“You don’t think so?”
“We wouldn’t have met,” I say again.
“How do you know?”
“We wouldn’t have met.”
I look away, draw the blanket to my neck and lie down on my side.
I ask her to turn off the light, and when she hovers in the kitchen, I say, “Aren’t you going to bed?”
“How can you be sure?” she asks instead.
I don’t like where this conversation is headed.
“What difference does it make?” I ask.
“Would you have talked to me if we did meet? That night, would you have ever talked to me if you didn’t have to?”
“I wouldn’t have been in that bar in the first place.”
“But—if you were.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I wouldn’t have talked to you.”
The rejection slaps her across the face.
“Oh.”
She crosses the room and turns off the light. But I can’t leave it like that. I can’t let her go to bed pissed.
In the darkness I admit, “It’s not what you think.”
She’s defensive. I’ve hurt her feelings. “What do I think?”
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does.”
“Mia—”
“Then what?”
“Mia.”
“What?”
“It has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t mean anything.”
But it does. It does to her. She’s walking toward the bedroom when I admit, “The first time I saw you, you were coming out of your apartment. I was across the street sitting on the steps of some four flat, just waiting. I’d seen a picture. I called from a payphone on the corner. You answered and I hung up. I knew you were there. I don’t know how long I waited, forty-five minutes, maybe an hour. I had to know what I’d gotten myself into.
“And then I saw you through the little windows on the side of the front door. I saw you jog down the steps with your headphones on. You opened the door and sat down outside to tie a shoe. I memorized your hair, the way it fell over your shoulders before you took these long arms and tied it back. A woman passed by with like four or five dogs. She said something to you and you smiled and I thought to myself that I’d never seen anything so... I don’t know... I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life. You went off running down the road and I waited. I watched cabs drive by and hordes of people walk home from the bus stop at the corner. It was six, maybe seven o’clock. It started to get dark. The sky was one of those dramatic fall skies. You were walking when you returned. You passed right in front of me and then jogged across the street, waving to a cab that slowed down to let you pass. I was almost certain you saw me. You dug in your shoe for a key and let yourself in, up the steps where I couldn’t see you. I saw the light in your window and your silhouette. I imagined what you might be doing inside. I imagined myself in there with you, what it would be like if it didn’t have to be like this.”
She’s quiet. And then she says that she remembers the night. She says she remembers the sky, so vibrant, as the sunlight was scattered by particles in the sky. She says that the sky was the color of persimmon and sangria, shades of red only God could make. She says, “I remember the dogs, three black Labs and a golden retriever, and the woman, all ninety-some pounds of her, swept away in a tangle of leashes.” She says she remembers the call, though at the time it left her unfazed. She remembers sitting inside feeling alone because that damn boyfriend of hers was working but, more so, because she was glad he was.
“I didn’t see you,” she whispers. “If I did I’d remember.”
She lowers herself onto the couch beside me. I open the blanket for her and she slides in. She presses her back into me, a vacuum seal. I can feel the rhythm of her heart pressing against me. I can feel the blood pulsing through my own ears. It’s loud enough I’m sure she hears. I wrap the blanket over her. I reach across her, find her hand, and our fingers lace together. Her grasp is reassuring. In time, mine stops to shake. I slide my bottom arm under the crevice of her neck. She falls into every gap there is until we become one. I rest my head onto a mat of dirty blond hair, close enough that she can feel the exhalation of air on her skin, reassuring her that we’re alive though inside, we can hardly breathe.
We fall into oblivion this way, into a world where nothing matters. Nothing but us.
*
She’s gone when I wake up. I no longer feel her pressed into me. Something is missing, though it wasn’t that long ago that there was nothing there.
I see her outside, sitting on the porch step. She’s freezing her ass off. It doesn’t appear that she minds.
The blanket is wrapped around her shoulders and she’s wearing my shoes on her feet. They’re huge. She’s kicked the snow off the step, though the ends of the blanket lie in it and get wet.
I don’t go out right away.
I make coffee. I find my coat. I take my time.