You shouldn’t do anything you’re not prepared for, my uncle’s boyfriend told him, and I could hear the shuffle of his feet in slippers, the sharp sound of the spoon against the pan.
“I can leave,” Watson was saying. “We can pick this up tomorrow. I know we haven’t talked at all about the case.”
“The case.” I’d forgotten. The sheet monster with Matilda’s face pinned to it, the gang of feuding friends around the supper table, Anwen in her floral dress. It’s all her fault.
I reached for his hands and settled them on my hips. “Come in with me,” I said. “Stay over.”
Inside the flat, a pot clattered loudly against the stove, and for once, neither of us startled.
“What are you thinking?” he asked. “I can see those gears moving. What do you want?”
I wanted to know who I was, now, in what felt like the aftermath of my life. I had survived my childhood. I was an adult, standing with the boy I loved, doing meaningful work that I had trained for.
I reached up to smooth Watson’s brow. The neatness of my life now was shocking to me, a girl with such ragged edges. I wasn’t sure if I could fit inside its borders.
But I wanted him. I always did. “I want to tell you more stories about my aging aunt,” I told him, instead, and when he realized I was teasing, he wound his fingers into my hair and kissed me, a promise in a language I couldn’t yet speak.
Ten
I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOFT, RHYTHMIC KNEADING of my cat’s paws on my stomach. When I opened my eyes, Mouse peered at me, shook herself all over, and then leapt from the bed.
Watson didn’t stir at such slight movement. It took more than that to wake him—I knew that from lingering in doorways, seeing him passed out on his back on his father’s couch, his eyes bruised underneath the arm flung over them. I often felt like some kind of wretched war bride, watching him recover from whatever trouble we’d gotten ourselves into. Moments like that, brief and far between, before I pulled him off to the next adventure.
But we had nowhere to go this morning, not yet, and still I couldn’t keep myself from stirring. I slid out from under the coverlet and picked up my dressing gown from the floor. My black mood had evaporated, as it often did, with the dawn. I had at least a few hours until it returned.
I had a cigarette by the window, a cup of tea in the kitchen. On the counter was a note from my uncle, written in his leisurely cursive: In London with Stephen through the weekend; he has tickets for Hamilton! You and your young man have fun. Call if you need anything xxxx.
I read the note over again. The flat was ours, then. I’d always been allowed a measure of freedom (see: boarding school, Berlin, the boy asleep in my bedroom), but Leander had been so present these past months—making meals, arranging doctors’ appointments—that I found myself reflexively looking over my shoulder, expecting to see him in the sitting room with a book braced against one knee, calling out, Charlotte, do you want toast soldiers with your eggs?
My stomach rumbled. I did, in fact, want toast soldiers with my eggs.
After spending some time with Anwen’s text messages, I stubbed out my cigarette in a coffee mug and began pulling things from the cupboards. There was a loaf of good sourdough bread on the counter, a pot of Araminta’s honey, a pair of avocados, some jam. There was a carton of brown eggs in the fridge, vegetables in the crisper. Onions in a wire basket, and potatoes. Butter and margarine.
Oil was for cooking. I knew that abstractly. I opened up the cupboard above the stove and pulled down bottles one by one. Olive oil, sunflower, sesame, coconut. I lined them all up on the counter, then redid my alignment alphabetically, then from largest bottle to smallest. I picked up the avocado and poked at it, the way I’d seen people do in markets. I lifted each egg to the light, then shook them, then placed them delicately back in the carton.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t prepare food. I had done so, often, for myself. Sandwiches, wraps, a salad. Things that required assembly more than art. I had grown up with a housekeeper, which was the sort of privilege that made one into an ornament, a useless decoration of a girl; I had never in my life made something for someone else that wasn’t a cup of tea. True, I could download a food app on my phone or leaf through one of the cookbooks Leander kept on the counter (though I didn’t want to consider why he owned a copy of 38 Meals for Your Picky Toddler), but I was intelligent. I was capable. I could figure this out for myself.
An hour later, I nudged open the bedroom door, carrying a tray.
Watson sat up on his elbows. “What do you have there?” he asked, his voice coated in sleep.
“I made you breakfast.”
“How domestic of you.” He picked up his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. “That’s—that’s a rather large plate you’ve got there. Plates?”
“This is tray one of four,” I said, placing it at the end of the bed.
He blinked at me. Perhaps he was still tired.
“Don’t begin eating until you see all your options,” I told him, and went off to fetch the next platter.
By the time I’d arranged it all on my coverlet to my satisfaction, Watson had roused himself appropriately. He’d put on one of my oversized sleep shirts—CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS—and poured himself a cup of coffee. That surprised me; he usually took tea.
“I need real caffeine to deal with this.” He lofted a piece of toast. “Can you explain this?”
“Salt, fat, acid, heat.”
For a long moment, Watson inspected it. “Holmes,” he said. “This sort of looks like cat food. So you should maybe explain.”
“I read it this spring, in a magazine, in that facility in London.” I sat down in my armchair, resisting the urge to light another cigarette. “I was supposed to reconfigure my relationship with food, you know, and so my therapist as an experiment gave me a stack of cookery magazines and told me to pick out what sounded ‘good.’ None of it did. All these garish close-ups of food arranged in pans, as though they were strange decomposing art. But one of the chefs they interviewed, some Danish man, said that the only thing you needed to know to cook was that every dish had to balance ‘salt, fat, acid, and heat.’”
“And you stopped reading there.”
“The brain can only hold so much information,” I reminded him. “If that was all I needed to know on the subject, I could move on to studying something interesting, like blood spatter.”
“And so what am I holding?” Watson asked, gesturing at me with the toast.
“That,” I said, “is tinned herring, cottage cheese, lemon juice, and a green substance from a jar with a rubbed-off label that smelled like tomatillos and motor oil.”
“I see,” Watson said, his expression perfectly blank. “And this one?”
“That is bacon, egg, avocado, sriracha”—he was already putting it into his mouth—“and a drizzle of Diet Coke.”
Watson only paused his chewing for a moment. “It’s not bad,” he said, mouth full, and went in for another slice.
“I added lemon. I know you like a lemon with your soda.” I sat back. “The rest of those are in similar permutations; the bread was an easy vehicle for their delivery.”