Page 136 of Knottingley Ever After
He shuts the door, gentle.
I am alone in the room with Boudicca, daughter of the Iceni, on my shoulder, the soft afternoon snow-light from the two windows washing the cedar floor in a long pale slant, and the small unmistakable pine-and-cream-paint-and-beeswax of the new room around me.
I lower myself onto the edge of the four-poster bed.
I look around at the fairy lights, the bookshelf, the cozy nest in the corner with my name on it. I let it land. I let it land the way I have been refusing to let things land at me for the past ten years — not the cataloguing landing, not the filing landing, not the registered-but-not-engaged-with landing.
The honest landing.
Maybe.
Maybe I am, against every careful private precaution I have taken with myself for ten years, allowed to dare to dream of a happily ever after.
Knottingley style.
CHAPTER 26
Cruising Altitude
~RÉMI~
The gate agent scans my boarding pass with the small unbothered beep of a machine doing the small unbothered job a machine does eight hundred times a day.
I am, as of this scan, professionally about to die.
Composed face. Composed face. The captain three bodies back is reading you right now. Do not.
My palms are sweating against the strap of my carry-on. I have, in the past ninety minutes, made four professionally unnecessary visits to the small terminal-side bathroom. I have, in the past forty-five minutes, swallowed the small white anxiety pill the team physician prescribed me at the start of my freshman year, and it has, so far, returned approximately fifteen percent of the calm it is supposed to deliver. The Trois-Rivières-bred Catholic upbringing my mother gifted me at age six is, somewhere on the back of my tongue, beginning to draft the small private Hail Mary I will, against the strict atheist convictions of my adult life, in fact say silently to myself the moment the wheels leave the ground.
The boarding tunnel smells of jet fuel and industrial floor wax and the small chemical-citrus of the airline’s gate-side hand sanitizer.
Breathe. Through the nose. Out through the nose. One foot. The next foot. You have done this fifty-three times in your adult life. The plane is, mechanically, a tube. The tube is, statistically, the safest tube on earth.
The tube is at thirty-five thousand feet, Rémi.
Shut up.
A small warm hand slides into mine.
I stop, mid-aisle, the soft press of the small fingers between mine the precise grip of a small person who has decided, with no prior consultation, that the man whose hand she has just taken is in fact her property for the next four hours.
I look down.
Iris is squinting up at me from approximately my collarbone, her head tilted at the precise small angle of a goalie reading an unfamiliar shooter’s shoulder, and her free hand is curled around the strap of her own carry-on. Her hair is in two soft pigtail braids that fall against the front of my dark-grey sweater — mine, by acquisition, three sizes too big on her, draping at the wrists, hanging halfway down her thighs over the small precise outline of a pair of new black lululemon tights she has, in the past four days, been wearing with such evident pleasure that Matteo has made me give him a status update on her wardrobe inventory twice.
Pigtails.
She is in pigtails on the way to a Friday road game. The captain three bodies back is not going to survive it.
Also, professionally, the week alone in her new nest has made the precise structural difference I drew on the napkin the night I started the cedar work. Two weeks ago she was running a low-grade fever on the bench. Today she is, by Coach Declan’sown private metrics, the most rested goalie in the building. Nobody outside this house, except admin and Dr. Halpern, knows what we built in the upstairs hallway. We agreed, the three of us, that the small private architecture would remain small and private, because the small private architecture is, structurally, hers. Even Boudicca — admin signed off on the kitten with prejudice last Tuesday, on the grounds that the kitten was found on campus property and therefore campus property’s problem — is, this weekend, staying at Dr. Halpern’s house under temporary supervision, because none of us was prepared to leave a small grey unsupervised dictator inside the team house for three days unattended.
“Why,” Iris says, mildly, “did you stop, defenseman.”
“Hm.”
“You look,” she observes, narrowing her eyes, “kinda pale.”
“Mm.”
