The Ten-Day Math #2
She had done it the first time at nineteen, on the back of an envelope, sitting on the stairs while her mother cleaned a kitchen that had already been clean for an hour.
She hadn’t known she was starting anything.
She had only wanted one page somewhere in that house where somebody had written down what was actually true, instead of everyone moving around it politely until it went away on its own.
She had done this before her first interview at Kade Group.
She had done it the night her second job folded, sitting on Dani’s floor with the radiator ticking.
She had done it in a Boston hotel room, twice, and had never told anyone about either time.
She had done it across two days in Astoria, columns and columns of it, the week she walked out on him and then walked back with terms.
It had to be paper. That was part of it, though she’d never gone looking for the reason.
A document could be found. A note on her phone could be read over her shoulder on a train.
Paper could be folded down small and put somewhere, and the folding was most of the point: at the end of it there was an object, small enough to hold, that contained the entire shape of the worst outcome.
You could put the worst outcome in your pocket.
You could carry it around all day and it weighed nothing.
The left column was the things she controlled. The right column was the things she didn’t.
CONTROL: the quality of her work. Whether she stayed.
What she said out loud and when. Whether she kept the model current enough that any competent analyst could pick it up in a week.
How much of her professional standing was independent of him — which she’d been quietly rebuilding since the reassignment, in ways she had been careful, until this second, not to call insurance.
DON’T CONTROL: the cure window. Vivienne. What Vivienne wanted. Whether the thing between her and Alexander survived contact with a threat that had real leverage attached.
She looked at the right column for a while.
Then, in the left column, in her own private shorthand, small, at the bottom, below everything else:
whether I’m still standing after.
She capped the pen.
That was the sentence. Ten careful days, the whole architecture of them, in five words on a legal pad in a building where nobody could see her write it.
Not whether he stays, not whether we survive.
She had put the load-bearing question in the column marked things she could control, and the thing she’d chosen to control was her own capacity to absorb losing him.
Mara had put it four hours ago in words Jo had walked away from the ledge annoyed at the accuracy of it. And then she had come back to her desk and done it anyway, on paper, in ink, without noticing she’d started.
The worst part was that it worked. Sitting there with the pad in front of her, the low panic she’d been carrying since eleven-fifteen had gone quiet. That was the trade, and she had known exactly what she was buying when she made it.
Jo tore the page off the pad, folded it twice, and put it in the inside pocket of her bag instead of the shredder, which she noticed, and did not examine.
Reagan called at nine, when the dishes were done and the apartment had gone quiet enough that Jo had run out of things to do with her hands.
“You didn’t call last night,” Reagan said.
“I didn’t have anything to report.”
“That’s not the criteria. It’s never been the criteria.
” Something clattered in Reagan’s kitchen, ninety miles south, followed by a child’s voice raised into the register that meant bedtime was being negotiated rather than accepted.
Reagan handled it without covering the phone — two sentences, no volume, negotiation closed — and came back without losing the thread. “How long is it now?”
“Ten days.”
“And what’s the plan?”
Jo laughed once and it came out thin. “Why does everyone assume I have a plan.”
“Because you’re my sister and I’ve known you since you were four.” Reagan’s voice didn’t change. “Tell me about him. Not the situation. Him.”
“He told the truth first,” Jo said, and the sentence surprised her a little on the way out.
“In an elevator, last night. He said he’d noticed we were being careful with each other, and he said it before I did, when he could have kept not saying it and nobody would have made him.
Then he moved a conversation today for real reasons and told Priya twice to move it, not cancel it, which is him being careful that I don’t read it wrong. ”
“Okay.” A cabinet closed. “That’s what he did. Is he good to you?”
“You always ask that.”
“I always ask that.” Reagan waited.
Jo stood at her own counter with the phone against her ear and worked out how to answer it honestly, since dishonesty had never worked on Reagan and she’d stopped trying somewhere around age twelve.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the real answer.
He’s good to me. He’s not exciting-good or powerful-good, he’s — he tells me things that cost him something to tell me.
He’s gotten it wrong twice in ways that mattered and both times he fixed it in front of me instead of behind my back.
” She turned the tap on and off again for no reason.
“And I’m still standing here with a folded piece of paper in my bag that’s basically an insurance policy against him. ”
“Say more about the paper.”
“It’s the thing I do. Two columns. What I control, what I don’t.
” It sounded worse in her own kitchen than it had on the ledge.
She said the rest of it anyway. “Mara called it a coping mechanism wearing a personality trait’s clothes.
At lunch. And then I did it again at six-forty, four hours later, like she hadn’t said anything at all. ”
Reagan was quiet for a moment. The kitchen noise on her end had stopped.
“Jo. Do you want me to tell you it’s fine, or do you want the real thing?”
“The real thing.”
“Then here it is, and I want you to actually sit in it instead of solving it before I’m done.
” Reagan’s voice dropped into the register she used for hospital calls and school calls, the one that meant the whole thing was coming.
“You built that habit in a house where nobody was coming. That’s where it comes from.
It kept you upright at nineteen and it got you through three jobs that went nowhere and it is one of the reasons you are as competent as you are.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s a character flaw, because it isn’t, and I watched you need it. ”
“But.”
“But you’re using a survival tool in a situation you’re not trying to survive.
” A pause. “You keep telling me he’s good to you.
Every call, for months. And you’re still standing at your counter at nine at night with a folded contingency plan in your bag, because some part of you has decided in advance that the thing you’re going to need, at the end of this, is to be intact by yourself. ”
Jo didn’t say anything.
“That’s not distrust of him,” Reagan said.
“I want to be clear, because I know how your brain works and you’re about to turn this into an accusation about your own character.
It isn’t one. It’s just that you learned early that the only reliable thing was your own capacity to take a hit.
And nobody’s ever asked you to unlearn it, because it makes you extremely useful and very easy to be around. ”
“You’re asking me to unlearn it.”
“No. I’m asking you to notice that you’ve never once tried.
” Something creaked, Reagan sitting down.
“That’s all. I’m not telling you to throw the paper away.
Honestly, keep the paper. Just — know that you’re the one who put it there, and he’s not the reason it’s in your bag. It was in your bag before you met him.”
Jo stood in her kitchen with the tap off and the refrigerator running and nothing to say that would have been true.
“I don’t know how to want something without also getting ready to lose it,” she said. “That’s the honest answer. I’ve never done it the other way. I don’t know what it would feel like.”
“I know, baby.” Reagan had not handed her a piece of pity in twenty-three years and she didn’t hand her any now. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you have to figure that out this week. Ten days isn’t a verdict.”
“It might be turning into one.”
“Then have the conversation. Somewhere with chairs.” Reagan snorted at her own line. “Was that the phrase? That’s a good phrase. Whose was it?”
“Mara’s.”
“I like Mara. Put her on the phone sometime.” A child called out again behind her, closer now, out of patience. “I have to go referee. Call me after the conversation. Not before. I don’t want the version where you’ve rehearsed it.”
“I won’t rehearse it.”
“You will absolutely rehearse it. Call me anyway.”
Reagan hung up first. Reagan always hung up first. Jo laid the phone on the counter, screen down out of habit, and didn’t move for a while.
She did not take the paper out of her bag. She thought about it, decided against it, and watched herself decide. That part was new. Ten days ago the whole sequence would have run underneath her without ever surfacing.
It was not the same as putting the paper down. She knew the difference, and she wasn’t going to hand herself credit she hadn’t earned.
Two more days until a conversation somewhere with chairs. She could hold a line for two days. She had built most of herself out of exactly that skill, and it had never failed her once.
That was the problem. It had never failed her once.