Page 68 of Second Alarm
The kitchen is very quiet. The dying-bug porch light buzzes through the door.
"I need to think. I need you to leave." She holds up her hand before I can speak. "Not forever. Not like — tonight. I need tonight."
"Okay." I stand up, knees sore the way they get when you've been clenching your quads for forty-five minutes without noticing. I walk to the door, stop, and turn around.
"If you need me, call me. Any hour. I mean that."
"Why do you always make it hard to hate you?"
"Wasn't trying to."
"I know."
"Good night, Hanna."
"Good night."
I walk to the truck and don't start it. I sit in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition, unturned, staring at the dying-bug porch light, trying to catalogue whether I've just won something or whether I've just lit the match on the structure I've spent ten years building with my bare hands.
My phone buzzes.
Hanna: Don't say I have to tell Cal by a specific day.
Me: I wasn't going to.
A pause. The three dots.
Hanna: But you'd leave the bed.
I look at the blue door, the buzzing light, and think about a twenty-three-year-old me in a twin bed in Oregon waiting for a text from a nineteen-year-old her that never came.
Me: Yes.
The three dots appear and stay for almost a minute.
Hanna: Okay.
Justokay.No follow-up.
I sit in the cab of my truck on Hanna Larsen's street on a Thursday night and watch the blue door until the kitchen light goes off, and then I drive home.
In my own kitchen when I pour out the cold tea, make new tea, don't drink it, and stand at the counter. No new messages come.
The thing about an ultimatum — I scrape my thumbnail along the edge of the counter where the caulk has split — is that you're supposed to feel decisive. You're supposed to feel like the sentence you said was a door closing behind you. I don't feel decisive. I feel like a man who's put a live grenade in the hand of the person he loves and told her she can hold it or she can drop it and either way he's standing right here when she decides.
I pick up the phone. Put it down. Pick it up. Put it down.
I go to bed at two in the morning and don't sleep.
At four fifty-one a.m., my phone lights up.
Hanna: I'm not going to let you leave the bed.
I stare at the ceiling for a long time.
Me: Okay.
It isn't agreement. It isn't a timeline. It's a woman in a dark kitchen sending a message at four fifty-one in the morning to theman who asked her to do the hardest thing she can imagine, and the message isI'm not going to let you leave the bed,and that isn't a plan, but it isn't ano, and I'll take it.
