"...Goodnight noises everywhere."
I close the book.
Nora opens her eyes. She does what any toddler would do when they have begun the descent toward sleep and are in need of a piece of information from the adult who is reading to them before they continue the descent into sleep..
"Again," she says.
"One more time," I say.
I open the book. I read it again. I read it slower this time. The slower is what she wanted. She didn’t ask for slower. She doesn’t yet have the language capability to ask. She wanted it read again slower because the second reading of a book she loves is the part where she falls asleep, and she’s used to falling asleep on the second reading, and her body is following the rhythm eventhough the body in the room delivering the second reading has changed.
By the time I am at the cow jumping over the moon, her eyes are closed and her breathing is the breathing of a sleeping child.
I finish the book and close it. I figure the book has a place on the nightstand that I do not know and I am not going to risk getting it wrong.
I set the book at the foot of the bed.
I stand up, very carefully. I look at her face for a moment.
She’s not asked the question I had been preparing for. She’s not asked if I am going to be there tomorrow. She didn't need to ask. I guess she already decided I would be.
I leave the room, and Maeve closes the door behind me and heads downstairs.
? ? ?
Maeve is at the kitchen island when I come downstairs.
The only light in the kitchen is the streetlamp on the side of the house and the small lamp in the dining room next door. She’s sitting on the stool I have been sitting on for breakfast for three days. Her hands are flat on the counter. Her shoulders are doing a thing I have not seen them do.
She’s crying.
She's crying without a sound. Her shoulders shake, but her breath stays even. She taught herself to cry like this — silently, so she won't wake Nora — and you only learn that by doing it alone, night after night, for three years. It is the most controlled crying I have ever seen. It is also the loneliest.
And some of that loneliness is mine. She left first, that morning, before I came out of the shower. But I am the man who let her stay gone — who told himself he would find her and then let three years go by without trying. Every night, she taught herself to cry like this is a night I could have been here for, and wasn't. I want to cross the kitchen. I want to tell her she doesn't have to be quiet anymore. I don't move. I haven't earned the right to. So I stand where I am and let her cry in silence, and not crossing that room is the hardest thing I've done in a long time.
I do not move toward her.
My hands stay at my sides. Her name stays in my throat. I don't, in any way, do what I want to do, which is to walk across the kitchen and put my hand on her back the way I have not put my hand on her back in three years.
I stand in the doorway and focus on anything else.
I do my best to ground myself.I’m in the kitchen at 7:54 on a Friday night.I am six-three. The doorway is six-eight. There is a small space above my head between my hair and the lintel that has been the shape of every doorway I have stood in for fifteen years.
She doesn’t turn around. She knows I am there. She’s letting me be there. She’s also not asking me to come closer.
So, I don’t
Eventually, she lifts her hands from the counter. She wipes her face with the heel of one hand. She gets off the stool, turns around, and her eyes meet mine.
"Don't say anything," she says.
"I won't."
"Don't make it a thing., I just need a minute."
"Take it."
She walks past me. She walks up the stairs. She closes the door of the upstairs bedroom very gently behind her.
