When Winter Blooms

I broke rule seven on a Wednesday.

In my defense, I didn't mean to. 

Lily had found a book, a small hardcover with a blue spine that she'd pulled from somewhere and was very proudly showing me, except she'd clearly gotten it from somewhere she wasn't supposed to, because when I asked her where she found it she suddenly became very interested in Gerald's ear and stopped making eye contact.

"Lily."

"Hmm?"

"Where did you get the book?"

"...Daddy's room."

Not his room, as it turned out, His study. Which was, per Rule Seven, off-limits at all times, a rule that Lily was apparently aware of and had decided did not apply to her, which fair enough, she was four, but still.

I should have just left the book on the kitchen counter and sent Ms. Park an email, I know that. But Lily was at her afternoon play session downstairs with the neighbour's kid, the study door was slightly open, and I told myself I was just going to set it inside the door and leave. Ten seconds. In and out.

I pushed the door open.

And then I stopped.

The rest of the apartment was grey and white and deliberately empty, no clutter, no personality, nothing that didn't serve a function. 

I'd gotten used to it, the blankness of the place. 

But his study was the opposite. Dark wood desk, books on every surface, papers that looked like they'd actually been touched. 

A real room, a room that felt like someone actually lived in it.

But that wasn't what stopped me.

The wall to the left of the door was entirely photographs.

Not framed, not arranged neatly. Just photographs covering the whole wall, some overlapping, pinned and taped and layered, like someone had put them up over time without much thought for order. 

Just: here, and here, and here. Filling the space.

All of them were her.

A woman. Dark-haired, light-eyed, the kind of face that smiled like it was her natural resting state. In some she was looking at the camera, laughing at whoever was holding it. 

In others she didn't know she was being photographed at all, reading, or looking out a window, or talking to someone just out of frame. 

There was one of her very pregnant, standing in a kitchen I didn't recognise, one hand on her belly and the other wrapped around a mug, looking down at herself with this expression that was so private and so soft that I felt immediately like I shouldn't be seeing it.

There was one of her holding Lily, Lily was still a newborn, tiny, red-faced, wrapped in white and the woman was looking down at her with an expression I can only describe as completely gone. 

Like the rest of the world had simply ceased to matter.

I stood there longer than I should have. Long enough that I stopped noticing individual photographs and just saw her as a whole, this woman, everywhere, alive in every frame, filling an entire wall of a room that otherwise had been stripped of everything soft.

He hadn't gotten rid of anything. He'd put it all in here.

"You're in my study."

I spun around so fast I nearly dropped the book.

He was in the doorway. Jacket off, sleeves rolled up, which meant he'd been home for a while 

without me noticing, I hadn't heard the elevator. He was looking at me with an expression I couldn't read, which was pretty standard for him, but this one had something underneath it. Something careful.

"I'm sorry," I said, immediately. 

"Lily had this, she'd taken it from in here and I was just putting it back, I wasn't,  I didn't go through anything, I just..."

"It's fine."

"I know it's on the list.."

"Miss Reyes." He said it quietly. "It's fine."

I stopped talking. He looked at the book in my hand, blue spine, some kind of nature photography thing and crossed the room to take it from me. 

His fingers didn't touch mine when he took it. 

He set it on the desk and then stood there with his back to me for a moment.

I should have left. The door was right there. I'd done what I came to do.

I didn't leave.

I looked at the wall again, I couldn't help it,  and he must have seen me looking because he turned around.

"That's Claire," he said. 

Like I might not have worked that out. Like he needed to say her name.

"She's beautiful," I said. 

And I meant it plainly, without any of the complicated feelings sitting underneath it. She was, She really was.

He looked at the wall. 

"She was," he said.

The past tense landed in the room like something physical. 

I felt it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, still looking at the photographs: "She would have liked you."

I didn't say anything, I'm not sure I could have.

"She was..." He stopped. 

Tried again. 

"She didn't have much patience for people who weren't straightforward. She said it was the thing she respected most in anyone. Being direct." 

"You're direct."

I didn't know what to do with that. I stood very still.

"Lily has her eyes," he said. Quiet, almost to himself. 

"I didn't notice it at first, or maybe I didn't let myself. But she has them exactly."

He looked at the photograph of Claire with the newborn. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he picked up a file from his desk, tucked it under his arm, and walked to the door. Completely composed. Like he'd just commented on the weather.

He paused in the doorway.

"Tell Lily the study is still off-limits," he said. 

"For her."

"Yes," I managed. "Of course."

He left. I listened to his footsteps go down the hall.

I stood in his study for another minute. Maybe two.

I looked at the wall. All those photographs, all that light, all those moments he'd pulled out of the rest of the apartment and put in here where he could close the door. Where he could be with her without anyone watching.

I thought about what he'd said. She would have liked you.

I don't know why that was the thing that got me. It wasn't the saddest thing about the situation. not even close. But something about it sat in my chest in a way I hadn't expected. 

The idea that this woman, wherever she was, might have seen something in me worth liking. The idea that he'd thought about it long enough to say it out loud.

I set the book on the edge of the desk, neatly, where he'd know it had been put back properly.

Then I went to the bathroom, ran the cold tap, pressed both wrists under the water for ten seconds the way my mother taught me when I needed to pull myself together, and went to get Lily from downstairs.

She came barrelling at me the moment I opened the door, Gerald-less for once, telling me something very fast about a game she'd been playing that I could only half follow. 

I took her hand and walked her to the elevator and nodded in the right places.

"Maya," she said, as the doors closed.

"Yeah?"

She looked up at me. "Your eyes are pink."

"I'm just tired, baby."

She studied me with that look she had, the one that was so much older than four, the one that made me think she'd been watching adults her whole short life and had gotten very good at knowing when they were lying.

She didn't push it though. She just put her hand in mine and looked at the elevator doors.

"Okay," she said, in a voice that meant she didn't fully believe me but was choosing to let it go.

I squeezed her hand.

We rode up in silence, and I kept my breathing even, and I did not think about a wall full of photographs or a man who kept them all behind a closed door, or the way he'd said her name like saying it was the only thing keeping her real.

I didn't think about any of it.

I almost managed it, too.