Lovely, Dark and Deep by Amy McNamara

Author:Amy McNamara [McNamara, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

it’s

so

still

IT’S QUIET WITHOUT MARY. Too quiet. I don’t mean to, but I catch myself expecting her in the kitchen, pressing some seriously powerful coffee, looking like a Technicolor sunrise. The house is dim without her. Even my father, normally so constant in his orbit, has a slightly deflated appearance. And as fast as everything around us lifted and swelled, suspended in Swap Night glamour, January pushes us ahead again, utilitarian in thick-soled boots. Nick and my dad disappear into the studio, establishing Nick’s fellowship, my dad says.

I run farther every day. Try to forget Michael’s warning. The look on his face. Winter is huge. The sky low and blank and endless. Pressing me down. Making it hard to breathe. If I could find a way to shut it all off again, just for a little while, I’d be okay. Not caught like this, wide open between Cal and nothing.

After Michael leaves, Cal crashes. Not sick, he tells me over and over, just tired. I don’t mind. I’m tired too. Used up. I just want to run and not think, shelve books and not think, sit and not think. On this morning’s run, a dead bird in the snow brings me to my knees. It looked so abandoned—by life, by itself. I’m doing it wrong somehow, failing to take up the new year’s offer of starting over. Because it’s everywhere, working its way into everything—a looping conversation with Patrick where I explain myself. Try. Use words in the hope of making it end differently. I tell him I wished I’d waited until we were somewhere private, at home, in the city, away from cars and drinking and general insanity. I say I wish I’d been a better person, more honest about what I wanted, and sooner, and maybe then I wouldn’t have slept with him again, after I knew we were done, after it was over, for me. I was pregnant—I’d tell him, he’d know—I was really scared that night. On it rolls, useless words while I’m brushing my teeth, while I’m tying my shoes, while I’m running past Mercy House, pretending Mary’s in there, wishing she were, I’m sorry, Patrick, a refrain echoing into nothing. It’s a meaningless exercise, my excuses pathetic, pointless. They fall like snow between us. It’s never going to happen. I have to hold it. Alone. He’ll never know. God, never is so long.

When I finish at the library, I head to Cal’s. He called in sick to his internship. We lie, legs tangled, warm on his couch. While he sleeps, I hold a book like I’m reading and watch him sleep or stare at the water. Or at his face. The winter light turns itself away from us.

My phone buzzes. I answer it fast so it doesn’t wake him.

“Mamie, I hear there’s a boy.”

“Mother,” I whisper, moving Cal’s head carefully off my thigh and crossing the room to an armchair by the bookshelves.

“Darling, can you hear me?”

“Yes, Mom. I can. You’ve been talking to Dad?”

“Marta, of all people.

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