CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER
SIX
The Pattern
Aoife
Simone said to me, in month three, that she had a bad feeling.
We were sitting in the break room at Mae's, and Simone had her tea and I had mine and she was looking at me with the expression she wore when she had decided to say something she knew I did not want to hear, the slight forward tilt of her chin, the directness of her gaze that did not blink away.
"What kind of bad feeling?" I asked.
"The kind where I've been watching you for three months and he has never once taken you anywhere that's actually his," she said. "Has he ever taken you to his neighbourhood?"
I opened my mouth and then closed it, because I had not put this together in quite that way before, and now that she had said it, it was very difficult to un-see.
"He just likes quiet places," I said.
Simone looked at me for a long moment with the expression of a person who has more to say and is choosing not to say all of it.
Her mouth pressed together very slightly, not unkindly, the expression of someone who loves you enough to leave you a door to walk back through.
"Okay," she said. "He likes quiet places.
" She drank her tea. Then: "Has he told you his last name yet? "
I said nothing.
"Right," said Simone.
"It just hasn't come up," I said.
"Aoife." She set down her cup and looked at me with the softer version of her face, the one she kept behind the directness, the one that belonged to a person who was saying a hard thing because she cared about the person she was saying it to.
"I'm not telling you what to do. But I want you to be looking at this with your whole eyes open, not just the part of them that wants it to be something particular. "
I thought about that conversation for a long time after. I thought about it on the evenings I sat in my apartment waiting to hear from him, telling myself I was not waiting. Simone is right. I know she is right. I am not looking at this with my whole eyes open.
And then he would text and I would pick up the phone and all of the looking-clearly would dissolve, because he was here and present and wanting to be near me, and I had been wanted by so few people in my life that I could not make myself not want it back.
This is the part that shames me most in hindsight. Not that I stayed, but that I knew and stayed anyway. I had all the information I needed and I chose the story I preferred.
?
The pattern was this: days of silence, and then his number on my screen, and then a few hours of his company and the particular warmth of being near him, and then he would leave and the silence would begin again and I would lie in the dark and sort through everything he had and had not said.
I found evidence. I told myself the way he listened was evidence.
The way he came back, always, after the silences.
The way he had, once, in the fourth month, taken my hand on the walk back from the restaurant and held it for two blocks before letting go, not looking at me when he did it, as if it had simply happened rather than been chosen. I had held onto that for weeks.
I told Simone about it. She said, "Two blocks?
" and I said, "It meant something," and she said, "I believe you that it meant something, sweetheart.
I just can't tell you what." Then she looked at me with the softer expression and said, "What do you actually know about him?
Where does he live? Does he have family? "
I knew he worked somewhere that required a suit.
I knew he took his coffee black. I knew the way he looked at me sometimes made me feel seen in a way I was not accustomed to.
I knew he had something heavy inside him that lived behind his eyes and occasionally surfaced in the way he went still and distant without warning, and then came back as if returning from somewhere I was not permitted to follow.
"Not much," I admitted.
"Right," said Simone, for the second time.
She was right. She was right about all of it and I knew she was right and I could not make myself pull back, because pulling back would have meant being alone again, fully and completely, in the apartment on Carver Street with no one calling and no one coming.
It's not enough, I told myself. I know it isn't enough.
But for now it is what I have, and I cannot let go of it yet.
?
In month five he disappeared for three days.
I spent those seventy-two hours cycling between the reasonable and the unreasonable.
I cleaned the apartment. I went to the daycare and was present and warm with the children and perfectly functional.
I went to Mae's and served tables and answered Mae's questions about whether I was all right with yes, fine, just tired, and she looked at me with her customary directness, those sharp eyes that missed nothing, and said nothing more.
On the third night I sat on the couch with my grandmother's throw pulled around my shoulders and I let myself feel the fear.
Not really the fear that something bad had happened to him, though that was the shape I tried to give it.
The older fear underneath: that I was too easy to leave.
That I was the kind of person people moved through rather than stayed with.
He texted on the evening of the third day. I picked up the phone so fast I nearly dropped it, and the speed of my own response made me close my eyes in a brief, private moment of self-recrimination.
I told Simone later that I had been fine. She said, "Okay," and did not press. She looked at me for a moment with something in her expression that was steady and careful and kind, and then she looked away. That was one of the things I loved about her. She knew when pressing would not help.