CHAPTER SEVEN
NORA
The Saturdays became a rhythm.
Not a dramatic one. Not the rhythm she’d feared — the official, court-mandated, scheduled rhythm of co-parenting with someone who felt like a stranger. Something more organic and therefore more terrifying.
He came at ten. He stayed until noon. Sometimes he brought something for Felix — the wooden trucks, then a set of measuring cups she’d mentioned in passing that Felix had claimed from the kitchen and refused to return.
He came prepared, which was the specific quality about Roman Vale that had always made him both impressive and a little alarming — he prepared for everything.
Even meeting an eighteen-month-old for the second, third, fourth time.
Felix got used to him quickly.
Children did that. They assessed without prejudice and they accepted without ceremony and they moved on. By the third Saturday Felix was bringing Roman his blocks without being asked, the specific toddler gesture of showing someone the things that mattered.
Nora watched from a careful distance.
She watched Roman sit on the floor of her apartment, in his weekend clothes, building towers with an eighteen-month-old who knocked them down with great satisfaction every time.
She watched him not flinch when Felix knocked the tower into his coffee.
She watched him figure out, by instinct, that Felix’s laugh was most reliably triggered by the specific sound of blocks falling rather than by faces or games. He’d found it on the third Saturday and returned to it every time since.
He was learning her son.
She did not know what to do about what that felt like.
Her friend Bea came on a Tuesday.
Bea had been with her through the labor and the first year and the specific chaos of raising a child while building a career while carrying a secret that required ongoing management.
She was thirty-three, a pediatric nurse, and she had the specific quality of competence that made other people’s difficult things feel briefly less impossible.
She looked around the apartment.
She looked at the wooden trucks lined up by the radiator where Felix stored his most valued objects.
“He’s been coming,” she said.
“Saturdays,” Nora said.
“How is it?”
“Strange.” Nora made tea. “Good for Felix. Felix loves the trucks.” She paused. “Roman is — he’s being careful. He’s not pushing anything.”
“And you?”
Nora handed her the mug.
“I’m watching,” she said.
“For what?”
She thought about it.
“For whether what I see is the person I married or the person who signed the papers,” she said. “I know neither of those is the complete picture. But I’ve been carrying the midnight version of him for two years and I’m — trying to update my information.”
Bea held the mug. “What does the new information say?”
Nora looked at the trucks.
“That he’s better than he was,” she said. “Something happened to him in the past two years. He’s—” She paused. “He’s quieter. More careful. He doesn’t move through rooms the way he used to — like every room exists to serve him.” She paused again. “He sits on my floor and builds towers with my son.”
“That’s significant,” Bea said.
“Yes,” Nora said.
“Is it enough?”
She looked at the board books on the shelf. At the drawing table across the room. At the panels she’d been working on — the new book, which was still finding itself.
“I don’t know what enough looks like yet,” she said. “I know what the beginning of something looks like.”
“And?”
“And it looks like this,” she said. “Saturday mornings with wooden trucks and careful distances.”
Bea was quiet.
“You still love him,” she said.
Not a question.
Nora looked at the trucks.
“I never stopped,” she said. “I was furious at him for two years and I never stopped.” She paused. “That’s the part I haven’t worked out what to do with.”
“Nora.” Bea’s voice was gentle. “Maybe you don’t have to work it out. Maybe you just let it be what it is.”
Nora looked at her.
“I’ve never been good at letting things be what they are,” she said.
“I know,” Bea said. “That’s why it’s good practice.”
They drank their tea.
Outside the window, the Brooklyn afternoon did its thing — slow, ordinary, indifferent to the complicated interior weather of the apartment above it.
Nora thought about Saturday.
She thought: let it be what it is.
She thought: I’ll try.