His Voice

Saoirse POV

On Sunday afternoon I went to the bookstore on Cortelyou Road.

I want to tell you why, because the why was not what a reasonable woman would have said if you had asked her on Sunday morning. The reasonable woman would have said *I needed to get out of the apartment.* She would have said *I needed to be in a place with strangers, with high ceilings, with the smell of new paperbacks, with the small ordinary public life of a Sunday in Brooklyn.* All of that would have been true.

The true thing underneath the true thing was that I had spent the night with Eddie Doyle’s sentence in the kitchen, and the only place in the world I knew of where the sentence might quiet for an hour was a bookstore.

I had loved this bookstore since I was twenty-two. I had not been allowed to go to it for the last three years because Derek had decided, early in the marriage, that bookstores were precious and that I was performing when I went to them, and I had stopped going rather than have the argument about whether I was performing. I had not been back since I moved.

I walked the seven blocks from my apartment.

I went in.

──

I went to the back.

The back was where the fiction was. I walked past the front tables of new releases without registering any title. I walked past the staff picks. I walked past the small section of literature in translation that I had, in another life, spent long careful Saturdays in, and I went to the back wall where the shelves run floor to ceiling and the light is yellow and the carpet smells the way the carpet in bookstores smells, which is a smell I would, if I had been asked to identify it, only have been able to call *the past.*

I stopped at the shelf with the Cs.

I want to tell you about the book.

The book was a novel I had loved when I was twenty-three. It had been the book I had read on the F train every morning that year, on the way to my first warehouse job in Long Island City. It had been the book I had pressed into the hands of two college friends and one girlfriend before Derek. It had been the book I had once mentioned, at a dinner party three months into dating Derek, with the small uncomplicated enthusiasm of a woman talking about a book that mattered to her, and Derek had — in front of two of his friends — made the small mean joke about it. The joke had been small. I do not even remember its specific words. The smallness was the point. The joke had told me that books I loved were going to be available to him as material, and I had, that night, made a quiet adjustment.

I had stopped mentioning books.

I had stopped, eventually, reading the ones that meant the most to me.

The book had sat on my shelf at 437 Birchwood for three years and I had not opened it.

On the night, the book had fallen off the coffee table.

On the morning after, when I came back to the apartment for the etching, the book had been on the arm of the corner chair. Somebody had picked it up off the floor.

I had not, until that Sunday afternoon at the back of the bookstore on Cortelyou, allowed myself to register what the placement of the book on the arm of the chair had meant.

It had meant: a person who broke into your house noticed the book that was on the floor, and the person picked it up, and the person did not put it on the bookshelf where it had lived for three years. The person put it on the arm of the chair where the version of you that left this apartment was no longer going to be afraid to read it.

A person had handled the book.

A person had handled the book the way a person handles a thing he understands is important to the person it belongs to.

I had not, until I was standing at the Cs at the back of a bookstore, let myself understand that the small placement on the arm of the chair was, in the entire vocabulary of small gestures the Verdict Killer had been making in my direction for two months, the most specific and most accurate of them.

I took the book off the shelf.

I held it.

──

I did not buy it.

I stood in the aisle and I held the book and I read the first page the way I had read it the first time at twenty-three on the F train, and I felt, for the first time in three years, the specific physical opening that happens in a person when she is reading a sentence she loved before she got married, in a body that has begun, finally, to belong to her again.

I read for some time.

I do not know how long. The bookstore was quiet on Sunday afternoon. The yellow light did not change.

At some point, a voice behind me said:

*“You’re still reading him.”*

──

I did not turn around.

I did not breathe.

I did not move the page in my hand.

I will never, for as long as I live, forget the exact sequence of sensations my body produced in the half-second between the sound of his voice and the moment my conscious mind caught up with what my body had already known.

The skin at the back of my neck. The base of my spine. My right hand on the book and my left hand at my side. The slow specific cold that started behind my sternum and moved outward in concentric rings the way a stone moves water.

I knew his voice.

I knew his voice from a single sentence from less than that, from the cadence of the consonants across two months of silence and an entire reassembled life, because his voice was the voice that had told me to breathe in my own living room at nine-fifty PM on a Tuesday, and a person’s body does not forget the voice that told her to breathe.

I did not turn around.

I want to tell you why, because the why is the part I am proudest of.

I did not turn around because the turning around was what he was waiting for, and I was not, in that bookstore, in that aisle, on that Sunday afternoon, going to give a man his second favorite gesture from me without first making him understand that I had decided to give it.

I kept my eyes on the page.

I read one more sentence.

Then I said, into the page, in a voice I did not recognize as mine but which was I understood, as I heard the syllables come out the steadiest voice I had used in three months:

*“Yes.”*

──

That was the entire exchange.

I said *yes.* I said it to the page and not to him, and I said it without turning, and I did not say anything else, and the silence after my one syllable was I will not lie to you one of the longest silences of my life.

Then, behind me, I heard him move.

Not toward me. Away.

Three slow careful steps that took him out of the row.

Then four more.

Then the small sound of the front door of the bookstore opening and closing and a man stepping out into the November Sunday on Cortelyou Road, and the bookstore quiet around me again, and the yellow light unchanged, and the book in my hand still open to the page I had been reading when he spoke.

I stood in the aisle for ten minutes.

I did not, in those ten minutes, do anything. I did not read. I did not look up. I did not move from the spot on the carpet where I had been standing when his voice came in behind me. I held the book and I let my body finish having the response it was having, and I did not interrupt it, and I did not perform any version of recovering my composure, because there was no one in the aisle to perform it for, and the body was doing what the body needed to do, and the body had earned the ten minutes.

After the ten minutes I closed the book.

I put it back on the shelf.

I walked out of the bookstore. I walked the seven blocks home. I went into my apartment. I locked the door.

I did not check it again.

I sat at the kitchen table.

I sat there until the November light went out of the window, and then I sat there in the dark, and at some point I noticed I was crying quietly, without any of the dramatics the body sometimes gives a person, just water moving down my face the way water moves down a face when the body has, finally, been given a thing it had been carrying for two months and decided to put down.

I was crying because he had been in the bookstore.

I was crying because he had spoken first.

I was crying because he had spoken to the book and not to me, and the speaking-to-the-book was the most exact thing anyone had said to me in a long time.

I was crying because Eddie Doyle had been right the night before, and wrong about why.

The body did remember.

The body had just been waiting for a thing worth remembering toward.