When Winter Blooms

The thing about living with someone is that you can't avoid them.

I know that sounds obvious, but when you live alone, or even with a flatmate, there's always an out. you can go to your room, you can time your kitchen visits, you can exist on different schedules and let the apartment absorb the awkwardness. You have options.

I had no options.

By Friday I had mostly talked myself down.

Mostly. Friday had been fine, I'd been busy, Lily had been demanding.

And busy and demanding are genuinely useful things when your brain keeps returning to a hallway and a voice saying your name in the dark. I got through Friday, Friday was handled.

Saturday morning was a different problem.

Saturday meant he was home. No office, no early suit, no elevator taking him away before I'd finished my first coffee. Just him, in the apartment, all day and a four-year-old who woke up at 6:30 wanting oatmeal, which meant I was at the stove by 6:35, which was exactly when Ethan Cole came out of his room and walked directly into the kitchen because that is where the coffee was and neither of us could do anything about any of it.

He came in and I was at the stove and Lily was at the island in her pajamas with Gerald propped beside her like a breakfast guest, and the three of us existed in the same kitchen like nothing had happened two nights ago, because nothing had happened technically. 

A person had carried another person down a hallway and put them to bed and pulled a blanket over them and said their name in the dark, and then two days later we were all just making oatmeal.

Fine.

"Morning," I said. To the pot.

"Morning." He replied, to the coffee machine.

Lily looked between us with the bright, indiscriminate energy of a child who had slept eleven hours and was ready to begin.

"Gerald wants oatmeal too," she announced.

"Gerald can have some of yours," I said.

"He wants his own bowl."

"He's a bear, Lily."

"He's hungry."

I got Gerald a small bowl and put approximately four oats in it and set it in front of him. Lily looked satisfied. 

I heard something behind me. Not quite a sound, more like the absence of one.

I stirred the pot.

We ate,  the three of us, plus Gerald, and Ethan stood at the counter with his coffee and his phone like he always did and didn't sit down, which was normal, except that this morning the not-sitting felt more pointed than usual. 

Like he was making sure there was a counter between us.

I understood that. I was doing my own version of it.

Lily ate six bites of oatmeal and then decided she was done and wanted to show her father something she'd drawn the day before. 

She slid off the stool and disappeared down the hall. And then it was just the two of us in the kitchen and the sounds of the city and the coffee machine finishing its cycle.

I picked up Lily's bowl and took it to the sink.

He moved to refill his travel mug.

We did this small, necessary dance around each other; him to the left, me to the right, perfectly calibrated to not occupy the same space, and it was so deliberate that it would have been funny if it hadn't been the opposite of funny.

"Sleep okay?" he asked.

I looked up. He was screwing the lid onto his travel mug and not looking at me.

"Yes," I said. "Very well actually."

"Good."

"The bed's comfortable."

"I know."

A beat.

"The floor is not," I added. I kept my voice completely even when I said it.

He looked at me then, Just for a second. 

"No," he said. "It's not."

And that was it. That was the whole conversation about the previous two nights. It was done, Filed. The lid was on it and we were both moving on and that was completely fine and absolutely the right call and I turned back to the sink and rinsed the bowl and the back of my neck was warm for no particular reason.

Lily came back with the drawing before he left.

It was a house, a big square with a triangle roof, the way all children draw houses, with a sun in the corner that had about sixteen rays coming off it. In front of the house there were three figures. The tallest one had what appeared to be a suit drawn on in careful crayon strokes. The smallest one had enormous hair. The middle one had, Lily had given it long dark hair and a yellow shape at the bottom of the page that I eventually understood was supposed to be a cardigan, My cardigan. 

The yellow one I wore on Tuesdays.

Three people. In front of a house. With a sun.

"That's us," Lily said, stating the obvious with tremendous pride. 

"That's Daddy and that's me and that's you, Maya."

I looked at the drawing for a moment.

"It's beautiful, baby," I said.

I looked at Ethan. He was looking at the drawing with an expression that was doing a lot of things at once,  something soft, something complicated, something that came and went so fast I almost didn't catch it.

"Can I keep it?" he asked Lily.

She looked surprised. "You want it?"

"Yes."

She handed it over immediately with the generosity of someone who has just discovered they have more power than they realised. 

Ethan folded it carefully, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket. Right against his chest.

Then he kissed the top of Lily's head and said he'd try to be home by seven and picked up his bag.

At the elevator he stopped. I was still at the sink. I knew he'd stopped because I heard the absence of footsteps, the same way I'd been learning all his sounds for two weeks.

I didn't turn around.

"Maya."

"Mm."

"Thank you. For last night." A pause. "For Lily."

I turned then. He was at the elevator, the same composed face he always had, except that he was looking directly at me and not at the space beside my head.

"Of course," I said.

He held my eyes for a moment. Then the elevator opened, and he stepped in, and the doors closed, and he was gone.

I stood in the kitchen for a long moment.

Lily had moved back to the island and was explaining the drawing to Gerald in great detail, including which figure was which and why she'd given me a yellow cardigan. Gerald had no notes, apparently.

I finished the dishes. I dried my hands. I folded the tea towel the way I always did and hung it on the oven handle and then I just stood there looking at it.

He'd said thank you for Lily.

For Lily, not for the rest of it. 

He'd been careful about that, the same way he was careful about everything, precise about where the line was, what he was and wasn't acknowledging. 

Thank you for last night, for Lily.

Which was right. Which was exactly what it should be, I was here for Lily.

 That was the job. The rest of it, the hallway, the blanket, the name in the dark. That was just a man who was tired and had been operating alone for a very long time and had done a practical thing.

That was all it was.

"Maya," Lily said.

"Yeah?"

"Can we go to the park today?"

I thought about Rule Six. Prior notification. I picked up my phone.

Then I thought about what he'd said yesterday morning to me, not Ms. Park. For Lily.

I put the phone down. Picked it back up. Found his number, he'd put it in my phone the first day, beneath the heading Emergencies, which I'd always thought said something about how he categorised things, and typed: Taking Lily to the park this morning. 

Back by noon.

Three dots appeared almost immediately.

"Fine."

Then, after a second: " Take her coat."

I looked at that for a moment. It was November. I had obviously been planning to take her coat. I was a professional who had been working with children for years.

I typed back: Already on it.

A longer pause this time.

Then: Good.

I put my phone in my pocket. Lily was already halfway to the coat hooks, Gerald tucked under her arm, one shoe on and one shoe being looked for.

"Come on," she said. "Gerald wants to see the ducks."

"Gerald has a lot of wants for someone with no legs," I said.

Lily found this very funny, I found her coat.

We went to the park.

And I only checked my phone once on the way there, which I thought was pretty good, all things considered.