32
IT WAS THREE DAYS LATER THAT I HEARD THE DOOR.
I wasn’t sure what time it was. I had passed out early the night before, so I figured it might still be nighttime when the lock rattled.
I braced myself for a burglar, and for a fleeting second, I wondered if I had given Frank a key, or Enid, and then—if Mom had learned to move objects. I had almost forgotten it could be anyone else.
But then he emerged, a shadowy figure standing in the doorway.
For a split second, I didn’t recognize him.
“Byron?”
It was Nate.
Harry sprung to the door as I scrambled to find pants.
“Did I wake you?” he said.
“No, I was just—resting,” I called as I stumbled toward the bathroom, where I splashed water on my face to force consciousness.
When I was standing before him, he went in for a hug. We hadn’t seen each other in about three weeks, so this was an understood expectation, what should have been a natural impulse.
Except we still weren’t huggers, and it still didn’t seem right. He didn’t look sick anymore, but he was thin, rubbery almost, as though he could fit between the cracks in the floorboard if I compressed him hard enough. I didn’t feel like hugging him.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I said. “It is you, right? You’re here?”
Part of me was afraid to touch him again, concerned that if I did, my hand would move through him.
“Not just a pod, or a vision, or a spirit of you. This is you, you?”
Another part of me wanted to push him—hard. I stood beside him and poked him a little.
“Luce,” he said. “It’s me. I promise. How are you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It looks like you’ve been busy,” he said.
He nodded at the coffee table. My sketchpad was out, stray fringes of paper creased over the edges.
My face warmed. I didn’t have time to organize my things. He didn’t have the context to appreciate what I had been doing.
“The place looks clean,” he said. “Did you do this?”
“Byron got someone to do it, but I’ve tried to keep it neat the past few days. It’s not bad, right?”
“Not at all,” he said.
“Where were you? Or, wait. Are you not supposed to tell me anything? If I ask you things, will you run away again?”
“I never ran away,” he said.
He walked over to the window and stayed there for a while, taking in the outside. Did it smother him to see these things again—the same construction, storefronts, street vendors, scuff in the bottom-left pane? Grimy with residue and weather changes, bird droppings that had appeared and gone and reappeared in his absence. Or was he relieved by the familiarity?
Home. Sort of.
“So that’s it?” I said. “That’s all you’re going to say?”
“No, that’s not it. But I can’t say it all at once, so can we sit down first? Have some tea and hang out a little?”
His lips were chapped, the corners of his mouth white, an old man’s mouth.
“I have water,” I said.
I went to the kitchen and filled a mug from the sink.
“I know you like tea,” I said. “If I had known you were coming, I could have saved you some. But of course you didn’t tell me you were coming. Unless I missed a message, or my phone broke, but you don’t leave messages. We used to have tea. Well, you did. I drank it all. Or Frank did.”
I handed him the cleanest cup I could find. “It’s chipped, but it shouldn’t be toxic. It doesn’t have that warning.”
“Thanks,” he said.
He shot a quick look at the alcove. He might have seen some of my stuff beyond the wall.
“You can have it back,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It’s yours now.”
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and took back his spot by the window.
“You smoke?” I said.
“That many in a day?”
“I’m quitting,” he said. “After today.”
“Good. They’re disgusting.”
“They are,” he said, lighting up like he had been doing it his whole life.
Then he looked at me, closely, as though he were seeing me for the first time.
“You look good,” he said. “Did you get a haircut?”
Enid had insisted I wash it each time I left the house. She said a hat was not the same as an excuse.
“I guess I’ve been wearing it a little differently lately. Enid said—”
“Who’s Enid?”
He didn’t even know who Enid was.
As I tucked the front strand behind my ear, he inspected my hand.
“No ring?”
“I didn’t lose it,” I said, flexing my fingers to find the right one. I could hardly remember what it felt like.
“So you said no.”
“No, I said yes.”
“Well, I didn’t miss the wedding, did I? Or the divorce?”
“No.”
“Then when is it?”
“There is no wedding.” It was louder than I expected. “I have to make coffee now. My head hurts. It’s weird that you’re here and you don’t know so much. I’m tired.”
“Need a hand?” he said.
“No, I can do it. You want some?”
“No thanks,” he said. “I’m off of it.”
“That’s depressing,” I said. “That’s the last thing I’d give up.”
“So what happened with Frank?” he said, following me into the kitchen.
“Nothing really. I mean he’s fine. Not like he died or something. He’s just out—of my life. We’re not together. I gave the ring back.”
“Are you okay?” he said. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No, nothing like that. Not intentionally anyway. He wouldn’t know how to do that. I mean he’s a great guy, but—
I didn’t want to marry him. That’s all. He wasn’t the right person—for me. For someone else, he’d be great. I’m fine now.”
My stomach was tight even then as I listened for the crackle of the machine and waited for the warm notes of roasted nuts and cocoa. I wanted to dive inside the pot.
“You want to talk about it?” he said.
“Coffee?”
“Frank.”
“Frank?” I said. “I’m over Frank.”
I was tired of thinking about it, and I didn’t appreciate all the questions all of a sudden, like I was the one who had things to explain.
I had to get away from him.
“I need to sit,” I said.
I filled my mug and headed back to the couch.
“Are you ready to talk about you?” I said. “Because I am.”
I gulped down my coffee and pills, and he resumed his place by the window.
It took him a minute before he started.
“I was never planning on going anywhere,” he said.
He locked my gaze so I knew he was serious. I couldn’t take his eyes. They were so dark, and pleading.
“Sure,” I said, looking away.
“And I never really left you either.”
“You didn’t?”
Now he was looking out the window again.
“Because it definitely felt like you did. It definitely felt like just one phone call and one note and that was it. Everyone assumed you were gone.”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Everyone! Harry, Frank, Enid.”
“Who?”
“Nate.”
“I know,” he said. “I should have called more. I just felt so much worse after I talked to you.”
“Why’d you come back then? Do you want me to leave? I can go this time if you want.”
I grabbed Harry, refilled my mug, and lurched toward the door.
I spilled a little as I went, but I didn’t fall.
I was halfway down the hallway when he called after me.
“Please, Lucy.”
I stopped walking and turned around, but I didn’t move.
“You’re the one who left!” I said.
Harry wriggled out of my arms and snuck back inside.
“But I’m back now.”
“You didn’t even try to stick me in a home.”
“Because you didn’t need a home,” he said, in his irritating calm. “You never needed that. Come inside.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t want to be near him either. I wanted to stay exactly where I was.
“I was an asshole,” he said. “I felt like such an asshole that when I heard your voice, it was like—I couldn’t breathe. Like my whole chest was caving in. And then I felt like a bigger asshole. So I couldn’t do it. No matter how I approached it, or tried to rationalize it and reason my way out of it, I couldn’t call. I picked up the phone so many times. So many times, but after a while—it just felt like too much.”
“I was the one in the dark, Nate, and it was really dark here. Black sometimes.”
He took a moment to compose his thoughts.
“It was only a few weeks,” he said.
“It felt like more.”
“I knew you had your pills and that the bills were paid. And I made sure Byron was around if you needed him. Plus, shit, Luce, I thought you were getting married!”
“You told me not to marry him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
I sat down in the middle of the hallway and leaned against the concrete.
He squatted next to me, and I looked at him. He was genuine. I could see that, but—I turned away from him. “I want to sit here alone, okay?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be inside.”
I’m not sure how long I was out there. It could have been twenty minutes; it could have been two hours. It was confusing, all these emotions churning together—relief on some level to see him, excitement even, euphoria. I couldn’t wait to tell him all that had happened. But there was also uncertainty, aching, maybe a little dread.
After some time passed, he came out holding an offering, a brown box.
“It’s fudge. I met this guy who makes it custom, and of course I thought of you. I know it’s not coffee, but . . .”
I appreciated that he didn’t say anything else. He just left me with the box, and for a second I thought, I could go now. For a night or two nights. I could wander with this fudge.
But I was exhausted, and my back was starting to hurt, and it was so much easier to just go back inside.
“I’D REALLY LIKE TO KNOW what happened,” I said.
I took a seat on the far end of the cushions, though there wasn’t much room between us no matter how I positioned myself.
He took a deep breath and cracked his knuckles. “It started when I saw her.”
“Who?”
“Mom.”
He pointed toward the closet area.
“She was there, in the shadows.”
“Like a flash in the corner of your eye?”
“You saw her again too.”
“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “It seemed like her. When was this?”
“I don’t remember exactly. It was a rough night, really fuzzy, but it all kind of went downhill after that.”
He finished his cigarette and lit another one.
“Before I saw her, I poured myself a scotch to help me sleep.”
“I thought you drank beer.”
“Beer wasn’t strong enough,” he said. “This went down so easy, Dad’s drink. I could almost smell it on his breath. For a minute, I felt a calm, like the kind that comes after the snow, when it’s just you and the crunching, and the wind across the powder. You know what I’m talking about?”
It was the peace Mom had given me.
“I think so,” I said.
He took a drag.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I kept promising one more shot. Just one more shot, and I’d pass out and be fine. But I was still awake, so I had another one and then another.”
He was the one who kept all of his emotions inside, smothered them until they fed on his fat cells, his muscle, his hair. I imagined him standing in the middle of a shower, water washing over him, draining away all of the skin and bone and blood, his center, his spine, and I wished I could have been there to hold on to some of it, to stop it up and stuff it back into place.
“I was eating cake,” I said. “I could have been here.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “I was messed up way before that. I remember seeing the bottle, almost empty, and thinking, Shit, I shouldn’t have had that much. Then, it was like as soon as I realized it, I looked up. And there she was. Of course she didn’t talk, but I almost thought I heard her whisper. Something.”
“Like a whistle,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, dragging out the s for an extra second.
“She was trying to save you,” I said. “Without her you could’ve died of alcohol poisoning, or—I don’t know, something else.”
“Maybe, but I was pissed at her then for leaving so fast. ”
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she’s here now.”
We both paused to look around the room. He slowly made his way toward the closet and peeked inside. There was nothing.
“You see her all the time?” he said.
“I’m starting to think it’s only we’re really desperate, when she’s afraid we’re going to die.”
“It’s a nice thought,” he said. “Though at the time it seemed like she was trying to kill me. When I reached out for her, I lost my balance and banged my head on the corner of the cabinet.”
He gestured toward the front of his scalp. “Nine stitches.”
“That happened when you were little too. I remember that.”
“It was my chin that time,” he said.
He ran his fingertips over the scruff to feel for the scar.
“I figured I’d go home and sleep it off. But when they asked how it happened, I couldn’t explain.”
He started walking around the room as if re-piecing the fragments of the night.
“I was confused and drunk, so they kept me around for observation, and along the way, they did some blood work and saw all the other toxins in my system.”
“My old pills.”
He sighed. “You figured it out.”
“I know pills,” I said. “I’m not dumb.”
“No,” he said. “But I was sneaky.”
“I should have figured it out sooner.”
“How? It’s not like I planned it. I thought I was just using enough to get through each day. They wanted me to stay, but I didn’t care. I was still going to go back to the apartment and crash, but when I thought about what I was going back to—”
“Me.”
“No, not you,” he said. “No Sabine, no money, no plan. A shitty job, a ghost, a dark apartment, cat hair. I couldn’t do it. I was suffocating. All I could think about was getting out.”
“Grieving,” I said.
He stopped pacing.
“Just enough time to get back on track, and then I was supposed to get back to work, but I knew that if I did—I worried I’d end up in the same place.”
“You could’ve called more.”
He wiped his eye.
I looked outside.
It might have been a real tear.
I sort of wanted to hug him then, but he was too far
away.
“But look at you now!” he said. “I mean, shit, Byron said you were stronger. He always said that, his stupid thing about glass, but—I see it now. You’re different.”
“Yeah, well thanks, I guess. I do feel kind of different, in a way. Older maybe. But it’s not like I miraculously transformed. Don’t expect me to go work on Wall Street or keep the place spotless or anything. I just kind of figured out what I was supposed to do—I think. But I’m still not like you.”
“Thankfully.”
A LITTLE LATER, I moved so we were sitting together on the cushions. At first it was strange to be so near to him, so I could almost feel his leg hairs, so little space, so few words. But I didn’t shift from my spot, and neither did he.
I looked at his bag on the floor and back at him.
“So what now?” I said.
“Are you hungry?”
“I ate fudge,” I said. “Are you staying?”
“If that works for you,” he said. “I was thinking I could take some classes again, figure out a way to slow down. I talked to some people at school. There are scholarships out there, different loan options. We’ll have to start over, but it looks like they’re willing to work with me.”
“That’s great,” I said. “You can fill up your cereal container.”
“Exactly.”
“And I won’t cost as much,” I said. “The zoo will be free, if I can get this position, which I think I will, and I’ll be busy with Enid. And I’ll have my disability checks and insurance. So you don’t have to worry about me.”
“You don’t have to worry about me either.”
He put out his last cigarette and put up his feet.
We stayed close, just staring in silence, almost like we were waiting for Mom to reappear.
After a while, when she didn’t, I opened my sketchbook and started thumbing through it. There were sticky notes on a few of the loose pages.
“What are these?” I said. “Who did this?”
“I did, when you were in the hallway,” he said. “I tagged the ones I thought would really pop.”
I examined his face. No signs of ridicule or condescension.
“What?” he said. “Have you noticed there’s nothing on the walls? We can’t live in a home with nothing on the walls.”
“I put a calendar on the fridge,” I said. “You can feel free to put stuff on it if you want.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Then he turned on the TV, and somehow amid all of the fuzz, he landed on one of the old kitschy superhero shows, one we both knew by heart. He knew not to change the channel.
As long as we watched, there was no need to say anything else.