Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
HOLDEN
Seven weeks. That's how long a wrong number has been the best part of my day.
Can't answer it. Won't check it for another two hours. Doesn't matter. I already know who it is, because nobody else texts me at this hour. Nobody else texts me at all.
The foal comes out slick, steaming, alive. Tom's flashlight drops. He's crying. The mare lifts her head, nickers at the wet thing on the ground, starts licking. This mother, at least, chooses to stay.
Sunrise paints the mountains copper. My arms ache to the shoulders. Blood and amniotic fluid have dried on my forearms, crusted under my nails. Sitting on the Hendersons' porch with a mug of the worst coffee I've ever tasted, I pull out my phone.
Question. If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? And don't say something boring like steak. I already know you're a steak person. You radiate steak energy through the phone.
Sent at 1:14am. Then, twelve minutes later:
Actually never mind. I know the answer. It's whatever you can cook in a cast iron pan over an open fire while looking disapproving. That's your whole vibe.
Then, 2:47am:
I can't sleep. My sister called today. She's pregnant. Third baby. My mother cried happy tears for forty minutes. When I told her Marrow and Light got picked up by a fifth boutique, she asked if I'd considered going back to school.
I'm really tired, Holden. Not the sleep kind.
My chest does that thing again. The tightening. The pull toward a voice I've never heard coming from a woman I've never seen living a life five thousand kilometers away that has absolutely nothing to do with mine.
Pounded yam and egusi soup. My mom's recipe. She makes it for Christmas and it's the only thing that makes December bearable.
Wait. You celebrate Christmas?
Mara. Everyone celebrates Christmas.
YOU HAVE A MOTHER??? You've never mentioned family. I assumed you were grown in a lab and released into the wild.
I have a mother. A brother in Cranbrook. His wife. Two nephews I see at Thanksgiving when my sister in law guilts me into showing up.
Oh my god. You have a WHOLE FAMILY. Do they know you're this grumpy or do you save it for strangers?
They know.
Do they know about me?
My thumb stops. The question sits on the screen.
Do they know about me. Such a simple sentence.
Such a complicated answer, because no, they don't know about her.
Nobody knows about her. She exists in a compartment of my life that has no label, no category, no explanation I could give my brother or my mother or Darren that would make any sense.
What would I say? That a woman texted me about a golden retriever two months ago and now she's the last thing I read before I close my eyes?
That she told me about her father dying when she was seventeen, how he collapsed at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning while making her fried plantains, how the ambulance took eleven minutes, how she still can't eat plantains?
That she told me, and the grief in her words matched something in mine so precisely it scared me?
No. They don't.
Why not?
Because I don't know how to explain what this is.
The three dots appear, disappear, appear again. Forty seconds of her typing, deleting, retyping.
Neither do I.
Week six changes something.
The texts get longer. More specific. She describes the garage studio at midnight, how the wax looks like amber when it's cooling, how she plays Fela Kuti while she works because her father used to.
She asks me what the mountains look like at dawn.
Asks what sound snow makes when it falls on still water.
Asks questions nobody has asked me in five years because nobody's been curious enough to wonder what my world looks like through my eyes.
Describe your cabin.
Why?
Because I've been imagining it for weeks. I want to know if I'm right.
One story. Log. Porch with a rocking chair I built. Woodpile against the south wall. Kitchen with a coffee maker that hates me. View of the Selkirks from every window.
Alone?
Yeah.
Always?
The question lands in my sternum. Not alone always. Alone now. Alone since 4:17am on a Tuesday when everything good in my life stopped breathing.
Not always.
She doesn't push. Doesn't ask. Just sends:
Okay.
That's it. One word. More grace than I've received from anyone in five years, including myself.
Later that night, past midnight, another buzz.
I want to tell you something. And I don't want you to try to fix it.
Okay.
My engagement wasn't just wrong. It was erasing me.
Tunde wanted a wife who'd host dinners for his colleagues, attend galas at the hospital foundation, wear the right outfits, say the right things.
He wasn't cruel about it. He was kind. That was worse.
Because I couldn't point to a single terrible thing he did.
He just quietly expected me to disappear into his life, and I was doing it.
Happily. Gratefully. For fourteen months, I was grateful to be disappearing.
And then?
Then one day I looked in the mirror while getting dressed for his department Christmas party.
I was wearing a dress his mother picked out.
My hair was blown straight because he once said he liked it that way.
The shoes were a gift from his sister. And I couldn't find a single thing on my body that I'd chosen.
I gave back the ring the next morning. Moved out that afternoon. My mother didn't speak to me for three weeks.
My hands are still on the phone. The cabin is dark. Just the blue glow of the screen in my bedroom, the same ceiling I've stared at for five years, the same quiet.
But the quiet isn't empty anymore. Hasn't been for weeks.
You did the right thing.
Everybody says that.
I mean it. You looked in the mirror and you chose yourself. That takes more courage than anything I've done in five years.
Silence. Long enough that I wonder if she fell asleep. Then:
What happened five years ago?
There it is. The question she's been circling for weeks without asking. The crater in the center of everything I am, the one all my silence is built around.
My thumbs hover. The screen blurs. Annika's text thread is still right there in my phone, still sitting at the top where I put it, her last words preserved like a headstone I carry in my pocket.
My wife died.
We were married three years. She went to bed with a headache. I was out on a call. Brain aneurysm. She was 32.
Her last text asked me to come home soon. I didn't see it until she was already gone.
Sending it feels like pulling stitches out of a wound that never closed properly. Raw, necessary, relieving in a way that makes my eyes burn.
Mara's response comes in one minute. No hesitation. No careful hedging.
I'm so sorry, Holden. I'm so sorry she was alone. I'm so sorry you carry that.
I don't want to fix it. I just want you to know that I'm here. At midnight. On the other end of this phone. And I'm not going anywhere.
Something cracks. Quiet, internal. A fissure in the wall I've been living behind since the morning I found Annika's body. One small crack, letting in light I haven't felt since a stranger texted me about a golden retriever named Mango.
Mara?
Yeah?
Pounded yam and egusi soup.
What?
The one meal I'd eat forever. My mom's recipe. She makes it at Christmas.
A beat. Then:
Come on, Holden. You're gonna make me cry on my garage floor AGAIN.
Go to sleep, Mara.
You first.
For the first time in five years, I do. The phone stays on the nightstand. Face up. Mara's name at the top of the screen.
Above Annika's.
I notice that too.
And I let it stay.