𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑬𝒎𝒑𝒕𝒚

March 28–April.
Days blur.

April 1st came and went.

He was in the booth. 8:00. The tea on her side, steaming. The coffee on his, untouched. The napkin said today. The napkin said this was the day they stopped being alive, and he was sitting in a diner on Duckworth Street watching the steam rise from a cup nobody was going to drink and he was alive. He was alive and she was somewhere in the city, alive or not, and he didn't know which, and the not-knowing was the worst thing he'd ever felt, worse than Rifa, worse than the sound of his father ending the call, worse than the stoop in Queens, because at least on the stoop he'd known what he'd lost.

She didn't come.

He waited until noon. Dottie refilled his coffee four times. Saoirse brought a sandwich he didn't order and didn't eat. The tea went cold. He replaced it. The new tea went cold. He replaced it again. Three teas. Three hours. The booth held him the way it always held him, quietly, without judgment, and the empty seat across from him was the emptiest thing in the world.

At noon he went home. Theodore was at the door. He lay on the studio floor with the dog on his chest and looked at the ceiling and thought: she's alive. She has to be alive. Because I would know. I would feel it. The way you feel a colour disappear from a palette, the absence would be specific. I would know.

He didn't know. He was telling himself a story because the alternative was unbearable.

•  •  •

He went back on Thursday.

8:00. Two cups. The booth. She didn't come.

He went back on Tuesday. She didn't come.

Thursday. Tuesday. Thursday. The days acquired a rhythm that was the opposite of the rhythm they'd built together, not the warm pulse of two people arriving at the same place, but the cold metronome of one person arriving at a place that was missing the other. He showed up. He ordered two cups. He sat in the booth and looked at the empty seat and the tea got cold and Dottie didn't charge for the second cup and nobody said anything because there was nothing to say.

Saoirse tried once. The second Tuesday. She came to the table with a look on her face that meant she was about to say something and had been building the courage for hours.

"Have you called her?"

"Every day."

"Does she answer?"

"No."

Saoirse looked at the empty seat. At the cold tea. At Fayiz, who had not slept properly in eleven days and was starting to look like it, the hollows under his eyes, the jawline sharper, the paint on his hands thicker because painting was the only thing he did now and the painting was the only thing keeping him from going to her flat and standing outside until she opened the door or called the police.

"She'll come back," Saoirse said.

"You don't know that."

"I know that the last time she disappeared, she came back. People who come back once come back again. That's... that's how it works."

She said it with the conviction of a nineteen-year-old who believed in patterns because patterns were the only thing between her and the chaos of a world that had given her two useless brothers and a debt she hadn't earned. He didn't correct her. He let her believe it because one of them should.

☕︎

He painted.

Every night. Every morning. The hours between the diner and sleep filled with canvas after canvas, the studio becoming a gallery of a woman who wasn't there. Her face, the one he'd started weeks ago, the left eye better than the right, he finished. He finished it in one night, working until 3 a.m., Theodore asleep on the good cushion, the north-facing windows black. The eyes came right. Both of them. The left and the right. He didn't know what changed, what unlocked the thing he'd been unable to see, except that he was painting from absence now instead of presence, and absence, it turned out, was the clearest lens he'd ever looked through.

He painted her hands. Wrapped around a cup. The ring catching the light. He painted them four times. The fourth was right.

He painted her shoulder. The angle of it when she was holding something back. The way the coat sat differently when she was armoured versus when she wasn't. He painted the shoulder twice. The second was honest.

He painted the scarf. The green one. Three loops, folded twice. He didn't need the scarf for reference. The scarf was on the hook. The scarf had been on the hook since November and it was still there, still green, still holding the shape of the last time she'd worn it.

The paintings were the best work he'd ever done. He knew this the way he knew certain things, with his chest, not his head. The way Mollie knew his paintings were good, with her body and not her brain. The paintings were honest. The paintings were accurate. The paintings saw her the way he saw her: completely, imperfectly, with the full weight of a person who had been paying attention for six months and was now paying for it.

He was terrified of what that meant. That loss made his hands better. That the best art came from the worst place. That he was producing the most truthful work of his life because the person it was about was gone and the gone was the thing the brush understood.

Rifa had said: I can't be the only thing you paint.

Mollie had never said that. Mollie had said: paint me. And he hadn't. Not when she asked. Not when she was there. He'd said not yet and now the yet was here and she was not and he was painting her in an empty studio at 3 a.m. and the paintings were beautiful and she would never see them.

•  •  •

Three weeks.

Twenty-one days. Six missed breakfasts. Twelve cold teas. Theodore stopped eating on the second week. Not completely, he still ate, Theodore was a dog, dogs ate, but he ate less, and slower, and he left food in the bowl, which he had never done, and Fayiz sat on the floor and watched his dog not eat and thought: he misses her too. The dog misses her and the dog is the most honest creature in this apartment and if the dog misses her then the missing is real and not just the work of a man who has loved too much again.

Theodore sat by the door every Thursday at 7:45.

Every Thursday. 7:45. Fifteen minutes before she'd normally arrive at the diner, which meant fifteen minutes before they'd normally leave the apartment, which was the time Theodore associated with her, not with the diner, not with the booth, with her, with the walk, with the moment the morning changed from before-Mollie to Mollie.

He sat by the door and he waited and he looked at the door with the expression of a dog who had been promised something by the universe and the universe had not delivered and he was not angry, he was not confused, he was just waiting, because waiting was what dogs did, because dogs didn't give up on people, because dogs sat by doors until the door opened or the world ended and they didn't know the difference.

Fayiz watched Theodore sit by the door and he thought about the word. The word he didn't have. The word Dottie said would come when he stopped looking for it.

He was not looking for it.

He was painting. He was sitting in booths. He was ordering tea no one drank. He was lying on the studio floor at 2 a.m. with a dog on his chest. He was calling a number that didn't answer. He was doing everything except looking for the word, and the word was there, he could feel it, the way you could feel a colour before you mixed it, the way you could feel a painting before you started. The word was close. The word was almost.

Theodore waited by the door.

Fayiz waited with him.

☕︎