark against the night, hers and his, eight feet of grass between them gone silver with frost. He sat on the step in the cold with his elbows on his knees. She came out with two mugs and sat close beside him, hip to hip, because the step was narrow and because she wanted to.
“You’ll freeze,” she said.
“I run hot. You’ve mentioned it. Several times. You keep records.”
“I do keep records.”
He took the mug and held it. He didn’t drink it, just stared down into it for a long moment.
“Nora,” he said.
“Rognar.”
“You’re my mate.”
He said it quietly, into the cold, looking out at the frost between the houses. It hit her with a weight even the stamp on that page hadn’t managed.
“What does that mean?” she made herself ask.
“It means permanence.” He took a breath, and she felt it, shoulder to shoulder.
“It means I’m not sitting here waiting to see how it goes, or hedging, or…
It’s not a human thing. My mother tried to explain it to me once when I was thirteen and I wasn’t listening.
In human words it means I’m done. It means you’re it.
It’s a promise, and I won’t take it back.
I’ve known since the truck outside George’s office last week, or at least that’s when I admitted it.
I haven’t told you because you needed to be able to leave. ”
“You took me off Deb’s schedule,” she said slowly. “The emergency contact.”
“I did.”
“That was you making sure I could leave.”
“That was me making sure that if you stayed, it was because you wanted to stay. Not because there was a schedule with your name on it and nobody else to call.” He started to take a sip but his hands were shaking, and he carefully placed the mug on the ground.
“Worst two weeks of my life. I’d fixed your porch light.
I knew the state of your tires. I wanted to…
There’s something inside me that just wants to close a hand around you, to make you safe, and make you provided for, and make it so you couldn’t go if you tried.
And that’s exactly what you’ve spent your whole life being on the wrong end of.
So I sat on my hands and I un-obliged you and I waited. ”
“And now?”
“Now you’re still here.”
She looked out at the two dark houses and the silver grass. She thought about the nine-year-old girl at a payphone with an account number copied off a letter. The girl who had learned that needing someone was the most dangerous thing a person could do.
And about the woman that girl had built, brick by careful brick.
A life so tight and so paid-up and so entirely hers that there was no room in it for a single other person to knock anything over.
And she thought about the eight feet of grass, and how she had crossed it, and how many times she’d crossed it, and how she had stopped counting, which she had never once done about anything else in her life.
“For someone,” she said, “who spent months complaining about your neighbor, you’ve made yourself remarkably difficult to get rid of.”
“You started it.”
“I started it. You moved in.”
“You gave me three eggs.”
“You asked for one.”
“I know,” he said, and something moved in his voice, some old buried amusement finally coming up for air. He set the mug down on the step and turned to look at her properly in the near-dark. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”
“About the eggs?”
“About the egg. Singular. I only asked for one.” He was almost smiling now, the real smile, the one he didn’t hand out to rooms. “I had a full carton in the fridge, Nora. I’d shopped.
I had twelve perfectly good eggs eight feet from where I was standing when I knocked on your door last October and asked to borrow one. ”
She stopped turning the mug.
“You knocked on my door,” she said, “for an egg you already had.”
“I wanted to see if you’d open it.” He said it simply, the way he’d said everything that mattered.
“You’d been glaring at me over the fence since the day I moved in and I couldn’t work out if there was a person under the glaring or just the glaring, and I couldn’t think of a reason to find out, so I invented one.
It was a bad plan. I had to eat fifteen eggs that week so you wouldn’t catch me. ”
“You—” She put a hand over her mouth. “A year. I have thought, for a year, that you were the kind of male who runs out of eggs.”
“I let you think it. It was easier being the one who runs out of eggs. Nobody checks on him.” The smile finally arrived “You gave me three. I only asked for one and you gave me three. And you did it while looking at me like I was something you’d found in a drain.
I stood in my kitchen with three eggs I didn’t need and I thought, there’s a person under there.
And she doesn’t like me at all. Best morning I’d had in months. ”
“You are,” she said, and couldn’t finish, because she was laughing, out on a frozen step at eight o’clock in the dark, “you are an absolute menace, you engineered a year of—”
“I engineered one egg. You did the year yourself, with the glaring.” He caught her hand off her mouth and held it, warm as a stone in the sun.
“So. Mate. That’s the word and that’s what it means.
No ring tonight because I know you’d want to price the ring yourself and probably audit the jeweler.
I’m not asking you anything. I’m telling you something that’s true, and you can file it wherever you file those. ”
The monitor crackled on the sill.
They both stopped to listen. It wasn’t a cry. It was the small conversational noise Charlie made surfacing halfway out of sleep, a low series of vowels addressed to no one. The sound of a seven-month-old with a strong opinion and no vocabulary to deploy it.
He tipped his head towards the window.
“She gets a vote,” he said.
They listened. The vowels resolved themselves into one clear syllable, repeated twice, with tremendous satisfaction, into the dark of the nursery. A fat, decisive, unmistakable “Bah.” And then the settling shuffle of a baby who had said her piece and gone back to sleep.
“That’s a yes,” he said.
“That is not a yes. That’s not even a word. She’s seven months old, her entire vocabulary is a noise she makes at the goalie.”
“She said it twice.”
“She says everything twice.”
“Two votes, then.” He put his arm around her on the step, and she leaned into the warmth of him without a single alarm going off anywhere in her orderly, over-warm, entirely rearranged life.
He kissed the top of her head, careful of nothing, because there was nothing left to be careful about.
“You’re outnumbered, my mate. It’s on the record. ”
“It’s not on any record. I’m the one who keeps the records and I know.”
“Then write it down.”
She looked at the two dark houses, and the frost between them, and the yellow light of the nursery window with her whole outrageous future asleep behind it.
“I’m not going to write it down,” she said. “I’m going to write my name on the emergency contact list instead.”