The Nearest Heart

It is Christmas morning and Emmy Hartwell-Calloway is lying in the dark understanding everything. Like a little girl, wide-eyed at the sight of presents, she's wide-eyed as her understanding of yesterday and the day before come into new perspective.

The assembling completed somewhere between three and five in the morning while she was asleep. She doesn't know when exactly. She knows only that she is awake now and the thing is assembled and she is looking at the ceiling of the east-facing bedroom on December twenty-fifth and understanding, with the specific clarity of something that has been in the process of being understood for approximately six months, what Juliet has been carrying.

The relief secret: a complicated feeling when her parents died. A feeling that required a word other than grief. Juliet said the word last night for the first time. Emmy received it. Emmy said: that's not unfitness. That's the opposite.

She meant it. She did not say it as comfort. She said it as accurate.

But the word unfitness is the word her mind returns to now. At three-to-five in the morning, on the way from last night to this morning, her sleeping mind has been doing the thing that sleeping minds apparently do: consolidation, pattern recognition, the assembling of what was laid out in pieces into what it actually is when seen whole. It remembered that word, which it had glossed over a bit yesterday in all of the emotional energy.

Juliet was carrying the feeling. And she was afraid the feeling made her unfit. If unfitness hadn't been the rightward, Juliet would have corrected it.

Unfit for what? Not marriage to Emmy - if that were the case, they would still be engaged.

Emmy lies very still.

Unfit to be a parent. That is the sentence Emmy stopped herself from fleshing out last night. She knew the shape of the fear. She named it almost: you were afraid it made you someone who couldn't — who wasn't fit to — and then she had stopped. She had stopped because it was not her sentence to finish.

But she knows what the sentence was.

And if the fear was about being a parent — if the thing in the waiting area was the specific fear of being unfit for the very thing Emmy wanted — then Juliet has been thinking about being a parent. Not as something to avoid. As something she wanted and believed she might not deserve.

The conversation that they'd had over a year ago, Juliet had said "I think we'd be good at it."

The pool, in July: I'd want two, I think.

September twenty-sixth: Would we? Yes. Yes. Yes — the third one from further down.

Emmy is completely still.

She is lying next to a person who has spent the better part of six months building toward a yes that kept getting buried under a secret she was not yet ready to give. And Emmy, earlier this week, near the wall, made peace with no. Said we're enough and meant every word of it. And she does mean it. She will always mean it. Whatever life contains, Juliet is enough, they are enough.

Emmy turns her head and looks at the east-facing window. The specific early light of a December twenty-fifth.

She knows what she has to do. She reaches over and steals the blanket.

#

"Calloway," Juliet grumbles, immediately.

"Hartwell-Calloway! And Merry Christmas, my jingle bell," Emmy says, already in the hallway.

"I had that. I was using it."

"It's Christmas. Community property applies with extra force on holidays."

A pause. "That is not how community property works."

"I'm interpreting it generously." Emmy appears in the doorway wearing the blanket with the specific authority of someone who has decided this is a robe now. She looks at Juliet, who is sitting up in bed with the expression of someone who has been awake for eight seconds and has already identified the source of her problems. "You look festive."

"I look cold," Juliet says.

"Fortunately," Emmy says, "it's Christmas. And I believe you may be receiving something warm this morning."

Juliet looks at her. The knowing edge — the quality of someone who has also been planning something. "Merry Christmas, Emerald."

"Ring-a-ling," Emmy says, and goes to make the coffee, throwing the blanket back at her wife.

#

The grandmother's snowman is on the kitchen wall. The leprechaun is on the kitchen wall. Both of them in their December positions, conducting their ongoing conversation. Emmy looks at them while the Chemex warms and thinks: the year has arrived somewhere. It has been a long way from March to here. He has earned his gravitas.

She carries the coffee upstairs and delivers it, hopping back in bed with her gemstone.

#

When they have warmed back up, Emmy gives her gift first. Juliet begins to protest that they should eat breakfast, or get dressed, or at least go downstairs. Emmy won't have it. It's Christmas, and they are going to open presents with the ferocity of five-year-olds.

Juliet indulges her, as she always does, and opens it with the expression of someone finally receiving the explanation for the geometrically unprecedented corner, and the explanation is: amber cashmere, deep and warm, the precise color of toffee in good light. Juliet holds it for a moment. She looks at Emmy. She puts it on over her pajamas.

She stands in the bedroom in the amber cashmere robe and she is warm — specifically, deliberately warm, wrapped in something that was chosen for her by someone who has been paying attention — and the look she gives Emmy has the quality of a person who has just been given the precisely correct thing.

"You knew," she says.

Strong hypothesis," Emmy says. "Is the sun girl happy?"

Juliet looks down at the sleeve. She runs a hand along it with the expression of someone encountering a correct answer after a long calculation. "It's perfect."

"I know," Emmy says.

Juliet gives her the look. The look that means: that is my line. Emmy receives it with complete serenity.

#

Juliet's gift: a small box, the kind that contains something deliberate. Emmy opens it.

What she notices first is the way the light bounces off of two stones differently than the others. Then she realizes there are four stones. Yes, the bracelet is fine gold. The stones exactly as the jeweler made them. Emmy doesn't know the specification; she sees only the object — and she knows what she sees.

"The sapphire," Juliet says. "You know what that is."

"Yes, my gemstone," Emmy says.

"The emerald." A pause, and a look. "You know what that is."

"Yes…" Emmy says.

"And these." Juliet touches the two matched stones. "Alexandrite. They change depending on the light — one thing inside, another in sunlight. But they're the same stone." She holds Emmy's gaze. "Two of the same stone."

Emmy looks at the bracelet.

The freight train, which struck her at three-to-five in the morning, completes its arrival. The two stones for a when. The pool in July. I'd want two, I think. The September conversation moving in circles until both of them said yes. The bracelet obviously commissioned in December from a Juliet who had just arrived at readiness.

She looks up.

"You have been saying yes," Emmy says. "Since July."

"Since before July," Juliet says quietly. "I have been saying yes for longer than July. I was not ready to say it where you could hear it."

Emmy looks at the bracelet again. Two alexandrite stones, matched. She is aware she is going to cry and is choosing instead to laugh. It is a near thing. She makes the laugh.

"I made peace with no," she says. "A few days ago. I stood next to the wall and I said we're enough and I meant every word."

"I know you did," Juliet says.

"And then you—" Emmy gestures at the bracelet. "With the two stones. And the when."

"Yes." The small precise smile. "I'm aware of the timing."

"The timing," Emmy says. She looks at the bracelet in the box. She looks at her wife in the amber cashmere robe on Christmas morning, entirely warm, entirely decided, entirely Juliet. She picks up the bracelet and holds it out.

"Put it on me," she says, "Put it on me right this instant!" Childlike Emmy will not wait.

Juliet does — with the care she gives to things that matter. She fastens the clasp. She holds Emmy's wrist for a moment, both hands, the way she holds things she is making sure of.

Emmy looks at the bracelet on her wrist.

"When?" she says.

"When we're ready," Juliet says.

"We?"

"We," Juliet says. Entirely certain. No qualification.

Emmy looks at her for a long moment. There are a number of things she could say. She has a file full of them — months of unfollowed threads and careful choices and the particular weight of a question she has been carrying since July. She considers them. She chooses the one that is most her.

"Ring-a-ling," she says.

Juliet laughs. It is the real laugh — the one that does not happen frequently and is therefore, when it arrives, completely hers. Emmy has been collecting this laugh since she was twenty years old and she collects it now on Christmas morning in the east-facing bedroom with the bracelet on her wrist.

#

Christmas Day: the particular warmth of a day that has been arrived at after a long road. The food is good, the fire is lit, both of them are wearing what they were given this morning — the amber robe, the bracelet catching the winter light at the kitchen table. They call their families. Emmy's parents, Rob, a video call that involves Susan asking pointed questions and Dale nodding seriously at them and Rob saying something from off-camera that gets him briefly removed from the frame. Juliet calls Gerald, who answers on the first ring and receives the thanks for the tarte tatin compliment with the specific Gerald quality of someone accepting something precisely right. She promises to make it again for him.

They walk in the Christmas afternoon. The park. The bench, theirs. The pond gray and still. They don't stop long — it is cold and Juliet is wearing the robe under her coat in a decision Emmy chooses not to comment on — but they stop at the bench for a moment and look at the December pond and Emmy leans her head briefly on Juliet's shoulder and the moment is what it is.

#

In the evening: the fire, the quiet, the year nearly complete.

Emmy is looking at the kitchen wall.

The leprechaun in his tinsel halo. The grandmother's snowman, scarf slightly too long. Both of them at their conversational angle. She looks at them for a moment — at the conversation that has been going on since at least March, the longest-running exchange in the house — and she thinks about what they have been discussing.

She gets up.

She goes to the back room. The windowsill in the good December light. The pamphlet that has been there since September — set there by her own hand on an evening after Rob had been over, after Priya's line about purposeful pauses, after Emmy had reorganized her clinical bag for the new semester. Two women holding a baby. Two men walking a sunlit path with a toddler between them.

She picks it up.

Juliet is in the doorway when she turns around.

Emmy looks at her. Juliet looks at the pamphlet. Something passes between them that does not require narration. Juliet takes it from Emmy's hand, considers the wall, and finds the space — to the right of the snowman, completing the arrangement — and puts it up.

Three on the kitchen wall now: the leprechaun in his halo, the grandmother's snowman in his too-long scarf, and the pamphlet with its cover of two families and a future that is no longer entirely hypothetical.

Emmy looks at them.

"What have they been discussing?" she says.

Juliet looks at the wall. At the three of them, the conversation that has apparently been in progress since March and has been waiting for the participants to catch up.

"This," she says.

Emmy puts her arm through Juliet's. They stand in the kitchen doorway together and look at the wall. The December evening outside. The fire doing its work in the living room behind them. The bracelet on Emmy's wrist catching the light.

The leprechaun, the snowman, and the pamphlet have no further comment. They are simply here, as they have been, waiting for the rest of the house to arrive at what they already knew.

* * *