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.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The Name
Aoife
“The heart was made to be broken.” — Oscar Wilde
He came over in month seven on a night when something was different about him. He had been drinking before he arrived, not heavily but enough that the careful containment he usually carried had softened slightly at the edges. He was quieter than usual, which for him meant very quiet indeed, and there was something in his face when I opened the door, a rawness that was only visible because the usual guard was not fully in place, the way you see the structure of a house only when the lights inside are on at night.
I made him a glass of water. He sat on the couch and I sat beside him and we talked about nothing for a while, or rather I talked and he listened, and at some point he reached over and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear in a gesture so gentle and so unlike his usual carefulness that I forgot what I had been saying mid-sentence.
Later, in bed, there was something different about him. He was more present than he usually was, less defended, and I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of interpreting this as feeling, of telling myself that something was changing.
I held onto that thought. He is here, I thought. He is here and he is different tonight and that means something.
And then, at the moment he was least guarded, he said a name.
Not mine.
He said it quietly, barely more than a breath, and it was a woman's name, and I heard it clearly because I was right there, because I had been paying very close attention to everything about this night. The name entered me the way cold water enters a room when a window is opened in winter, total and immediate and impossible to pretend you had not felt.
I went very still. I looked at the ceiling. I did not move and I did not make a sound and I thought, with a clarity that was almost peaceful in the way that extreme pain sometimes produces a kind of calm: There is someone else. There has always been someone else. And whoever she is, I am not her, and all of this, all of these months and all of this carefully rationed hope, it was never about me at all.
He did not seem to realise what he had said. He settled beside me in the dark and within minutes his breathing evened into sleep.
