Chapter Seventeen #2
It isn't locked. That's the first thing.
I sit down with it in the dark and it opens right up, no code, nothing, the record just there for anybody's hands.
He never hid it. He showed it to me himself six hours ago.
There's no drawer I'm going through here, no lock I'm picking, and I still feel like I'm doing a thing I'd have to explain, sitting alone in the low light going back through it with him asleep down the hall.
I go back through it like he did. The shirt guy, the beer.
Forward, slow. And it's different alone.
He's not talking over it now, and without his voice laid on top, the order of it says something else.
It's so complete. There's a picture from every place.
Way more than the obvious nights, the ones I'd have guessed, him and me together.
There's one of me asleep. On my side, mouth open, a plug night, a night with no memory in it of a camera.
There's one of me at the counter in the morning in just the camisole, coffee in my hand, looking at nothing, and I know I was alone in that kitchen, I know it the way you know which mornings were yours, and there's a picture of it anyway, framed from the hall, steady.
There's one of me on the phone with Claire, curled in the chair by the window, doing the Sunday voice, and I never felt a lens on that either.
Little ordinary nothings I was sure only I was in.
He was in them too, back somewhere, holding the camera level.
I sit with that one a while. He was up, is the thing I build first. He was up and I didn't clock him, I've never been a morning person, he moves quiet, he's always moved quiet.
That covers the counter. It covers most of them if I let it.
The picture of me asleep is harder — to take that one he'd have had to stand over me in the dark and hold still, and I'd have had to not stir, and I stir, I've always been a light sleeper.
Except. Except I sleep like the dead in this apartment.
I have since the first week. He said it to me once, easy, months back, you sleep so well now, like it pleased him, and I took it for a nice thing and I still want to take it for a nice thing, and mostly it holds.
I keep going the wrong way. Back, past the shirt guy, and there shouldn't be a back, he said day one, near enough.
But the record doesn't start clean where I start.
There's older stuff behind it, gone dim like old files do, and I tell myself it's just his camera roll, everybody's got years of junk on a tablet, and then there's one that stops my thumb cold.
Somebody's shoulder. A room I know is this apartment because I know that window.
And a scrap of pale fabric with little washed-out flowers on it, just the corner of it, on a person who isn't me, in a frame that isn't now.
The robe.
For a second I don't do anything with it.
It just lands. The cold comes up the back of my neck the way it did in his lap the night he first said her name, except there's no one holding me now, no voice to fold it back down, only me and a dim square of somebody else's shoulder in the room where I sleep.
And for that second I see it. Not in words.
All at once, the whole shape of it, the way a dark room jumps at you when the light flips on before you meant to look, and it's so big and so plain that my chest pulls tight and my eyes sting and I hear myself make a small sound with nobody there to hear it.
Then the thing that runs me now gets both hands on it and starts hauling it back under, quick, before I can read what the light just showed me.
I don't open it bigger. I'd like to say I don't open it bigger because it's nothing, and I don't open it bigger, but that's not the reason.
The reason is my hand won't. I sit there in the dark with my thumb an inch off the glass and the sentence starts up in me on its own, the one that's been down under the floor since he said her name into my hair, there was someone here before I, and it stops there.
It always stops there. At before I. The rest of it stays a shape in the dark with no words hung on it, because the next words cost too much.
I can feel how much from where I'm sitting, the way you feel in the dark that a stair isn't there before you put your weight down.
So I don't put my weight down. I pull back up onto the landing where it's safe and I do the work, and the work is harder tonight than it has ever been, more pieces, laid down more careful.
He had a life before me. Of course he did.
He's not a kid, he had rooms before this one and people in them, and a man who keeps everything, who keeps me in a row of pictures because he can't stand to lose a single step of me, that man kept them too, whoever they were, because that's who he is.
He's the one who doesn't throw things away.
And isn't that the whole reason it's safe in here, that he holds onto what's his and never lets it go.
I lay every piece of it down. It takes all of them and there's a long minute in the middle where none of it covers, where I can feel the cold come straight up through the gap and the whole shape of the thing standing right there wanting a word, and then I get the last piece down over it and press until the floor goes quiet.
I put the tablet down. I pick up my phone instead, and here's the part I'd never say out loud to a living person.
I sit in the dark and I type what's happening to me into the little box, like it's going to come back with an answer, like somebody already wrote the page for exactly this and I just have to find it.
I don't even finish typing it. Half a question in I catch myself, a grown man on a couch at two in the morning asking a search bar to tell him what he is, and I turn the phone face down.
There's nothing in there for me. Whatever this is, it doesn't have a page.
It's just mine, and it's got one door, and the door's asleep down the hall.
I turn the tablet off and set it face down on the arm of the couch, squared up, how it was, so the morning won't know I was here. Even doing it I know that's a joke. The morning always knows. The morning has a picture of the counter.
I go back down the hall. Graham hasn't moved.
I get in on my side, careful, and the second the mattress takes my weight his arm comes over without him waking, heavy, sure, and pulls me back against him, and his hand finds the cage through the sheet and settles there.
Even asleep he goes easy once he's got it, a man checking a lock in his sleep and finding it locked.
I lie in it. It's warm. It's the warmest place there is and I'm in it and I wanted to be in it and I'm not lying about that part, not to myself, not now.
But something came back down the hall with me tonight.
I turned around again. I got right up to the edge of the thing and I turned around and came back to bed, the same as I did in the hall with the robe, the same as I keep doing.
Only it didn't come free this time. There's a weight left in me from the turning, a tax I paid that I never used to have to pay, and I lie here in the warm with his hand on the lock and I can feel it sitting on my chest, not going anywhere.
Every other time the wanting closed the whole thing over clean and I went under.
Tonight the wanting won, it did, it always does, but it left a corner turned up, and through the corner I can feel that the next time I get up and go looking, the turning around is going to cost me more than it did tonight, and the time after that more again, and that I'm going to keep getting up.
That's the part that won't lie flat, and for once I make myself hold it instead of pushing it under.
It isn't him I'm scared of. He already catches me, the tablet has a picture of the counter, and that was never where the fear lived.
The fear is smaller than that, and closer, and it's mine.
The turning around is a thing I do with my hands, the same motion every time, and hands wear out.
One of these nights I'm going to come up to the edge and reach for the thing that walks me back and my hand's going to close on air, and I'll be standing there with nowhere to put my eyes but straight ahead at it.
And I tell myself I don't know what happens then.
I lie here in the warm and I can feel the other answer sitting just under that one, the one I don't pick up, that the looking was never the thing I was scared of, that I could stand at that edge with the light full on it and take in every part of it and still be here in the morning against his back.
If that's true then the looking doesn't cost me any of this.
It only costs me the not-knowing. And the not-knowing is the last soft place I've got left.
So I keep my eyes shut on it and I keep it a shape with no words in it.
I don't walk it any further than that. I wait for the sleep that always comes easy here, his hand heavy and sure on the cage, and for the first night I can remember, it makes me wait.