The Nearest Heart

The text comes on the last Sunday evening of September.

Hi Emmy — hope you're both well. Evan and I are planning a dinner out in a few weeks, same as before if you're free? Hattie asks about you. (She doesn't actually ask, she doesn't speak yet, but she does a thing with her face when I say your names, which I choose to interpret as asking.)

Emmy smiles at the phone and the subtle emotional manipulation of a cute baby knowing her name. She holds it out to Juliet without saying anything. She doesn't need Juliet's permission to book it for both of them, but she does want to see Juliet's reaction.

Juliet reads it. Something in her expression settles — the particular warmth of someone receiving news that confirms a thing they already suspected, perhaps even hoped for. "Yes," she says, which covers both the invitation and everything Fiona has established about how Harriet takes in information.

"I feel so honored to have a baby ask about us," Emmy says as she texts back.

They work out the logistics in the four-minute way that logistics work out when both parties are straightforward people, and then Emmy puts the phone down and they return to their respective Sundays — Juliet to the doctoral notes spread across the floor, Emmy to the journal article she has been mostly reading for forty minutes and making little progress on.

The evening continues.

It is some time later — the particular stretch of Sunday evening that is past the productive part but not yet the close, where both of them are in the living room with their things and the light is lower and the September dark is settling outside — that Emmy puts down the article, still on the same page as a half hour earlier.

"I keep thinking about it," she says, in a way that invites a conversation to start.

She is looking at the ceiling. Juliet does not ask what her wife is thinking about. She does not really need to. This is a conversation that she has known would resurrect.

"After Harriet," Emmy says. Not an explanation — more like locating the thought in time. "And before. For a while."

Juliet is quiet. Her pen is in her hand but she has not written anything for a moment. Slowly she puts the pen down, and pulls her legs up toward her body. A move Julian wouldn't have taken. Julian would have slouched, or perhaps looked to the side. Or sat awkwardly on the chair in Emmy's dorm room, after she asked a particularly scandalous question. But Juliet is not Julian. Juliet pulls her legs up to her chest, settles them, and wraps her arms around herself. She is mentally preparing for the conversation that they simultaneously have and have not been having.

"Do you?" Emmy says. She is still looking at the ceiling. The question is careful, light, entirely unforced — the question of someone who has learned how to ask things without applying pressure to them. Emmy doesn't apply pressure. She already has a gemstone, more pressure might shatter it, not form it into something more precious.

"Yes," Juliet says, after a few moments. She says it simply, the way she says things she has decided to say. And then she is quiet again, and the quiet is specific. Juliet's eyes wander the room, taking in all of the familiar elements, lingering on the hairbrush, lingering on the wedding photo, and then they rest on Emmy, who still looks vaguely skyward.

Emmy knows this quiet. It's a hallmark of Juliet. She has been learning its specific shapes for almost two years: the working-quiet, the thinking-quiet, the receiving-quiet. This one is something else. It is the quiet of someone who has said a true thing and is holding the rest of it carefully. Not exactly holding it in, for that would be keeping something from the relationship she vowed to be a full member of. More holding it in a waiting area, because it's not fully understood by the owner, let alone the receiver.

The article is on the sofa beside Emmy. The room is the room it is: the teal throw on her chair that she is not sitting in, the fire unlit, the bookshelf. The wall with its one photograph and its open question, the same open question it has had since they moved in — the wedding photo, the bare space, the question they have discussed and not decided and discussed again and not decided.

She looks at it for a moment. Juliet does not look at it. The wall is patient.

"I think it would be good," Emmy says finally. "For us. For the world. For our world." She pauses. "And I think we'd be good at it."

"Yes," Juliet says again. Juliet has no objection to anything Emmy has said, and agrees with all of her being.

Emmy turns her head to look at her. Juliet is sitting on the floor with her notes — but not the position she takes when she is working seriously — and she is now looking at her pen, not at Emmy as she was earlier. Her expression has the careful quality. The both-hands quality. She's now looking at her hands. Emmy needs more.

"You sound like you're reading from a position paper," Emmy says.

Juliet looks up. Something flickers — surprise, maybe, at the register of it. Hurt maybe? No, that would be too strong. The quick thing. Emmy has not said a quick thing in a while.

"Do I," Juliet says.

"A bit."

A beat. Then, from Juliet, something that is almost a smile — not the small precise one, something slightly less controlled than that. The bashful, semi-apologetic, sincere smile. "I don't mean to."

"I know, Jules," Emmy says. "But you do sometimes, when you're— when something's close." She pauses. Not pressing. Observing, the way she observes. "You go more precise the closer it gets."

Juliet is quiet. How close are we?

Emmy hears something — the edge of the thing she always hears and does not pursue. She could follow it. She knows the direction. She has known the direction for months — the shape of what isn't being said, present in every conversation like a room she can see through a window but hasn't entered.

She makes her choice.

"We'll figure it out," she says instead, and it is not the thing she was going to say but it is true and it is enough, and the way she says it contains the full yes she has been carrying since July.

Juliet continues to wrap her arms tightly around herself.

"Yes," she says, for the third time, and this one is different — not the careful yes, not the positioned yes, but something quieter. Something that has come from further down. Something shaky.

"Emerald… don't think that…." The words escape the philosopher, so well trained in them. Emmy plops down on the floor next to Juliet and places her arms around her.

"I know you don't," she says in a low tone. "It's OK. We will figure it out together."

The room holds it.

#

Later, Emmy thinks — lying in the specific quiet of after, the September dark fully arrived outside the window — that she should steal her toast back.

Not literally. Probably not literally. But something in that direction. Something in the direction of being the person who would have made the quick joke more easily, who wouldn't have weighed the observation before offering it, who would have said you sound like you're reading from a position paper in the first thirty seconds instead of sitting with it for twenty minutes. When did she become the person that was so guarded?

She has become very careful. It has served her well in the clinical hours — the careful observation, the professional restraint, the knowing when not to press. She has brought some of that home. She is not sure, lying here, that the home required it.

Juliet, her beloved soulmate, beside her, is already at the edge of sleep. The doctoral work has done this — made her tired in a specific way, the tired of someone whose mind has been working at capacity and is now offline. It suits her. She is beautiful when she is offline. She is beautiful the rest of the time too, but the offline Juliet has something — some quality of being entirely her own, not performing or managing or handling anything. They both have been very much online lately.

Emmy watches her for a moment.

I keep thinking about it.

I know.

She had asked are you thinking about it too and Juliet had said yes and she had not followed the yes into the room she has yet to be invited into. She does not regret the choice. But she is aware of it. It has a small weight. It goes in the file alongside the one from the day Rob brought his paper over, the one from before that.

The file is getting specific.

Later, she thinks. Not yet. But the direction is set. She must make a choice sooner or later on how to proceed.

She closes her eyes. The house does its September work outside. Somewhere, Fiona Marsh may be having dinner out, and Harriet is being watched by someone who is not Emmy and Juliet, and is doing the face thing when she hears their names. Next time, it will be them.

* * *