by Matt Dean
Chapter 8
A book lay open on the kitchen island, but Leland wasn’t reading it. Instead, he’d been staring at an appointment reminder the size of a business card. He’d already undergone two CT scans, a PET scan, a nerve conduction test, an impressive array of blood work, and a series of intradermic allergy tests—and now this, an MRI scheduled for eleven o’clock today. He’d grown so weary of negative results and inconclusive findings that he halfway hoped something would turn up—a harmless little blotch in the medulla oblongata, a pinprick in the hippocampus, some tiny mark somewhere that explained everything.
“Morning, Pop.” John Carter had just come into the kitchen from the hallway. His wheat-colored hair stood up in forty different directions. He went to the refrigerator and opened it and stared vacantly into it, as if he were a preschooler, incapable of reading labels. “Any bread?”
Laying the appointment reminder across the open face of his book, Leland got up to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee. “There’s a loaf of challah six inches from your face.”
“Yes!” John Carter took the bread and some butter from the fridge and swung the door shut. He began pulling knives one by one from the knife block, settling finally on a butcher knife. When he dug its blade into the challah, one whole end of the loaf collapsed under it.
With the back of his hand, Leland nudged his son aside. He opened a drawer and took out a bread knife. Hefting it, clanging its blade on the counter, he said, “Thick or thin?”
“Thin. I’m making toast.” He shaped his mouth around that word, toast, as if were the name of his soulmate.
Leland plumped up the misshapen loaf and cut two slices from the middle. “Have a good sleep?” He wiped the bread knife with a dish towel and returned it to the drawer.
“Can’t say,” John Carter said through a yawn. He dropped the bread slices into the toaster. “Slept through the whole thing.”
“How’s school? How’s the new piano teacher?”
“Hairy.”
Returning to his barstool, Leland wondered who or what was hairy? Was this person or thing literally or figuratively hairy, or both? And was there any point in asking for clarification? He decided on a new tack. “How’s the job? Are you getting along with Jo Barber? She’s not hairy, too, is she?”
John Carter shrugged. For a moment it seemed that would be his entire reply, but then he said, “She’s basically got me leafleting every day. Like a carnival barker or whatever. Ms. Treat says I should quit before all that yelling wrecks my voice.”
“You could sing instead of yelling, couldn’t you? It could become a kind of signature.”
“I thought of that. Ms. Treat just gave me the stink-eye, so I don’t think she approved.”
The toaster popped, and John Carter buttered his toast. He went to the fridge, where, again, he stared at the cartons and packages as if their labels were printed in foreign languages—Swahili, Esperanto, Romanian. Finally, he took a plastic bottle from the door. Maple syrup. Of course. Holding the bottle with both hands, shaking it, he coaxed drips and oozes of syrup into the spout and onto his toast.
Maple-flavored syrup, in truth. The good stuff, the Grade A Light Amber from Vermont, was too runny and too sweet, if you asked Ben and John Carter. They’d always preferred this gunk, this concoction of noxious chemicals and old-time marketing. More than once, Leland had caught Ben in the kitchen with the bottle upended over his mouth. As a small boy John Carter had always, always spread the stuff on his toast. The last time Leland had seen him do it, there’d been a table, not an island, in the middle of the kitchen, and John Carter had been only just tall enough to reach the countertops.
How could this child be nineteen years old? A red-faced mewling newborn, an alien in receiving blankets, had mysteriously turned into a whole person—still an alien, but an alien capable of memorizing an entire sonata by Mozart or Beethoven. Leland suppressed an urge to go and tug the boy away from the counter and crush him in a bear hug.
“Oh, hey,” John Carter said over his shoulder, “is it MRI day? Are you nervous?”
That did it. Leland went to his son and turned him around and hugged him hard. John Carter grunted and sputtered, his arms limp at his sides. Leland buried his face in the boy’s hair. Remarkable: He smelled exactly as he had as a baby, like talc and fresh laundry.
“Dad…”
“I love you, son.”
“Dad…”
“Bear with me,” Leland said. “Thirty more seconds. Suck it up.”
“Dad…”
“Okay, okay.”
Leland let go and went to the French doors. A moment passed. A piece of silverware clattered in the sink. John Carter came up behind him.
“I love you, too, Dad. But you’re weird.” He left the kitchen.
Some minutes later, the clap of Anna Grace’s heels on the floorboards roused Leland from a daydream. He’d been staring sightlessly into the side yard, his mind having wandered far, to a campus dance. He remembered the glittering pink light of a long hall, an auditorium or a cafeteria with arched windows. There’d been a boy, a cross-country runner Leland had halfway wished he could dance with. Beer had been served. Anna Grace had drunk too much of it.
She kissed his cheek. “Morning.”
Taking her in his arms, rocking her from side to side, he eased her into the kind of shuffling slow-dance they’d surely done in the pastel lights of the dance hall. He tipped her into a deep dip. Her leg swung upward so sharply that her shoe flew off and landed on the floor with a slap.
“Leland, stop,” she said, her voice sharp. “My shoe.”
He let her go, and she went looking for the shoe. “John Carter warned me you were being weird,” she said. “Now I see what he meant.”
“You don’t know the half of it. I’m awkward and lame, too.”
Crossing to the coffee maker, he took a cup down from the cabinet and filled it. He sprinkled in half a packet of Sweet’N Low. They sat at the island. He slid the cup toward her. She touched his hand, perhaps as an apology for barking at him, and he wrapped his fingers around hers.
“I’m feeling sentimental,” he said. “Getting soft in my old age.”
“Mm,” she said. “I think I’m getting less sentimental.”
That was certainly true, he thought. He sipped his coffee and said nothing.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked him.
“Not much to say.”
That wasn’t true, though, was it? There was too much to say. Words fell short.
Nostalgia, for example: a miserably inadequate word. Earlier, Leland had been thinking about John Carter as a kid smearing maple syrup on his toast. That had been nostalgia, of course—but it was more than that. Leland felt affection and longing for the erstwhile John Carters, but he didn’t want his son to regress to boyhood. No, he wanted all the John Carters at once—all the past, present, and future John Carters. When he’d hugged his son, it had been out of love for all of him, for all his minutes and moments, all his failings and flaws, and—of course, of course—all his brilliance and beauty.
It was inarticulable. If he tried to put his thoughts into words, they’d turn to ashes and splinters in his mouth. Something easier, then: “Do you ever miss having babies?”
Anna Grace yanked her hand away. She straightened her back. “I’m hot-flashing right now as we speak—and you want to talk about babies?”
So then. No matter what, he’d have the taste of ashes on his tongue. “I don’t mean we should have more. I’m not insane.” Anna Grace didn’t relax. “I mean in a totally sentimental way—remembering having our babies.” She narrowed her eyes. “Not having them—not you giving birth. I mean being with them—cuddling and bathing and kissing them and—”
“And changing their diapers and rearranging your whole life around breastfeeding—”
“And hearing their first words and helping them take their first steps—”
“And hearing them cry their
heads off when they take their first fall—”
“And getting to know their personalities. Corinne was curious but cranky. Ben was so easygoing. John Carter was afraid of everything, including teddy bears, for God’s sake. And—”
“I was always wet. For years on end, I was wet. Constantly. Spit-up, tears, milk, blood. Diarrhea.”
Leland looked at his wife. “It’s like we remember a completely different bunch of kids.”
“You didn’t get morning sickness. You didn’t get thrush from breastfeeding. God almighty, how that itched. And then mastitis with John Carter. Ouch. And I smelled like sour milk for a year at a time. Milk stains never come out. You wash a blouse and the stain’s gone, and then you take it out of the closet and there it is again.”
“I know there were bad things, too,” Leland said. “That time Ben crushed his finger in the car door and we thought they’d have to amputate it. And John Carter fell through the floor in that old house. Got that gash on his leg.”
“Remember when the boys found that dead— What was it? A frog?”
“A dead bowfin, totally rotten.”
“They put it down the back of her shirt—”
“Well, Ben did. Could you even see John Carter—”
She howled and clapped her hands over her mouth. “My God, no. There’s no way—”
“And Ben didn’t dare to do it twice.”
“Not after he— Not after he—”
She couldn’t catch her breath. Leland collapsed against her. They both gasped and cackled. Anna Grace wadded up a napkin and crushed it against her face.
Not after he had to get stitches—that was, no doubt, what she’d been trying to say. Corinne had thrown a rock at Ben and had clocked him in the back of the head as he’d fled from her. A rock sharp enough to split open his scalp.
Talk about wet. The three children had stampeded into the house, all of them wailing, each wet in his or her own way—Corinne with fish goo and pluff mud, Ben with his own blood, and John Carter with miserable tears.
Ben had gotten a shaved head and ten stitches, and Leland and Anna Grace had ordered him to hand-wash Corinne’s fishy clothes over and over until they no longer stank. Corinne had done extra chores as well, each assigned a wage and carefully recorded, until she’d paid for Ben’s stitches and antibiotics. John Carter had received nothing but a stern lecture. If he’d been put on restriction, it would have been bad enough for him, but to have to live with the guilt of his complicity and to have no better way to compensate than to apologize over and over—that nearly killed him. It was funny now, twelve or thirteen years later, but back then the house had seemed, for months, to have become a maximum-security lockup.
Gradually, Anna Grace and Leland came back to themselves. As their breathing returned to normal, they wiped the tears from their eyes. Anna Grace examined her napkin. It was smeared with black mascara and eyeshadow the color of cocoa powder. Dabbing at the corners of her eyes with the corners of the napkin, she got up from her barstool.
“Damn,” she said, stifling fresh giggles, “now I have to touch up.”
“Oh! That reminds me of the time that—”
“Don’t you dare,” she said, panting. “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare.” She went down the hall. He heard her climb the stairs.
His appointment reminder still lay across the gutter of his open book. He picked up the card. The office assistant who’d written it out had a backward-sloping hand. The number 11 leaned leftward—a drunkard supporting himself against a light pole. It wasn’t funny, but the sight of it cracked him up all over again.
When Anna Grace came back to the kitchen, she had her purse in one hand and her phone in the other, and she was already talking. “—sure I already mentioned it, but I may have—” She stopped and looked from Leland’s face to the card and back again. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” He tucked the card into his book and closed it. “What did you forget?”
“Dinner tonight.”
“Catch me up, please?”
“Tonight. Dinner. Seven p.m. Scott Cable is coming for dinner.”
“Scott Cable?”
“You’ve met him. John Carter’s piano teacher.”
Leland shook his head. He was absolutely certain he’d never met anyone named Scott Cable. In fact, he was so certain that he suspected he must be wrong.
“I didn’t tell you about this?” Anna Grace tapped her phone with her thumb. “I thought I e-mailed you, but— Oh, never mind.” She dropped her phone into her purse. “Scott’s pretty down to earth, so don’t go to too much trouble.”
“What?”
“It’s Wednesday,” she said. “I have lessons until six. I can get back in time to eat, but not in time to cook.”
“Oh. Of course. Obviously.”
She kissed him goodbye. With her thumb, she wiped a bit of lipstick from the corner of his mouth. “Your skin is dry. You should put some lotion.”
“Thank you?” he said.
She kissed him again and hurried out the door.
Half an hour to the imaging center in Mt. Pleasant. Two hours for the MRI. Half an hour back, plus a stop at either Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. He’d have two or three hours for cooking. Plenty of time, especially if he made something simple.
But still. He’d had so much blood drawn and been injected with so many strange compounds—allergens, tracers, contrast dyes—that he sometimes felt slightly foreign to himself, as if his bodily fluids had been replaced with synthetic goop. After this MRI, he could easily foresee himself trying to draw the flatware across the table with his personal magnetism, or attempting to stop a clock with a wave of his hand.
Enough was enough. If there was something wrong with him, it would show up on its own. He plucked the card from his book and ripped it into tiny flecks, which he scooped up in the palm of his hand and tossed into the trash.
Chapter 9
Corinne woke to the gurgle of the coffee maker and the hiss of something frying in a pan. Pleasing sounds, to be sure—a real breakfast in the making, and with no effort on her part. She arched her back and stretched her limbs and breathed deeply through her nose. Garlic, cumin, anise. Andrei must have thrown together a batch of mici, the skinless Romanian sausages his grandmother had taught him to make. Corinne had praised them once—only once, on their fourth or fifth date, when it had been inconceivable not to praise them—and now he could scarcely enter the kitchen without slapping a couple of pounds of ground beef into a bowl and fumbling around among the spice jars.
Soon she felt his weight on the edge of the mattress and then the warmth of his lips on her shoulder. She rearranged her pillows and sat up. He held two plates. Buttered toast, scrambled eggs, and yes, mici. He’d undercooked the eggs and overcooked the sausages. It was, apparently, the Romanian way. She longed for a stack of pancakes and some rashers of bacon.
Still. Last night’s romantic dinner had devolved into an argument about Catholic schools, and it was better not to begin the day with an argument about breakfast foods.
“Good morning,” she said, as if to the mici.
“Forks.” Andrei set his plate on the end table. “And coffee. Shit.”
She watched him as he leapt up and hustled to the kitchen. He was naked—boldly so, for a man who’d just been standing over a skillet full of hot grease. When he came back again, his cock swung heavily as he moved. The sensation of desire buzzed from her brain to her belly to her limbs. She felt dizzy and lightheaded, but heavy, too, as if wanting had weight. But before she could satisfy her wanting, she would have to eat his ugly little sausages.
Sitting once again on the edge of the bed, he handed her a fork. She cut one of the mici in half and tasted it. Too much cumin. He never measured the spices—his grandmother never had, so why should he?—and every batch was a new adventure. She chewed and nodded, chewed and nodded.
Grinning, eyes glistening, Andrei took up his plate and forked some eggs into his mouth.
Corinne wondered if other marriages were like this, if every common little thing meant something else. A plate of eggs and sausages was both signifier and signified, both breakfast and apology. Chewing, likewise, meant more than chewing—it also meant I forgive you.
On second thought, it was probably the other way around. Cooking was absolution, and eating was penance. She set her plate aside.
“You’re not hungry?” His eyes lit up. “Morning sickness?”
She could tell him. She could just say it right out: Either Romanian food is gross or you’re a terrible cook or both. But no, on second thought, she couldn’t say anything of the kind. What she said was, “I usually have coffee first, that’s all.”
Wincing, leaping up again, he said, “I never brought the coffee.”
This time she followed him to the kitchen. He’d been watching CNN while he cooked, and the TV on the kitchen counter burbled at low volume. Beside the coffee maker, there were two mugs, his with a finger of half-and-half at the bottom, hers with a tiny mound of sugar. Corinne filled both mugs. When he lifted his cup to drink, a bit of coffee splashed his bare knee, and as he brushed it away, he seemed to notice for the first time that he was unclothed. Or perhaps he recognized that his penis had pulled up a bit, so that it wasn’t quite so bulky-looking as before. Men were vain about such things—or so it had always seemed to Corinne. Setting down his coffee, he went into the other room.
She stood at the pass-through and watched him put on a pair of jeans. She liked the way he looked naked—the slenderness of his waist, the craggy jut of his shoulder blades, the glide of small muscles beneath his skin, the unlikely high fullness of his ass—but he was somehow even sexier half-dressed.
“Are you going back today?” she asked him. She suddenly had a vision of a languid day spent in bed. Make love, nap, eat, nap, repeat.
“Eventually.” He gathered their plates and brought them into the kitchen.
“Oh.”
He began scraping the uneaten food into the trash can. “I’m in no hurry.”
“Driving?”
“Mm-hm,” he said.
Since the beginning of September, he’d been coming home on Monday nights and leaving again on Wednesday afternoons. It was better, he said, if he and his team worked on Saturdays and Sundays, when the client’s office was closed. Servers could be rebooted without having to get anyone’s permission. Databases could be rebuilt or reindexed without anyone complaining.
Corinne understood all of that, but not why he insisted on driving rather than flying. His client had never yet questioned an expense report. His subcontractors flew in and out of Atlanta from Chicago, Vancouver, and Portland, Maine. Why should Andrei drive six hundred miles a week in his own car? Yes, okay, he could claim the mileage as a tax write-off, but what about the ten hours a week he spent in the driver’s seat rather than in the company of his wife? There was no write-off for that.
“Hey,” he said, scrambling for the TV remote. He raised the volume. “Check this out.”
A strip mall, sunlight glinting on the sidewalk, cars passing. It could be almost anywhere in America, but after a second or so, Corinne recognized it. The cars were driving on East Bay Street. The strip mall contained, among other things, the nail spa where Corinne had had her last pedicure. A chyron at the bottom of the screen read, MIRACLE WORKER?
In voice-over, a female reporter was saying, “Mrs. Thủy has her skeptics, but she says she’s certain her daughter performed a miracle. A flock of believers agree.”
After a jump cut, the camera showed the front of the nail spa, where a small crowd of people had gathered on the pavement. Crosses and burning votives lined the sidewalk. Another cut, and the face of a manicurist filled about half the frame. Corinne thought she might be Lorelei’s mother.
Mrs. Thủy spoke into a microphone, but the reporter’s voice continued offscreen. “Mrs. Thủy doesn’t want her daughter to appear on camera or to be mentioned by name, but she says pilgrims are welcome to seek this modern-day saint.”
And now Mrs. Thủy’s voice, thinned somewhat by the sound of the breeze whooshing across the microphone. “We are bless that our child is happy and healthy and the Lord give her this gift. We hope people of all faith will be touch by it.”
“And as for the bird?” The reporter again. “He’s doing just fine.”
The scene shifted to the interior of the salon, where a white-haired man—Mr. Thủy? Lorelei’s father? her grandfather?—sat on the familiar rattan couch, holding a bundle of towels. As the camera moved closer, the man folded back the edges of the linens, and the head of a white bird popped out. The albino grackle. It looked around in its twitchy way and blinked its red eyes.
Andrei switched off the TV. “Crazy, huh? Gives new meaning to ‘Holy City.’”
Corinne was still staring at the blank screen. She hardly knew what to say.
“You went there, right?” Andrei asked her. “Didn’t you try that place?”
“I was there.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She looked at him. “No. I was there. When it happened.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You witnessed a miracle and never said anything?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “There was no miracle. Not that I saw. The bird died.”
Andrei peered at the ceiling. He looked as if he were doing trigonometry in his head. “But if you saw the bird die, and now the bird is not dead, then there was a miracle. You didn’t see the actual resurrection, but—”
“Resurrection?” she said, laughing. “The bird didn’t actually die. Obviously.”
“But you just said the bird died. You said you saw it.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It happened after you left,” he said, “that’s all.”
She threw up her hands. “I have to pee.”
By the time she returned from the bathroom, he’d folded up the sofa bed, put on a shirt, and begun to wash the breakfast dishes. She paused in the living room, watching him through the pass-through. His back was very straight.
He said, “I know you converted as a means to an end, but most people actually believe what they say they believe.”
Corinne flung herself onto the couch. Of all their stock-in-trade fights—the one about grad school, the one about the tiny apartment, the one about Catholic education—this was the one fight to rule them all, the one fight to bind them. He advised her, cajoled her, convinced her—and then when she did what he wanted, he turned it against her.
She’d converted to Catholicism for him. She’d converted because it mattered so much to him and his family. Yes, that was true. It was also true that, even after six months of conversion classes, she’d never be mistaken for a devout Catholic. But at her baptism she’d had—or she believed she’d had—a true conversion experience. To deny it or to forget about it when it suited his purposes was maddening, if not actually cruel.
“I’m so exhausted,” she said.
Andrei finished scrubbing a dish or pan, rinsed it, and put it in the draining rack. He said, rather flatly, “We went to bed at eleven and I let you sleep till ten.”
Her mind was wandering. The bird had been merely stunned, not dead. She’d watched it carefully. She’d thought it stopped breathing. But she never touched it, never held it. People used to bury the comatose all the time, when doctors cupped and bled their patients and had no very great understanding of the body. The bird napped for a bit in its bundle of hand towels, and then a child mistook its waking for a resurrection. There was no other interpretation of events.
“If you look at any poll on the topic,” Andrei was saying, “you’ll find that most people believe in God. Most people believe in miracles. I’m one of those people. At every single Mass, every single day, all over the world, a miracle occurs. The Host becomes the body of Christ. That’s a miracle. It’s one of the things you professed to believe when you were baptized.”
She’d been baptized in Ap
ril. They’d been married in June. That meant he’d attended Mass twice in the two-and-a-half years she’d known him.
“Andrei,” she said. “Why do you want to have children with me?”
“It’s a biological drive, isn’t it?” He didn’t move from the sink. “Doesn’t everyone want kids? Even gay people want kids now.”
“That wasn’t the question. Why do you want to have children with me?”
“What you’re saying is, you don’t want to have children with me.”
Was that what she was saying? She admitted—only to herself, and grudgingly—that he might be right.
He came out of the kitchen, his hands still damp with dishwater, a cluster of soap bubbles still clinging to one wrist. A droplet of water fell from his thumb and splashed the parquet floor near his bare foot. “What do I need to do?” His eyes were wet. “Do I need to be home more, is that it? I can talk to Suresh about taking the lead in Atlanta. It means a smaller piece of it for me, but then again, it frees me to take other work, so I can—”
She stared at his mouth as he talked, as if trying to read his lips, as if his dialogue had been badly dubbed and what she was hearing didn’t match what he was saying.
“Or you can come with me.” He brightened, warming to his own idea. “Yes. Come with me to Atlanta. It’s a really great hotel. I’ll upgrade us to a suite for the week. It’s not like there’s anything keeping you—”
Having come once again within spitting distance of the One Fight, he broke off.
Without realizing it, she’d shrunk from him: She was sitting now in the corner of the couch, her shoulders hunched forward, her arms folded across her chest. An outside observer, just entering the apartment, might think he’d threatened her or raised a hand as if to strike her.
In truth, she was thinking of him at his finest. After her baptism, he’d walked her home. It was a beautiful clear night with a mild chill in the air. They barely spoke but hardly needed to. She might have been walking inches above the pavement. The candlelight, the singing, the murmur of the priest’s voice as he recited the liturgy, the quiet plash of holy water in the font—all had left her feeling strangely and pleasantly insubstantial, as if her bad deeds and unkind thoughts really had been washed away, leaving her lighter, actually physically lighter, than she’d been before.
By then Andrei had been sleeping in her bed three or four times a week, but on that night, when they reached her door, the door to this very apartment, he took both of her hands in his, kissed each on the knuckles, and bade her good night. It was exactly what she needed and wanted, and he’d given it to her by instinct, without asking or having to be asked. To be understood, to be known so perfectly, she thought now—that was the essence of romantic love.
Andrei crouched in front of her. He dried his hands on the tail of his shirt and held them out to her. She took them. As he had on that April night, all those months ago, he kissed her knuckles.
“Are we okay?” he said. “If we’re not okay, help me fix it. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Just tell me.”
“We’re fine.”
Any fool, she thought— Any fool could hear that her tone belied her words, but Andrei said, “Okay,” and then, “I love you.”
With a grim smile, she said, “Moi aussi.”
“I suppose I should—” With a sigh, he got to his feet. “The drive doesn’t get any shorter.”
“I would come,” she said. “I would. But I’m volunteering every day. Thursday through Monday. They count on me.”
“Okay,” he said, and then, “Of course they do.”
He brushed his teeth and showered and shaved, all with the bathroom door standing open, all with Corinne looking on from the couch. Finally, he stood at the bathroom sink and combed his hair with his fingers. He wore a towel wrapped around him, knotted just above his hipbone.
“You should take a week off,” he said. “Week after next? A free week in a luxury suite?”
“They have a pool?”
“They have a pool.” When he put on his deodorant, he held his arms out from his sides, apelike. “We’ll be done soon. I’ve got some leads for the next gig. One’s in Pittsburgh. I can maybe stay with Vic and Jodie.”
Vic and Jodie were his brother and sister-in-law. Corinne had never met them.
“That’d be…” Convenient, handy, cheap—multiple adjectives applied, but she couldn’t muster the strength to choose one. Andrei didn’t seem to notice.
After he’d dressed, he slipped his laptop into his briefcase and patted his pockets to make sure he had his keys and wallet. He kept a set of clothes in Atlanta, in luggage that he checked at the front desk every Monday, and so he had no packing to do. Corinne roused herself to see him off. They kissed goodbye. She waited in the doorway until he waved farewell one last time and stepped into the elevator.
Once she’d closed and locked the door behind her, she didn’t quite know what to do with herself. Until he’d left, she’d craved solitude. Now that she had it, it seemed like a stupid thing to have wanted. Five days of loneliness, uncertainty, anxiety, and yes, sexual frustration. She would miss him terribly—until he came back. Were other marriages like this, she wondered? If so, what on earth kept everyone together?
Andrei had dropped his towel on the bathroom floor, as ever. She picked it up. It smelled vaguely chocolatey. The scent of his body wash. His smell, the native scent of his skin, always reminded her of nutmeg.
She turned on the shower and let it run. Even though Andrei had finished showering barely thirty minutes before, the water would take ages to warm up again. Sitting on the toilet lid, Corinne buried her face in his discarded towel and tried to make herself cry. She could cry for the man who’d walked her home after Easter Vigil, whom she’d barely seen since. She could weep for the sad cluster of people gathered around the nail salon, hoping some miraculous thing would bloom from the dull, workaday concrete. She could mourn the foolish young woman who’d given up a Master of Public Administration in order to have babies. She could, in theory, cry for all those things—but she didn’t.
The water ran hot. The mirror fogged over. Drops of condensation drizzled off the bottom of the glass and puddled on the vanity. She shrugged off her nightgown and stepped into the tub.
Just as she drew the shower curtain, the bathroom door opened with a suck of cold air. Corinne yelped in surprise and, covering her breasts with her arms, shrank back against the tile. One foot slipped on the wet floor of the tub, and she began to fall. She saw in a flash how she would come to her end—wet, naked, concussed, and humiliated. Just as quickly, she reached out to save herself, hoping the shower curtain would sustain her weight just long enough, just for the second or two she needed to get her feet under her. But instead of the curtain, she grabbed hold of Andrei’s hands, or his hands grabbed hold of hers—impossible to say which.
He’d come back for something—toothbrush, phone charger, another round of arguments, something—and now here he stood, his shirt soaking through, his eyes twinkling, his crooked arms holding her upright.
“Are you all right?” he asked her.
“I think so,” she said. She had yet to catch her breath. Her heart had yet to stop slamming in her chest. But she was indeed all right.
“I couldn’t leave,” he said. “Not without—”
“I know it was only about eight minutes,” she said, “but I think I kind of missed you.”
“Is there room for me?” He was already stripping off his wet clothes.
Grinning, nodding, and yes, God help her, shedding tears at last, she stepped aside for him, and he climbed in. He was already hard, his erection bobbing in the steamy air. She bent her head as he kissed her neck, breathed the nutmeg scent of his skin, pressed her body against his. The water washed over them both. She said his name, told him she loved him, said his name again. He pushed her wet hair back, away from her ear, and said in a low growl, “Moi aussi, moi aussi.”
