Chapter 43: Before New York
1273 Words
Three weeks passed the way significant countdowns always do.
Quickly in the aggregate. Slowly in the individual days. Each morning arriving with the particular quality of time that is running toward something — not dreaded, just present in a way that ordinary time is not.
New York was coming.
We both felt it.
---
The weeks were full.
Prisca had preparation — practical and professional. Finding an apartment share in Brooklyn through a contact of Voss's production company, a sublet in Bushwick two subway stops from the studio where the project was based. Logistics and equipment lists and a preliminary meeting with Voss via video call that left her with four pages of notes and the specific brightness that professional excitement produced in her.
I had my own version of full.
The collaborative piece with Abdullahi was under review at the journal — six to eight weeks, no news yet, which was normal and expected. The field study was complete and submitted. Holt had mentioned a departmental undergraduate research prize that she was nominating the study for, which I had received with the same careful quality Prisca brought to genuine praise.
The book — sixty-eight pages now — was continuing its daily accumulation.
And the garden on Morrison Street was being tended.
---
I went to Cleary Hill twice in the three weeks.
The raised beds had been planted properly now — the parks department had assisted with the layout and Gloria and three other residents had done the planting itself, choosing what to grow with the combination of practicality and symbolism that characterized everything the neighborhood association did.
The first time I went alone.
The second time I brought Prisca.
She walked through the garden slowly — it was not much yet, just green beginning in the raised beds, the soil dark and new. But something about the arrangement, the care visible in it, the peonies Gloria had transplanted from her own garden into the corner nearest the original fence line —
Prisca stopped at those peonies.
"She brought her own flowers," she said.
"From her garden at home," I said. "She said she wanted something living that had been tended before."
Prisca looked at the peonies for a long moment.
Then she raised her camera.
Held it.
Shot once.
Lowered it.
"That's the final frame," she said quietly.
"Of the Cleary Hill film?"
"Of this version," she said. "Gloria's peonies in the ground of what used to be vacant." She paused. "Tended things, moved. Continuing."
---
The night before Prisca left we had dinner at her apartment.
She cooked — not elaborate, just real. Pasta, good olive oil, bread from the bakery on Commonwealth. The kind of meal that was about being present rather than being impressive.
We ate on the floor.
The cork board above her desk had been partially cleared — the New York materials organized, the Cleary Hill materials archived, the Voss project documents consolidated. The board looked different. Purposeful in a new direction.
"What does the room feel like?" I said.
She looked around her apartment.
"Like it's waiting," she said. "For the next version of what happens in it."
"Good waiting or uncertain waiting?"
She thought about it. "Both," she said. "The same as always."
---
After dinner she showed me the Bushwick sublet photos.
Small — genuinely small, the specific small of New York apartments that Boston apartments had never quite matched. A single window facing a courtyard. A desk. The essentials.
"It's enough," she said.
"It's a place from which you go to do the work," I said. "That's all it needs to be."
She looked at the photos. "My mother said the same thing." She closed the laptop. "She also said pack light and I have not packed light."
"How many bags?"
"Three." A pause. "One is entirely books."
"Of course it is."
She smiled. The full one.
---
We talked for a long time after dinner.
Not about New York specifically — about everything and nothing, the easy movement of two people who had learned to talk the way they breathed. A conversation that covered Thomas's draft progress and Peter's office hours and Abdullahi's symposium paper being requested for a graduate seminar and Dora's pre-law summer internship and the garden and the book and a film Prisca wanted to see before she left.
At some point she said: "Are you actually all right?"
"I've said I am."
"I know." She looked at me directly. "I'm asking because you're performing slightly."
I looked at her.
The direct, accurate look.
"A little," I admitted. "Not much."
"Tell me the little."
I thought about it honestly.
"I'm going to miss you," I said. "Specifically. The floor and the coffee and the Thursday walks and the way you read." I paused. "Not in a way that makes me want you to stay. Just — in the honest way."
She held my gaze.
"I'm going to miss you too," she said. "The same specifics." She paused. "And the map. I won't be able to see the map."
"I'll photograph it every two weeks," I said. "Send it to you."
She looked at me.
"You'll photograph the map," she said.
"So you can see if anything new has been marked."
A pause.
"Daniel Reeves," she said softly. "You are the most quietly extraordinary person I have ever known."
I looked at her.
"You're the one who taught me how to see," I said.
---
She left the next morning.
Amtrak again — the familiar platform, the familiar cold that was now June warmth, the familiar goodbye that had become a practiced and comfortable thing.
At the platform doors she stopped.
Turned fully.
Looked at me.
"Photograph the map," she said.
"Every two weeks."
"And keep writing."
"Every day."
"And go to Cleary Hill."
"Already planned."
She smiled.
Then she stepped forward and held on — properly, both arms, the kind that lasted a moment longer than necessary.
When she stepped back her eyes were bright.
Not crying. Just full.
"Three months," she said.
"Three months," I agreed.
"I'll be back in September," she said. "Before senior year."
"I know."
She looked at me one final time.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you," I said.
She turned and went through the doors.
I stood on the platform and watched the doors close.
Then I walked out of South Station into the June morning.
Boston spread around me. Green and warm and familiar.
Three months.
I put my hands in my pockets and walked toward the T.
---
That evening I sat at my desk for a long time.
Quiet apartment. The map on the wall. The two prints beside it. The notebook open.
I photographed the map on my phone — the first fortnightly photograph, as promised.
Sent it to her.
Her reply came twenty minutes later.
She had arrived in Bushwick. The apartment was small. The window faced a courtyard. There was a desk.
*It's enough,* she wrote.
*It always was,* I said.
A pause.
Then: *Photograph sent. I've set it as my phone wallpaper.*
I smiled at my phone.
Then I put it down and opened the notebook.
Seventy pages.
I turned to where I had left off.
Wrote the next paragraph.
And the one after.
Outside Boston moved through its June evening, warm and long and full of the particular light that summer produces in a city that has earned it through months of difficult weather.
Inside the apartment the lamp made its small warm circle.
And in it, steadily, without rushing, the book continued to become what it was always going to be.
- Writer
