Page 12 of Take the Fall
The light went while I sat. The window went from blue to the orange of the streetlight coming on below. It wasn’t long before a key turned in the lock.
My whole body came up off the stool before I’d decided to move. The deadbolt turned. The door opened on the shape of him, big in the frame, the cold of the stairwell coming in with him. He stopped when he saw me standing there in the dark.
He reached over and turned on the lamp by the door without looking at me.
“Almeida let me in,” I said. “I didn’t have mine.”
He nodded. Set his keys down. Hung his jacket on the hook, the one I’d grabbed mine off of going out the door a night ago.His eyes moved over everything in the small room except my face.
That was the thing I couldn’t get my hands around. He wouldn’t look at me. Luke, who watched everything, who’d unsettled me for a month with the flat unbroken attention he gave a room, wouldn’t bring his eyes up to mine. And I couldn’t read it. Anger held down to the coals, or something I wanted to look at even less. The not-knowing sat in my chest beside the guilt, which had taken its own seat by now and wasn’t giving it up. I’d done this. Kissed him and run and let him clean the floor alone. And I still didn’t know what I’d done it for, or what I wanted now, and being guilty and unsure at the same time turned out to be a particular kind of sick.
“I came back,” I said. It was meant to be the whole speech. In the lit kitchen it was four words, and they just sat there.
“I see.” He said it to the counter.
I waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t any rest of it. He didn’t ask where I’d been. Didn’t ask about the night, the kiss, the running, any of it. He moved around the edge of me into the kitchen and I stepped back to give him room. We did the small careful dance of two men too aware of each other in four feet of space. Both of us minding not to touch. Both pretending the minding was nothing.
“You eat?” he said. To the kettle.
“Not for a while.”
He filled it. Got the rice on. Cracked eggs into the scratched pan one-handed the way he did. The smell came up, oil and egg and starch. The smell of the only other night I’d watched him cook, weeks ago, after the fall, when he put me to bed and made me eat first.
I understood this was the conversation. The food was what he had in place of the words. He was going to feed me and not say the thing, and let the feeding be the saying, and that was asclose as either of us was getting tonight to the floor and what happened on it.
“The Inspector asked after you,” he said, after a while, his back half-turned, not looking around. “Said the desk’s there when you want it. He’s not writing you up for today. Come in when you’re ready. No rush.” A pause, the spatula moving. “He means it. He’s not pushing you.”
I should have felt something clean at that. Relief. The small mercy of a boss who’d hold my chair while I came apart. What I felt instead was the cold edge of the bigger thing behind it. The file. The reopening. Men I’d never see, across the city, weighing whether I got to keep the only thing I’d ever been any good at.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe. We’ll see.”
It came out vague and I let it stay vague. He didn’t reach in after it. Didn’t push. Maybe he knew there was nothing in me tonight worth pushing against. Maybe he just didn’t have the words forare you going to be all rightany more than I had them for the truth, which was that I didn’t know. That I was scared in a way I’d never once let anyone see. Scared the way you’re scared of a thing already in motion that you can’t get in front of. The desk, the badge, the whole shape of my life, sitting on a table being decided by people who’d decided against me once already and found it easy.
He put the plate in front of me. Sat across with his own. We ate without talking. The eggs were good, plain and hot and salted right, and I was hungrier than I’d let myself know. For a while there was nothing in the room but the two of us and the small sounds of forks and the fridge going behind it. It was the most peace I’d had in two days. And it was built entirely on us agreeing, without one word passing, not to say the thing.
When the plates were empty he stood and took them both and washed them and dried his hands and folded the towel square over the rail.
“Early shift,” he said.
“Okay.”
He came back past me, close in the narrow kitchen. Close enough that I felt the warmth come off him and the plain clean smell of the soap we both used. He didn’t stop. Didn’t slow. Didn’t look at me. He went down the short hall to his room. His door closed. Soft. The latch finding home.
I sat alone at the counter and let out the breath I’d been holding since five o’clock. It hadn’t been a fix. He hadn’t forgiven me, because there was nothing to forgive that either of us would name. He hadn’t said it was all right, because it wasn’t, and he didn’t lie. He’d fed me and gone to bed and left both our doors where they’d always stood. A room each. The wall between. It wasn’t a fix. It was a floor. After a night of standing on nothing, a floor was more than I’d come home daring to hope for.
Then the phone lit up on the counter, buzzing hard against the wood, and the floor went out from under me again.
Mother.
Not the unknown number that had been hunting me for two days, the one I’d let ring out from a bar stool while the whiskey did its work, the one I knew without checking was an assistant on my uncle’s floor. This was her. Her own number. Her own thumb on her own phone. The patriarch had been emailing for two days and I’d been deleting them unread, because email from my father was a thing I could refuse. A call from my mother was not. They knew that. They’d always known that. In the half-second before I answered I understood this was the one I’d take, and that they understood it too, and I answered anyway.
“Mom.”
“Ryan.” Her voice was the voice that raised me, soft and careful, and it went into me past every defense I had up for everyone else. “There you are. I’ve been worried. Are you eating? Are you sleeping?”
“I’m eating, Mom. I just ate, actually.” True, for once. “I’m fine.”
“It’s been so cold this week. Have you had your coat?”
