She did all of this without asking. Without announcing it. Without any of the ceremony that would have required me to saythank youin a way that also meansI hate that I need this.
The first time I use the bathroom alone, it takes twelve minutes. I have a system. I've been developing the system since the hospital — a sequence of movements that gets me from the door to the toilet and back without needing to call anyone, without needing to lean on anything except the grab bar that she installed, without needing to admit that a thirty-four-year-old firefighter can't take a piss without planning it like a tactical operation.
The system works. It's slow and it's graceless and at one point I have to brace my hand against the wall and breathe through an ache that travels from my pelvis to my back teeth, but it works. I managed it. Alone. That counts.
Nora is in the kitchen. She's pretending to organize the Tupperware Maman sent home with us, but I know she was timing me. Not in a checking-up way — how you notice how long someone has been in a room and make a calculation about when it's appropriate to worry.
"All good?" she says. Not looking at me.
"All good."
She opens her mouth — and I know what's coming. I know it the way you know the second half of a sentence before someone says it, because I've been braced for it since we walked through the door. She's going to offer to help. She's going to suggest a solution, or ask if I need anything, or do any one of the fifty kind, practical, devastating things she's been doing for the past week.
"I got it," I say.
It comes out harder than I mean it to. Not loud — I don't raise my voice. But the texture is wrong. There's a hardness in it that I didn't put there on purpose, one that sounds like a door being latched from the inside.
She pauses. Her hands stop on the Tupperware. For half a second her expression changes — not hurt exactly, but adjusted, like someone recalibrating a calculation in real time.
"Okay," she says. And goes back to the Tupperware.
I go to the couch. Poutine is already there, occupying the exact center of the middle cushion with the territorial precision of a creature who has been waiting two weeks to reclaim this spot and will not be moved by man, cat, or act of God. I lower myself down — slowly, using the crutches and the arm of the couch and a technique the physiotherapist taught me — and end up beside her. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't move. She stays exactly where she is, which is the closest thing to affection Poutine has ever offered and which I am choosing to interpret aswelcome home, I suppose.
Nora hands me my phone. "Keep this on you," she says. Casual. Like she's reminding me to buy milk. "In case you need anything while I'm in the other room."
"I'll be fine."
"I know. Just — keep it close."
She doesn't push it. She puts the phone on the couch cushion next to me and goes back to the kitchen, and I let it stay because fighting this particular battle isn't worth the energy and because, if I'm being honest, she's not wrong.
Night.
Nora is in the guest room — the room I called a guest room but which is actually the room where I keep my weights and a fold-out couch that had never been unfolded until she arrived, and a poster of the '93 Habs that I should probably take down but haven't because it reminds me of watching the playoffs with my father before he moved to Rimouski and became a person who sends birthday cards two weeks late withsorry, forgot — love, Papawritten inside, and I'm not going to think about that either.
She's set up in there. Her suitcase — a small one, the kind you pack when you're telling yourself this is temporary — is open in the corner. Her laptop charger is plugged in by the window. She's been quiet since dinner, which was Maman's shepherd's pie reheated and eaten at the kitchen table with Bagel on her lap and Poutine under the table pretending she wasn't waiting for scraps.
I'm in my room. The door is half-open because closed feels too far and open feels too close and halfway is the only distance that doesn't require a decision. Bagel is on my bed, curled in the space between my arm and my torso, purring at a frequency thatI swear is calibrated to lower blood pressure. The phone is on the nightstand where she put it. Within reach.
The apartment is dark. The street lamp outside paints a stripe of amber across the ceiling. Somewhere outside, a snowplow scrapes the avenue.
I can't sleep. My body won't settle — the mattress is different from the hospital bed in every way, which should be better but isn't, because my pelvis memorized one position over the past two weeks and any deviation from that position registers as treason. I shift. Something catches. Bagel adjusts.
Two hours pass. Or one. I don't check the phone.
Then I hear it.
Something in the kitchen. Small. A cupboard opening and closing. The whisper of bare feet on tile. The crinkle of something — a bag? A wrapper?
She's in the kitchen.
I don't move. Bagel's ear twitches. The sound continues — quiet, careful, the sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard.
The amber stripe holds still on the ceiling.
Whatever she's doing in there, she doesn't want me to know about it. And that sound — a person trying not to be heard — makes me want to get up and see.
I don't. Some things you let be.
