Iwrote a sentence. Deleted it. Wrote another. Deleted that one, too. Frustrated, I opened a second document, the one about the bar, the one I’d been writing alongside the David chapters without fully acknowledging what it was becoming. I typed half a paragraph about the stove light and erased it because it was too honest and then typed it again because dishonesty required more energy than I had left.
The manuscript was not cooperating.
Neither of them were.
I should’ve been used to this by now. My manuscript had not cooperated in months, the cursor blinking from the same paragraph on David’s last good day, the fish taco chapter stalled at the moment where we get in the car and David falls asleep against the window, and I watch him and know.
I’d been unable to write the knowing.
The knowing was the end of something. Writing the end meant arriving at whatever came after, and the after was the part I’d been flinching from for two years.
But tonight, oddly, the problem wasn’t the fish taco chapter.
Tonight, the problem was that I’d opened the laptop at 5:30 p.m., written three words about David, and then deleted them because the words that wanted to come out were not about David. They were about a blanket and a pair of hands and the phrase “not yet.” I’d said those words twelve hours ago in this kitchen. They’d been reverberating inside my skull ever since with the persistence of that damned Kars4Kids jingle again.
I loved kids.
But God, I hated Kars4Kids and their stupid ad campaign.
At 6 p.m., I turned on the stove light.
For Hiro. I turned it on for Hiro.
Hiro didn’t like the dark.
There was no other reason.
That lie was so thin I could see through it from where I sat.
At 6:15, I heard the front door followed by the careful sequence of sounds that heralded Benji’s arrival. He was earlier than usual. He didn’t workTuesdays, but he’d gone to the bar for inventory, and he usually stayed until seven or so. He’d come home early, which meant something or nothing. Or it meant that I was now tracking another person’s schedule with a rigor I’d previously reserved for medication dosages and feeding times.
His footsteps went into the kitchen, then stopped.
There was the silence of a person reading something on a refrigerator.
Yes, I recognized that particular silence. It’s a skill. A learned, honed skill. I possessed it.
I’d left a note, one I’d written at the clinic between appointments. It required four drafts—for a Post-it note about pizza that was not about pizza. I’d stuck it behind the whiteboard in the spot that had become ours through repetition and mutual understanding. Benji was now reading it. I was sitting at my desk seventeen feet away with a laptop full of deleted sentences and a heartbeat I could feel in my teeth.
I caught the soft scratch of a pen.
I stared at my laptop screen.
The cursor blinked.
The words still didn’t come.
Through the wall, I heard Benji’s footsteps retreat down the hall, heard his door close, and heard theapartment settle into the unmistakable quiet of two people in separate rooms who were both thinking about the same thing.
I tried to write.
The cursor blinked.
I typed a word. Deleted it. Typed the same word. Deleted it again.
I read the sentence before it, which was about David in the car. The sentence was fine. It had been fine for weeks. The next sentence was right there. I couldfeelit; but every time I reached for it, my brain instead supplied the image of Benji’s fingers on mine above a piece of fleece.
I closed the laptop.
