Chapter 12 — The Silence After

Grief is not linear and neither is heartbreak, but both follow a logic of their own if you wait long enough.In the first week, Maya was angry. The clean, clarifying kind of angry that makes you productive in brief, brittle bursts. She rearranged her classroom. She marked every piece of work her students had submitted. She reorganized her kitchen cupboards at eleven PM on a Thursday.In the second week, she was sad. The slow, waterlogged kind that sat in her chest and made everything slightly heavier than usual. She went to work. She came home. She ate meals that were technically nutritious and had no taste.In the third week, she picked up the red umbrella to throw it away and then put it back by the door, and that told her something she wasn't ready to hear.She didn't look for him. She'd considered it — had typed his name into a search bar at 2am and then deleted it — but some part of her held to the request in the index card. Please don't look for me. She hated that she honored it. She honored it anyway.She called Priya on the second night. Priya said the things a good best friend says: I'm here, I'm coming over, that absolute bastard, no actually let's not call names yet, tell me everything.Maya told her everything. The index card. The empty apartment. The cold side of the bed.Priya did not say I told you so, which was the measure of her."He gave you no explanation at all?""Four sentences. He said he'd explain when he could.""And you believe he will?"Maya thought about it. Really thought. She thought about the specific quality of his honesty, the way he never performed, the way even his silences were real."I don't know what I believe," she said.* * *November came in grey and purposeful. Maya threw herself into the school's autumn art exhibition, which she ran every year and which was, this year, the most aggressively curated it had ever been because she needed something to organize.The children's work went up on the walls. Self-portraits, landscapes, abstracts. One boy — Marcus, six years old, currently at war with the colour purple — had produced a painting he called 'the dark but with something inside it.' It was a canvas of near-black with a single spot of gold in the centre.Maya looked at it for a long time.She hung it in the place of honour.* * *On a Tuesday in mid-November she went to Birch & Brew. She sat at the table by the window — their table, though she didn't let herself call it that — and ordered a chamomile tea and graded papers and did not look at the door.She went the next Tuesday too. And the next.On the fourth Tuesday, the barista said: "Your friend hasn't been in for a while."Maya looked up."The guy with the camera. He used to come every week.""I know," Maya said. "Yeah."The barista nodded, moved on. Maya looked at her papers.She thought: he was real. Whatever else, he was real. What we had was real.She thought: that is not enough, but it is something.She held onto it. The something.