Free What I Had Before I Had You by Sarah Cornwell

hunch.”
    “It’s just crazy,” she mutters, sitting down on the steps to wait.
    I push the door open. The basement is completely dark. I step inside, and it is just like the first time. Back through the square of the door, I can see Carrie sitting with her elbows on her knees, but the farther I move inside, the smaller she becomes until I can hardly see her at all. The staircase is darker than I remember. My feet bump into the first step. I imagine wild-eyed, murderous men waking in the dark.
    I ascend by feel, and as my eyes adjust, I can make out more and more: the sconces on the walls, the depth of the landings. I call out, “Daniel?” My voice rings to the top of the building and bounces back down. There is a creak above me. At each landing, I call for him, and always the creaking is from a higher floor, until I am at the top, passing between the burned-out studs of what was once the door to the honeymoon suite.
    I emerge into wind. The walls are partial, jagged lath and cinder that comes away in my hand. One whole wall is gone, the suite open to the ocean. I could just step out into nothing. This was the wall with the big window, the one we all climbed out of. I danced here, in this spot. And over there, that was the wall with the mural. I feel each step with my toes before I shift my weight. I call, “Daniel?”
    Something bursts out of the darkness, and I shout. It hits my ankles and glances away. Pale furry hindquarters disappear around a corner. Then the cat creeps back in, staying low, to look at me. He is all bones. The last time I stood here, I would have trapped him in a milk crate and taken him home.
    In my childhood, there were always animals: stinky lovelorn dogs and pregnant cats to birth in our laundry room and broken-legged mice that we kept in shoe boxes full of moss. I never had a stuffed animal, because my mother thought that real ones deserved our care. They were free to come and go, and not a few of them ended up as grease on the parkway, cats especially. We buried front halves and back halves of things so many times that I learned to love generally and with measure. The animals were not allowed in the nursery. That rule was strict. After all, reasoned my mother, cats have been known to smother infants, and even the sweetest dog, when provoked, will bite.
    For a few years when I was very young, we had an old parrot called the Admiral who spouted nautical phrases like “Thar she blows” and “Come about,” sending us into bellyaching fits of laughter. My mother inherited the Admiral after the death of a client, his secret nautical enthusiasms outed by his bird. The Admiral ate Cheerios from my bowl and rode on my shoulder, to the oohing and ahhing of the neighbor kids. When he flew off, I waited days and days in hopes that he would come back, that he loved me more than he loved the endless sky. When it was finally clear that he was gone forever, I wailed for hours, and my mother held me on her lap and stroked my hot face with her fingers and told me that the only sure thing was her and me, and the rest of the world could do you wrong, and this was how it felt.
    SAM ASKED IF I loved the man I was sleeping with—the one he found out about—and I couldn’t answer. People talk about love in a binary that makes no sense to me. Check a box, yes or no. The man in question worked at a bike store, and I loved finding grease marks where he had thoughtlessly rubbed the back of his neck as he worked. I loved his square golden jaw and the delight he could take in the stupidest things—YouTube videos of cats, songs he liked coming on the radio, things like that. But he is not someone I could miss. Sam, on the other hand . . . At night, slumber-headed, I am still careful not to tug the covers too far to my side. I find myself picturing vacations we planned but never executed, and he is still there, in the morning at hotels, shaving his incorrigible thick black facial hair, or on the slopes, stacking