Chapter 60 Long Distance
MIA
Long distance looked different from the inside than I had expected.
From the outside, standing on a pavement in August watching a truck turn a corner, it had looked like absence. Like a space where something had been removed.
From the inside it was not absence.
It was presence in a different shape.
It was the phone call at nine every night and the text before eight every morning. It was learning to read the specific quality of his voice when he was tired versus energized versus working through something he had not decided how to say yet. It was knowing his schedule well enough to understand why some nights the call came at nine exactly and some nights at nine forty and what the difference between those two times meant about his day.
It was the Tuesday morning texts about something small.
A coffee that Fiona's mom had gotten exactly right. A thing the nine year old had said at dinner. The strip of water visible from the window at the specific angle.
The ordinary things. Still. Just arriving through a phone instead of across a kitchen table.
Chloe came to visit in October.
She arrived on a Friday evening with a bag and enough energy to fill my small rental room immediately and we went to the restaurant near campus that I had been going to since September and she asked about everything without pausing long enough for me to finish one answer before the next question arrived.
How is the program, she said.
Hard, I said. Good hard. The kind that makes you think differently rather than just more.
How is Caleb, she said.
Good, I said.
Just good, she said.
Really good, I said. The coaching staff is apparently exceptional. He sounds different on the phone lately.
Different how, she said.
More landed, I said. Like he has arrived somewhere and recognized the ground.
She looked at me.
You sound different too, she said.
I do, I said. I know I do.
Good different, she said.
I think so, I said.
We stayed up until one talking about nothing specific and everything actual, which was the specific thing Chloe had always been best at. The conversation that moved easily between the surface and the real without making the transition a production.
At one she turned the light off.
In the dark she said: Are you happy?
I thought about it honestly.
Yes, I said. Not the way I used to think happy meant. Not everything is finished or resolved. But I am doing the right thing in the right place and the people I love are okay and I am okay. I think that is what happy actually is.
She was quiet for a moment.
That is the most adult thing you have ever said, she said.
I had a complicated year, I said.
She laughed in the dark.
Caleb came in November.
Two days, a weekend between training blocks, and he drove from the new city and arrived Saturday morning at the door of my rental room with coffee in both hands and the expression I knew meant he had been driving for a while and was glad to have stopped.
Sweet, I said, taking mine. Exactly right.
Always, he said.
He came in.
The room was small and he was not and the nursing textbooks were stacked in the order I was working through them. He looked at the stack.
You are ahead of the syllabus, he said.
I am a fast reader, I said.
You are also doing the thing where you get ahead of what is required because it makes you feel in control, he said.
I looked at him.
That is either very perceptive or very annoying, I said.
Those are apparently my two modes, he said.
I genuinely almost threw something at him.
We spent two days in the small room and the streets around it and the coffee shop on the corner that I had been going to every day since September because the table by the window was almost always available and the coffee was right.
We did not do anything dramatic.
We walked and talked and ate and studied in the same room and I watched him read through a tactical booklet the coaches had given him while I worked through a pharmacology chapter and the Saturday afternoon passed around us quietly and completely.
This is good, he said without looking up.
I know, I said.
Not the visit, he said. This. The way we are in a room together.
I know, I said.
I looked at him.
He was reading with the focused attention he brought to things he was genuinely learning. His coffee was going cold on the desk because he always forgot it when he was reading and I had started reminding him and he had started remembering slightly more often.
I went back to pharmacology.
Sunday evening he left.
I walked him to the truck and we stood on the pavement in the November cold.
Two months until Christmas, he said.
Two months, I said.
Then we are both home, he said.
Then we are both home, I said.
He kissed me on the pavement in November outside my building.
I held onto his jacket.
Same time when I get there, he said.
Same time, I said.
He drove away.
I stood on the pavement.
Then I went back upstairs.
My phone buzzed.
Mom: How was the visit?
Mia: Really good.
Mom: Good. Go study.
I went and studied.