Chapter 5
Text Me When You Get Home
The first text arrived on a Thursday, at 9:14 at night, while Sarah was folding laundry.
She was sitting on the floor of her living room with a basket of towels, a half-watched cooking show on the laptop, and her phone face down on the carpet. It buzzed once against the boards. She turned it over without much interest, expecting Mark, and saw a number she did not know.
Hi. This is Daniel. From Gus's. And the dog thing. I got your number from the library website, don't worry, it's the branch line, I haven't been in your files. I just wanted to say the following: Pickles has been sitting by the front door since Tuesday. I think he's waiting for you. I think I've been replaced. That's all. Goodnight.
She read it twice, holding a towel against her chest.
It was not true, about the number. She had given it to him herself, on the Tuesday, at Ruth's, on the back of a napkin. It had been an awkward, hurried moment, as they were pulling on their coats. He had said, "In case I'm late. For next week. So I can warn you." She had said, "Warn me about what?" and he had gone pink and said, "I don't know. Dog emergencies." She had written it out in her small neat hand, and he had folded the napkin and put it in his shirt pocket as carefully as if it had been a ticket.
So the library website was a joke. She understood that after a second. It was a way of making the thing small, so that neither of them would have to say what it was.
She smiled at the phone.
Then she looked at the smile, as it were from the outside, and felt it slide off.
It's a text, she thought. It's a friend. You're allowed to have a friend.
She set the towel down. She typed, and deleted, and typed again.
Tell Pickles I'm sorry, she wrote. I don't know how to be replaced by a man in a hoodie. Who is this?
The three dots came up at once. They stayed a long time.
It's Daniel, he wrote. From Gus's.
I know. I'm joking.
I knew that.
Did you?
I did not, he wrote. I almost wrote an apology and put it in a hat.
She laughed out loud, alone, on the floor. It was a short, startled sound, and it filled the little room. She put her hand over her mouth.
Save my number, she wrote. You'll want it.
Already done. I've put you under "Sarah (Library, Dog-Approved)."
That's a lot of words.
It's a lot of dog.
It was a thing, in the end, that she could not have explained to anybody.
It began as nothing. It began with a photograph of Pickles asleep on a stack of lab reports, with one velvet ear flopped over his nose. It began with a question about whether a person could be allergic to a library, because Daniel had gone in on Saturday and sneezed eleven times. She sent a photo of the children's section with a small boy asleep under the picture-book shelf, wearing one boot. He sent a picture of a bicycle frame, rust-brown and naked, hanging from a hook in his garage.
What's that?
A 1962 Schwinn. I'm rescuing it.
From what?
From being a lamp. A guy was going to hang it from his ceiling and put a bulb in it.
That's a crime.
That's what I told him. He was very hurt.
She sent him a quote from the story hour. A girl of four had said, loudly, in the middle of a book about a bear, I think the bear is lying. He sent back a heart with a pencil through it. She did not know what it meant. She asked. He said, It means I agree with the four-year-old, and I have a pencil.
It was funny. It was the kind of funny that comes from two people trying to out-silly each other on a slow evening, and it carried no weight at all. It was easy to forget that she was doing it.
She did not tell Mark.
She did not decide not to. It was only that there had been no moment. On Friday, at dinner, he talked about a client. On Saturday there was the pancake, and his mother's call, and a movie. On Sunday he drove her to her mother's, and held her hand in the car and talked about the year ahead, a trip in the spring, a long weekend in Vermont. It was all very nice. It was a bit like being read to. The phone sat in her bag the whole time with its small bright light. She kept thinking, I'll mention it, and then something would happen, and the moment would go by.
It's not a secret, she told herself. It's just a thing I haven't said.
Text me when you get home, Daniel had said, the second Tuesday.
They had been standing on the sidewalk outside Ruth's with the dog between them. It was bitterly cold, a night with a wind off the river like a knife. She had her scarf wrapped to the nose. He was in the canvas jacket and a knitted hat with a pom-pom that somebody's grandmother had made, and he was stamping his feet.
"It's three blocks," she said.
"I know."
"I'll be home in six minutes."
"I know. I just. It's a thing. I do it with my sister." He looked a bit embarrassed. "When she was, in a, she had a bad time a few years ago. I started asking her to text me when she got in. I never stopped. It's not about, it doesn't mean anything. It's just, it's good to know."
"To know what?"
"That you got there."
She looked up at him. He was not joking. He had gone very slightly red above the scarf, and his eyes had a look in them she could not quite read, a kind of watchful, careful, courteous worry, like a man holding a cup that is too full.
She waited for the other thing.
She waited for the small tight feeling, at the base of her skull, that came when a man asked where she was. The little warning bell. It did not come. It was only a request. It was so lightly made, and so plainly without any hook in it, that she did not know what to do with it.
"I'll text you," she said.
She did. She sent it from her kitchen, with her coat still on. Home. And then, because that seemed too short: Safe. Warm. Unreplaced.
The reply took thirty seconds.
Good. Me too. Pickles is eating a sock.
Is it yours?
It was.
Goodnight, Daniel.
Goodnight, Sarah.
She stood with the phone in her hand and a silly smile on her face, for a good long while.
Then she thought of Mark.
It was a thing she noticed. It was a small, quiet, uncomfortable observation, that arrived as she was taking off her scarf, and that she tried, with some success, to put down. When Mark said text me when you get home, he meant: tell me where you are. When Daniel said it, he meant: tell me you're all right.
They sounded identical. She could not have said, if you had asked her, what the difference was.
She only knew that one of them left a mark.
It went on like that into December.
She stopped being surprised by it. She learned the rhythm of his days. He was up at six, with the dog, and sent a photograph of whatever he had found on the walk, a dead leaf shaped like a hand, a mitten on a fence, a squirrel with a whole slice of pizza. At eight, he was in the classroom, and went quiet. At noon he sent a message about lunch. At three-forty, when the bell went, there was always a burst, as though a dam had gone. He wrote in lowercase. He used a great many words that were not quite words. He had a habit of typing a long message, and stopping, and sending something shorter, so that she could tell, by the gap between the dots and the answer, how much he had cut.
She learned his stories. He had a sister named Nina, who was thirty-six, and a nephew, Owen, who was ten months old and hated shoes. He had a father in a small house on the east side, a retired mailman who still delivered the neighborhood's mail by habit. He told her the walking route, in detail, as one tells a map. His mother had died when he was seventeen. He mentioned it once, at about eleven at night, in the middle of a message about soup.
my mom made the best soup. it was never the same twice. she said that was the secret, you couldn't write it down.
Sarah looked at it for a long time.
I'm sorry, she wrote.
it's ok. it was a while ago.
Doesn't mean it isn't.
The dots came up. They went. They came up again.
no, wrote Daniel. you're right. it doesn't.
She lay in bed, with the phone held above her face in the dark. It was past midnight. She had a story hour in the morning. She did not feel tired. She lay still and said, in the small cold room, to nobody, "My dad had a laugh like a truck starting." And then, because it was the dark, and nobody could hear, she said it again in a text.
My dad had a laugh like a truck starting. I still have a voicemail. I can't listen to it. I can't delete it either.
There was a pause.
i won't ask you to, he wrote.
Thank you.
can i tell you something about voicemails?
Yes.
i have one of my mom. it's eleven seconds. she's asking if i want chicken. that's all. i've played it maybe four hundred times. i know exactly where she breathes.
Sarah put her free hand over her eyes.
What does she say about the chicken?
she says "or fish, honey, i don't mind."
And what did you say?
i said fish, wrote Daniel. i didn't know i was supposed to remember.
She cried a little then, quietly, lying on her side with her face in the pillow. It was not the hard kind of crying. It was only a thing letting go. She did not type anything for a long time. And when at last she did, it was only a few words, and they were not the ones that she had meant.
That's the best story I've heard in a year.
it's a terrible story.
I know. I mean it's true.
yeah, he wrote. that's the thing about them.
On Thursday, the twenty-eighth of November, she went to Thanksgiving at Mark's mother's, and spent two hours in the bathroom.
Not literally. It only felt like it. It was a long, noisy, perfectly nice meal, in a house that smelled of sage, at a table with a lace cloth and eleven chairs. Carol Hollis had made three kinds of potatoes. She had also made several remarks. You're thin, dear. You should have the stuffing. Do you do anything with your hair? It would look so lovely up. Mark says you've been so busy at the library, you must be exhausted. Poor man, he does miss you.
Mark sat at the head of the table and carved. He was wonderful. He was warm and funny and kind. He kept one hand on the back of her chair. When his stepfather asked about the library, he said, "Sarah runs the whole place," and she said, "I don't," and he said, "She does," and squeezed her shoulder, and everybody smiled.
At four, she excused herself. She went into the little pink bathroom at the end of the hall, and locked the door, and sat on the edge of the tub.
Her phone had one message. It was a photograph.
It showed a dog, on a kitchen floor, wearing a paper hat. It was brown and orange and shaped like a turkey. It had been put on with a rubber band. The dog's expression was terrible. It was the face of a man who has been asked to attend his own execution in a costume. Behind him, out of focus, a woman held a baby in one arm and was shouting something at the camera, with her mouth wide open.
That's my sister, wrote Daniel. Pickles has been wearing this for forty minutes. He has not blinked. I think he's trying to die.
Sarah laughed.
She laughed so hard she had to turn on the tap, so that no one would hear. She sat on the edge of the tub with her hand clamped over her mouth and tears running down her face. She looked at the photograph, the paper beak, the long, wounded, patient eyes. She looked at the sister, mid-shout, with a baby on her hip, and the table behind her, and a very old man in a cardigan holding up a carving knife. It was a loud, crowded, happy-looking room.
It looked like somewhere you could be yourself.
Happy Thanksgiving, she typed. Tell Pickles he's very brave.
he says to tell you he has never been so humiliated.
Tell him I'll bring him a treat.
he says that's the only thing that could help.
There was a tap on the bathroom door.
"Babe?" said Mark. His voice was warm and light, a little muffled by the wood. "You okay in there?"
"Yes! Just a minute."
"You've been a while."
"I'm coming."
"Mom's about to do the pie."
"Coming."
She turned the phone face down. She looked in the mirror. A pale girl looked back, with her cheeks flushed and her eyes wet and bright, and a mouth that would not stay straight. She wiped her face with a square of toilet paper. She breathed. She waited for the smile to go away, and it took a very long time.
When she opened the door, he was standing in the hall.
He had his hands in his pockets. He was smiling. It was a lovely smile, and it did not quite reach all the way to the eyes, and he was looking at the phone in her hand.
"Who was that?" said Mark.
"Tessa," said Sarah.
It came out easily. It came out smooth and round, like a pebble, as if it had been waiting in her mouth. She had not decided to say it. She heard it land. She saw him nod, and look away, and put his arm round her waist, and she walked with him back down the hall into the warm noise of the dining room, past the photographs of him as a boy, and sat down in her chair, and picked up her fork.
That was a lie.
She said it to herself, distinctly, in the voice that lived at the back of her head. It was a cold, small, plain voice, and it was not angry. It only wanted her to know.
You've never lied to him before.
She ate her pie.
Home, she wrote, that night, at eleven, in her own kitchen, in her coat.
good, wrote Daniel. how was it?
Long.
how long?
Gus said twenty minutes.
ah.
I'm tired.
do you want me to go away?
She looked at it.
She stood there in the yellow kitchen with her bag still on her shoulder, and she thought, yes. She thought: you should say yes. She had the sentence ready. It would have been the simplest thing in the world. I'm tired. Good night. I'll talk to you later. It would have closed a door she could not see, gently, before it was open.
No, she wrote.
She sent it before she could think.
no?
Stay, she typed. Talk about something stupid.
ok. do you want the thing about the squirrel?
What squirrel?
the one with the pizza. i have a theory about where he got it.
Go, wrote Sarah.
She pulled out a chair, and sat, and took off her coat, and put her feet up on the other chair. It was a quarter past eleven. She had not eaten much. Somewhere in the building, a pipe was knocking. She sat in her kitchen in the dim yellow light and watched the dots come and go, and read about a squirrel with a slice of pizza, and a man who had followed it for half a block, and she did not stop smiling for an hour and ten minutes.
She knew what it was.
She did not say it. She did not say anything. She did not even say it in her head.
But she put her phone on the counter that night, when she went to bed, with the screen turned up, where she could see it.