The Late Sitting

The text message from Bruno said fourth floor, room 408, and I remember standing in the freight elevator at eleven at night thinking how weird it was that a gallery kept inventory in a room with a number that high, but I was tired and I was getting paid cash to cover his sick self, so I didn't think too hard about it.

I'm Noor, I'm twenty-eight, and at that point in my life I was working mornings as a lifeguard at a community pool and taking whatever odd shifts my friends threw at me, because rent in this city does not care about your plans. The gallery shift was supposed to be simple. Walk the halls, count the big pieces, tick the boxes on a clipboard, don't touch anything, leave by one. Bruno had done it a dozen times and he made it sound like getting paid to wander a museum with the lights mostly off, which honestly sounded great to me after a summer of screaming children and sunscreen.

The elevator opened on the fourth floor and the corridor smelled faintly of dust and plaster, which I noticed but didn't question, because what do I know about what inventory smells like. My phone said 408 and the doors on that corridor were heavy gray things with little brass numbers, and 408 was at the very end, past a dead fire extinguisher and a stack of empty crates. The door was locked, which struck me as odd for a storage room, but there was a code pad next to it and Bruno had sent me a door code in the same text, so I typed it in, heard the click, and let myself in as quietly as I could, because it was late and I figured everybody sensible had gone home hours ago.

The room was not storage. The room was a studio, a big open one, with high grimy windows along one wall that let in the orange smear of the city, and the floor was littered with plaster dust and tools and scraps of clay gone hard as rock. There were works everywhere, half-finished things draped in sheets and things standing naked and strange in the shadows, an arm without a body, a torso bent like it was listening for something. The only real light came from a single work lamp on a stand in the middle of the room, and under that lamp was a woman, and I was already three steps inside before I saw her.

She had her back to me and she was leaning over a figure on a scaffold, a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, and she was wearing headphones, which explained why she didn't hear the door. I stopped dead, about to back out the way I came, and that was exactly when the floor creaked under my sneaker.

She turned around fast and the chisel slipped out of her hand and hit the concrete with a bright metallic ring that echoed in all that open space. We both froze. She pulled one headphone off her ear and stared at me, and I stared at her, and the air in that room got very thick very fast, because I knew that face. I had known that face for three years of my life and then I had spent two more years not looking at it, and here it was at eleven at night under a work lamp, older by a little, sharper by a little, and absolutely unmistakable.

Maeve.

"Oh my god," she said, and her hand went to her chest, "you scared the absolute hell out of me."

"I'm sorry," I said, and my voice came out weird, high and thin, "I'm sorry, I didn't, I thought this was 408, I thought it was storage, I'm filling in for a friend, the inventory shift, I have the code and everything."

She looked at me the way you'd look at a ghost you'd been half expecting, and she didn't say anything for a second, and then she said my name, just my name, Noor, soft, like she was checking it still worked.

"Hi, Maeve," I said, because what else is there.

"How do you have the code to my studio?"

"I don't, I have the code to 408, that's what the text said." I held up my phone like it was evidence. "Bruno asked me to cover his shift, the inventory count, he sent me the room number and the door code and I just, I typed it in and walked in like an idiot."

She came around the scaffold and picked her chisel up off the floor and stood there turning it over in her fingers, and up close she looked tired in the way artists look tired, the kind of tired that's really just three weeks of deadline. There was plaster dust on her forearms and a smear of it near her jaw and her hair was pushed back with some kind of clip that was losing the fight.

"So Bruno has the code to my studio," she said, mostly to herself. "Of course he does. I told him once, two months ago, when he was helping me move the bronzes, and he probably wrote it in his phone under everything, because Bruno."

"I can go," I said. "Honestly, I'll just go count whatever's in the actual 408 and you can pretend this never happened."

She looked at me then, really looked, and something crossed her face that I couldn't name, and she shook her head slowly.

"Walk into my room in the middle of the night after two years and offer to pretend it never happened," she said. "That's very you, Noor."

Ouch. Fair, but ouch.

"I didn't know it was your room," I said. "I didn't know you were even in this building. I thought you moved across town after we..."

"After you left," she said, and she set the chisel down on the bench with a care that looked a lot like not slamming it down. "Yeah, I moved studios. Cheaper rent, higher ceilings. That was two years ago, in case you lost count."

"I didn't lose count."

"Good."

And then we just stood there in the middle of her studio with the lamp humming and the city glowing through those dirty windows, and I took stock of her the way you take stock of someone you used to know by heart. Twenty-nine now. Same ink stain on the side of her right hand where she rests it. Same habit of crossing her arms and then uncrossing them like she can't decide what she's defending. She'd gotten a little tattoo on her wrist I didn't recognize, a small black line, and I hated how badly I wanted to ask about it.

"So the inventory," I said finally, because silence was going to kill me faster than awkwardness would. "Is there actual inventory in this room, or did Bruno send me to count your sculptures?"

"There's a storeroom across the hall, 409," she said. "He's off by one. He's done it before, the idiot."

"Great. So I'll just."

"Or," she said, and then she stopped, and she pressed her lips together, and I watched her decide something. "Or you could stay for a minute. I've got coffee going cold on that bench and a deadline in nine days and about two years of questions, and I would honestly rather talk to you than count crates."

"That depends on the questions."

"Yeah," she said, and she laughed a little, and the laugh did something to the room, it loosened everything up one notch. "Fair. Sit down, Noor. The stool's under the sheet, mind the plaster, it gets everywhere and it does not come out of jeans."

I pulled the stool out and sat, and she dragged a folding chair over from the bench and sat down across from me with her cold coffee, and for a minute neither of us said anything, and the strangest part was that it wasn't even a bad silence. It was the old silence, the apartment-on-a-Thursday-night silence, and that scared me more than the chisel hitting the floor had.

"You look good," she said.

"You look tired."

"I am tired. I've got a commission due and the client changes her mind weekly." She sipped the coffee and made a face at it. "Why are you here, really? Not the shift. I mean why are you in this city, doing gallery shifts at midnight, when the last I heard you were talking about moving to the coast."

"The coast didn't work out," I said. "Long story, bad winter, came back in March."

"Huh."

"What's that mean, huh?"

"It means the coast didn't work out and somehow I'm glad, and I'm trying to decide if I'm allowed to be glad," she said, and she looked at me over the rim of the cup. "You're the one who left, Noor. You get that I get to be a little weird about this."

"Yeah," I said quietly. "I get that."

Because she was right, and I knew it, and I had known it for two years, and sitting there in the dust and the lamplight with her was the first time it had ever felt like something I might actually be able to fix instead of just carry.

"Okay," I said, and I turned my cup around on the bench because my hands wanted a job. "Ask your questions. Two years of them, you've earned it."

"Where do I even start." She leaned back in the folding chair and it creaked under her. "Do you remember the thing you actually said when you left? Because I do. I've got it memorized like a stupid song."

"I said I needed to figure out who I was without you."

"See, and the crazy thing is I believed you. I sat here and I believed you and I gave you six months, and then a year, and then I stopped counting out loud but I never actually stopped." She said it evenly, no heat in it, which somehow made it worse. "So question one. Did you figure it out?"

"Kind of," I said, and she huffed a laugh that wasn't really a laugh.

"Kind of. Great. That's worth two years."

"It's worth more than that and you know it, or you wouldn't have let me sit down." She didn't argue with that, she just looked at me, and I pushed on before I lost my nerve. "I figured out that who I am without you is someone who swims laps at six in the morning and teaches kids to float and goes home to an apartment where the only voice is the radio. So yeah. I figured it out. The answer was lousy."

Maeve set her cup down on the floor, slowly, like she was buying herself time.

"You live alone?"

"Since March. It's a one bedroom over a laundromat, it smells like dryer sheets at all hours, it's fine." I shrugged. "It's fine, Maeve. It's just not."

"Yeah," she said softly. "I know that tune."

And then the silence came back, but this time she was the one who broke it, and what she said caught me so far off guard that I actually looked up at the ceiling as if the answer might be written there.

"Can I tell you something dumb? Something I probably shouldn't say out loud at midnight to someone who walked in by accident?"

"Those are usually the best things."

"I still think about your hands." She said it flat and fast, the way you rip off a bandage, and then she stared at her own hands like they'd betrayed her. "All the time. Not even in a, you know, a loaded way, just. You had steady hands. You'd hold a coffee cup with both of them and your thumbs would line up, and I put that in a drawing once, did I ever show you?"

"You showed me," I said, because I remembered, God help me, I remembered the drawing, it had lived on our fridge for a year.

"And then for two years I kept putting them in things. Sketchbooks full of hands that aren't yours anymore but started out yours, and every sculptor I know does the thing where the model is supposed to be nobody, and I've been lying to every sculptor I know." She stopped and rubbed her palms on her thighs. "Okay. That's out. That was dumb. Your turn to be weirded out."

"I'm not weirded out." My voice came out lower than I meant it to. "I'm the opposite of weirded out, which is its own problem."

"So what's in your sketchbook, metaphorically."

"I think about the way you said my name when you were annoyed. Nobody says it like that anymore. It's just Noor, flat, like a stamp on an envelope. You used to make it two syllables with a whole argument in the middle."

She laughed for real then, a short surprised sound, and she covered her face with the ink-stained hand, and I watched her shoulders come down from wherever they'd been living since I walked in.

"God. Okay. We're doing this, then." She stood up, and she held out her hand, and I looked at it, and I swear my pulse did something undignified. "Come here. There's something I want you to see, and I've been going back and forth since you walked in on whether I'd ever show you, and apparently tonight's the night, so."

I took her hand and let her pull me up.

She led me past the sheeted shapes to the far corner, where a figure stood on a low turntable under a drop cloth, and she caught the cloth by one corner and pulled it off in one motion, the way she used to pull tablecloths, all flourish and dust.

It was a woman, about half finished, in plaster, taller than life by a little, one arm finished and the other still a rough block. The pose was simple. She was standing with her weight on the back foot, shoulders turned, head beginning to swing around toward the viewer, but not all the way. Caught in the middle of turning away from something. Or turning back. You couldn't tell which, and the entire trick of it was that, I could feel the trick working on me from six feet away.

"She's due in nine days," Maeve said. "The client wants a dancer. I keep telling her she's not a dancer."

"What is she?"

"You tell me."

So I walked around it, slow, and the lamp threw my shadow across the plaster, and somewhere on the far side of it I stopped walking, because I was looking at the hands, at the finished one, and the fingers were long and the thumbs were.

Oh.

"Maeve."

"Say it," she said from behind me, quiet. "I want to hear somebody say it besides me."

"The hands are mine." I turned around and she was standing there with plaster dust on her forearms and her jaw and that little black line on her wrist, and she wasn't hiding from it at all. "You built a woman turning away and you gave her my hands."

"I built a woman turning away and I gave her your hands and your shoulder line and a jaw I had to change twice because the first version made me throw my mallet across the room." She said it all in one breath. "Two years, Noor. Two years of telling myself the model was