“I have a question,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“The — the Little time rule.”
My tongue felt thick around the words. I made it push through.
“What if I don’t always feel — that way? What if it comes and goes? What if some days it’s just not there, and I’m sitting in a designated hour performing something I can’t feel, and the whole thing turns into a fraud?”
He nodded slowly, like the question was a good one and he wanted to honor it by thinking before he answered.
“The rule isn’t a performance requirement,” he said. “It’s permission. The time is yours. What you do with it depends on what you need in that hour. You can be playful. You can not be. You can cuddle Clover. You can not. You can read, or sleep, or sit and look out the window. You can be exactly as Little as you feel and not a drop more. The only thing the rule requires is that you don’t pack it into a shoebox and pretend it doesn’t exist.”
I looked down at the page.
“That’s the only thing that matters,” he said. “That you don’t hide it again. That whatever it is, however it shows up, it gets to show up. The rest is yours to shape.”
I looked across the room.
Clover was propped against the pillow where I had left her. Her head on the linen, her small grey body still in the morning light. The two buttons on her face — the old black one, the new brown one — looked back at me.
Not literally. I am not a woman who believes stuffed animals look. But in the specific way that a thing you have loved for a long time can seem to be aware of you — in the peripheral, in the weight of it, in the small animal part of the brain that doesn’t know the difference between a toy and a person when the toy has been carrying your fear for you for twenty years.
I felt the hinge in my chest turn another notch.
I looked down at the page.
Across the top, between our names and the first rule, there was a small blank space where I was supposed to sign. Below the rules, a second blank space where he would sign after. A pen lay beside the page — his pen, the one he used for the maps, black ink, the cap tucked neatly at the top of the barrel.
I looked at the pen.
I looked at Clover.
I looked at the line that said No shame attached.
***
The pen was surprisingly heavy.
I positioned it over the blank space above my printed name and my hand started to shake.
My knuckles had gone white around the barrel. The nib hovered half an inch above the paper and refused to descend.
His hand came across the table.
He didn’t take the pen from me. He didn’t reach for my wrist or my fingers or any part of the grip. He simply laid his hand over the back of mine. Large, warm, dry. Palm flat across my knuckles, fingers settled along the sides of my hand, his thumb resting on the bone at the base of my own thumb.
He held.
“You aren’t giving anything up,” he said. Quiet. Right over the top of the paper, so close I could feel his breath on my forearm. “You’re choosing something. That’s all. It‘s a choice, Sadie. That‘s the only thing a signature can be.”
My hand was still shaking under his.
I thought of the six-year-old me.
I hadn’t thought of her in years — had not permitted her, had kept her in the shoebox with the photos and the report cards and the button-eyed rabbit. She surfaced now uninvited. Standing in a doorway somewhere in Pueblo, in a coat that was too big, with Clover in one hand and a grocery bag of her other belongings in the other. Clover had already been missing the one eye by then. The rabbit had come to me like that, from somewhere earlier, a place before Pueblo, a place I didn’t have a clean memory for. The six-year-old had stood in the doorway and a woman she’d never met had crouched in front of her and said something kind and the six-year-old had filed the kindness away and decided, quickly, quietly, without anyone helping her, that the way to stay was to not need anything.
It had been a good decision. The decision had kept her.
