Page 62 of Beautiful Savage
I register it without tears, staying focused on the table like I'm performing daughter-at-dinner the way Gunner performed boyfriend-through-texts.
After dishes, Nicolas kisses the top of my head at ten o'clock, his usual bedtime. He walks past the portrait without looking. Seven years on that wall have made it invisible to him. I sit on the couch in the half-light from the kitchen lamp, the painting above me in shadow.
At 11:45 PM, lying in my childhood bed with moonlight through the curtains, I text:Will you tell me when it's done.
One minute later, the fastest response all day:Yes.
He's been waiting for me. Been holding his phone.
Are you safe.
A long pause. Five minutes, maybe eight. The phone rests on my chest in the dark, and I imagine him doing something dangerous while I lie here.
Yes.
Don't lie.
I'm not lying.
I hold the phone against my cheek, the screen dark, the room dark, Nicolas asleep down the hall. Miami is ninety minutes south where Gunner sits in the apartment we shared. The cottage sheets smell like lavender and home, nothing like his sheets that smell of cedar and us.
I fall asleep around 1 AM with the phone still pressed to my cheek.
The next day passes in fragments. Coffee with Nicolas who doesn't ask questions. Walking the garden where Maman's roses bloom full on the arbor, the lemon tree heavy with fruit, the mahogany in the corner.
The day fractures itself along the axis of my phone, which I keep within arm's reach at all times. The air is thick with the chirr of cicadas and the scent of Nicolas's turpentine, but I am attuned only to the light vibration in my pocket or the ping of a new message.
At 8:54 AM: The garden is the same.
The reply doesn't come until 9:13. Nearly twenty minutes, though I count each one. Good. That's all he writes. The word is so bare, so stripped of comfort, it lands like a thumb pressed to a bruise.
I reread the last message, then type: I might go back to teaching tomorrow. I've missed it.
Eleven minutes later: No, you haven't.
He's right, and it stings. I imagine him in the Miami apartment, back pressed to the wall near the window, phone in his palm, reading me as easily from a distance as he ever did from two feet away. I imagine the sound of his voice when he said my name, how even his silences felt like they contained a hundred unsaid things.
I am in the habit of lying to everyone, but with Gunner, the truth always scrapes to the surface.
At 10:47: I want you to be careful on Tuesday.
Four minutes, thirty-one seconds: I will be.
I take the phone outside, sit on the bench beneath the arbor where the roses have begun to turn brown at the edges, petals curling lightly like paper. I scroll through old messages, absurdly desperate for more, for something. I am dull with longing and boredom, two emotions I used to cure with movement—balletcenter routines, the impossible reach for a perfect arabesque—but now I have only the stasis of waiting for him.
At 11:03: Don't make me wait long after.
Two minutes: I won't.
I want to write something witty, something to break the tension, but nothing comes. My anger from yesterday is still there, but it's softened into a kind of ache. There is a part of me that wants to throw the phone into the garden, another part that wants to call him over and over until he relents and picks up.
I eat lunch in silence, scrolling headlines, looking for news about the Hallstein appointment. In Miami, two people have already been shot outside the old stadium where Gunner said he sometimes ran the stairs at night. Every news story feels like a veiled threat.
I help Nicolas stretch a fresh canvas for a commission. He staples the edges with the precision of an old master, forearms braced along the frame, and for a moment I remember being a small child, watching him paint Maman in the garden. I remember her laughter, the way she held my hand when we crossed the street, the afternoons of baking together when the kitchen filled with citrus and cinnamon. I wonder if this is how love always ends up: a series of absences you never get used to, but which shape every day after.
Finally, when I can't hold it back any longer, I type: Can't stop thinking of you.
The truth is I miss him so badly it feels like a fever, a physical thing spreading through my chest and limbs. I want to tell him I wish he was here, I wish he was safe, but I know it would only make his worry worse.
