Part Ten: The Conversation
Nora was in the sitting room when he came back in. She had fed both babies and they were, apparently, asleep, in the portable crib she had assembled with a practiced efficiency that impressed him in the specific way that competence in an unfamiliar domain always impressed him.
She was sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea and she looked, for the first time since the park, like someone who was not actively managing an emergency.
He sat across from her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked at him. “For which part?”
“For—” He considered this. “For the part where the marriage ended in a way that meant you were doing this alone. Whatever part of that is mine.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You’re not entirely responsible for the marriage ending,” she said. “I know that. I’ve had six weeks of very long nights to think about it, and I know that.”
“I know. But—”
“But you’re also not not-responsible,” she said. “And I think you know that too.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know that too.”
A pause.
“What do you want?” she asked.
He looked at her. It was the direct question, the one she had always been willing to ask when he would have approached it more obliquely, and he had always found it simultaneously disorienting and clarifying, which was a thing that was true of her generally.
“I want to know Luca and Mia,” he said. “Whatever form that takes — whatever you decide is workable, whatever is right for them. I want to be present for them.” He paused. “And I want to know — I would like to understand — whether the thing that ended the marriage is still the thing it was. Or whether it was what I thought it was.”
She looked at him.
“What did you think it was?”
“I thought it was structural,” he said. “Incompatibility. I thought we wanted different things.”
“And now?”
“I think I was too busy to want what I wanted,” he said. “And I think I mistook that for a structural problem.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“That’s a more honest answer than I expected,” she said.
“I’ve had twenty minutes to think about it, and I was thinking about it in the car.”
“Twenty minutes is not very long.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t. I’m not saying it’s a conclusion. I’m saying it’s where I am right now, and I thought you should know where I am, because you’ve spent six weeks making decisions without knowing where I was, and I think that’s been unfair to you.”
She looked at the babies in the crib.
She looked back at him.
“I don’t know where I am,” she said. “I’ve been in survival mode for six weeks and I haven’t had enough sleep to know anything more complicated than that.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m not asking you to know.”
“I need time.”
“Yes.”
“And I need practical things to be stable before I can think about anything else.”
“Yes,” he said. “Those things can happen. The boiler will be fixed tomorrow. If the apartment isn’t liveable after that, we’ll find somewhere that is. Those things I can do now, regardless of anything else.”
She looked at him in the same way she had looked at him on the bench, and on the way to the car, and at dinner — the steady assessing look, the checking of intention against action.
She found what she was looking for, or enough of it.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
From the crib, Mia made a sound. Nora started to rise, and Adrian rose at the same time, and they looked at each other across the small distance of the sitting room, and after a moment he said, “I’ll go.”
She sat back.
He crossed to the crib and he looked at his daughter — at Mia, six weeks old, who had his eyebrows, Margaret had said in the car, which he hadn’t registered in the moment but was looking at now and couldn’t unsee — and she looked back at him with the unfocused, absolute presence of a very young infant, receiving information about the world without yet having categories for any of it.
He picked her up.
She was lighter than he had imagined, and heavier than seemed possible, and warm.
He stood in the guest suite of his apartment building on a Thursday evening in October and held his daughter for the first time, and the thing that had been calculating and measuring and connecting since the park went quiet.
From the sofa, Nora watched him.
She did not say anything.
She didn’t need to.
