Chapter Eighteen #2
"Okay," she says, and lets me have it, because she's kind, and letting me have it is its own small terrible mercy. "Get some sleep. Answer me if I call, okay? Just answer."
"I will."
I won't, not really, and we both stand there on the line a second knowing it, same as I stood in a parking lot with Dev's friend Pete knowing it.
Then she says love you, doofus, the old word, the one from before any of this, and I say it back, and I hang up, and the apartment is quieter than it was before I called.
That's the thing I didn't know could happen.
You can reach for the one person and miss and come out of it more alone than you went in.
The thing that was opening is still open.
I've got nowhere to put it now. I tried the one door out of the house and I couldn't get myself through it, and there's one door left in the whole place and it's the one I've been walking through all year, and it's about to come home and eat when it gets here.
* * *
Graham's key's in the door a little after eight.
I'm on the couch when he comes in, not doing anything, the lamps down low, how they get without my deciding it, and he sets his bag by the door and reads me off the top before he's got his coat off.
He looks up from the zipper and there's the small warm sweep of me, head to foot, the one that finds whatever I brought in the door, and his face softens and settles on me like I'm the good part of his day.
"There she is," he says. He hangs the coat. He comes over. "You've got a face on. What happened."
"Nothing. Ran into a guy from softball. Pete Dolan."
"How's Claire?"
The kitchen goes very still around me.
I never told him I called Claire. There's no text, no note.
He was on a site walk across town with his phone in his pocket and I sat in this room and called my sister and said forty words to her and hung up and didn't tell a soul, because there's no soul to tell, and he walks in the door forty minutes later and asks me how Claire is.
Not how's your day. Not who'd you talk to.
How's Claire. Like the name's just sitting on my face where he can read it, the same as the closet was on my face, the same as Nora was, the same as every private thing I've ever tried to hold has turned out to be printed on me in a hand only he can see.
And I go for it. The thing I always go for. The piece that walks me back. He notices everything, that's the whole him, that's what I came here for, he probably heard my voice do the after-Claire thing when he walked in, he probably. He probably.
My hand closes on air.
There's no piece there. I reach for the place where the piece lives, the smooth true reasonable thing that lays down flat over the cold and makes the floor a floor again, and it's like reaching back for the man in the aisle, the mouth moves and nothing's behind it.
I've laid that piece down a hundred times.
I laid one over the counter photo and one over the picture of me asleep and one over a scrap of somebody's robe in a frame that isn't now, I got so good at it that it stopped feeling like work, and I reach for it now with him standing three feet away asking how my sister is that he has no way on earth to know I spoke to, and my hand comes back empty.
The floor isn't there. I go to stand on it like I have all year and there's just the drop.
And the sentence finishes.
It's been stopping at the same place since he said her name into my hair in the spring.
There was someone here before I. It always died at before I, because the next word cost too much, and I could feel from the landing how much, and I'd pull back up onto the safe part and do the work.
There's no safe part tonight. There's no work left to do.
The sentence just finishes on its own in the quiet kitchen while he stands there warm and easy waiting for me to tell him how Claire is, and it finishes all the way, and it's so plain and so big and so old that my chest pulls in on itself and my eyes go hot.
There was someone here before I got here.
There was a robe on a body that wasn't mine, in this apartment, in a frame that isn't now.
There's a whole dim row behind my row, gone soft with age, on a tablet on the arm of that couch, and he showed me my row himself, warm, proud, day one near enough, and he never once said mine was the first. He keeps everything.
He said it like a gift. I've got everything.
Every step. And I'm a row of steps on a man's tablet, in order, complete, and I set that down the night he showed me because his hand was on my neck, and I can't set it down now, because there's a row behind mine, dim and folded up on a high shelf with a name I asked him twice and he said long gone.
"Teddy," Graham says. Mild. His hand comes up toward the back of my neck, where it goes, the warm settling weight that ends every night like this.
I step back out from under it.
I don't decide that either. The body just does it.
The body that never fumbles, that goes down at the pat of a hand on the floor, that sinks into the after like water finding the low spot, it takes a step back from his hand and gets the couch between us, and the moving is the loudest thing I've done in a year.
I feel how loud it is. He feels it too. His hand stops in the air where my neck was.
"Who was she," I say.
My voice is wrong. It's small and it's climbing and there's no man under it to hold it level, that's the thing, I go to say the next part in a low steady voice, a voice with a floor, and I don't have one, I confront him in the only voice I've got left and it's high and shaking and it belongs to the small kept thing between my legs and not to any man who ever stood in this kitchen.
It should stop me. It doesn't. It comes anyway.
"Elise," I say. "The robe. There was somebody here before me.
Wasn't there. In this apartment. You kept her too.
You keep." My hands are doing something in the air I can't watch.
"How many have there been. Is that. Is this a thing you do.
Am I just. Am I the next one. On the tablet.
Is there a row behind my row, Graham, because I saw it, I saw the robe, I saw a shoulder that wasn't mine, and you said long gone and you said day one like I was the first and I'm not the first, am I. "
He doesn't move. He's not moving at all.
"I called my sister tonight," I say, and my voice cracks on sister, all the way, "and you walked in and knew.
You always know. I can't have one thing.
I reached for one person outside this house and I couldn't even do it and you knew before your coat was off.
What am I. What am I to you. Because I went out today and I did the guy I used to be for a man in a store and he's dead, Graham, he's dead, you.
There's nothing left of him. I went to grieve him in his own voice and I don't even have the word for it anymore, the plain one, the man's one, it's gone, you took it and I can't. I can't keep doing this.
I have to stop. I don't know what stopping is but I have to, I have to stop, I can't."
It runs out of me. All of it, ugly, out of order, no floor under any of it, my face wet, my breath going in wrong.
I'm standing in the low lamplight on the far side of the couch with my own words hanging in the air between us and my chest heaving, and I've said it, the most of it I can reach, and I'm braced.
I'm braced all the way down. For him to be hurt.
For him to be angry, for the warm to drop out of the room, for the floor of the whole year to give and take me with it.
I don't know what I want back. I want him to fight it or fold or something, I want the room to do something with what I just threw into it.
Graham stands there.
He doesn't come around the couch. He doesn't reach for me again.
His face hasn't changed, is the thing I'll keep coming back to, standing there watching me shake, his face hasn't done a single thing.
There's no hurt landing in it. No anger climbing up under it.
Nothing catching at all. He just looks at me across the couch, easy, patient, the same warm read he gave me when he walked in, like I'm still the good part of his day, like nothing I said cost him one single thing.
He reaches into his pocket. For a second something in me lurches, expects, I don't know what.
He takes out his keys and he sets them down on the side table, quiet, the whole ring, the little pink key on it catching the lamp for a second, and he does it like he'd do it on any night in the world, and he leaves his hand resting there beside them, and he watches me, and he waits.
He's not scared.
That's the last thing I get, standing there wrecked with all of it out on the floor between us.
Whatever I was braced for, it isn't in the room.
I have said the biggest thing I have ever said to anybody and the man I said it to is calmer than I have ever seen him, and I don't know what that is.
I can't read it. I've never once not been able to read the warm off his face and I can't read this, and I stand there in the quiet with my heart going and wait for it to turn into something.