Page 69 of Close Reading

I climb up beside her. She is on her back, eyes half-closed, her arms still where they fell, open, palms up. She has not corrected the position. Margot, who corrects everything.

Her hand finds mine. She turns her head on the pillow. Her hair is everywhere, dark against the white, across her face, in her mouth. She does not fix it. I reach over and move the strand from her lips. My thumb brushes the corner of her mouth. She closes her eyes at the touch. Opens them.

“I’m not afraid,” she says.

The sentence is so simple it takes me a moment to hear what it’s carrying. Three words. No subordinate clause. No qualification. From a woman who has been afraid every morning for twelve years.

“I thought the fear was structural,” she says. “I thought it was holding me up.” Her thumb moves across my knuckles. Back and forth. “It turns out it was just heavy.”

My throat closes. I bring her hand to my mouth. I kiss her knuckles—one, two, three, four—slowly, my lips against the bones of her hand, the hand that was open on the bed while I touched her. I kiss the palm. I press her hand against my cheek and hold it there. I cannot speak. The words are somewhere behind the ache in my throat and they are not coming out and my lips on her skin will have to be enough.

“You did that,” she says. Her fingers curl against my face. “I need you to know.”

“Margot.”

“I love you.” Her hand on my cheek. Her eyes on mine. “I love you in a way I didn’t know I was still capable of.”

I turn my face into her palm. I kiss the center of it. I press my body against hers, my chest against her side, my leg over hers, my arm across her stomach, the full length of me against the full length of her.

“I love you,” I say. Into her palm. Into her skin. Her chest moves under my arm. A breath that is almost a laugh. Her hand slides from my face into my hair. Her fingers close, gently, holding.

We lie in the morning. The light moves across the bed. Her hand in my hair. My mouth against her palm. The room holds us.

Kali thumps her tail against the door.

Neither of us moves.

37

MARGOT

The project is finished. The work is done. What the work built is not.

The research space is cleared when I arrive. The shared bookshelf stripped, the annotated copies of Kimmerer and Lorde returned to the departments they came from. The fluorescents are on. The Chemex is on the shelf. I am going to pack it last.

I begin with my desk. The Pat Levin mugs, the one with the chip and the one without. I brought two in September. Both are going home now, to the shelf beside the tea and the lint rollers.

Her desk is half-cleared. She came yesterday for the electronics. What remains is the archaeology of Priya: three pens, none capped. The Tsing article with her marginalia, the passage she circled three times and wrote YES beside in letters large enough to read from four feet away. A dog hair on the surface. Golden. Fine. Kali’s.

I pick up the dog hair. I hold it for a moment. I put it in my pocket.

The Chemex. The wooden collar is warm from the light. The glass is clean. I washed it yesterday after the last pot we made together. The Chemex goes in her box. I am not sure yet where it will live. I am learning to leave certain things undetermined. The learning is recent and ongoing and not entirely comfortable and I am doing it anyway.

The room is empty. Two boxes, two bare desks, the fluorescent hum. Seven months ago I walked in here with a lamp and a six-foot distance and a system designed to keep anyone else from getting close enough to matter. The distance is four feet now. The distance is no feet now. The lamp is at home.

I pick up both boxes. One in each arm. I carry them to my office, where they will sit on the floor beside my desk until I decide what goes where. I am in no rush. The deciding can wait.

I turn off the fluorescents. The door closes behind me.

The April light is on the quad. I pass the place by the trees without stopping. The place is just a place. The earrings are on my ears, both of them, always both.

I walk to Lavender House. It is Thursday morning. She will be there.

The wall is coming down. The light is good.

38

PRIYA