5. What He Stopped Talking About

October came in cold and complicated. Nora had adjusted the plan. New timeline, new target date, new calculations entered into the planner with a steadiness she had to manufacture from scratch each morning and which became more genuine as the days passed, the way most things became more genuine with practice. She had picked up an extra shift at the pharmacy on Thursday evenings. She had found two small scholarship applications she'd missed in her first pass and submitted both before their deadlines. She was, by any reasonable measure, handling it. What she was less good at handling was the way October seemed to be doing something to Eli. It wasn't dramatic. He didn't stop showing up or start being unkind. He was still there in the kitchen at odd hours, still noticed things, still left the TV on low when he fell asleep on the now-functional futon and turned it off when he woke. But there was something careful about him in October that hadn't been there in September, a quality of guardedness that was different from his usual self-containment, as though he was managing something that required most of his internal resources. Sofia noticed too. She mentioned it to Nora in the sideways manner of someone who wants to discuss something but isn't sure it's her story to tell. "Our dad called," Sofia said, one evening when Eli was out. She was painting at the kitchen table, which she did sometimes when the light in her room was wrong. "Like, last week. He does this occasionally — swoops in, wants to be present, makes it about himself, leaves. Eli's not great at —" She trailed off, mixed a color, started again. "He spent four years writing songs that were mostly about that, and then he signed with this small label and they dropped him after one EP because the sound wasn't commercial enough, and now he doesn't — he doesn't really write anymore. He says he does, but the notebook he carries around? I don't think he opens it." Nora absorbed this. "You don't have to tell me this," she said. "I know." Sofia looked at her painting. "I'm telling you because you're here every day and you're going to notice that he's being weird and I'd rather you understand why than just think he's being weird for no reason." "I'm not going to think badly of him," Nora said, which came out more certain than she'd planned. Sofia looked at her with the particular look of a person filing information. The thing was: October or not, the late-night kitchen conversations had continued. They happened the way things happened between people who shared a space and kept similar insomnia hours — not planned, not avoided, just there. They talked about small things and occasionally, when the hour got late enough that social caution wore thin, about slightly larger ones. She had told him, on a Tuesday at 1 a.m., about her father. Not the whole story — just the shape of it: that he'd left when she was twelve, that the debt was partly a legacy of the gap he'd left in the finances, that she had decided somewhere around age fourteen that plans were the thing you made when you couldn't rely on other people to catch you. He had listened without filling the silence unnecessarily, which was the thing she appreciated most about talking to him. "What happened with the label?" she asked, on the night after Sofia had told her about the EP. It was late October, a Friday, and she had finished a study session and found him in the kitchen doing nothing in particular, which was its own kind of thing. He looked at her with the expression she had learned to identify as the face he made when he was deciding whether to answer or redirect. He answered. "They wanted me to change the sound," he said. "More accessible. More — I don't know, more like other things. I said no and we went back and forth for about six months and then they said it wasn't working and that was that." A pause. "I was twenty-two. I had been doing that for three years. I thought I knew what I was doing." "You did know what you were doing," she said. "Just not what they wanted." He looked at her. That specific look — the one that recalibrated something. "Yeah," he said, after a moment. "That's — yeah." "Do you still write?" The pause before his answer was a different length than usual. "Sometimes," he said. "Mostly I think about writing and then —" He stopped. Made a gesture that was the physical equivalent of an incomplete sentence. "It's harder when you don't know if you're doing it for yourself or for the version of yourself you thought you were going to be." Nora looked at him across the small kitchen table, and she thought: I know exactly what that is. I know exactly that specific kind of hard, and I've never heard anyone put words to it. She didn't say this. What she said was: "That makes sense." He nodded, and looked at his hands, and didn't say anything else for a while. The kitchen clock marked the minutes. Somewhere outside, a car went by with its window down and a fragment of music floated briefly into their silence and then was gone. Neither of them moved to end the night.