Page 98 of Where the Snakes Sleep

There used to be nothing I could not say to Henri.

Once, I knew everything.

Not because he reported to me, and certainly not because he has ever tolerated the suggestion that he requires anyone’s permission, but because sharing things was simply what we did. A new theory occurred to him at two in the morning, and I heard it before breakfast. A grant was approved, and he appeared in whatever room I occupied with champagne before the formal letter had cooled from the fax machine. Someone irritated him at the university, and by dinner I knew the offense in such detail that I could have reconstructed the conversation word for word.

When we were younger, even our silence felt shared.

I could sit across from him for an entire evening without speaking and still know where his mind was wandering because eventually he would look up from whatever he was reading and say, “You know what I have been thinking?”

I always did.

Or believed I did.

Lately, I know less.

Meetings occur that I hear about afterward.

People visit Le Mas and leave before I am introduced.

Decisions are made, and I learn of them only after they become facts.

There is always an explanation.

Henri is busy.

I cannot be included in everything. I know that.

I am not a child demanding to accompany him into every room.

And yet I miss being wanted in the room.

There.

That is uglier than I intended.

But perhaps ugliness is what these pages are for.

I miss when Henri looked for me.

That is the simplest truth.

There was a time when he seemed almost incapable of experiencing anything without my witnessing it. He would come into the laboratory simply because he had not seen me for several hours, lean against the bench while I worked, irritate me by touching things I had carefully arranged, then act offended when I told him to leave.

Now entire days pass in which our paths cross only because we sleep in the same bed.

He comes in after midnight.

I wake when the mattress shifts.

Sometimes he kisses my shoulder. Sometimes he does not.

In the morning he is already downstairs by the time I dress.

This is what happens to people after eighteen years, I suppose.

Familiarity.

Routine.