The Width of Glass

Epilogue — The Last Note

Mara pov

April came slowly to Harwick Street.

It arrived in the way April arrives in cities, not all at once but in increments, a degrees warmer and then another, the light staying a little longer each evening, the trees along the pavement putting out the tentative first green of things that have survived something and are trying again. I noticed it on my way to work and on my way home and from the kitchen window in the mornings, the street below changing its register from the grey contained quality of winter to something more open, more willing.

I noticed it from both kitchens now.

I had not moved officially. My name was still on the lease of the fourth floor apartment across the road and my lamp was still on its timer and my hexagonal bathroom tiles were still collecting grime in the grout lines with their personal enthusiasm. I went back to water the plant Cass had given me as what she called a housewarming that is also a gentle hint, and to collect post, and occasionally to sit at my kitchen table with a document I needed to spread out, because my kitchen table was bigger than Eliot's and some work required the space.

But most evenings I was on the seventh floor.

Most mornings too.

Cass had met Eliot in February at the restaurant on the corner, the one that had been there long enough to have regulars. She had arrived with the specific alertness of a person who has been given an edited version of a story and intends to fill in the gaps herself, and she had sat across from him and asked him questions with the focused pleasure of someone conducting a very enjoyable interview, and Eliot had answered them with the careful honesty he brought to everything, including the ones about the street and the window and the notes, which I had decided to tell her in full because she was Cass and she was going to find out anyway and I would rather she heard it from me in a register I could control.

She had listened to the whole thing and then looked at Eliot for a long moment and said, you slid notes under her door for three weeks before you spoke to her.

He said, yes.

She said, and the notes were about genuine dangers.

He said, yes.

She said, and you built an eight week file on her former partner using government contacts.

He said, yes.

She said, and you booked flights to Norway without telling her.

He said, yes.

She said, I have to be honest with you, she said. Any one of those things in isolation would concern me deeply. Together they're either the most alarming thing I've ever heard or the most romantic. I haven't decided which.

Eliot said, I understand.

Cass said, she's the most important person in my life. I want you to know that I know where you live.

Eliot said, I appreciate that.

Cass looked at me and said, I like him.

I said, I know.

She said, his delivery is terrible but I like him.

I said, the delivery grows on you.

That had been February. It was April now and Cass had since decided that the answer to her question was the second one and had stopped being cautious and started being enthusiastic, which expressed itself primarily in sending me articles about Norway that I already knew about because Eliot had already sent them to me, and occasionally texting me things like I told you you needed to get out more at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday for no discernible reason.

I was, in the general scheme of things, not going to argue with her.

The consulting work Eliot did had expanded in March, a new client, a more substantive brief, the kind of work that used the parts of him that had been sitting unused and that he came home from in the evenings with a quality of focused tiredness that was different from the directionless quiet he had had before. Different and better. He had also started seeing someone again, a therapist he had found through a recommendation, and he went on Thursday mornings and came back quieter than usual and occasionally said things in the evenings that were clearly the residue of something he was working through, and I listened and said what seemed useful and did not push at what wasn't ready to be pushed.

He had written the letter to Henrik's wife.

He had told me about it on a Thursday evening in March, three weeks after Norway, sitting at his desk with the letter in front of him, not the final version but close, and he had read it to me and I had listened and said one thing, which was that the third paragraph was the real letter and everything before it was preamble, and he had looked at it for a moment and then rewritten it starting from the third paragraph.

He had sent it the following week.

He hadn't heard back yet. He had said he might not and that he had made peace with that possibility before he sent it, which I believed and which I also thought was not the whole truth but was as much of the truth as he had access to yet, and that was sufficient.

The girl was fifteen. Her name was Astrid. He had told me that in Norway, sitting at the window of the stone house above the water, and it was the first time he had said her name to anyone.

I thought about Astrid sometimes. About what it meant to grow up with an absence that had a shape and a cause. About the letter that might arrive and might not and what either outcome would cost and what it might return.

I thought about the things that survive and the things that don't and the difference between them, which was not always virtue or luck or any quality inherent to the thing itself but sometimes simply the presence of someone who paid attention.

It was a Saturday morning in April when I wrote the last note.

Eliot had gone out early, the kind of early that belonged to someone who had not entirely broken the habit of being awake before the city and who used the quiet hours for the consulting work that required sustained concentration, and I had woken to an empty apartment and made coffee and sat at his kitchen table with the morning light coming through the window and thought about all the mornings I had sat at my own kitchen table across the road and what they had felt like and what they felt like now.

I got a piece of paper from the drawer.

I sat with my pen for a moment.

Then I wrote, in handwriting that was still slightly too large for the space but less so than it used to be, one line.

I folded it in half.

I put it on his pillow.

I heard his key in the lock at half past eight and I was in the kitchen when he came in, still in yesterday's socks, coffee in hand, and I watched him put his bag down and go through to the bedroom the way he always did when he came in, coat off, keys on the shelf, and I waited.

A moment of quiet.

Then he came back to the kitchen doorway.

He was holding the note.

He looked at it for a moment longer than was strictly necessary for one line of handwriting.

Then he looked at me.

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The expression on his face, fully open, nothing managed, the warm unguarded version that I had first seen across a kitchen table and which still did the same thing to my chest every time it appeared, was sufficient.

I said, I found a second lease. In this building. Second floor. Bigger kitchen, no hexagonal tiles. It's available from June.

He said, you looked at leases.

I said, I've been here most nights for three months. The commute is becoming impractical.

He said, the commute is forty five seconds.

I said, it's April and it rains.

He looked at me with the expression and then looked at the note in his hand and then back at me.

He said, June.

I said, if that's too soon I can look at later in the year.

He said, June is not too soon.

He said it in the tone he used when something was the obvious answer and he was mildly surprised it had been offered as a question.

I said, alright then.

He crossed the kitchen and I stayed where I was because I had learned that he moved toward things in his own time and in his own way and that waiting for that was not the same as the old waiting, the waiting that had belonged to someone else's control of the pace of things. This waiting was something I chose.

He stopped in front of me and I looked up at him and he put his hand against my face the way he did and I leaned into it the way I did and he said, Mara.

I said, yes.

He said, what does it say.

He meant the note. He was holding it but he was looking at me.

I said, you read it.

He said, I want to hear you say it.

I looked at him in the April morning light of the kitchen of his apartment that was going to be our building if not yet our apartment, in Harwick Street where I had arrived in October with two suitcases and a lamp and the specific managed relief of someone who had gotten out and was trying to remember what out felt like.

I said, it says I'm staying.

He looked at me.

I said, that's all. I'm staying. I thought you should have it in writing.

He said, I think that's the best note you've written.

I said, I had a good teacher.

Outside the window the street was doing its Saturday morning things, the market setting up on the corner, the café putting its chalkboard out, the ordinary April life of a city that did not know and did not need to know that something had happened in it, quietly and over time, in two apartments facing each other across a width of glass.

He kissed me in the kitchen with the morning light coming through the window and the note folded in his hand and I thought about Caldwell Street and Renner Street and the first note and the last note and all the notes between them, all the things said in the gaps and the things that no longer needed to be.

The lamp was on across the road.

In a few months it would be on a different timer, in a different apartment, in the same building as this one.

I thought about that.

I thought it was exactly right.