Page 21 of Keep Me

“No,” I said. “It was actually… good. He seemed lighter. Happy.”

“Look at that,” Cassidy said, her voice genuinely warm as she flicked her turn signal on for the highway. “Miracles happen on Fridays. Maybe the old man is finally learning how to breathe.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, tapping my fingers against the dashboard. “I think he is.”

By the time we got back to North Haven, the sun was sinking low. Zane wasn’t home yet, his final review session ran until eight, so the blue apartment was entirely quiet when I let myself in. I walked into our bedroom, the walls catching the dimming sunset light. I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the photograph. I didn’t put it in a drawer, like part of me wanted to. I walked over to the small wooden dresser near the window and propped the print against the vintage glass lamp I had found at a flea market. It was the first picture of my mother to ever live in a home of my own.

I stepped back to look at it. The sundress she was wearing in the photo matched the paint on our bedroom walls so perfectly it looked intentional. Like she had been waiting for this exact room to show up. My phone was sitting on the mattress. I picked it up, unlocking the screen, and opened the message thread with my dad.

Me: Made it back safe. Thanks for lunch, Dad. The birds were nice.

I hit send and sat down on the edge of the bed, watching the three dots materialize, dissolve, and materialize again in the quiet of the blue room.

After

Usually, I think about after like it’s a real place.

After finals. After graduation. After the busy season, the move, the wedding. After I’m better. We say it like an address. Like a town just up the highway with good parking and no waitlist, where everything we postponed is being held for us behind a counter.

I am doing it more than I have ever done it. I have a whole life stored in after right now. Lunch with my dad is there. A beach day Cassidy keeps planning at the worst possible moments. A summer with no alarms. The person I am going to be when the last exam leaves my hands, she is there too, sitting in a plastic chair, holding my ticket.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about after, though. It isn’t a place. It’s a bet. Every time you put something there, you are gambling that the road stays open. That the counter stays staffed. That the things you stored there do not get tired of waiting for you.

For most of my life, I did not believe in after at all. The bad years taught me that. You do not store things in the future when you are not convinced you will be attending it. I kept everything on me, like a girl who does not trust the coat check. It was safe. It was a different kind of bet.

So maybe that’s what getting better actually is. Nobody at any point said it to me in these words, not Lucy, not Zane, not the worksheets with the breathing circles on them. But I think this is the whole thing. Learning to put something down in after and walk away from the counter. Trusting the world to keep its appointments. Right about now, I had everything stored there. Everything that mattered, packed, and labeled, waiting just on the other side of finals week.

I was getting so good at betting.

The reply came at 11:52 that night, long after the three dots had given up and gone home twice.

Dad: Good.

I was still looking at the word when the dots came back for one more round. Then:

Dad: They missed you.

I didn’t have to ask who. I sat on the edge of the bed and read the four words more times than I’ll admit to. My dad had spent years speaking fluent silence, and here he was attempting a new language, careful and stiff, like a man ordering coffee in a country he had landed in that morning. The grammar was strange. The accent was thick. I understood him perfectly.

Me: Tell them I’ll come say hi soon. After finals.

There it was. After. I filed my father in the same place I was filing everything else that May, set the phone on the nightstand next to my mother’s photograph, and fell asleep easy.

Finals week turned the apartment into a machine with two settings. Zane studied the way he did everything, like a siege, fortified at the kitchen table behind a wall of color-coded notes, granola bar wrappers accumulating around him like shell casings. I studied the way I did everything, in unpredictable bursts, on the floor, in the bathtub with no water in it, once memorably inside the closet because the acoustics felt studious.

But the mornings came back to us. That was the thing I kept noticing. The music was playing again. The shower ran, the coffee went into the blue travel mug, his cologne went onto my wrist, three granola bars went into the side pocket. We kissed at the door like people who had somewhere safe to put things. The off-balance morning from last week felt like weather that had passed through and kept moving.

My dad called on Tuesday night. That was new, too. The man texted under duress and called under subpoena, and here he was, calling for no reason I could find anywhere in the conversation. He asked which exam was next. He asked if Zane was studying or just over-studying, which was such an accurate read of the kitchen table that I laughed out loud. He told me the new hummingbird, the one with the crooked tail feather, was a bully and he was considering an intervention. It was four minutes of nothing. It was the best call we had ever had.

“I’ll let you go,” he said, before I had even thought about going. He’d been doing that lately, ending things first, gently, like he was being careful with my time. Finals, I figured.

“Okay, Dad. Talk soon.”

“Talk soon, kiddo.”

By Friday, Zane’s siege had moved to campus. He had his exam at noon, the big one, the one he had been building fortifications against for weeks. He kissed me twice at the door. Once for luck, once because the first one was for luck therefore it did not really count as a kiss.

“Are you going to the library?” he asked me.