I should have left. I knew that. The rational part of my brain—the part that sounded like my mother, like every etiquette book, like the unspoken law of cousins and family gatherings—was screaming at me to turn around, to go sweat it out in my tiny room.
I stopped breathing.
Her fingers were warm. Light as a fallen petal. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t open her eyes. In that half-dream state, perhaps she thought the chaise was wider, or that the warmth beside her was just the memory of a body. -ENG- Sleeping Cousin -RJ353254-
Either way, I have never sat so still in my life. And I have never felt so entirely awake.
I froze.
You are there.
And then, without opening her eyes, she whispered—so softly I almost thought I imagined it— "Tu es là." I should have left
Minutes passed. Or an hour. Time had turned syrupy. A moth bumbled against the screen, frantic and soft. I watched her breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The rhythm began to sync with my own heart.
A loon called across the water. Long and low and sad. Lena’s fingers twitched, then curled slightly, as if she were holding onto something in a dream. I stopped breathing
It was the summer of the broken air conditioner, the summer the magnolia trees dropped their petals like crumpled love letters onto the driveway, and the summer I learned that a sleeping person is a locked room.