Four Days

Saoirse POV

The envelope was on my doormat on Monday morning at seven-eleven.

I want to tell you what that exact time felt like, because it had a quality I am not sure I am going to be able to describe correctly. Seven-eleven was the time I left my apartment on Monday mornings to drive to a job in Williamsburg. The envelope had been placed on the mat with the specific timing of a person who knew the door would be opening within minutes, and who had not wanted me to find it on Sunday night, when I would have had to carry it through the long hours of a Sunday evening alone, but had wanted me to find it on my way out into a Monday I already had reasons to be in.

That was a kindness.

I noted the kindness.

I picked the envelope up.

──

I want to tell you what was inside, because the inside was a small object that contained one of the larger pieces of information he had given me yet.

A slip of paper. White. Handwritten.

Three things on the slip.

An address, a number, a street name in Brooklyn Heights, no zip code, no apartment number, no building name. He knew I knew how to find an address with that information. He knew, also, that the address told me which house. Brooklyn Heights had houses, not just buildings. The address was a house.

A day. Thursday.

A time. Eight PM.

Nothing else.

No name. No request to confirm. No alternative plan if I did not appear.

I had and this is the part I want to be careful about *recognized the handwriting* before I had finished registering the words.

Inside the book I had loved at twenty-three, on the title page, there was a single word in my mother’s hand. She had given me the book for my birthday and had written, in the small slanted writing I had grown up with, the single word *Saoirse* and a small heart. There was nothing else on the page.

Underneath my mother’s word, in a handwriting I had not, until I saw it on Monday morning at seven-eleven, consciously remembered seeing before, there was a second word. The word was at the bottom of the title page. It had been in pencil. The pencil had been very faint and very recent. I had not noticed it on Sunday in the bookstore because I had been holding the book closed for most of those six minutes, but I had in the way a person registers an object she has loved opened the title page once, briefly, to confirm my mother’s word was still there, and underneath my mother’s word I had seen, without consciously registering, the second.

The second word was *yours.*

The handwriting on the slip on the doormat was the same handwriting as the second word.

He had written, in pencil, on the title page of a book he had moved from the floor of my living room on a Wednesday morning two months ago, the single word *yours,* and he had in the way the man he was put information into the world trusted that I would find it when I was ready to find it, and trusted that I would understand what the finding meant.

The book was mine.

The slip in my hand was him acknowledging that the book had always been mine.

The address on the slip was him asking me, in the only language we had ever spoken to each other, whether I was willing to come and see who he was.

I went to work.

I drove the etching to Williamsburg.

I came home.

──

Tuesday I had a delivery in Brooklyn Heights.

I want to be honest about how I felt about that, because I had a delivery in Brooklyn Heights on Tuesdays roughly every six weeks, and Tuesday’s delivery had been on my schedule for ten days, and I had not, until I had the slip of paper in my apartment, thought of Brooklyn Heights as a neighborhood my body would be visiting in a different mode than the freight-handling mode I had spent the last three years occupying it in.

The address on the slip was four blocks from the address of my delivery.

I made the delivery. I returned the etching to my client a small Manet drawing in a cherry frame and I left the building. I got into the van. I sat in the driver’s seat with my hands on the wheel for a moment, and I considered, for the first time, the geography of the thing I had been carrying since Monday morning.

Four blocks.

I drove home.

I want to tell you what I did not do. I did not drive past his street. I did not, in the van, with the slip in the pocket of my coat on the passenger seat, allow myself to take Henry to Pierrepont and turn east. I drove the way I always drove from a Brooklyn Heights delivery, which was directly to the BQE and back to Ditmas Park, and the choosing to drive that way was, in the quiet small way the days were beginning to be made of, its own kind of answer.

I was not going to come early. I was not going to scout. I was going to come on Thursday at eight or I was not going to come at all, and either choice was going to be a choice I made on Thursday, in my apartment, in front of a mirror, with a slip of paper on a kitchen table and the trees outside the window.

That was Tuesday.

──

Wednesday, Priya called.

She called at six PM. She said: “Have you eaten. I’m getting Thai.”

I said: “I’m not hungry. I’m okay.”

There was a small silence on the line. Priya, in fifteen years of friendship, had never once received ‘I’m okay’ from me as a complete sentence. The two of us had a vocabulary that did not include ‘I’m okay’ unless it was being deployed as a lie, and Priya knew that, and I knew Priya knew that, and the silence on the line was the small careful silence of a woman absorbing the information that her best friend had used the most generic possible deflection on her.

After a moment she said: “Okay, love. I’ll bring Thai Friday. Don’t argue.”

“I won’t argue.”

We hung up.

I sat at the kitchen table.

I had, that Wednesday at six oh-three PM, lied to Priya for the second time in my life, and the second time had been smaller than the first and had cost me, for reasons I am not going to fully explain, more.

The reason I am not going to fully explain it is that the second lie had been a lie I told to clear space in my Thursday evening for a man.

I sat with that for a long time.

I did not, even sitting with it, change my decision.

The decision had not become a decision yet. The decision was still, on Wednesday night, a thing I was permitting to assemble in me.

──

Thursday, I dressed at six PM.

I want to tell you about the dressing because the dressing was the moment I understood I was going.

I had not, until I opened the closet, made the decision. I had told myself, all day, that I would decide at seven. I had told myself, in the shower, that I would decide on the drive over if I drove over. I had told myself, even, that the decision could be made at the curb of his building that I could drive to Brooklyn Heights and park and sit in the van for ten minutes and then turn around and drive home, and the going would not have committed me to the entering.

At six PM I opened the closet, and I took out the black dress.

The black dress was the dress I had bought myself in 2019, before Derek, with money from the first big freight contract I had landed on my own. The dress was simple, well-cut, sleeveless. The dress had been hanging in the closet at 437 Birchwood for three years and I had not worn it once, because Derek had said, the one time I had worn it on a date with him before the wedding, that it made me look hungry. He had meant the word the way he meant most words. I had stopped wearing the dress.

I had packed it in the duffel on the night.

I put it on.

I looked at myself in the mirror of my own apartment on Thursday at six-eleven PM, and I understood, looking at the woman in the black dress, that I had been deciding to go since Monday morning at seven-eleven, and that the decision had simply been waiting for my body to put on the dress that confirmed it.

I did my hair.

I did not call my mother.

I did not call Priya.

I did not, at any point that evening, allow myself to consider whether I was making a mistake, because the consideration was not what the evening was for. The evening was for arriving at a door in Brooklyn Heights at eight PM and seeing what was behind it.

At seven thirty-four I picked up the keys.

At seven thirty-six I went down the stairs.

At seven thirty-eight I started the van.

At seven fifty-six I parked four houses down from the address on the slip.

I sat in the van. The street was quiet. The brownstones were the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights — dark, expensive, lit warmly from within, the windows of his block showing the small intimate evenings of people whose lives I did not know.

At seven fifty-nine I got out of the van.

At eight oh-one I knocked on the door of a house I had never been inside.