They take the three flights slowly, the stairs ache with each step.
“Laura’s home now,” he tells her. “In bed. The doctor made her. ‘Stay in bed,’ he said, and so there she is. In bed.”
“Is she OK?”
“Well, yes. And no. She’s having trouble breathing. She’s so petite, you know, and she’s carrying everything up front. All that weight on such a delicate woman, it’s remarkable. She’s never weighed that much before. But the baby is fine.”
They stop outside his front door. The Christmas wreath is still hanging, two birds with holly in their mouths, entwined in straw and yarn.
“They think the baby should be fine,” he says. “Everything is supposed to be fine.”
“It’s going to be fine,” she says. She hugs him again, and this time lets him hold on to her.
“Of course it is,” he says. “And then she was driving me mad with all the yelling back and forth from her room to the kitchen, so I got these.” He waves the baby monitor. “We needed them anyway.”
They are still standing in the hallway and time is passing very slowly, like the time before someone kisses you for the first time, thinks Sarah, only this is not about a kiss. A forceful wave of emotion plunges into her, and she feels dizzy. It isn’t about her, it isn’t her moment, but she is still a servant to her surroundings. And then she remembers to focus, and she is back, she is present again.
“I don’t want to go back in there,” says Gareth. He looks down sadly, embarrassed. His ears flush pink, and Sarah wants to grab them to see if they’re as warm as she thinks they are.
“It’s OK to feel that way,” says Sarah.
“Things have been…difficult,” he says.
“You can handle it,” she says. And then, even though she didn’t know if it was true, even though she had only known him a few months, she chucks his shoulders with her hands and boldly tells him, “This is the moment you’ve been waiting for your entire life.”
“Well, I don’t know if it was this exact moment,” he says.
“No, it was this one. I checked,” she says drily. She laughs at him, and then he starts laughing, too, and then the moment is over, and everything she felt drains from her body. Relief. At last.
THE BOOK they are making is about rats beneath the city and lovers aboveground, all living off the same alley in New York. Some panels are split in half, others in quarters, so multiple story lines are visible at the same time. There are some characters who are identifiable only by their shoes, and others by their tails. There is a heroine, and her name is Mirabella. She looks like Gareth’s wife, Laura. To a T. Tiny bones, olive skin, dark black hair like a shroud. There is a young man, Ali, who rides a skateboard around town, and he’s in love with a woman named Amy who wears pink high heels and clips made of shiny pearls in her hair, and an older man, Horace, who has sturdy brown boots with laces and makes sure all of the animals in the city are fed, and is sometimes watched by a mysterious woman who lives behind purple curtains. And there are rats named after saints, like Luke and Agnes and Antonia, some with longer story lines, pairing off and traveling together, and some that make only brief appearances, spouting off one-liners, truisms of life. All of the characters have the same mission: They are all marching desperately through this alley, trying to fall in love.
They haven’t decided on a title for it yet. Sarah likes Love Alley but Gareth thinks that sounds like a porn title. “Like ladies of the evening in the red-light district of Amsterdam.” It sounds romantic when he says it like that, thinks Sarah, but he makes everything sound romantic.
They have spread out the new pages Sarah Lee brought on his kitchen table, salt and pepper shakers and electricity bills shoved aside, the baby monitor holding down an errant corner of a page. The sketches are in black and white, and the table is vintage 1950s style, with peach-and-blue swirls decorating the square top lined with silver. They are sitting on matching peach vinyl chairs that squeak slightly as they move. Gareth has made fresh coffee and brownies. The brownies have walnuts in them. They are still warm. Sarah Lee is trying not to get crumbs on her sketches, or on her new shirt, or on her new scarf. This is why I don’t bother dressing this way, she thinks. It’s too much work.
Occasionally the baby monitor spurts and fits, Laura in the other room sighing, breathing, shifting. Twice Gareth has to leave the table, first to refill her water pitcher, and once for an unexplained reason; she just called—“Gareth, I hate to interrupt your meeting, but…”—and he rushed off to the bedroom, stayed for a few minutes, and then came back smiling, shaking his head.
“What a sense of humor that woman has,” he says.