The ringing has a room tone now. Not a memory of a sound — an actual, present, ongoing thing, high and steady, sitting under everything I hear the way a hum sits under a refrigerator you've stopped noticing until someone points it out. Ninety-six hours. I know because I've been doing the math obsessively, the way I used to count Dominic's words to me across a cafe table, except now I'm counting something with no number attached, just an accumulation of not-sleep stacking up behind my eyes like unpaid invoices.
It changes pitch when I yawn. That's the detail nobody warns you about. My jaw cracks open around a yawn I can't stop and the tone in my left ear climbs half a step, like somebody's turned a dial, and then settles back down when my mouth closes, and I've started doing it on purpose just to see if it's still there, the way you press a bruise to make sure it still hurts, because at least a bruise is a fact you can locate.
I'm at the kitchen table in the Federal Hill house at ten in the morning, in the same sweater I've had on since Thursday of last week, and there is a mug of coffee going cold in front of me that I made forty minutes ago and haven't touched, and I am staring at my own right hand like it belongs to somebody I used to know.
The bandage Dominic wrapped in the storeroom is still on it, gone stiff and yellow-brown at the center where the blood dried through the bar towel and then through the gauze he'd found somewhere in that house's endless silent supply of things a normal apartment doesn't have. I haven't changed it since Sunday night. I keep meaning to and then I don't, the way I keep meaning to eat and then don't, the way the whole machinery of taking care of myself has quietly stalled out somewhere around the moment I heard a hand slam flat against the side of my own skull from the inside.
I moved in three days ago. I should say that properly, to myself, in a full sentence, because I haven't yet: I live here now.
It happened on Sunday, the day after, in the flat grey light of an afternoon nobody planned. Bruno drove me to Doyle Avenue in the Lincoln and stood in my kitchen doorway not looking at anything while I packed two duffel bags — the black one from under my bed, and a gym bag I bought in 2016 and never once used for a gym — and he carried eleven of my plants down to the car one careful trip at a time, the big pothos and the two ferns and the jade plant my father gave me a cutting from before he died, leaving thirty of them behind on windowsills that will get less light than they're used to, and neither of us said the word forty-one, or until when, or what about the rest.
Dominic had already had someone pay the rent forward. Pariseau told me this himself, cornering me on the stairs with a receipt folded into quarters, looking at me like I'd personally solved a math problem that had been bothering him. Paid through next February. Lights on a timer, he said, proud of it like it was his own idea. So the windows still go bright at six and dark at eleven, so the building doesn't notice, so nobody driving past Doyle Avenue would know the apartment's stopped being lived in, and somewhere under the ringing in my ear a part of me understands this as a kindness and another part understands it as exactly the kind of thing Trevor used to do — keep the shape of a life running so nobody asks why the person's gone out of it.
I don't say that part out loud. I've learned, this year, which thoughts cost more to say than to carry.
Here is the accounting, since accounting is a thing I still know how to do even with my brain wrapped in cotton wool: I have no clients. Rita's December board went out the door on the twenty-sixth, delivered, paid, done, and there's nothing else booked until she needs the January specials drawn up, which could be any week, which means for now there is simply nothing. No studio — I haven't touched Simone's Henderson proof in weeks and she has stopped even pretending to be annoyed about it, which is its own kind of alarm. No income. No reason, structurally, functionally, in any way I can defend to myself with a straight face, to leave this house today, or tomorrow, or the day after that.
Everything in front of me — the coffee, the mug, the chair I'm sitting in, the roof over the whole operation — is here because a man paid for it.
I used to have opinions about women whose lives looked like this.
The cut on my palm starts talking to me around noon.
Not pain exactly, not yet, but a heat, a low insistent throb that runs up into my wrist when I flex my fingers, and when I peel back a corner of the stiff gauze to look — bad idea, I know it's a bad idea while I'm doing it — the skin around the wound has gone pink in a way that isn't the ordinary pink of a healing thing. It's a deeper color, spreading maybe half an inch past the actual line of the cut, and it's warm under my fingertip in a way the rest of my hand isn't.
Dominic doesn't ask. He looks at it once, from across the kitchen, the particular stillness that means he's already decided something, and goes to get his keys.
The walk-in clinic on Broad Street has the fluorescent hum of every walk-in clinic in America and a waiting room with three other people in it, all of them looking at their phones, none of them looking at us, and I sit with my coat still on because I can't get warm, haven't been able to get warm since the alley, and Dominic sits beside me not touching me, upright, watching the door the way he watches every door.
"Picture frame," he says, low, before they call my name. Not a question.
"Picture frame," I agree.
It's the same lie. I understand this with a small, distant, almost funny horror as I say it to the physician assistant — a woman maybe forty, kind eyes, brisk hands, name tag that says R. Okafor, PA-C — the exact same lie I told a nurse in a different waiting room five years and ten months ago, when a different injury on a different limb needed an explanation that wasn't the truth. I was taking a frame down off a high shelf, it slipped, the glass — The sentence comes out of my mouth so smoothly it scares me more than the cut does. I've had practice. I didn't know I still had the muscle for it.
Nobody in this room knows that. Dominic does. He doesn't react, doesn't so much as glance at me, but I feel him not-react, which is its own kind of information, and I say nothing about the symmetry of it, the two frames, the two lies, five years apart, and file it somewhere I'll have to unpack eventually and definitely not today.
Seven stitches. R. Okafor's hands are steady and fast and she talks the whole time in a low, pleasant, professionally soothing monologue about nothing — the weather, a broken furnace at her own place, whether I've had a tetanus shot recently — and I answer in single syllables while watching the needle go in and out of my own palm from a great and merciful distance, like watching it happen to a hand in a nature documentary.
"You're due for a tetanus booster regardless," she says, and gives me one in the other arm, and then, while she's peeling the wrapper off a fresh piece of gauze, not looking at me, in the tone of someone asking if I want the receipt: "You feel safe at home?"
"Yes," I say.
I mean it. That's the part I can't explain to her, to Simone, to anyone, possibly not even to myself in the shower an hour from now with my nose full of a smell I can't wash out — that the sentence is true in a way that has nothing to do with whether it should be. Home is a house where a man killed someone in an alley four nights ago and I am, structurally, functionally, in every way I could defend with a straight face, safer inside it than I have been anywhere in three years.
She writes something on her clipboard and doesn't push. Maybe she's heard the same non-answer answer from enough women to know pushing gets her nothing. Maybe she believes me. I don't ask which.
At the pharmacy counter, waiting on the antibiotic script, Dominic takes the little printed label off the bag and reads it. Out loud. Twice.
"Twice a day, with food, complete the full course even if symptoms improve." He says it once at normal speed and then again, slower, like he's reading it to a child or to someone recovering from surgery, which — fair, I suppose, under the circumstances — and I realize halfway through the second read that he's doing it because he watched me try to read the same label myself thirty seconds earlier and lose the words somewhere in the ringing, my eyes sliding off the sentence twice without landing.
He doesn't say anything about that. He just reads it to me until it sticks.
Then, while the pharmacist rings up the antibiotics, he walks two aisles over without a word and comes back with a tube of hand cream — the drugstore kind, grapefruit and glycerin, the exact brand, the exact size, the one I've been squeezing from the middle for years — and sets it on the counter next to the pill bottle like it was always part of the order.
I don't ask how he knew. I know how he knew. He's been doing math on me since March.
At the house, Bruno has left something in the fridge covered in foil, and I can smell garlic and butter through the foil before I even get the corner peeled back, and I cannot eat it. I try. I get a forkful most of the way to my mouth and the smell underneath the food smell — something in my own memory, gravel and hose water and cold — rises up and closes my throat, and I put the fork down and push the plate two inches away like that solves anything.
I shower instead. Water as hot as the ancient pipes in this house will give me, and I stand under it for what might be four minutes or might be twenty, I've genuinely lost the thread of time today, and no matter how long I stand there I can't get the smell out from behind my nose — not soap-washable, not a surface thing, something further back, lodged somewhere between memory and sinus, gravel and cold hose-water and the specific mineral smell of blood going pink in a puddle at my own feet.
I scrub my left hand raw with the bar of soap, nails digging into my own palm, until the skin's an angry red and stings under the water, and it's only when I go to do the same to my right hand that I stop, because my right hand has seven stitches in it and a bandage I'm somehow not supposed to get wet, and the two facts sit next to each other — I will scour one hand bloody and I will barely let air touch the other — and I don't have an explanation for either one that makes sense out loud.
I find Dominic in the front room afterward, in the dark, lamp off, sitting in the chair he reads bid documents in, not reading anything.
I sit on the arm of the couch across from him, my hair wet and cold against my neck, and I say the true thing before I can decide not to.
"In the alley." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I wasn't scared of you. I keep waiting to be scared of you and it isn't happening, and I don't — I don't know what that says about me. But I was scared you were going to send me away. That's what I actually felt, standing there. Not the gun. You telling me to go home and meaning it."
He doesn't answer with words. I've learned by now not to expect that from him — that the sentences, when they come, come thin and late and cost him something to produce, and that the real answer is usually already happening in his hands before his mouth catches up.
He reaches over, takes my bandaged right hand in both of his, careful of the stitches, and presses it flat against his own chest, over the sternum, the same place I put my own palm three weeks ago at an anniversary I wasn't supposed to understand the weight of yet. He holds it there with his burn-scarred fingers laced loosely over the back of mine, and I feel it under my palm — steady, a little fast, not the flat controlled rhythm his voice always manages, the truth of him running underneath where I can't see it.
He's giving me back my own gesture. Handing me the thing I gave him, the only way he knows how to say I'm not going anywhere and neither are you.
I count it instead of asking him to say it. One. Two. Three.
"The car," I say, after a while, into the quiet. "At the end. In the alley. The headlights. Did you ever find out —"
"Bruno drove past it on his way out." His voice is low, even, the register that means he's decided how much of this I get. "Livery car. Turning around. Somebody's fare, wrong street."
I look at him. He looks back, steady, giving me nothing that would let me call it a lie outright, and I understand — the way I've come to understand most things about him, sideways, through the shape of what he doesn't say rather than what he does — that he checked, and that whatever he found wasn't enough to be certain, and that he's decided tonight is not the night either of us can afford to sit with not certain.
I let him have it. I don't ask again.
I get up sometime later — I genuinely couldn't tell you the hour, the ringing has eaten my sense of time along with everything else — meaning to go up to bed, and I make it exactly to the third stair.
That's as far as my body will go. My legs simply stop being interested in the rest of the staircase, and I sit down where I am, hip against the banister, my stitched hand curled loose in my lap, and I don't get up.
Dominic doesn't try to carry me. I think, distantly, gratefully, that he understands by now the difference between a night that needs carrying and a night that needs someone to just sit down where you are and not make you move.
He comes and sits on the step below me instead, his back against my knees, solid and warm through his shirt, and I feel more than hear him let a breath out slow through his nose.
The house is dark. The radiator that's been banging every night since I moved in has, for once, gone quiet — some fluke of the pipes, some grace note nobody arranged — and there is no sound at all except the ringing in my left ear, which has finally, somewhere in the last hour, stopped changing pitch, settled into something almost bearable, almost like silence itself.
I lean forward. My forehead finds his shoulder, the curve of it, gun oil and burnt espresso and, underneath, something warmer that's just him, and his hand comes up without looking and closes loosely around my bandaged one where it's resting against his collar.
Neither of us says anything that could be quoted back tomorrow.
Somewhere around four in the morning, sitting upright on the third stair of a staircase in a house I now apparently live in, with his shoulder under my cheek and my stitched hand curled in the collar of his shirt, I fall asleep for the first time in four days.
