He tented his slender fingers. ‘No one has time for any of that, okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Which is not to say that we’re inhuman. We are in the Humanities, after all! Just — hey — don’t bring it into work with you, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’ he said as I watched, behind him, the clouds begin to break apart in a sudden, clattering rainstorm.
‘Okay,’ I said.
The rain continued for a full week. It battered the windows in roaring torrents and ran like a river in the streets. I woke at night with a racking cough that left me torn and sour, and decided that the smoking really would have to stop. So, once the storm moved on, I slapped a nicotine patch to my shoulder and bought a new pair of lightweight sneakers. I was still young, I told myself; there still was time for me. At dawn, I wheezed along the promenade by the river, where Carol and I once had strolled on summer evenings. I added a hat and gloves and thermals as the days began to chill, and when the paths became clogged with soggy leaves I switched to a treadmill at the gym.
The Monday after Halloween, I cleared my third chapter. And that Thursday I presented a paper based on it to a conference at NYU. Aside from my fellow-panellists, three people forwent lunch to sit in the over-lit and under-heated conference room. Two of them looked unsure as to how they’d gotten there, but one turned out to be a minor star in my field. He took me out afterwards for coffee, and suggested that I send him something for a collection of essays he was editing. I hadn’t been able to publish anything since a handful of reviews during the first year of my MA in Dublin, so I caught a train uptown to my carrel and stayed there until I’d edited the chapter down to a submittable draft.
At one a.m., I splurged on a cab to take me home. And for the first time in a long time, I felt grateful to be in New York: to be lurching between the lights in the crush and blare of Midtown, then speeding across the bridge suspended high above the East River. The cab rolled past the no-name clothing stores of Downtown Brooklyn and hung a right at the rust-coloured arena that always reminded me of the carcass of a ship I had once seen marooned on rocks off Inisheer. We slowed on President, coasting between the lights. I paid the cabbie and climbed the stoop. Someone, two weeks before, had strung the railings with cotton cobwebs, and they remained, as did a gang of pumpkins on the lower window ledges, their features now soft with decay.
In the hallway, I smelled chicken stock wafting from an apartment whose tenants I had never seen. I climbed the stairs and turned my key. The lamp by the window was lit. A coat I recognized was strewn across the couch, a pair of shoes set neatly on the floor beside the coffee table. Once, on a beach in Clare, a wave had knocked me off my feet, dragged me across the ocean floor and pushed me back and rolled me; I had tried to breathe but there was nothing but water. That’s how I felt when Carol stepped from the kitchen.
‘I still have my key,’ she said unnecessarily, her smile an exhibit for a case already won. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Hi,’ I said, very aware suddenly of a lightness at my fingertips. ‘You’ve come for more of your stuff?’
She stepped towards me, the fullness of her lower lip squeezed between her teeth.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant. I think it happened in Dublin.’
Her dark hair was shinier than I remembered it, her skin clearer. And when she bent to sit, she cupped her belly with a hand as though the gesture were the most natural thing in the world. We talked about what we’d both been doing for the past few months. I told her that I’d missed her, and she said she’d missed me too. Eventually we moved on to Tyler, who she said was just a colleague, then a friend, then a mistake. When she started to nod off, I insisted that she take the bed, and fetched the spare blanket and pillow from the hall closet to make up the couch.
In the morning, with nothing resolved, we walked to the subway together and went our separate ways. I taught my class with a new and terrified energy, and I realized suddenly how young they all were, in their baseball caps and sneakers, their heavy coats that mothers had picked out. As I packed my bag, I wished them well for the weekend. They filed out with nods or a mumbled word, but Elizabeth Jordan lingered. She was a Psych major who always sat in the corner, rarely participated in group discussion and never spoke to anyone before or after class. But she wrote uncommonly well, with empathy and poise. She smiled at me, all teeth.
‘Have a good day,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.’
I had half-forgotten her voice, New England-y and clipped.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
She looked towards the door. ‘No, it’s just … I was thinking that you used to look so unhappy, is all. But now you look happy. You’re happy?’
I thought about it.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She smiled again, that dour face flashing with bright dentition. And her eyes, so often careworn, seemed relieved.
The following night, Carol came over for dinner. While I prepared the food, we stood across from each other at the breakfast bar, my knife dipping into the flesh of vegetables, her hand darting to the bowl to snatch a slice of pepper or a disc of carrot.
‘It’s strange,’ I said as we ate, ‘the way things turn out. Isn’t it?’
Carol set down her cutlery and wiped her lips. ‘What do you mean?’
I shrugged. ‘We were always so careful, is all.’
‘Well, nothing’s a hundred percent.’
‘And we never even talked about —’
‘We talked about it.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘for scares. But I used to think it would be the worst thing in the world, you know? We were so unprepared. Or I was. And all that stuff. But now … I’m just, I’m really glad you’re back.’
She cut and speared an asparagus stem. ‘I’m not really back yet, you know,’ she said. ‘But, do you want me to come back? And do you want to be here?’
I reached for her hand; she let me take it. And after dinner, without a word, she led me to the bedroom. We got under the covers together and lay there fully clothed. The sheets were soft and cool. Her breathing was high and quick. I woke in the night facing her. I’d always loved the way she slept, with her hands joined together beneath her head as if in prayer. I reached down to touch her stomach, expecting hardness, fullness, but she felt just as I remembered. She groaned and rolled over and I snatched my hand away, the feel of her in my fingers. On Sunday morning, after breakfast, she went to her sister’s place to collect her stuff. And every evening that week we unboxed the things she’d taken and returned them to where they belonged.
For Thanksgiving, we gussied ourselves up and brought a store-bought pumpkin pie to Darren and Emma’s place. Carol sprawled out on the living-room floor and played self-consciously with Sky’s stuffed toys and blocks. I joined Darren in the kitchen to help with the turkey and the stuffing, the cranberry sauce and the Brussels sprouts and the three different kinds of potatoes. He wore a T-shirt printed with an image of an armed Indian tribe and the legend Homeland Security, kept a bottle of gin on the draining board from which he took frequent nips. A green felt card table groaned under the weight of food. We chatted like in the old days but didn’t know what to toast. Later, when Carol passed out on the couch, and Emma pleaded with a sugar-rushing Sky to sleep, Darren and I crept downstairs to the stoop with the last of the gin. The street was quiet, the avenue dark, but every window on the block was lit.
‘This situation right here is really quite a situation,’ he said and passed the bottle. ‘You won’t believe what’s ahead of you.’
I took a swig and winced, passed the bottle back.