Thirty days to fall in love

Chapter Five: "She Left Fingerprints on Everything He Forgot He Owned"

Chapter Five: "She Left Fingerprints on Everything He Forgot He Owned"

POV: Ava Reese — First Person Present Tense

The trouble with Nathaniel Cole is that he reads the acknowledgments page.

I discover this on Day Ten, sitting across from him on the couch while he reads a book I left on the coffee table — a novel about a cartographer who maps countries that do not exist — and I am pretending to illustrate but actually watching him the way I watch everything I am trying to understand, from the peripheral edge of my attention. He reaches the acknowledgments page. He does not skip it. He reads it the way he read my contract, slowly and with the particular gravity of someone who understands that a list of names represents a list of debts, and that debts are the most honest record of what a thing cost to make.

I look back at my sketchpad. I have drawn his hands without meaning to. Open, resting on his knee, the same way I drew them on the kitchen counter card that I left him last week.

I close the sketchpad.

My phone buzzes. June's name. I answer in the kitchen, two rooms away, with the water running so the sound carries, and June says in the voice she uses when she has information that is going to cost me something: "Dr. Osei moved your scan forward. Next Tuesday, not the week after. The new imaging shows something in the left lobe that he wants to look at more closely." A pause that is a breath held and then released. "Ava."

"Okay," I say.

"That's not — Ava, that's not an okay situation."

"I know what it is," I say. "I'll be there Tuesday."

I turn off the water. I go back to the couch. I pick up my sketchpad. Nathaniel does not look up from the acknowledgments page, and I sit across from him and look at the drawing of his hands and think: eighteen days. The number has a new weight this morning. I set it down and let it be heavy, because the alternative is pretending it is light, and I stopped pretending things were lighter than they were approximately two years ago when a doctor used the word prognosis in a sentence and I understood for the first time that some words are not medical terms. They are warnings dressed in syllables.

I pick up my pen. I draw the lighthouse keeper from the manuscript I am illustrating — an old man with hands like driftwood, standing at the edge of everything, collecting what the sea sends back. I have been drawing him for three weeks. I think I understand him better than I did before I came here.

Day Eleven begins badly and does not negotiate.

I know from the moment I wake that the treatment has settled into my body the way a storm settles — not with immediate violence, but with a low, pervasive pressure that makes every ordinary function feel like something earned rather than assumed. I dress slowly. I drink half my chamomile. I go to the clinic and sit in Chair Seven and June holds my hand through the hard part without being asked, which is the specific grace of someone who has learned to read a body's needs before the person inside it has named them.

On the crosstown bus home, the nausea arrives with the abruptness of something that has been patient long enough. I hold the metal rail and breathe through my mouth and count the stops and tell myself: four more, three more, two, one, door, street, building, elevator, floor, door.

I make it.

I go directly to my room. I sit on the edge of the bed and hold my own elbows and wait for the shaking to stop. My hands are doing the thing they do after a difficult Tuesday — a fine, persistent tremor that no amount of willing away will resolve, only time, only the slow recalibration of a body returning from somewhere it did not choose to go. I lie back. I close my eyes. The ceiling of the guest room is white and clean and entirely without feeling, and I stare at it and think about the lighthouse keeper with his driftwood hands, about what it means to stand at the edge of something and collect what comes back.

I do not hear Nathaniel come home.

I hear the knock.

One knock, not two. One knock is a question. Two knocks would be an announcement. He has chosen the one that gives me the option to not answer, and I notice this about him — the way he always leaves a door open in the spaces between us — and I say: "Come in."

He opens the door and stands in the frame. He is still in his work clothes, collar loosened, the way he always looks at six in the evening, like a man who has been carrying something precise all day and is only now setting it down. He is holding two paper containers from the deli three blocks south. He holds them out.

"I didn't know what kind," he says. "I got two."

I look at the containers. Tomato rice. Chicken noodle. Both from Carla's Deli on the corner, where the sign in the window is hand-lettered and has not changed in eleven years.

I take both containers.

He nods once, the way he nods when something is settled, and he closes the door, and his footsteps move back down the hall, and I sit on the edge of the bed holding two containers of soup that are still warm from being carried eight blocks in November air.

I do not cry about the scan. I do not cry about the tremor in my hands or the nausea or the eighteen days remaining or the left lobe that Dr. Osei wants to look at more closely.

I cry about the soup. Both containers, because he did not know what kind.

I cry about the specific and devastating grace of being known imperfectly, by someone who is still trying.

On Day Twelve I wake early and feel, against all reasonable expectation, like myself. Not fighting. Not counting. Just myself, in a body that is mine, on a morning that is mine, in a penthouse that is not mine but that has accumulated, in twelve days, the small evidence of my presence everywhere — my tea on the counter, my ink on the doorframe, my sketchpad on the coffee table open to a drawing of his hands that I forgot to close.

I go to the kitchen. Nathaniel is already there, reading something on his phone, coffee in hand, and he looks up when I come in and says nothing, and I say nothing, and I put the kettle on, and for three minutes we exist in the same kitchen in the early morning light with the city doing its indifferent thing forty-one floors below, and it feels, in a way I do not have a safe name for, like something that belongs to both of us.

I take my chamomile to the writing desk in my room.

I open the drawer where I have kept, since Day Zero, a single sheet of cream paper folded in thirds — the beginning of something I started writing the night I placed the signed contract on top of my will.

I uncap my pen.

I write the first line of a letter I will not finish for eighteen more days, a letter I will seal and give to June and ask her to deliver on Day Thirty-One, a letter addressed to a man who brought me two containers of soup because he did not know what kind, and who reads acknowledgments pages, and who leaves coffee outside doors he cannot bring himself to knock on.

I write: I knew on Day Twelve.

I cap my pen.

I fold the paper. I place it back in the drawer.

I sit very still for a moment, my hand resting flat on the closed drawer, pressing down the way you press down on something you need to stay.

Then my phone lights up on the desk. Not June. Not Henry.

A text from a number I do not recognize, except that I do recognize it — it is not saved in my contacts because I never saved it, but I know the last four digits the way you know the shape of something that has been in your peripheral vision for long enough to become familiar.

Diana Cole.

Miss Reese. We should have lunch. I know something about you that my son does not. I think it is time we discussed what is kind.

I read it twice.

I set my phone face-down on the desk.

I press both palms flat against the wood and look at the window and the grey November sky beyond it and think about what it means that she knows, and what it means that she is calling it kindness, and what it means that I have twelve days behind me and eighteen ahead of me and a letter in a drawer with one sentence in it, and a man down the hall who brought me both kinds of soup.

I think about all of this for exactly as long as it takes the sky outside to shift from grey to the particular pale gold of a winter morning deciding, against the odds, to be bright.

Then I pick up my phone.

I type back: Where and when.

I press send.

I open my journal. I write three words beneath the date: She knows. Good.

Because here is what Diana Cole does not understand about kindness, what she cannot understand from the outside looking in at a situation she has reduced to a problem requiring management: I am not here to be protected from the ending. I came here for the living, and I have twelve days of proof that I made the right trade, and eighteen days left to make it mean something, and no one — not Diana Cole with her careful sentences, not the scan that Dr. Osei wants to look at more closely, not the tremor in my left hand that will not be willed away — no one gets to take the remaining days from me by calling the taking kind.

I close the journal.

Down the hall, I hear Nathaniel's voice — low, measured, the phone-call voice — and then the sound of his door, and then the particular silence of a penthouse in the morning when one person has left for the day and another remains, and I sit inside that silence and feel it, the full weight and the full warmth of it, and I let it be exactly what it is.

Eighteen days.

Not one of them wasted.

Not one.

Diana Cole knows. Ava knows she knows. She is walking into the confrontation with open eyes and the reader understands, for the first time, that the danger in this story is not only what is coming medically — it is the people who will try to decide, on Ava's behalf, what she deserves.