Chapter 58 TEN DAYS
Chapter 58 TEN DAYS
POV: Reese Calloway
Ten days. Neither of us said it out loud after the kitchen table conversation but it was in the room every morning when Cole arrived and every evening when he left and neither of us wasted any of it on anything that didn't matter.
Day one he was on the ice at six and at my door at noon and we ate at the place on my block and spent the afternoon at Mercy Row without a camera or a production schedule or any reason to be there except that it was a Tuesday and the kids were skating and neither of us had anywhere else we needed to be.
DeShawn spotted me coming through the side entrance and skated over with the specific urgency of a nine-year-old delivering important information.
"The picture lady is here," he announced to nobody in particular, loud enough for the whole near end of the rink to hear. He said it the way you said a title. Not describing me, identifying me.
Cole looked at me.
I looked at DeShawn. "The picture lady doesn't have her camera today."
DeShawn considered this. "That's okay," he said, and skated away.
Cole was still looking at me.
"Don't," I said.
He pressed his mouth together and went to get his skates.
Day three I started the first editorial shoot for the magazine contract.
A portrait series. Chicago artists, the editor's concept, my framing and my subjects once I had the list. We shot in a ceramicist's studio in Pilsen in the morning, the light coming through the north windows the way north window light always came, clean and shadowless and honest about everything it landed on.
Cole came.
He sat in the corner of the studio on a stool the ceramicist had pointed him toward and stayed there for three hours while I worked. He didn't offer opinions or move to better angles or say anything about what I was doing while I was doing it. He watched the way he watched things, completely and without announcing that he was watching.
That evening over dinner he said it was the best he'd ever seen me move through a shoot.
I looked at him across the table.
"You've seen me work for six weeks," I said.
"I know what I saw," he said, and went back to his food.
Day five we went back to the restaurant.
The same corner table. The same waiter who brought water without being asked and left us alone with the same unhurried patience as the first time. The conversation was smaller than the first dinner, not in the sense of mattering less but in the sense of two people who had stopped performing for each other and found that what was left was easier and quieter and didn't need to cover as much ground.
We stayed until they closed again.
Neither of us commented on that either.
Day seven Tommy came over.
He arrived with enough takeout for six people, which was Tommy's way of handling social situations he cared about, and the three of us sat in my apartment on the floor with the containers between us while Tommy pulled up the press coverage from his league welfare interview on his phone and passed it around.
The coverage was careful and respectful. His name, his account, his words given the space they needed without the framing that turned a person into a symbol of something larger than themselves. He was in the coverage as a person who had experienced something and had spoken about it and was now continuing to exist in the world.
He was not a target.
Tommy read one piece out loud and when he finished Cole said nothing and I said nothing and Tommy looked at the phone in his hand for a moment and then put it down on the floor beside the takeout containers.
"Okay," he said. The specific okay of someone who had been waiting to see a thing and had now seen it and could put the waiting down.
Day nine Cole came over in the morning with his bag.
It was smaller than I expected. He set it by the door and we had coffee at the kitchen table and I didn't look at the bag and then I looked at the bag.
He went through it once before he left, checking something, the unhurried inventory of someone who had packed for travel enough times that the process was automatic. I was at the counter when he reached into the jacket he'd been wearing every day for six weeks and took out the folded photograph.
The one from day one. Cole at ice level, laughing at the seven-year-old, completely unaware.
He put it in the front pocket of the bag and zipped it closed.
I turned back to the counter.
On the last night we walked along the lake.
Cold enough that we were both in our jackets with our hands in our pockets for the first half mile, the lake running dark and flat to our left and the city running lit and loud to our right and neither of us filling the space between us with anything that didn't need to be there.
We stopped at a bench facing the water.
Sat down.
The lake moved in front of us and the city kept going behind us and we sat there in the specific quiet of two people who had stopped needing to fill quiet.
Cole said: "I used to think being good at something meant not needing anything else."
I looked at the water.
"Me too," I said.
He reached over and took my hand. Held it the same way he had after the first dinner, his thumb against the back of my knuckles, not making anything of it.
"I was wrong," he said.
The lake kept moving in front of us and the city kept running behind us and his hand was in mine and neither of us said anything else for a long time.