Page 96 of Graceless

He'd said it in the flat voice, the one he uses for the true things, and I'd believed him. I'd put my hand on his chest and felt sorry for him. The asshole. I'd felt sorry for him —

I looked at the two lines.

Somebody in that conversation had been wrong, and it wasn't the test.

I called Nina, and she picked up on the second ring, fast and low, mother-reflexes.

"It's me," I said. "Can you come."

She didn't ask one question on the phone. That's Nina. Twenty minutes, and she came down my stairs with her coat over pajamas and a container of something because her hands don't leave the house empty, and she found me at the table with the test standing on it like a little white monument, and she stopped.

She looked at the test. She looked at me. She looked around the kitchen — at the one cup in the rack, at the rolling pin on the counter, parallel to the edge, back on duty — and I watched my best friend since second grade read the whole file in four seconds, no loupe, and her face went through fury and landed somewhere that scared me more, somewhere quiet.

"How long has he been gone," she said.

"Two weeks tomorrow."

"Two weeks." There was the fury; it just needed a number. "Two weeks you sat in this basement with the voice, doing the — the swab thing, the little jars — Caterina. Two weeks. I stood on my stoop and I let you walk home."

"You didn't let me do anything. Nobody lets me."

"That's the problem," Nina said. "That has been the problem since second grade," and her voice broke on it, and that was it, that was the crack, and she crossed my kitchen and took hold of me, and I came apart, everything I hadn't let out in fourteen days, all of it at once, ugly, into her shoulder, into pajamas that smelled like her whole warm house, and she held on and said terrible loving things about men over my head until I could breathe.

Then she put me in a chair and heated whatever was in the container and stood over me while I ate it, and that is also a procedure. The other one. Hers.

"Eat all of it. You're eating for—" She stopped herself. Looked at the ceiling. "I was going to make the joke."

"Make the joke, Nina."

"No. It's too soon and it's not funny yet." She sat down across from me and put both hands flat on the table, her gavel move. "Okay. Committee's in session. Talk."

So I told her what could be told: he was gone, he'd left a note. "Saying what," she said, and I gave her the part I could say out loud: "That he decided to go." I told her about the calendar and the two lines.

I did not tell her about the beach, or grace, or the name in the gold downstairs. Nina has always known there are rooms in this story she isn't shown, and she asked nothing I couldn't answer.

She just moved in. Not literally — better than literally. By midnight there was a schedule on my fridge in her handwriting, next to the rules, under the grocery list I couldn't take down: who called when, which days she'd come, what I ate.

At the door, with her coat on, she stopped.

"He decided," she said, like she was spitting out a seed. "Men love deciding. It's the staying they can't commit to." And she kissed my forehead, hard, and went home to her sleeping house.

I sat back down at the table with the test and the note in front of me, side by side, and I read the eight words again, and then — because the house was quiet, and the coffee was long gone, and there was nobody left to perform for — I finally did the thing I'd been too flattened to do for two weeks.

I went back over the beach.

All of it — the blankets, the stars, the whole conversation, word by word, because I have every word; you keep the words from nights like that. And it held up. The grace, the door, the nuns, saved-gets-you-in — everything he told me out there has checked out against everything that came after. He doesn't lie. It's the one thing I'd still swear to.

Except.

I can never have a child.

I sat with that sentence a long time.

He didn't say we can't make one. He didn't say it's impossible. He said have. I can never have a child — and that's true, isn't it. That's true the way everything he says is true. A thing that has to leave can't have anything. He could father a child and still never have it, and the sentence covers both, and he knew the difference when he built it, and he laid it down in the middle of all that truth where a woman feeling sorry for him would swallow it whole.

My whole job is finding what's under a surface somebody wanted kept. And he handed me a covered-over sentence in the dark and I never even picked up a light.

I put my hand flat on my stomach and said it to the empty chair: