"My brother," I said. "I have to go."
"Oh." Just that. One small syllable. But I watched it land in her, watched something flinch behind her eyes—the hurt of a woman who's been left before, who knows the exact shape of a man putting his clothes on in the dark. She covered it fast, the curated calm coming back down. But I'd seen it. I see everything. It's the one thing I've never been able to switch off.
I was up off the sofa before I'd decided to be, crossing to her bare as the day I was born. I took the glasses out of her hands—gentle, both of them—and set them on the windowsill. Then, I bent and got my hands under her and lifted her clean off the floor. She made a surprised sound and wrapped her legs around me on instinct, her arms going around my neck, her face dropping level with mine.
I looked at her. Made sure she was looking back.
"There is no other place I want to be than right here," I said. "Hear me. Not one. But my brother doesn't call like that unless he's in real trouble, and that trouble is the reason I'm in this cityat all. So, I have to go see about it." I held her eyes. "And then I'm coming back. I promise you that. I don't make promises I don't keep—it's about the only clean thing I've got. I'll be back."
She studied my face the way she did, reading it for the lie, and didn't find one because there wasn't one. Something in her went soft and certain.
"Okay," she said, and kissed me—slow, deep, both hands in my hair, a kiss that said it believed me. Then, she pulled back an inch, and that reckless shine I'd first seen on the pier came up in her eyes, right there in the dark with my hands full of her.
"Do we have time," she said, "for one more?"
I grinned. Couldn't help it.
"Darlin'," I said, "I've carried heavy things my whole life, and not one of 'em ever felt like getting to hold you. The car can wait."
The dumbest, sappiest line yet, and I felt myself doing it again, handing this woman my whole soft underbelly on a plate. This time, I didn't even reach to take it back. She laughed against my mouth, low and delighted, and tightened her legs around me. I turned and put her back against the one bare stretch of wall in that room full of her secret work.
She weighed nothing. Less than nothing. I held her up against that wall like she was made of light and took my time about it, the city quiet below and the glasses sweating on the sill and Tommy's car somewhere out there closing the distance. With every move of her against me, I felt the thing behind my breastbone pull tighter and fill up with something I had no name for and no defense against.
Whatever was waiting out there in the dark of Charleston could have me in ten minutes.
For now, I had this. And I was going to be here for all of it.
15
MARY CATHERINE
He left before the city did.
I heard him moving in the dark—quiet, efficient, the sounds of a man who knew how to leave a room without disturbing it. The soft drag of denim. The zip of something. A pause at the sofa where he crouched down and I felt his hand in my hair, one slow pass of it, before he straightened and crossed to the door.
"I'll be back," he said. Low, into the dark.
"I know," I said.
A pause. Then he came back to the sofa, crouched down, and held out his new phone. "Put your number in."
I took it and typed it in without comment, handed it back. He looked at the screen for a second—something passing across his face that he didn't bother to contain—then, he stood.
"I'll be back," he said again. Like the number made it more true.
"I know," I said again. Like I'd believed it the first time.
The door closed. His footsteps on the stairs, then nothing.
I lay on the sofa in the studio and looked at the ceiling and waited for the thing to arrive—the hollowness, the morning-after accounting that should have come for a woman who had left her wedding yesterday and slept with a stranger the same night. I waited for the shame, the Catholic guilt, the voice that had narrated most of my internal life in a tone borrowed directly from the Baltimore Catechism.
It didn't come.
What came instead was the light. Slow and gray at first, then gold, moving through the east-facing window and across the floorboards, touching the canvases stacked against the walls one by one. My work. My room. My mess of turpentine and old coffee cups and the disorder of a space where nobody else's preferences had ever had to be accommodated.
I pulled the blanket—a studio blanket, paint-stained, wholly unglamorous—around my shoulders and sat up and looked at it all in the new morning light.
I felt extraordinarily fine.
