She didn't ask which studio or where. She was the only person in my life who knew it existed—the only one I'd ever trusted with it—and the fact that she didn't make anything of it now, didn't sayI told you soorI always knewor any of the things she had every right to say, made me love her even more.
"Okay," she said.
I stopped. Looked at her. "Are you all right?"
She met my eyes and held them, and there was something in her face that was beyond the events of the afternoon—something older and more private, some struggle of her own that I didn't have words for and she wasn't offering words for. We stood in the middle of it together the way sisters stood in things, without requiring them to be named.
"I'll be all right," she said.
I believed her, mostly.
She left, and I stood in my childhood bedroom alone, and for a while I just—stopped. Let the silence have me. Let the exhaustion and the grief and the wild impossible events of a Saturday in March settle down through me like sediment through still water.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Then, I lay back on it, staring at the ceiling I had stared at for twenty-nine years. The familiar geometry of a room that had held every version of me.
I should have been hungry. I'd had a piece of toast in full bridal hair and makeup while my mother watched to make sure I didn't drop anything on the dress, and that had been the entirety of the day's food. By any reasonable accounting, my body should have been staging a protest. But hunger felt like a language Iwasn't currently speaking—too far down the register of ordinary needs, buried under everything else.
I thought about going to the kitchen and decided against it. I thought about the rehearsal dinner leftovers my mother had carefully wrapped and stored in the refrigerator last night, which now had the quality of artifacts from a previous civilization.
I stayed on the bed.
I thought about the corner. Midnight.
And the sediment stopped settling and something else entirely started up.
Later, I went to the bathroom and turned the shower on as hot as it would go. I stepped under it and stood there while the heat worked through the cold the Atlantic had put into my bones, and I thought about?—
I thought about his face. Without the hat, without the glasses, the water coming down it.
I thought about his forearm under my hand.
I thought aboutno place I'd rather beand how he'd said it and immediately looked like a man who'd walked into a screen door, surprised by his own sentence.
I thought about the way he'd held the dress. Carefully. More carefully than the situation required.
I thought about his hand over mine on my knee in the car, the jolt of it, and then?—
I tipped my head back under the water and laughed at the ceiling, because I had left my wedding mere hours ago and here I was in the shower thinking about a man I'd met in an alley. That was either the most alarming development of a very alarming day or it was the most honest thing that had happened to me in years. Possibly both. Probably both. The alarming and the honest were operating as a unit.
I hadn't felt this about Daniel. That was the thought underneath all the others, the one I kept approaching and thenveering away from. Standing under hot water after a day like this one, I had run out of things to veer with. In three years, I had never once stood in a shower thinking about Daniel Whitaker's forearm. I had never had to try not to look at him. I had never felt something electric move through me at the press of his hand.
I had thought that meant we had a mature relationship. A partnership. The kind built on compatibility and shared values and the practical affection of two adults who made sense together.
What it meant, I was beginning to understand, was that I had never been knocked sideways by someone before and had mistaken the steadiness for love.
Brock. I turned his name over in my mind the way you turned something over in your hand—testing the weight of it, the edges. Just the one name. I didn't know his last name. I didn't know where he was from or what he did or who he was to anyone in this city. I only knew that he'd been outside a church at the right moment and had driven me to the beach and jumped off a pier after me and told me I wasn't hitchhiking anywhere as if that were simply a fact he was informing me of.
He'd saidit'll keepabout whatever had brought him to Charleston. He'd saidwe'll figure it outwhen I told him I needed a plan.
I turned the water off before I went any further down that road, because I had things to do and twelve years of Catholic school had given me a fairly well-developed sense of when a thought was about to become a problem.
I dried my hair. I found clothes—jeans and a soft top and the flat shoes I kept by the door. I felt myself exhale.
The rest of the bag took twenty minutes. I was good at packing, had always been—one of the competencies of a woman who spent her career assembling the right things in the right order under pressure. Clothes for several days. My charcoalpencils and the small sketchbook I kept in the nightstand. The photograph of my grandmother that lived on the dresser, the one where she was nineteen and arriving somewhere, her face carrying the expression of a person who had already decided.
I set the photograph in last.
I looked around the room once—the room I'd grown up in, the narrow bed and the bookshelf and the cross above the door that my mother had hung there when I was seven and never taken down—and I thought:I am going to be okay. I don't have evidence for that yet. But I believe it.
