28. Epilogue, I Can Float #3
In the golden lamplight afterward, with my head resting on the chest I finally got to memorize completely, I lie in the room that is only ours and feel the last of the old fear leave the building entirely.
I make lazy circles on the soft hair on his chest, his nipples, then below his belly button and I see his face brighten. He rolls over me to make me feel my effect on him again. And it's not even fifteen minutes since crested. He is my man.
And we do it over again, this time much slower as he does things he loves.
Voss, A Week of Nothing
We stay a week.
That is the honeymoon. No flights, no itinerary, no country neither of us has seen. The same lodge above the same cove, a road that takes forty minutes to come down and a signal that dies to the north and does not come back, and seven days in which absolutely nothing is required of either of us.
The dress dries on the back of a chair by the window for three days before anybody moves it. Salt-stiff, ruined, the ivory gone the color of weak tea along the hem. Neither of us can bring ourselves to send it out to be cleaned.
On the first morning he wakes at 0430.
I feel him surface beside me in the dark, feel the whole twenty-year machine come online at once. I don't say anything. I lie still and let him have it. And after a moment his arm comes back over me and he goes to sleep again.
That is the honeymoon too. That is most of it, actually.
He cooks, badly, with enormous seriousness.
He burns eggs on the second day and takes it harder than he took the airstrip.
We walk down to the cove in the afternoons and sit on the rocks and do not talk for long stretches, and the not-talking has stopped being a thing either of us has to be brave about.
On the fourth day I notice I have stopped doing the thing.
I sit down in a room and I do not find the exits first. I had not planned to stop.
There was no decision. Eleven years of walking into a space and mapping my way out of it, three of them at a dead sprint, and somewhere between a courtroom and a cove it simply quit, the way a fever breaks while you are asleep and you only find out afterward.
I tell him and he is quiet a while.
“Mine hasn't quit,” he says finally. “Just so you know. I still go and countin' the cars, yeah."
“I know you do.”
“It might not ever stop.”
“I know that too.” I put my hand flat on his chest, over the place that has been standing a post since before I met him. “I didn't marry a man who stopped. I married the one who comes back to bed.”
***
On the fifth day, sitting on the rocks with the tide going out, I hear myself say, “So how many rug rats do we want?”
I did not plan the sentence. It arrives fully assembled, in the voice of a woman who is not doing arithmetic.
He doesn't miss a beat. “Three.”
I turn and look at him. “Three.”
“Could be talked into four.” He is watching the water, entirely calm, a man delivering a figure he has evidently been sitting on a good while. “ Wouldn't push past four, no. That's a whole mess of car seats to haul around, yeah.”
“You have thought about this.”
“Some.” A pause. “A while.”
“Since when.”
He is quiet long enough that I turn all the way around. When he answers he is still looking at the water, and his voice has gone down into the register he keeps for the true things.
“Ever since a truck at midnight.” He turns his hand over on his knee.
“I went and spent twenty long years figurin' I didn't never get to want a thing like that, no.
A man who shows up late to the landin' don't get handed someone small to keep.” He finally looks over at me.
“Then I got handed you, yeah. And I clean quit bein' late.”
I do not cry at this. I want that on the record. I sit on a rock on the Big Sur coast in a borrowed sweater with salt in my hair and I do not cry, and he lets me not cry, and after a while he takes my hand and neither of us says one more word about it.
Three, then. Possibly four. It is the first time in eleven years I have made a plan that runs longer than a week.
***
On the last night the fog comes in off the water and takes the whole cove, and the lodge goes quiet the way places go quiet when the weather closes them, and we lie in the dark in a room with the window open and the sound of a sea we cannot see.
He finds my hand in the dark, laces his fingers through mine, the way he has since the beginning. “Come here, Mrs. Nolan. The room's clear. I checked.”
“You did not.”
“I surely did.” A pause. “Twice.” Another pause, and I can hear the grin in it. “Let's get started.”
“On what.”
“Three,” he says. “Possibly four.”
And I laugh into his shoulder, and then I stop laughing, because the thing I have been carrying for eleven years picks that moment to set itself down.
“For three years I swam to keep from drowning,” I tell him, “and I never once let go, because letting go was the same as going under. I'm letting go now.”
His arm comes around me. Like what I imagined in the truck.
The room holds and the water that used to be the thing I feared is just the thing I rest on, and I settle into it, into him, and I don't sink.
“Turns out,” I tell him, “I can float.”