More Than Words

Nina hung the jeans back up and opened the drawer in the night table she remembered was on her mother’s side of the bed. Inside she found a drawing she had no recollection of making. It was a yard with grass and two bunnies. Nina had written Hoppy Sunday! on it. And she’d labeled all of the items in Spanish and English with arrows—tree arbol, her younger self had written, bunny conejito, sky cielo, sun sol, lawn cesped, flowers flores. She wondered now if it was a project her mother had given her, the Spanish professor helping her daughter learn, or if it was something Nina had created on her own to make her mother happy.

Either way the drawing made her smile. She wondered if Rafael had made similar drawings, or if it was different, growing up bilingual, two languages being an innate part of who you were instead of learning the building blocks of a second language one by one. Nina pulled her phone out of her back pocket and snapped a picture of the drawing.

Then she looked around the room some more. There was her parents’ wedding picture standing on the dresser next to a picture of her mother holding an infant Nina. Both of them were asleep on a couch, Nina on her mother’s chest, her hands gripping her mother’s wavy, dark hair. Nina picked it up, trying to see herself in the tapering of her mother’s fingers, or the tilt of her neck. She thought maybe the shape of their earlobes was the same.

It was mind-blowing to be here. This place she grew up in but didn’t. This house she had known but forgotten. It was a place where memories lived. Where they’d been stored up waiting for her, but she never knew. And now that she did, now that she’d found them, the one person who’d been keeping them from her was the only person she wanted to share them with.

39

There was a knock on the door, and Nina went downstairs to answer it. Tim was back, carrying two bags of food.

“You wouldn’t believe what I found,” he said as he walked into the kitchen and put them down on the island.

Nina began unpacking and smiled, realizing Tim had bought everything he usually bought for his own apartment. Roasted chicken, kalamata olives, cheddar cheese. At least dinner would be easy. “What did you find?” she asked.

He pulled an elaborate gingerbread kit out of the second bag of groceries. One that would look like a castle, with a drawbridge and parapets and four different turrets. “Just like the one we made a million years ago. The store was unpacking these when I got there—the first holiday shipment of the season.”

* * *

• • •

“This is looking even better than our castle did when we were kids,” Tim said, later, as he held two gingerbread walls together so that Nina could pipe icing on the outside corner.

“I don’t know, that was a pretty good one,” Nina said, concentrating on keeping the icing straight and even. “If my memory serves.” Though, of course, now she was wondering if it did.

“We had fun when we were kids, didn’t we.” Tim moved on to the balustrade, icing the bottom so it would stick to the top of the terrace before Nina added the piping. “We’ve always made a great team.”

Nina thought about the epic sand sculptures they built on Georgica Beach with their dads’ occasional directions, the surprise party they made when they found out that Richard, who took care of the house in East Hampton, was turning forty, roping in all the adults to celebrate and getting the cook they had that summer to make a cake in the shape of a football, since that was Richard’s favorite sport. She remembered, too, how Tim joined her under the table during the first Christmas without her mom, when she couldn’t face the adults anymore, with the sympathy in their eyes. Tim had crawled under the table with a plate of cookies. “Thought you might be hungry,” was all he’d said. And they’d stayed there eating cookies until she was ready to come out again.

“We did. Nina and Tim, Friends Until the End—isn’t that what our parents used to say?”

Tim paused in his icing to look at Nina.

“Okay, I’m too gooey,” she said. “I have to wash my hands or I’m going to stick to the piping bag.” Nina got up from the table, but Tim stopped her with his hand on her wrist.

“Wait,” he said, his voice serious. She sat back down. “I want to say something. I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this the right way ever since the conversation we had in your dad’s kitchen.”

Nina’s heart sped up. She knew what was coming next. Unconsciously her eye went to her left ring finger. She licked off the tiny bit of frosting that was on her knuckle.

Tim cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, with your dad gone, with our lives changing. It’s been hard, and I know I haven’t always said the right thing or done the right thing, but Nina, I don’t want to lose you. I keep thinking about what would happen if you died, how shattered I’d be. I know, it’s morbid and awful, but I can’t get the image out of my mind. And I keep thinking about being here with you now, being with you at your dad’s funeral. I want to always be with you. The world seems more manageable when we travel through it together. This is what I should’ve said before, but it took me a while to figure out how to say it.

“I’ve never loved anyone else the way I love you. When I dated other women, I was always looking for what we have, the closeness, the comfort, the unconditional support. When I think about children, I think about having them with you. When I think about living out the rest of my life, I think about doing it with you by my side. That awe I felt when I first met you, when you were fifteen hours old and I cried when they made me leave you—I don’t know if it’s ever gone away.” His eyes were wide, open, almost pleading. He got down on one knee and pulled a ring box out of his back pocket. “I couldn’t get to your mom’s ring,” he said, “because of the will and everything. So . . . I bought you a new one. And maybe that’s better. It’s our story, not anyone else’s.”

“Oh, Tim,” Nina said. She looked at him, the person she’d known and loved her entire life, and took the box from his hand, opening it up as she did. Inside was an exquisitely beautiful ring. A round diamond surrounded by sapphires, with smaller diamonds set into the platinum band that would encircle her finger. The sapphires were the same color as the drop her father had gotten her, the same color as the bracelet, as her eyes. Of course she would say yes. Of course she would.

“Nina?” he asked, softly, as he stood. Then he reached over and brushed frosting off her cheek and she laughed, sliding the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly.

“I’m a mess,” she said. “But yes. Of course yes. And, Tim, this ring is gorgeous.”

Tim kissed her, and she wrapped her arms around him. And she started to cry.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Tim said, wiping the tears from her cheeks with his fingers. His breath smelled like the gumdrop he’d just eaten. “We’re going to make it okay.”

“I know,” she said, leaning her head against Tim’s chest, feeling its solidity and warmth. Feeling his heart beat so strong and steady. He knew her. He was the man her father had always wanted her to be with—whom he’d given his permission to the day before he died. Maybe this was her dad’s last gift to her.

40

That night, Nina had wanted to sleep in her old bedroom, so they made up her double bed and climbed into it, under the white eyelet canopy. Nina took the ring off and put it next to her on the bedside table. She often slept in jewelry, but that ring took up a solid third of her finger. It seemed too big to sleep in, like she could hurt herself with it.

“Everything’s going to be better from here,” Tim said.

They’d decided to keep their engagement secret for a while, even from his parents. It didn’t seem like the right time to announce something joyful, so close to her dad’s death.

Nina answered Tim with a kiss. Then they snuggled and cuddled, running their fingers up and down each other’s bodies, along the curves of their torsos. In other relationships Nina had been in, physical attraction had been one of the main drivers of the relationship. She’d dated Alex the summer she lived in D.C. after finishing her MBA. They would spend whole weekends without putting on clothes. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. In photos he would smile serenely while secretly sliding his hand along her backside or, if they were sitting at a table, between her legs. The last night, before she headed back to New York, they’d gone to the Lincoln Memorial at two A.M. and had sex in the shadows of the monument, her sitting on his lap, a long skirt keeping them shielded from any passersby.

They’d both gone into that relationship knowing it would be a summer fling. He was joining the State Department, heading to Moscow in September. And she was fine with that. Sometimes the intensity of their attraction scared her. She found herself doing things she knew she shouldn’t—calling in sick to work so she could spend the day with him, blowing off plans with college friends because all of a sudden his night was free. Alex never asked, never pressured her; she wanted to do these things to be with him, and that was what she found frightening. Tim never made her feel that way. He made her feel safe. In control.