The Nearest Heart

She had not asked.

This is the thing she keeps returning to in the days after — not what she saw on Emmy's face when she looked up from the grief text, not the tears specifically, but the fact of her own choice not to ask. She had wanted to ask. She had opened her mouth with the intention of asking. And then she had looked at Emmy's face — the particular quality of it, the thing she had been watching Emmy carry for the better part of two months — and she had closed her mouth and moved to the sofa instead.

She does not know if she made the right choice. She knows she made the only one that felt honest. For someone who has the ability to catalog past events and neatly organize motives, movements, and intentions, not knowing if she made the right choice is strange. Not knowing if there was a right or wrong choice is even stranger. Embodied physical philosophy. The annoying kind.

Further complicating the matter, Emmy had not explained. Emmy had held the embrace and said nothing, which in Emmy's register sometimes means I don't know how to say this yet and sometimes means I have just understood something and need to stay in it, and Juliet had held her and not asked and told herself she would take the not-knowing for as long as Emmy needed. The Emmy of two years ago would have blurted things out, impulsively. That was the Emmy whose first honest reaction to seeing Juliet in her present form was to laugh, at what no one is really sure. Granted she immediately realized the gravity of the situation and stopped laughing and became everything Juliet needed, but the impulsive laugh happened nonetheless. But today's Emmy has had nearly three semesters of clinical training - she is more guarded.

This is, she thinks, what she would tell a student who asked her how to sit with uncertainty. Hold it without filling it. Let the other person have their timeline.

She is finding it considerably more difficult when the other person is Emmy.

#

The dream comes on a Thursday in the second week of December, which is to say it comes twice — once asleep, once in the kitchen the following morning when the Chemex is warming and the December garden is visible through the window and the residue of the dream is still in the room.

In the dream, Julian is in the kitchen.

She knows she is dreaming and she also does not know, in the way of certain dreams that have a quality of simple truth rather than strangeness. Julian is at the counter — the same counter, this kitchen, the one she has known since childhood — and he is making coffee badly, the way Julian always made coffee, the drip machine he has used since he was sixteen because it was the machine in the house and he learned the machine and the machine was sufficient. He does not know she is there. He is simply in the kitchen, doing what he does in the kitchen, and the kitchen has the quality of before.

She stands in the doorway.

Julian is twenty, perhaps — which would be about the age she is now, which is an odd calculation to make in a dream and she makes it anyway. He is careful in his movements, precise, not wasting motion. She recognizes the precision. She recognizes the posture. She recognizes, with the specific clarity of distance, what it was to be this person — the careful one, the one who had made himself into the right shape for a house that had stopped having the right people in it.

He does not look up.

She watches him until the dream ends, which it does without announcement, the way certain true things end: simply, and leaving something behind.

#

She thinks about it while the Chemex warms.

Julian in the kitchen. Julian making bad coffee in the house he grew up in, alone, before any of it. What she felt watching him was not grief — she has been specific about what is and is not grief in her own processing, and this was not grief. It was something that required a different word. Recognition, perhaps. The understanding that he had been real, that she had been him, that the carrying she has been doing for ten years was his carrying before it was hers, and that the carrying is one of the true continuities between them.

He had been careful. She is careful. This did not come from nothing.

She is also — and this is the thing the dream gave her that she did not expect — someone he was not. She stood in the doorway and she watched Julian and she thought: he did not have this. This kitchen, these notes on the windowsill, the east-facing bedroom, the particular certainty of waking up next to someone who has decided you are what they want. He did not have any of it.

She has all of it.

She pours the coffee.

The garden through the window is the December garden — the year's work visible in it, or the year's work not done visible in it, the garden that was going to be tended in the spring and then in the summer and is now simply what it is. She looks at it for a moment. Things grow or they don't. It's not too late. It is also December.

#

The jeweler is on a different street, not Marlowe, a short walk from the university — she has passed it six times and on the seventh she goes in.

She knows what she wants. She has known what she wants since July, since the pool, since the particular quality of Emmy's face watching the children in the shallow end and saying I'd want two, I think in the way she says things when they arrive as speech before she has decided to say them. Juliet had filed it. She has been carrying it since, and what she has been carrying has been taking shape.

The jeweler is patient and specific, which are the two things Juliet requires of a jeweler.

She describes: a bracelet, fine gold, a small sapphire — she produces the specification for the stone she has looked up, the same quality as the pendants they both wear — an emerald, and two smaller stones. The two smaller ones should be identical to each other. The same stone, the same cut. They should not be sapphire or emerald. They should blend — a stone that is between things, composite. She would like the jeweler to recommend the stone, given these criteria.

The jeweler recommends an alexandrite. It is, she explains, a stone that looks different depending on the light — one quality indoors, another in sunlight.

Juliet considers this. "Yes," she says. "That's right."

The jeweler writes it down. The timeline is before the new year. This is achievable.

On the walk back to the university, Juliet carries the weight of what she has just done. Not the bracelet specifically — the bracelet is an object, and objects are, once commissioned, simply on their way into existence. The weight is what the bracelet contains: the sapphire (theirs, from the beginning), the emerald (Emmy, her Emmy, the name she has given to the most important person in the room since she was twenty years old), and the two identical alexandrite stones.

Two identical stones.

She had filed I'd want two, I think in July. She has been carrying it. Now she has put it somewhere it can be seen — not yet given, not yet explained, but made. An answer in the language they speak.

She is not ready to say everything yet. But she is ready to say this.

#

Emmy is at the kitchen table when Juliet arrives home, and she is doing something on her laptop with the particular quality of someone who closes a window approximately one second before you can see what it contained. Juliet observes this. She observes the quality of Emmy's not-quite-casual expression. She observes the small shopping bag tucked against the leg of the table.

She makes no remark. They are both keeping December surprises. This seems like the correct arrangement.

"Good day?" Emmy says.

"Productive," Juliet says. She hangs up her coat. "Yours?"

"Quiet," Emmy says. "Nice."

They are, Juliet thinks, very good at this. At the particular accommodation of two people who are both planning things and have decided to let the other plan. There is a warmth in it — the mutual agreement to not-press, which in this case contains an equal and opposite warmth: I am planning something for you. You are planning something for me. December doing its December work.

#

That evening: the living room, the fire, the December dark arriving early as it does. Juliet is on the floor with the doctoral notes. Emmy is on the sofa with something she has been reading, or not reading, in the specific way she sometimes does not-read while working through something.

Juliet looks at the garden through the window. In the dark it is simply dark, the shapes of it suggested rather than visible. The garden that did not get tended. The year has turned around it.

She thinks about Julian in the kitchen. She thinks about the bracelet on its way into existence. She thinks about the waiting area and what it contains and the particular shape of what she has been carrying — not the thing itself, which she is approaching in the way she approaches complex arguments: from the sides, carefully, until she is close enough to say the true thing directly.

She is getting closer.

Emmy's breathing, across the room. The fire. The December evening doing its December things.

Later, she thinks. But soon.

* * *