Six Weeks

On the last night Racquel could not pack, which was ridiculous, because she had done the same suitcase eleven times in six weeks going back and forth between the hotel and the site.

The room in Woodbrook had become hers in the way a room does: her ring on the left side of the sink, her shoes under the chair in the order she took them off, the kettle she had bought in the second week because the hotel kettle tasted of somebody else’s coffee. Tonight all of it had to go into a bag and stop being hers.

She had bought things. That is what you do at the end. Pepper sauce, the brand he liked, four bottles, wrapped in a towel because she had learned that lesson the hard way in March. A shirt she was not sure about. Doubles she had eaten standing up on Ariapita Avenue at eleven o’clock that night with a woman from the audit team, because it was the last chance, and because if she went back to the room too early she was going to sit on the bed and count hours.

· · ·

Six weeks is not a long time. Everybody had said that to her. Six weeks is nothing.

Six weeks is forty-two nights of a ten o’clock phone call, is what it is. And a ten o’clock phone call is a good thing for about nine days, and then it becomes a shape you pour the day into, and by week four you are both reporting. The site. The traffic. What his mother said. Whether the contract will extend.

She had noticed it happening and had not known how to say so. He had noticed it too. She knew he had, because in the fifth week he had said, at the end of one of them, “We sound like two people filing a report,” and she had said, “I know,” and neither of them had done anything about it, because what do you do about it from eleven hundred miles away at ten at night when you both have work in the morning.

· · ·

He called at two.

She was awake. Of course she was awake. The bag was half done on the floor and she was lying across the bed with the air conditioning making the only sound in the room, and the phone lit up and she had it to her ear before the second ring.

“Andre.”

“You sleeping?”

“Clearly.”

“I wasn’t going to call.”

“You were absolutely going to call,” she said. “You have been going to call since about eleven.”

A pause with a smile in it. She could hear his fan. She could hear the particular quality of his front room at two in the morning, a sound she had not realized she knew until she was somewhere else.

“Say something that is not about the flight,” he said.

· · ·

So she did.

She told him about the woman on the audit team who called everybody darling and had a laugh like a car alarm. He told her the tap in the bathroom had started doing the thing again and he had not fixed it and was not going to fix it before tomorrow, and she said she did not care about the tap, and he said he knew, he was just saying it so she would know he had thought about the state of the house.

“I changed the sheets,” he said.

“When?”

“Sunday.”

“Andre, it is Thursday.”

“I changed them Sunday and then I slept on the couch Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so that they would still be fresh,” he said, and she laughed so loudly that she had to put her hand over her mouth for the room next door, and then she stopped laughing, because it was the single most romantic thing anybody had ever done for her and he had said it like a man reporting on maintenance.

· · ·

They talked about what they were going to do, which started as a joke and did not stay one.

He wanted to take her to the place on Hope Road. She said she did not want to go anywhere, she wanted to come in the door and not go back out of it for a day and a half. He said his mother was expecting them Sunday. She said Sunday was fine. Sunday was a long way from Friday afternoon.

“What time you land again?”

“Twenty past two.”

“And then customs.”

“And then customs.”

“So three,” he said. “Half past three.”

“Andre.”

“Mm.”

“Stop doing the arithmetic out loud,” she said, “because I have been doing it in my head for four days and it is making me a person I don’t recognize.”

“What kind of person?”

She lay back on the bed with her arm over her eyes. “The kind who books a seat near the front of the plane,” she said, “so she can get off first.”

He was quiet for a second. Then he said her name, once, in the register he did not use on the ten o’clock calls, and the room in Woodbrook got about ten degrees warmer, and after that the conversation stopped being one she would have repeated to the woman from the audit team.

· · ·

Later, when they were both quiet and neither of them had said anything for a while and neither of them had hung up, she said, “You know what I missed most?”

“Tell me.”

“This is going to sound like nothing.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“When you come in from outside and you put your hand on my back when you pass behind me in the kitchen,” she said. “You don’t even know you do it. You do it going past. Forty-two days and that is the thing I keep thinking about. Not the big things. Your hand on my back for one second going past me to the fridge.”

He did not say anything for long enough that she checked the screen to see if the call had dropped.

“Andre?”

“I’m here,” he said. His voice had gone somewhere. “Go to sleep. You have to be at Piarco for six.”

“I’m not going to sleep.”

“I know,” he said. “But put the phone down and lie there, and I will lie here, and that is close enough for one more night.”

· · ·

She finished the bag at four and slept for an hour and a quarter.

The flight was the flight. She had the seat near the front. She watched the water go from the blue it is over there to the blue it is over here, which is not the same blue and which nobody believes until they have seen both, and somewhere over the middle of it she stopped being able to read the magazine.

They landed at eighteen minutes past two.

Customs took forty minutes and she was sweating through a good shirt by the end of it and she did not care in the slightest. She came out into the arrivals hall at three minutes to three, pushing a trolley with four bottles of pepper sauce wrapped in a towel, into all that noise and all those people holding signs.

He was at the barrier, on the left, where he always stands.

She stopped walking. She was maybe twenty feet away and she stopped, with the trolley, in the middle of the floor, and just looked at him for a second, because in about four seconds this was going to be over and she wanted the four seconds.

Then Andre came around the end of the barrier, and she let go of the trolley.

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