Then he came back in with a cup of black coffee and he set it on the nightstand and he looked at me looking at it, and I knew something had shifted, some invisible line had been crossed, and there was not going to be a way back to the before-time.
He said, “It’s black. You drink it anyway.”
I sat up. The blanket fell away. He watched it happen and did not look away. He was looking at me like he had looked at me in the dark, like I was something worth looking at. Like I was something he wanted to keep looking at.
I reached for the coffee.
I drank it.
It was terrible. It was the worst coffee I had ever had. It was cold, probably, from sitting while he made it on the generator-powered stove. It was the wrong kind of bitter. It tasted like he had made it with his hands and his attention and the understanding that I would drink it anyway. It was absolutely the best thing I had ever tasted.
I said, “Thank you, sugar.”
He said, “You’re welcome.”
He was in a thermal shirt now. His hair was wet. He had washed. He had made me coffee. He had come back. He was still here.
I stood up and I followed him to the doorway of the bedroom, holding the coffee in both hands, looking at him standing in his thermal shirt at the stove. He was real. He was here. He had come across the snow and brought a generator and fixed my bike wheel through a child and kissed me and slept on a couch too small for him and made love to me like I was something precious.
I thought:this is the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me.
And then I took another sip of his terrible coffee and smiled at him, and he smiled back, the first real smile I had seen on his face, and I understood that I was not coming back from this.
There was no back to come from.
There was only this: the blizzard. The apartment. The man at the stove. The terrible coffee. The knowledge that the power was eventually going to come back, and my house was eventually going to be warm, but that something in me had been changed by this night in a way that was not going to be undone.
Not by him leaving.
Not by the foreclosure.
Not by any of the things coming next.
8
KNOX
The light on the garage door came back on at 10:14 a.m.
I saw it from the kitchen window of the apartment. I was standing at the sink with a cup of coffee that had gone cold ninety minutes ago, the surface slicked with a film of grease from the grounds I had not bothered to strain properly. I had been watching the snow and the day and the particular slant of light through the clouds that meant the historic blizzard was finally exhausting itself, but I was not thinking about the storm or the light or anything that required thinking beyond one simple fact: the light meant power, and power meant Maple was going to leave.
The bulb flickered once. Steadied. Went bright.
I set the cold coffee on the counter without finishing it. My hands did not shake. I understood the difference between what I wanted and what I was going to get, and that understanding was the only thing that kept me standing upright.
They had been in the apartment for sixty-one hours. Sixty-one hours and seven minutes, if I was counting. Which I was.I had been counting since 3:14 a.m. when she had come to me in the dark, when she had told me she did not want to wait anymore, when I had learned what her body sounded like when it was honest.
Maple had not left except for the bathroom and a thirty-minute stretch on Day 6 afternoon when she had stood at the window while I pretended to be asleep, watching her watch her house through the snow. I had felt her understanding shift. Felt her realize that the apartment was going to have to sustain two people for at least another day. That my presence was necessary. That the wanting was now paired with the practical. I had watched her come to terms with it.
I had not told her to stay. I had not said anything. I had just kept making coffee and checking the generator and the propane tank and refueling when the gauges dropped. They had moved through the hours like two people who understood that the clock was running out, that the world was going to intrude eventually, that whatever had happened here in the dark was going to look different when the sun came back. When you could see clearly. When decisions had to be made in the daylight instead of the dark.
The garage light stayed on. Yellow and steady against the snow.
I walked to the bedroom.
Maple was sitting on the edge of the bed in one of my thermal shirts and her own sweaters piled on top, all of it layered because the apartment had not quite warmed back to comfortable. She was still getting cold in the way that meant she had lost weight somewhere before the storm, had been carrying stress in her shoulders, had been living on coffee and will and the particular determination of a woman who did not know how to ask for help. Her hair was down — she had washed it yesterday with cold water from the shower and my soap, an old-man soap thatsmelled like pine and something chemical, and when she had come back to bed smelling like me, I had understood that this was happening whether I had planned for it or not, whether I had any right to want it. She had claimed me in small ways. With soap. With the particular angle she rested against my shoulder. With the way her hand found my hand in the dark and held it while she slept.
She looked up when I appeared in the doorway.
