Page 95 of Breakaway
I set it as the wallpaper. Mouse's face fills the screen. Unimpressed. Supervisory. Present.
Mouse is waiting for me when I get back to the apartment twenty minutes later.
"Hey, Maus."
She yells at me once. I fill her bowl. She inspects the contents with the focus of a health inspector running a final evaluation and then eats with the urgency of a cat who has never been fed in her entire life.
I lean against the counter. The kitchen is organized. The cutting board is in its drawer. The rice is on its shelf. The apartment is the apartment I have been building for weeks now, one routine at a time, and the man standing in it said the truest sentence of his life twenty minutes ago.
I pull out my phone and open FaceTime and call Wes.
He picks up on the second ring. His face fills the screen, his apartment behind him, the low light of a Miami evening. He is on the couch. I can see the edge of the balcony through the sliding door, the sky going purple over the water.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"How was the session?"
"Hard." I set the phone against the backsplash so I can see him and lean against the counter. Mouse finishes eating and jumps up beside the phone and puts her face directly into the camera. "Mouse. Move."
Wes laughs. "Let her stay. I haven't seen her in a week."
"She's blocking the entire screen."
"She's showing me her face. It's a gift. Accept it." Mouse yells at the phone. Wes says, "Hi, Mouse. You look angry."
"She's always angry. It's her brand." I move the phone slightly. Mouse gives me a look of deep professional offense and jumps down. "There. Now you can see me."
"I can see you." His voice shifts. Not much. Enough. "You've been crying."
"Yeah."
"Hard session?"
"The hardest one." I look at his face on the screen. The hazel eyes, the steadiness, the way he is holding the phone like he is holding the conversation open without pushing on it. "Gwen asked me what happens when I'm not useful. I said I don't know how to be a person who isn't useful. She asked if it's true. I said I don't know."
"You said you don't know if that’s true?" His voice is rough.
"Not no. Not yes. I don't know. Which is different from believing it's true."
He puts his hand over his mouth for a second. Then he drops it. His eyes are bright on the screen.
"That's different," he says. "That's good."
"I know."
"How do you feel?"
"Tired. Emptied out. Like I ran a full sixty and someone took the boards away." I look at the ceiling and then back at the screen. "And lighter. Like the sentence was taking up space and now it's outside of me and it's not running things from inside anymore."
He nods. He doesn't say anything for a few seconds and the silence on the video call is different from the silence in Gwen's office. This silence holds the answer he is not going to give me because the answer is not his to give. He knows that.
"I wish I was there," he says.
"I know. But I think I needed to come home from this one alone. I needed to stand in my kitchen and feel it without anyone catching me."
"You're standing in your kitchen."
