005 | The Important Things
772 Words
He came back with two cans of the blue coffee.
Same kind she always got apparently. She didn't ask how he knew. Maybe he'd seen her buy it. Maybe he'd just guessed. Either way he held one out and she took it and he sat back down in the same spot and opened his own.
She turned the can in her hands.
"The amnesia is a symptom," she said. "Not the actual condition."
He said nothing.
"There's something wrong with the part of my brain that handles memory. The amnesia showed up first so that's what everyone focused on. My parents. The doctors." She paused. "But eight months ago they found the rest of it."
"The rest of it."
"Deterioration." Flat, factual, the way she'd practiced saying it. "It's slow. But it's moving." She looked at the vending machines. "The amnesia gets worse first. Then other things. Then."
She stopped.
He understood.
She waited for his face to do the thing. The shift. The eyes going soft and careful. The way people started treating her differently the second the information landed, like she'd become something fragile mid-sentence.
She looked at Caiden.
He was looking at the vending machines.
His face hadn't done anything. He just looked like someone sitting with a fact, turning it over, figuring out where it fit.
"How long," he said.
"Doctor said a year. Maybe more. Maybe less." Small shrug. "Bodies don't follow schedules."
Silence.
"That's what the third condition was about," he said.
She blinked. "What?"
"Don't feel sorry for you." He looked at her. "I thought it was the amnesia. But it's this."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. "Both," she said.
He nodded and looked back at the vending machines.
She didn't know what to do with someone who didn't immediately make her feel like a tragedy. She had built the three conditions specifically to buy herself time before that happened. To have at least a little while where someone just saw Nora.
"You're not going to say anything," she said.
"What do you want me to say."
"Most people say sorry."
"You told me not to feel sorry for you."
"I know what I said."
"So." He looked at her. "I'm not going to say it."
She looked at him for a long moment. The light had shifted while they'd been sitting here, gone from thin pale afternoon to something lower and warmer. She hated that light sometimes. Too obvious.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay," he said.
She put the chips she hadn't touched on the bench between them. He looked at them. She nodded. He took the packet and ate one and she looked back at the vending machines and something in her chest loosened slightly, the kind of loosening you don't notice until after it happens.
They sat there without talking and it was fine.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," he said after a while.
"I know."
"How."
"Because you've been carrying your dad's pen for however long and I only found out today." She paused. "You don't hand things out easily."
Something moved across his face. Quick, like light through a window.
"No," he said. "I don't."
A train passed somewhere above them. The vending machines hummed.
"I should go," she said. "Train."
"Yeah."
Neither of them moved for another second.
Then she stood, picked up her bag, and looked at him still on the bench with the chip packet on his knee.
"Same time tomorrow," she said. "At the gate."
"I'll be there."
She started walking. She was almost at the edge of the park when she heard him say her name. Quiet. Just once.
She turned.
He was still on the bench, not looking at her, looking at the ground.
"Tonight," he said. "When you write it down." A pause. "Write that it was okay. Telling me. Write that it was okay."
She stood there in the fading light.
"Okay," she said.
She turned and walked toward the station and she was almost around the corner when she heard him say one more thing, low enough that she almost missed it.
"I'll be there early," he said. "In case you need a minute before you read it."
She stopped walking.
She didn't turn around.
She stood there on the pavement with the city moving around her and her chest doing something she didn't have a word for yet and after a moment she kept walking, because if she turned around right now she didn't know what she would do and she needed to get home and write this down before she lost it.
All of it. Every single word.
- Writer
