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I hear her get up. I hear her cross the room. I hear her stop on the other side.

The lock turns. The little brass knob.

She opens the door.

She’s still in my T-shirt. Her eyes are red. She’s been crying and doesn’t want me to know.

She looks at me.

“You came back,” she says.

“I said I would.”

She doesn’t say anything to that.

I stand there in her doorway, and I know what I’m going to ask her. I know exactly. What I don’t know is what she’s going to say.

For the first time in my life, I don’t decide that part.

“Tess,” I say.

43

Portable

Tessa

He’s been gone an hour and twenty minutes. I know because I’ve been watching the numbers change on my watch. The tears won’t stop. They started before the screen door finished slapping shut behind him, and they haven’t stopped since, and they don’t make any of the noise I would have expected. They just come steadily, the way water comes through a ceiling once it finds the weak place, and somewhere around the twenty-minute mark I gave up wiping them. I’m sitting on my bed in his T-shirt with my knees pulled up, exactly where he left me, and I haven’t moved. My legs went numb a long time ago. I don’t move.

I’m coming back, Tess. He said it from the doorway, with his shoes on and the first Sentinels shirt off the pile pulled over his head, and I nodded, because that’s what you do when someone tells you that. My mother used to say it too. She said it from the doorway with her purse on her shoulder and her keys already in her hand in the same voice she used to say goodnight, and most of the time it was true, eventually, after three days or five. And then one time it wasn’t, and there was no difference at all in how she said it. Nobody warns you about that. The last time sounds exactly like every other time. So I nodded at him, and I listened to his feet on the stairs and the screen door and nothing after it, and then I looked at my watch, and I’ve been looking at it ever since, because the only thing I’ve ever been able to do with someone leaving is count how long they’ve been gone.

I keep going back over it. How much do you have saved? Answer me. Flat and hard, like a man going over a bill. And then, when I didn’t answer, slower, almost gentle, which was worse. Can you support yourself somewhere else? Could you do it on your own? At minute nine, I understood what he was asking. By minute thirty, it was the only thing it could possibly have meant. He was finding out if I’d be okay. He was checking that I could land on my feet, so that when he went, he wouldn’t have to carry me with him in his head. It’s a kind thing to do. That’s what makes it so unbearable. He was being kind. He was making sure he could leave me without feeling bad about it. I told him the truth, which is that I don’t know, and he nodded like that settled something, and then he got up and put his shoes on.

Around minute forty, I get up on legs I can’t feel and shut my door. I’ve never shut it all summer. Open means come in, that’s the rule in this house, and I stand with my hand flat against it and can’t say why I was doing it, except that I think I wanted to be the one who closed something for once. Then I sit back down in the same spot and look at his things. The Sentinels shirts sliding off the bag that won’t zip. Seven of them, three hats, the socks with the logo on the ankle that I made fun of four hours ago, before any of this, when he picked me up off the curb at the airport and the cop blew his whistle twice and he wouldn’t put me down. His charger is in the wall by the bed. I thought, he’ll have to come back for those, and then I hated myself for thinking it, because I know exactly what kind of thought that is. It’s the thought of a little girl standing in a kitchen doorway, counting what’s left of her mother’s things in the closet to decide whether she took enough of them to mean it.

Somewhere around the hour mark, the crying changes. It stops being about tonight. It stops being about what he said or how he said it, and it went down into something older and much simpler.

Of course. That’s what it kept saying. Of course.

He signed his name on a contract. He’s a professional hockey player now. His whole life is starting, and I’m a girl in a borrowed room with a spreadsheet full of bus routes. I knew this was coming. I’ve known since the draft. I just thought I’d have until September. I thought I’d get to watch it happen slowly, and say goodbye properly, and be good about it. I didn’t think it would be tonight in his T-shirt.

And because I’m me, even while I’m crying, my mind keeps working underneath it, the way it always has. I’m going to be fine the way I’ve always been fine. I’ll be alone like I always am, but I’ll be okay. I’m already deciding what I’ll say when he comes for his things. I’ll make it easy for him. I’ll have the shirts folded. I’ll tell him I’m proud of him, which will be true, and I won’t cry, and he’ll never have to know I was ever like this.

I wipe my eyes, and then I hear the screen door open downstairs.

My whole body stops. Then heavy feet on the stairs, and then the hallway, and then nothing. He’s standing outside my door. I can feel him there through the wood. I stare at the knob and don’t breathe.

He knocks once.

He has never knocked on my door. Not one time here, all summer. He’s always just walked in because the door’s always been open.

I move fast then, the old speed, the speed from before, when a car pulled into the lot and I had about forty seconds to be a different kid than the one I’d been all afternoon. I wipe my face with both hands and then with the hem of his shirt, which smells like him and nearly undoes me all over again. I press my fingers under my eyes. I put my legs down off the bed, and pins and needles shoot all the way up to my hips, and I sit up straight and fold my hands in my lap like someone waiting at a bus stop. I take a breath in through my nose and let it out slow. You learn early to have your face ready by the time a door opens. Nobody wants to come home to a kid who’s been crying. It makes them feel like they did something.

“Come in,” I say. It comes out almost normal.

The door opens. His shirt is stuck to his back and dark under the arms. His hair is wet at the temples, and his face is red from the heat, and he’s breathing like he walked back faster than he walked out. He stands in the doorway and looks at my face, and I can see him see it, all of it, everything I just tried to wipe off.

“Tess,” he breathes.