Reminder (3)

The convergence happened on a Tuesday.

Stuart knew it was a Tuesday because the turkey sandwich was on the counter, half-eaten, the bread going stale at the edges, and because the Hendricks claim was open on his laptop with the cursor blinking at the end of a sentence he did not remember writing.

He was standing in his kitchen. He was also standing in a kitchen with a window over the sink and a bowl of fruit on the counter — bananas, two oranges, a pear with a bruise on its left side that his thumb knew the shape of. Both kitchens were present. Not alternating. Both. His feet on the linoleum of the apartment and his feet on the hardwood of the house, and it did not hurt. That was the part he would never be able to explain.

The apartment kitchen was cold, the fluorescent above the stove pulsing at the edge of his vision. The other kitchen was warm. Morning light came through glass someone had cleaned recently and fell on the fruit and on a coffee maker Stuart had never owned and that his hand reached for without his deciding to reach.

The coffee was already made. He poured a cup. The mug was heavy, ceramic, dark blue, with a chip on the rim from a morning when someone's elbow knocked it against the faucet and the chip flew into the sink and was never found. His hand adjusted its grip so his lip wouldn't catch the rough edge. He had been adjusting this grip for years. He had never held this mug.

He drank. The coffee tasted like coffee, and underneath it there was another coffee — the same flavor from a different source, the way a voice sounds different in a room it has lived in. The coffee of a man who makes coffee every morning in the same kitchen with the same machine and the same chipped mug, and the chip is a landmark, and the landmark is a life.

"Stuart? Did you start the coffee?"

Her voice came from down a hallway he could not see from the apartment and could see from the house — the photographs on the wall that he had hung and not hung, the room at the end where Graham slept. The voice still carried the texture of sleep, the consonants soft. She was real. She was down the hallway.

"Yeah," he said. His voice came from both places. Both Stuarts said it and it was the same yeah, the same half-swallowed affirmation of a man who has started the coffee.

He put the mug down. He put it down on the counter in the apartment where there was no mug and on the counter in the house where the mug stood beside the fruit. In both kitchens his knuckles — the same knuckles, the same scar on the left index finger from nothing he could remember — rested on the counter before he pulled his hand away.

---

He left work at noon and told the receptionist he had a doctor's appointment.

The waiting room. The fountain. The chair that fit him. The weighted quiet, the air thickening, the pressure in his ears. He sat inside it.

Dr. Pell came out. She did not seem surprised. She did not seem unsurprised. She seemed like a doctor whose patient has arrived on a day that is not his day.

"Stuart," she said. "Come in."

He went in. He sat. She sat. The file was on her desk. It was six inches thick now.

"The overlap," he said. "It's not episodes anymore."

"No."

"It's constant."

"It has been constant for some time. What you're experiencing now is what we've been tracking."

"What happens when it finishes?"

Dr. Pell took off her glasses and set them on the desk. Without them her face was older, and her eyes were the eyes of a person who has answered this question for fourteen years and the answer has not changed.

"The treatments were meant to slow it," she said. "To keep the two of you apart—"

"Were."

She paused. It was the first unscripted moment Stuart had witnessed in that office. Every other word she had spoken had arrived with the fluency of a person reading from a text she had written herself. The pause was the gap in the text.

"Were," she said.

She did not finish the sentence. She squared the file against the edge of the desk and let the word stand where it was, and it sat in the room the way the names had sat — Carol, Graham — with the weight of a thing that has been true for a long time and has only now been let into the air.

"Which one am I?" he said.

Dr. Pell looked at him. The look was the look she had given him at the end of the first visit — steady, warm, one layer. She was looking at Stuart. Both of him.

"That's what the treatments were for," she said.

Past tense. Stuart sat in the chair that fit him and the chair fit both of him, and it held all of it — the apartment and the house, the turkey sandwich and the bowl of fruit, the empty pillow and the woman whose voice came from down a hallway that was getting closer.

As she opened the file to make a note, a photograph slid from between the pages and landed on the carpet between their chairs. A school photograph, sky-blue backdrop, the child's name printed at the bottom in white serif letters. A boy with dark hair and Stuart's jaw, giving the camera the composed half-smile of a child who has been told to say cheese and has decided to say it without committing. Ten years old. Maybe eleven.

Stuart picked it up. The face was a face he had never seen and it was as familiar as the chip on the mug. The jaw was his jaw. The eyes were Carol's. The boy was in a file in a doctor's office and at the end of a hallway in a house Stuart had never entered and was standing in right now.

Dr. Pell took the photograph back and replaced it in the file. She said nothing. The folder held it with the same manila indifference it held everything else — the Tuesday sessions and the Thursday sessions and the two Stuarts and the boy who belonged to one of them and both of them and neither.

---

He did not go home. He drove past his building on Route 8 and kept driving until the strip malls thinned and the dealerships gave way to older houses, the ones that had been there before the development, with porches and driveways and the particular architecture of a life that includes another person. He was not looking for anything.

He stopped at a light. A woman in the crosswalk with a bag of groceries, the bag held in one arm the way people hold groceries when they've refused the second bag. She crossed in front of his car. She did not look at him. He did not look at her. The light changed. He drove.

He drove home. He stood at the counter where the turkey sandwich had been. The sandwich was gone. He had not cleaned it up. The counter was empty and clean, as though someone else had wiped it — someone whose hand knew where the sponge was and who turned the faucet at the angle of a different faucet in a different kitchen.

He went to bed. He lay on the left side. He put his hand on the spare pillow.

The pillow was warm.

Not from the apartment. Not from the heating vent above the bed. Warm the way a pillow is warm when someone has been sleeping on it and has just gotten up. The cotton under his fingers held the heat of a head that had been there minutes ago, and the pillow held the shape of her, and the shape was warm.

Stuart spread his fingers on the pillow. The warmth entered his hand. He closed his eyes.

---

He woke in the house.

The bedroom was not the apartment bedroom. The ceiling was higher. The walls were a blue two people had agreed on.

Carol was beside him. He could hear her breathing — the catches, the long exhales, the sound she made at the bottom of each breath, the rhythm of a specific woman asleep in a bed she has slept in long enough that the bed has learned her. He shifted, and the mattress answered under his hip, giving where it had been taught to give, and the give was familiar in his body the way the chip on the mug was familiar in his hand.

He lay still. The treatments had been for keeping them apart.

He got up. The hallway was dark. He did not bump anything — the turn past the bathroom, the four steps to the kitchen, the counter where his hip found the edge at exactly the right height. He walked through a house he had never entered like a house he had always known.

The kitchen. The dark. The window over the sink showing the streetlight and the yard and the car in the driveway. He could feel the apartment counter underneath the house counter, the linoleum underneath the hardwood. His hand on one counter was his hand on both.

He turned on the light. The house kitchen appeared, with its fruit and its coffee maker and the photographs on the refrigerator. His eyes moved across them the way eyes move across something too bright — the shape, the color, the sense that there are faces in the frames and one of them is small and dark-haired. He looked away. It was too much to see all at once.

He reached for the sugar bowl. The sugar bowl was on the counter between the coffee maker and the fruit. His hand reached across the counter and his fingers found the lid and he lifted it.

The apartment did not have a sugar bowl. Stuart drank his coffee without sugar. His hand reached for the spoon anyway. His fingers closed around the handle — the same fingers, the same knuckles, the scar on the left index finger — and he lifted the spoon and dipped it into the sugar and measured one level spoon. He held the spoon above the counter. The cup was not there. The cup was not there and the spoon was full of sugar and his hand held it in the air above the place where the cup would be, where the cup was, in the other kitchen, on the other counter that was this counter, and the sugar sat in the spoon and the spoon hovered and Stuart's knuckles were white on the handle.

The granules caught the overhead light. Each one distinct. Each one a small crystal of sweetness that one Stuart took every morning and the other never took, and both Stuarts were holding the spoon. The sugar waited. The cup waited. The hand could not tell the difference.

He tipped the spoon. The sugar fell. It fell into a cup he could not see and could feel — the faint ceramic ring of granules hitting the inside of a mug with a chip on the rim. Or it fell into the air. Or it fell into both. The sound was there and not there and Stuart stood in the kitchen holding the empty spoon and his knuckles loosened on the handle and his hand set the spoon down on the counter beside the sugar bowl.

He heard footsteps in the hallway. Bare feet on hardwood. The particular sound of a woman walking in a house in the dark toward a kitchen where a light has been turned on and the light means someone is awake and the someone is the person she married.

Carol came into the kitchen in a T-shirt and shorts, her hair down, her face real — the imperfection and the asymmetry that photographs flatten, the way one eye was always more awake than the other in the first minutes after sleep. She looked at him with the look of a woman who has found her husband in the kitchen at — she glanced at the clock on the stove — 2:15 in the morning, and the finding is not alarming but it is noted.

"Can't sleep?" she said.

"Just getting water."

"You turned on the light for water?"

"I was going to make coffee."

"At two in the morning."

"I changed my mind."

She opened the cabinet. She took out a glass. She filled it at the tap and handed it to him and her fingers touched his when the glass passed between them — the brief contact a married couple performs a thousand times and does not notice.

He drank. The water tasted like the house — the mineral signature of a well he had been drinking from for twelve years. Not champagne. Water. The taste of water in a house that is yours.

"You okay?" Carol said.

He looked at her. The real face, the asymmetry, the one eye more awake, the light on and the clock reading 2:15. He did not know which Stuart was looking.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm okay."

She nodded. She went back to bed. Her footsteps down the hallway — bare feet, the particular sound. He listened until the sound was gone and the house was quiet with the quiet of breathing in other rooms.

Stuart stood in the kitchen. He put the glass on the counter. His knuckles on the countertop. The other knuckles on the other counter. The same hand. The sugar bowl with its lid replaced. The spoon in the dish beside it, one granule still clinging to the curve of the metal, catching the light and throwing two shadows across the porcelain — one from the fixture over the sink, and one from somewhere else, fainter, falling the wrong way.

He turned off the light. He walked back down the hallway in the dark, not bumping anything, and he got into bed beside Carol and the mattress took him on the left side, giving where it had learned to give, and his hand found the pillow on the right side and the pillow was warm.

 

~End~