His Maid, His Obsession

Chapter 5

What I Chose

I crossed the room.

Not fast — fast would have been wrong, fast would have broken whatever fragile thing existed between us at that moment and sent him back to the bookshelf. I moved the way you move toward something that might startle — deliberately, with each step announced by the sound of my foot on the hardwood, giving him every opportunity to register that I was coming before I arrived.

He didn't look up.

His hand was still pressed flat against the sketchbook, the tremor still moving through his fingers in that small fine wave, and his eyes were still fixed on somewhere that wasn't this room. His jaw was set. Not clenched — set, like something braced.

I reached the couch and I sat down.

At the opposite end, turned slightly toward him, close enough that I was in his peripheral vision but far enough that he still had the length of the cushions between us.

I didn't touch him.

I didn't speak.

I just sat there and I breathed and I waited and I let my presence be whatever it was going to be — useful or useless, wanted or intrusive — without deciding in advance which one it needed to be.

Ten seconds.

Twenty.

His hand was still shaking.

I looked at his hand on the sketchbook.

Then I looked at mine in my lap.

And I placed my hand on the cushion between us.

Open. Palm up. Not reaching toward him. Not asking. Just — there. Present. An offer so quiet it barely qualified as one, the kind that could be completely ignored without acknowledgment because it had never been loud enough to require a response.

I looked at the grounds and I waited.

And then something touched my palm.

One finger.

Just one. The tip of his index finger making contact with the edge of my palm with a tentativeness so extreme it was barely contact at all. Testing. The way you test ice before you trust your weight to it.

I didn't move.

His finger stayed where it was.

Then, slowly — so slowly that I could track each millimeter of it — his hand moved from the sketchbook and turned and settled into mine.

Not a grip. Not the desperate clutching of someone drowning. Something quieter than that. His hand in my hand, his fingers finding the spaces between mine without pressing, his palm warm against my palm in the specific intimate warmth of skin that has been carrying tension finally resting against something that is not tense.

I closed my hand around his gently.

His breathing changed.

His jaw was unclenched. His shoulders — which I could see from here had been drawn slightly upward, that involuntary armoring of the body under stress — dropped a fraction.

His eyes came back to the room.

I felt it happen before I saw it — the return of him, the specific quality of presence that was different from the absence of moments ago. Like a light coming back on behind glass.

He looked at our hands.

Then he looked at me.

His expression was — I didn't have a word for it. Not gratitude exactly, though it contained that. Not relief, though it contained that too. It was something more specific than either of those things. The expression of someone who has been somewhere very alone and has just discovered, without expecting to, that they are not alone anymore.

"Sorry," he said. His voice was rough. The word cost something.

"Don't be," I said.

"It happens," he said. Looking at our hands. "I can't always — " He stopped. Started differently. "Sometimes I go somewhere I can't get back from easily."

"I know," I said. Though I didn't know, not really, not from the inside. But I knew what it looked like from the outside now and I knew what had helped and that felt like enough knowing for the moment.

He nodded slowly.

He didn't let go of my hand.

I didn't pull away.

After a while he said, "How long have you been here?"

"Four days," I said.

He looked at the window. Something moved across his face — a calculation, or an attempt at one. "Four days," he repeated slowly. Like he was testing the number against his own internal record and finding a discrepancy.

"Does that seem wrong?" I said carefully.

"Time is—" He paused. His thumb moved once across the back of my hand. Unconscious. Absent. A small habitual comfort that I suspected he didn't know he was doing. "It moves differently for me. Sometimes a day feels like a week. Sometimes a week disappears entirely." He said it matter-of-factly, the way you describe weather in a place you have lived long enough to stop finding remarkable.

I thought about that. About what it meant to live inside time that didn't behave. To wake up and not know where Wednesday had gone. To reach for a memory and find the shelf where it should be empty.

"That sounds disorienting," I said.

"It used to," he said. He thought about it. "Now it's just — how things are."

I looked at him.

There was something in the way he said that — *now it's just how things are* — that landed in a specific place in my chest and sat there with a weight that I felt long after the words themselves had passed.

The acceptance in it.

I thought about Eleanor.

About the visit I'd witnessed that first morning — Eleanor in this wing, her precise unhurried tour, her instructions, the CCTV cameras she'd pointed out with the casual ownership of someone who had never once considered that watching a person constantly might be its own kind of violence.

I thought about the unlabeled bottle I'd found at the back of the kitchen cabinet two days ago.

I'd not touched it. hadn't moved it or opened it or done anything except put it back exactly where it was and close the cabinet and stand at the counter for a full minute thinking about what it meant that a bottle of pills in the kitchen of a mentally ill man had no label.

No label meant no prescription.

No prescription meant no doctor had authorized it.

No authorization meant someone had decided, privately and without medical oversight, what this man should be given and how much and how often.

Someone with access to this kitchen.

Someone with a key to this wing.

I pressed those thoughts down.

"Alex," I said.

He looked at me.

"Are you hungry?" I said. "I can make dinner."

He looked at me for a moment longer than the question required.

"Yes," he said.

I made rice and vegetables and grilled chicken with a sauce from ingredients in the refrigerator and he came to the kitchen without being called a second time. He sat at the table while I cooked and I was aware of him behind me the whole time — not uncomfortably, not in the way of someone monitoring, but in the way of a new and specific presence that my body was still learning to account for.

He was quiet while I cooked.

At some point I reached up for the cabinet above the stove and found that what I needed was further back than I could comfortably reach and I went up on my toes and still came up short and then a hand reached past me and retrieved it without comment.

I turned around.

He was standing directly behind me.

Close — closer than he'd been at any point today, the proximity of someone who had closed a distance without thinking about the closing of it. He held out the jar of seasoning and I took it and he stepped back and went back to his chair and sat down and said nothing.

I turned back to the stove.

I seasoned the chicken.

My heart was doing something unreasonable that I chose not to acknowledge.

We ate at the kitchen table.

He was more present during dinner than he'd been at lunch — more here, more in the room, his eyes clearer and more focused. He ate with the same quiet deliberate attention as before but this time he looked up occasionally and when he did he didn't look away immediately.

He looked at me.

I looked back.

Neither of us made anything of it.

When the plates were cleared we washed and I dried and we worked side by side at the sink in a silence that was, I realized, no longer the silence of strangers. Something had happened today — through the soup and the tea and the hand on the couch and the jar retrieved from the top shelf — that had moved us past strangers.

I was thinking about that when he spoke.

"Glande."

My name in his mouth for the first time.

he'dn't used it all day — hadn't used any name, hadn't addressed me directly in any way that required naming me.

He said it like he'd been considering it.

I looked at him.

He was looking at the window above the sink. The darkness outside. The reflection of the kitchen in the glass — both of us visible in it, side by side at the sink, the warm light behind us.

"Thank you," he said. "For today."

I looked at our reflections in the dark window.

"You don't have to thank me," I said.

"I know," he said. "I wanted to."

I looked at him — the real him, beside me, not the reflection — and he was looking at the window still, at our reflected selves, and his expression was one I'd not seen on him before.

I dried the last dish and hung the towel on the rack and I was about to say goodnight when I noticed something.

The cabinet above the stove.

The one he'd reached for me.

It wasn't fully closed.

The door hung open an inch and through that inch I could see the back of the shelf where the jar had been and beside where the jar had been — pushed further back, partially obscured by the shadow of the shelf above — was a small brown bottle.

Different from the one I'd found before.

Different shapes. Different sizes.

New.

I looked at it.

Then I looked at the dinner I'd just served him and thought about the sauce I'd made from the refrigerator ingredients and the specific cabinet I'd used for the seasoning before he retrieved the jar for me.

The specific cabinet.

The one directly above where that bottle was sitting.

My hand tightened on the dish towel.

Had I used anything from that cabinet without noticing?

Had something from that shelf gone into the sauce?

Had I —

"Glande."

I turned around.

He was looking at me from the table with an expression that had changed while my back was turned. The openness was still there but something else had arrived alongside it. Something unfocused. His eyes were not quite tracking the way they had been a moment ago.

"I feel—" he started.

He stopped.

His hand went to the table surface. Pressed flat.

"Alex," I said. Moving toward him.

"Strange," he finished. Slowly. The word arrived late. "I feel strange."

He looked at me and his eyes were glassy in a way that hadn't been there sixty seconds ago and I looked at those eyes and I looked at the open cabinet and I looked at the small brown bottle in the shadow of the shelf and I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach entirely.

Because if I'd used something from that cabinet without checking—

If something from that shelf had gone into what he just ate—

If I'd done this to him without knowing—

"Alex." I was beside him now. My hand on his shoulder. "Look at me. Can you look at me?"

He looked at me.

His eyes tried to focus.

"Glande," he said. Like my name was something he was holding onto.

"I'm here," I said. "I'm right here."

And somewhere above the stove behind me, in the shadow of the shelf, the small brown bottle sat in the cabinet I'd left open.

And I'd absolutely no idea what was inside it.