The Nearest Heart

Emmy wakes on Christmas Eve with the specific quality of someone who has set something down after carrying it a long time. She feels refreshed, and free.

The room is quiet. Juliet is asleep. It is early — the particular early of a December twenty-fourth that has not yet decided what it is — and Emmy lies still in the warmth of it and takes inventory.

What is true: she said the thing. She said it yesterday, near the wall, in the living room, and she meant it, and she watched Juliet receive it, and they held each other for a long time. The file is not gone — she knows it isn't gone, that it will come back at intervals, that acceptance is not a single act — but the shape of it is different. She is not measuring the actual against the hypothetical anymore. She said so. She meant it.

She is, approximately, at peace.

What is also true: Juliet was quiet through the evening. Not the working-quiet, not the thinking-quiet. The other kind — the kind Emmy has been cataloguing all autumn — and it had a different quality than expected. Emmy had anticipated the lightening. She had anticipated the ease that follows the setting-down. What she got instead was a Juliet who held her tightly and said very little and ate dinner beside her in a specific quality of quiet that Emmy had filed as: still processing. Still in the receiving of the thing.

That is fine. Processing takes time. Juliet processes thoroughly.

She gets up and makes the coffee.

#

Juliet comes downstairs an hour later, dressed, with the particular quality of someone who has made a decision about their presentation that morning — not for an occasion, but for themselves. She sits at the kitchen table. She accepts the coffee. She looks at the snowman and the leprechaun, who are continuing their conversation.

"Christmas Eve," Emmy says.

"Yes," Juliet says.

The word has less in it than the day deserves. Her jingle bell is not jingling this morning.

Emmy sits across from her. She does not fill the quiet. She has learned, across the months of this autumn, that filling the quiet is the thing she must not do. She waits. She watches Juliet hold the coffee mug in both hands in the way she holds things when she is grounding herself — the specific grip of someone making sure of the object in their hands.

"Are you all right?" Emmy asks. The question she is permitted to ask.

"I'm thinking," Juliet says.

"Oh, okay."

"I have been thinking since yesterday."

"I know," Emmy says. She does not say: I expected something lighter than this. She does not say: I thought you would feel released. She keeps these things in the professional register she has been developing all semester — the knowing when not to press — and she waits.

Juliet sets down the mug.

"Emmy," she says. Then stops.

"I'm here," Emmy says. And she is — entirely here, the way she has been learning to be, the gift she gave herself and her family.

"I know," Juliet says. "I know you are." A pause. "I need to tell you something. I have been needing to tell you something for a considerable time and I have not been ready and I—" she stops. "I'm closer to ready than I was."

"Then when you're ready," Emmy says.

"Today," Juliet says. "I would like to tell you today. I very much want to, if I'm able."

"Okay, don't stress over it," Emmy replies, "We can try today, but if it isn't right, it isn't right."

#

The day: Christmas Eve doing its Christmas Eve things around them. Music on in the background, Juliet's idea that Emmy recognizes as a way to reset, or perhaps turn back the clock to the lighter moments two days earlier. They decide to walk in the morning, the park in the December cold, the bench theirs, the pond gray and honest. They do not sit on the bench — it is too cold even for the sitting — but they stop near it for a moment and look at it, and the moment has the quality of something they are both aware of. Juliet pulls Emmy in close for an embrace, Emmy sneaks a kiss. There is never doubt of love between them, even in the midst of whatever Juliet is carrying.

In the afternoon, Juliet begins to cook. She does this with the focus of someone who needs to be somewhere other than their own mind for several hours, and Emmy lets her — sits at the kitchen table with a book and periodically asks questions about the cooking that have no bearing on the cooking and that Juliet answers without noting their irrelevance. Juliet bakes, cooking for her is not about artistic expression. It's about survival.

At four o'clock, Emmy says: "You don't have to tell me anything you're not ready to tell me."

"I know," Juliet says.

"I meant what I said yesterday."

Juliet is quiet for a moment. Then: "I know you did. I am working with it."

Something in this lands differently than Emmy expects. She files it. She turns a page.

Dinner is quieter than it should be. The food is good — Juliet's cooking despite her Hartwell heritage, Christmas Eve, all of it — and they eat by the fire and Emmy makes a small joke about the leprechaun wearing formal attire for Christmas Eve and Juliet gives the small precise smile and returns to her food. Emmy watches her. She is careful. She is aware of the calibration required — the space between giving room and abandoning the field entirely.

She thinks: she will tell me when she's ready. She thinks: today, she said today. Don't push, it's not fair to her to push.

The evening arrives around them. Nine o'clock. The fire. The quiet.

Emmy puts down her book.

"Jules," she says.

Juliet looks at her.

Emmy knows, in this moment, that she is standing at the edge of the choice she identified in November — the power she has and has decided not to use. She knows she could press now, gently, with all the clinical precision she has been building, and Juliet would open the door because Emmy asked. She knows this is true. She knows it is unfair. She has been not-doing it for months.

But Juliet also said today. And today is nearly over.

"You said today," Emmy says. Softly. Not pressing — offering. The difference is everything, and she knows she is walking very close to the line between them.

Juliet looks at her for a long moment. Something crosses her face — not the surprise of being pushed, but the recognition of being given exactly the amount of nudge that she needed and no more. The specific look of someone who has been waiting at a door, and someone has said: it's okay to open it.

She opens it.

#

It takes a long time.

Not because the words are hard to find — Juliet always finds words — but because the words require the full honesty that Juliet gives to things she has decided to be fully honest about, which means the objections handled, the context given, the thing said from the beginning and not the middle. She tells Emmy about being thirteen. She tells Emmy about the year Julian learned to be the careful one. Julian was about 10. He realized that Mom and Dad sometimes forgot to pay bills. He started keeping the calendar up to date for them, reminding them. They found it endearing, and he felt proud that he could help.

When Julian was about 12, Mom and Dad met new friends who liked to gamble. Mom and Dad didn't really gamble much with them, but they'd socialize every few weeks. Julian began to worry about them being in close proximity to vices that he suspected they could eventually fall for. He began to find reasons to need them on the nights they planned to go out. Not every one of them, just a few times each year that he would suddenly require their presence.

Slowly and almost too easily, Julian became a stabilizing force in the family earlier than any child should have to become one. It was natural for his analytic mind, and it was its own form of reward. It was a burden, one that he was prepared (at least he felt) to bear.

Finally, Juliet tells Emmy about what arrived in his chest the year the formal voices were on the telephone, telling him there had been an accident, and that they needed to speak to his Uncle. And how Julian had felt when Gerald told him. Juliet described the shape of what she has described to herself in various forms over ten years, the thing that required a different word than grief, a separate feeling that came alongside it. The word she has never said out loud, not even to herself in her mind.

She says it out loud. Relief. She had felt it when her parents died. How in the world could she feel that when the people she loved the most in the world would never come home. Juliet's eyes fill with tears once more.

Emmy is very still.

She receives it the way she receives things Juliet gives her: completely, without rushing to respond, without inserting the clinical framework even though the clinical framework is present and has something to say. She does not say: this is a recognized psychological response. She does not say: what you felt is well-documented. She says nothing for a while, and then she says:

"I know."

Juliet looks at her.

"Not — I don't mean I knew the word," Emmy says. "I mean I know you. I've known you for seven years. I know the shape of what you carry." She pauses. "It doesn't change anything about what I think of you. And it shouldn't change anything about what you think of yourself."

"I was afraid—"

"I know what you were afraid of," Emmy says. "You were afraid it made you someone who couldn't — who wasn't fit to—" She stops. Something is assembling in her chest, slowly, that she is only partially tracking. "Jules. It makes you someone who felt something complicated at thirteen, in an impossible situation, and who has been honest enough with herself to know it and careful enough with it to carry it well." A pause. "That's not unfitness. That's the opposite."

Juliet is very still.

"You could have told me," Emmy says. Not an accusation. Something else — the softest version of a wish.

"I'm telling you now," Juliet says.

"Yes, my most precious gemstone" Emmy says. "You are."

They are quiet for a long time. Emmy has moved to Juliet's end of the sofa sometime in the telling — she is not sure when, it was not a decision she made consciously — and they are close together in the firelit room with Christmas Eve doing its final quiet things outside the window. She has moved Juliet's arms apart from where they hug her legs to her chest, and she has replaced them with her arms.

Juliet says, after a while: "The waiting area is empty now. No more secrets."

Emmy looks at her. "Good," she says.

They stay by the fire until neither of them can keep their eyes open, which is later than it should be for two people who will be woken by nothing — no children, no alarm, just the December twenty-fifth beginning — and they make their way upstairs in the specific exhausted warmth of two people who have been somewhere together that required something from both of them.

Emmy falls asleep with Juliet's breathing beside her and something assembling itself in the back of her mind that has not quite finished assembling — something about the word Juliet was afraid to say, and the specific nature of the fear, and what the fear was of — and she is almost asleep before it comes close enough to examine, and then she is asleep, and it is Christmas.

* * *