Read Online The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu - Free Book Online Page B

construction workers had said. There were sliding doors over the built-in bookshelves that lined the walls, and on every floor there was a bathroom.
    “They’re for Naomi,” she said. We were on the top floor, and Judith had just pointed to the fourth and last bathroom.
    “We used to have these terrible fights. They only got worse after her father left. She hated both of us for that, but I was the only one around for her to take it out on, which made her hate me even more. We would fight and she would lock herself in one of the bedrooms for hours at a time. There was nothing I could do to get her out. A couple of times I left her alone and she ended up running away from the house. She never went far. I actually found her once in a closet right by the front door. But still, I always went mad trying to find her. I pictured her hurt or kidnapped, or some other awful thought that I couldn’t fight back, and I would take off running, but I guess you already know that part.
    “I made a promise to her when we moved here. I told her she could have all the space she wanted. In return, she had to promise to stop running out of the house when she got upset. Now, when she gets mad, she can lock herself on any floor of the house and never have to worry about seeing me, or anyone else.”
    She smiled, and then laughed a little, holding her hand to her mouth.
    “I know this sounds ridiculous. But it works, most of the time, and right now that’s all I really care about. This is our third house in as many years, and if it took a half-dozen bathrooms and as many floors to make it work, that’s what I would have done.”
    I couldn’t help but admire Judith’s devotion to her daughter, precisely because of its excesses. Who didn’t want to be loved like that? She didn’t apologize for anything, and I believed her completely when she said she would have built half a dozen bathrooms if needed. But it wasn’t just because she wanted to make Naomi happy. All you had to do was look at her eyes for a few minutes to see how tired and full of regret she was. She wanted peace; a hundred extra feet of plumbing were surely worth that.
    “This must sound ridiculous to you,” she said.
    “Nope,” I said. I popped my “p” just as hard, if not harder, than Naomi had done earlier. It was a silly thing to have done, but it made Judith laugh with relief, which was more than I could have hoped for. This time, instead of covering her mouth with her hand, she stretched out her fingers and without thinking took two of mine in hers. She leaned in just far enough for me to meet her face less than halfway. It wasn’t a kiss so much as it was a gentle press, or an extended graze of lips, full of a sudden, almost crushing tenderness. We held it for as long as we could, three, maybe four seconds at most, and then the moment passed.
    Judith took a slight step back and said, “I should go check on Naomi.”
    “It must be getting late,” I said.
    “I’ll walk you to the door,” she said.
    She walked me to the door and leaned her head outside so she could see my building.
    “Get home safely,” she said.
    “I’ll try.”
    Less than a minute later and I was climbing the steps to my own apartment. There hadn’t been enough space between her house and mine for me to linger over the evening. Within a few minutes I was struggling to fit my key into my door, since the light on the landing had burned out months ago and no one had ever thought of replacing it, and then I was turning the knob and leaning into the door, which always creaked as if it were about to fall off its hinges. When I turned the living-room light on and stared into my apartment, an inevitable sense of regret swept over me. How much better would it have been to have spent even just a few minutes walking in the cold? Or to have sat on the stairwell in the pitch black, unable to see my hand in front of my face? There I could have replayed pieces of our conversation, reenacted our