The Nearest Heart

April arrives with the particular energy of a month that has been waiting its turn, knows it has a day less than the previous one, and wants to make the most out of it. The back garden, which spent March reconsidering its options, has made several decisions: there are things growing back there now, green things with actual intent, and the kitchen window is starting to offer a view worth having. The garden hadn't been tended to much over the previous years. Last summer was busy with moving and wedding, and Julian was never much interested in nurturing that particular kind of growth, despite Gerald’s encouragement. But this year, it could be the year of the garden's rebirth. Emmy was willing, Juliet was intrigued. But today, Emmy is at the table with her seminar reading when she hears the gate.

She does not need to look up to know it's Rob.

There is a specific quality to how Rob Calloway moves through the world — a forward momentum, a slight imbalance toward whatever's next — that announces itself before he does. He is a young man, confident sometimes to a fault, but sometimes cautious around his older sister and her wife. The wife he had, at one point, said was hot. Less than 24 hours after she had become.

The gate has barely closed before the knock, and the knock is two beats rather than one, and by the time Emmy reaches the front door he has already taken a small step back from it and is looking up at the house the way he looks at most things: as if assessing whether it can be improved. The house knows the reverse is more likely.

"It's still green," he says, about the door.

"It's always been green," Emmy says.

"Yeah." He considers this for a moment, then apparently decides it passes, and comes in.

#

Rob in the Hartwell-Calloway house has a specific quality. He has been here enough times now that he moves through the hallway without the slightly careful tread of a guest, but not so many times that he has stopped noticing it. He notices it every time — the bookshelf, the hairbrush, the particular way the light falls in the front room — and then he puts the noticing aside and acts like he was never doing it, which Emmy finds both characteristic and endearing. You don't grow up to be a psychology student in isolation, and she is well aware that the same influences on her childhood that brought her to careful observation were also present in her house for others.

"Juliet home?" he asks.

"Kitchen."

He is already heading toward it.

#

Three at the kitchen table: the first time, it was slightly unfamiliar. The table had always seated four, but in many cases was meant for just two. Three always has an interesting cadence, and with Rob, now it has its own rhythm. Juliet makes the coffee for three with the same care she makes it for two — the right ratio scaled up, the bloom correctly timed, the pour even — which, Emmy has come to understand, is a form of acknowledgment. Juliet does not make gestures. She makes coffee correctly. To the point that eventually someone is likely to have a caffeine addiction which will lead Juliet to explore decaf. Hopefully not for a while.

Rob accepts his mug and wraps both hands around it the way Emmy does, which is a Calloway habit apparently, even if stereotypically feminine, and sits across from Juliet, who is still standing at the counter pouring her own. Feminine energy is what the house is used to these days, not that being female defines either of the owners more than in a practical sense. Rob looks around the kitchen with the particular attention of someone who has been here before and is checking what has changed.

"Leprechaun's still up," he says.

"Obviously," Emmy says, "He doesn't seem to want to leave."

"I don't blame him," he says, as if this is relevant information.

"He approves of our friend," Juliet says, looking at Emmy, and there is something in her expression that is almost a smile. After just a month, Emmy's pop of levity has entranced the stoic Juliet to some extent. Emmy wonders how this will translate into the small spontaneous side of Juliet, likely in the far future. It's fun to plant seeds, watch them grow, appreciate the journey.

Rob pulls his jacket off and drapes it over the back of his chair and stretches in the specific way Emmy has watched him do since he was twelve — elbows out, neck to one side, the slight sound he makes that he also doesn't know he makes — and the kitchen receives all of this without comment because the kitchen by now has met Rob Calloway several times and knows what to expect.

#

"Sim session this morning," he says. Not to anyone in particular. To the kitchen, slightly. The kitchen doesn't respond.

Emmy looks up. "How was it?"

"Good. Better than last week." He drinks the coffee. "Still doing the same thing, though. I know the whole sequence — I can run through it in my sleep, I've done it probably five hundred times — but the moment I'm actually in the seat it's like the sequence lives somewhere different in my head. Some part of it that doesn't move as fast." He shrugs, the Calloway shrug that means it is what it is and I will fix it. "Instructor says it's normal. Happens to everyone for the first year."

Emmy has an immediate thought, which is: phronesis. She does not say this.

Juliet, at the counter, has turned her head a fraction in the way she turns it when something has landed.

"The simulator is perfect," she says. A statement, not a question.

"Pretty much. Doesn't bank the same as actual, but for controls and procedure — yeah."

"But you know the procedure in the simulator and you can't reproduce it at the same speed in the air."

"Not yet." Rob looks at her. Something in his expression adjusts — not quite recalibrating, but paying attention in a slightly different way. She isn't challenging his ability to learn, and she also has never seemed to have any desire to pilot a plane herself. Rob is intrigued to see where this line of questioning is going, even if these have been statements thus far. "Why?"

"I'm just — no," Juliet says, and there is the very specific quality in her voice of someone pulling a thread back before it unravels too far. "You were saying."

"You can just say the thing," Rob says. "Whatever it is."

The particular compressed silence of someone deciding whether to actually say the thing. Juliet feels a slight bit of being put on the spot, Emmy can tell.

"The body and the mind learn at different speeds," Juliet says finally. "And the simulator teaches the mind. The actual flight teaches the body. They know different versions of the same sequence, and in the air you need both, and the two versions haven't finished negotiating yet." A pause. "That's all."

Rob looks at her for a moment, processing what she said. A pretty remarkable insight for someone who hasn't been in the air before. "Yeah," he says slowly. "That's exactly it."

Emmy drinks her coffee.

#

It is somewhere in the middle of this exchange that Rob mentions the philosophy elective, in the specific way that people mention things they are not entirely sure they should be mentioning. He knows it's probably a loaded thing to say, but if he doesn't, and he makes it through an entire semester of a class in Juliet's calling, he'll never hear the end of it. And it might make some sense to have his sister-in-law on his side when it comes to end of the semester exam prep.

"Oh — I picked up an extra course this semester." He has the tone of someone who has rehearsed casualness. "Philosophy thing. Requirement for the degree or whatever."

Emmy, who knows her brother, notes the "or whatever."

"Which module?" Juliet asks.

Rob looks at her with the expression of someone who was expecting either a tease or a polite response and is not sure what this is. "Personal Identity and Ethics."

Something shifts in Juliet's quality of attention. It is small — the particular sharpening that happens when she encounters a topic she knows — but Emmy can see it from across the table.

"Caulfield teaches it," Juliet says. "Or he did when I sat in on a seminar last year. Did he change the reading list?"

"There's a — Parfit? Something about—"

"Reasons and Persons. Yes." She has put her mug down. "The part three reading?"

"I think so. We're about halfway through the module."

"What's your position on Parfit's reductionism?"

Rob blinks.

This is the specific moment, Emmy thinks, where most people say something like I haven't really formed one yet and the conversation moves on. Rob Calloway, to his credit, does not do this.

"I think he's — I mean, I need to read more before I have an actual position." A diplomatic dodge of the student before the master. He pulls his jacket slightly off the chair back, roots in the pocket, and produces a small notebook that is about a third filled with handwriting. He opens it to a recent page. "I wrote down a question, actually, because I couldn't figure out—" He looks at the notebook. "If identity is just psychological continuity — like, the thing that makes you the same person over time is just the causal connection between your mental states — then what happens in cases of radical discontinuity? Where does the person go?"

Emmy watches Juliet.

There is a specific quality to how Juliet goes still when a question means something to her. Not absence — presence, focused. It doesn't hurt that Juliet, more than anyone else potentially on the planet, has both academic and practical understanding of "radical discontinuity".

"That," Juliet says, "is the question."

"So there's an answer?"

"There are several. None of them entirely satisfying." She leans forward slightly, and her hands are around her mug and her attention is entirely on Rob, which is — Emmy has seen Juliet give this quality of attention to Mags, to her seminar tutor, to a passage of Wittgenstein that was being especially resistant. She has not seen her give it to Rob before. "Parfit's answer is that the question itself is less important than we think. That personal identity isn't what we should be using to determine moral obligations. What matters is psychological connectedness, which admits of degrees. The Ship of Theseus problem—"

"—is in the reading, yeah." Rob is writing something in the notebook. "We talked about that. The ship with every plank replaced."

"Do you think it's the same ship?"

"I think—" He stops. Looks at the notebook, then at Juliet. "I think the ship doesn't know the difference. But the person who owned it might."

Emmy is very quiet on her side of the table.

Juliet is quiet too, for a different reason. "That's a more interesting position than most of my classmates arrive at in the first week," she says, and it is a precise statement, fully meant, not a compliment designed to encourage. Just: accurate.

Rob looks extremely pleased and tries not to show it, which is a very Rob response.

"I'm in the second month," he says.

"Even so."

Juliet rocks back in her chair for a moment as the air returns to the room, the intensity of the conversation goes down. Emmy asks Rob about the more mundane parts of his life, about whether he's heard anything from their parents lately. About the rumor that they're planning a trip to visit Crestfield in the next few months. They haven't confirmed yet, Emmy knows that if they do, she and Juliet will likely host. Rob's dorm room is not spacious enough, obviously.

Rob, for his part, answers Emmy's mundane questions as best he can, but he does take the opportunity to get in a bit of his own information mining. While he's spent a good amount of time with Emmy and Juliet, he hasn't truly grasped their relationship yet. He observes a very quiet devotion between them, but at times it can be too quiet. Cold isn't the right word, but Rob knows his sister, and knows her personality to be more naturally loud. Yet when she's with Juliet, she doesn't seem at all unhappy, perhaps just… peacefully settled? If that's even a thing?

"So if Mom & Dad come, you gonna cook for them?" he asks knowingly.

"Oh… we're two women sharing a house… I think somewhere there's an old law that says we kinda have to," Emmy says with a bit of a laugh. "I can whip together something edible. Juliet's actually a really good baker when she decides to. Very precise, very tasty."

Rob looks to Juliet with surprise.

"I contain multitudes, Rob," Juliet says with a knowing glance to Emmy.

"That's my gemstone," Emmy replies. Juliet blushes slightly. Rob notices the warmth.

#

The afternoon has shifted by the time Rob makes motions toward leaving. April does this — the light at four o'clock is different from the light at noon, the warmth it had at midday already reconsidering. He stands and stretches and puts the notebook back in his jacket pocket with the specific care of someone who has stopped treating it casually.

"Same time next week?" he says to Emmy.

"I have a seminar Tuesday. Wednesday might—"

"I'll text." He picks up his mug and brings it to the counter, which Emmy notes he has started doing in the last few visits. He is learning the house's expectations. "Juliet—" He looks at her. There's something in his expression that is doing several things at once: the Rob directness, the slight uncertainty of someone new to a territory, and underneath both of those, something that is simply — interested. "The Parfit thing. I'm going to have a position by next time."

"I'll hold you to it," Juliet says.

He nods, as if they have agreed to something. He kisses Emmy's cheek on his way past and out through the hall, considers making some similar affectionate move toward Juliet, finds his body already down the hallway, and the green door closes, then the gate, and the particular forward momentum of Rob Calloway moves away down the street.

#

The kitchen returns to its natural size.

Emmy sits with the last of her coffee and the afternoon and Juliet, who is looking at the doorway through which Rob has just left with an expression Emmy does not have a clean word for. Not warmth exactly — warmer than warmth. The specific quality of someone who has just discovered an unexpected thing and is deciding what to do about the discovery.

"He's good," Juliet says, eventually.

"At philosophy?"

"At thinking." She picks up her mug. "They're related but not identical."

Emmy knows this. She is also looking at the doorway, and at the notebook-shaped absence, and at the beginning of something she hadn't known she had been waiting for — the two of them finding each other without her in the middle, finding the grammar of it already there, waiting to be used. Rob had known Julian briefly, as his sister's best friend who was always very quiet, very reserved. Rob had been friendly to Julian, never hostile, but the wavelengths were never aligned. Perhaps Rob's wavelength just calibrates to Juliet better, and it's taken awhile to settle.

"He'll be back Wednesday," she says.

"I know," Juliet says.

Outside, April is doing its April things to the back garden. The things growing back there have, in the course of one afternoon, made several additional decisions. The kitchen is warm. The leprechaun on the wall maintains his position.

Emmy turns back to her seminar reading, which has been waiting patiently, and finds she does not entirely mind how long it waited.

* * *