37. Two Small Lives by the Window
For Leo and Chicken
She dreams of the apartment in New York more often now that she’s in Melbourne. The light here feels different; softer, from the south, always carrying a trace of salt.
In the dream, she is always arriving in the late afternoon, when the light has already given up. She is holding cheap plastic grocery bags in one hand and turning the key with the other. She leans her shoulder into the door the way she used to, like the building is deciding whether to let her in.
The first thing she does is wait for the sound.
There should be the soft thud on tile. The open-mouthed hello and the tail flick that said, Hurry up; we’ve been starving for hours, even if it was only minutes. Chicken first, always first; Leo behind him, playing it cool.
In the dream, there is nothing.
The air is thin, too clean and too cold. This is how she knows she’s dreaming. The place has already forgotten them.
It was never a big place. A mattress against the wall. A counter made from an old door balanced on two crates. A stove that clicked three times before the gas caught. The floor was scarred wood that had already belonged to too many people.
At the far end of the room was the sunroom. It was narrow and bright and a little cracked around the edges. Three loose windows. Pale tile that held the heat during the day and felt like bone at night. She would’ve let the rest of the place fall apart if she could have kept just that thin strip of light and the bowls by the window.
The bowls are still there in the dream.
Two of them, side by side, exactly where she left them. The green ceramic bowl with the chip on the rim that had opened into a hairline crack. The silver metal one with a dent from when Chicken knocked it off the counter during the first week, when he still believed in force before patience.
In the dream, the rest of the apartment is almost the way it was. The mattress is there with its sunken middle. The radiator is still making that slow breathing sound in the wall, the hiss and knock and spit that used to scare her, until it turned into something like a presence. Somewhere under the smell of dust and old paint there is a sweetness she knows down to her bones. Warm cat breath and fur and sleep. She is sure she can smell it.
She sits on the tile in front of the bowls and looks at them the way someone might look at grave markers. She thinks, I used to sit here and watch you eat. She thinks, This is where my life made sense.
When she wakes in Melbourne, her heart is already running. She wasn’t ready for how much grief there was in two small bowls.
She never needed an alarm. She had Chicken. He had a way of jumping that barely made a sound. A small soft landing on the pillow behind her head. He would sit there and breathe, and she would feel the warmth of him through her hair. There would be a pause. Then the bite. Just sharp enough to feel the neat pressure of his teeth on her hairline and jerk awake.
She would hiss his name into the dark. Chicken. He would answer with a huge mechanical purr, a full body engine. She would pull him down and press him against her chest and feel that vibration through her ribs.
My backup heart, she would whisper into his fur.
Leo didn’t do any of that. Leo had self-respect. He waited.
He had a stillness that felt almost ceremonial. Most mornings, she would find him in the sunroom, sitting exactly in the stripe of light that crept across the tile when the sun came in low between the buildings. He would sit there with his paws tucked, his body neat, his expression patient, like a little old man who refused to be rushed. If she sat with him, cross legged, her back against the window frame, he would lean, slowly, against her shin. Not nudging. Leaning. Committing the whole warm weight of himself to her leg like she was something he trusted to hold him.
She talked to him. She told him things she didn’t tell anyone else. She told him I’m down to coins and whatever is left on that card, and I don’t know how to make rent. She told him, I’ve been eating instant noodles for three nights and I lied to my father and said I was fine. She told him, I don’t know how to leave. Leo blinked up at her like a priest. Calm. Steady. Unmoved.
People love to call that kind of life small. But there in the dark kitchen at four in the morning, rinsing bowls and tearing open foil packets with her teeth because her hands were too tired and Chicken couldn’t wait, there was a feeling that slid through her and sank. Something soft. Something like safety. She almost couldn’t look at it. It felt undeserved. She was living on borrowed time in a place that wasn’t hers.
But sometimes she felt it anyway.
Looking back from Melbourne, she thinks that was love. Not the kind of love you can brag about. Not the story you tell at dinner. No first date or meet cute. No scene. Just the quiet love that shows up like work. The kind that makes you get up when you have thirty-two dollars until Friday and spend eight of it on the expensive kind of food because they like it better. The kind that makes you pull on boots over bare legs and go out into freezing air at midnight because you forgot the litter.
People say it’s just two cats.
People who say that have never built their entire sense of being worth keeping alive on the way something small breathes against them in the dark and trusts them with sleep.
Her father called her from Melbourne on Tuesday night. It was already dark by then, and the air outside had that grey look the city gets when snow decides if it is staying.
His contact flashing on the screen made her stomach turn. She loved him, but seeing his name still made her feel like a child who hadn’t done her homework.
Are you eating? he said.
It was never hello. It was never how are you.
Yes, she said.
And you are warm? he said.
Yes, she said again.
She could picture him easily: the flat near Box Hill, the hallway smelling faintly of jasmine rice.
When he was worried, he drank tea. The flat always smelled of laundry and tea.
You cannot stay there, he said.
She let out a small, tired laugh, because if she didn’t laugh, she’d cry, and she didn’t want to break in front of him.
I’m fine, she lied. I can stretch it. I have money for rent for two more weeks, maybe three. I’m figuring things out.
Money for rent meant cash she didn’t want to admit she’d borrowed. Figuring things out meant nothing. She had nothing figured out. She had a mattress, two bowls, and a stack of coins in a cup.
He didn’t answer right away. She could hear small sounds through the phone. The quiet clink of the mug being set down. His slow exhale through his nose.
It is not about two more weeks, he said.
I’m not asking you for money, she said too fast.
I know, he said.
That was what did it. The inflection of ‘I know’. Not angry. Not disappointed. Just tired in a way she didn’t often hear from him. Tired and a little scared. Her father was not a man who admitted fear.
Baba, she whispered.
He didn’t fill the silence. He let it sit. That was one of his kindnesses. He had a way of letting space open without crowding it. She always thought of it as the way he listened in Chinese. It wasn’t really a language thing, but it felt like one. His patience lived there.
Finally he said, You do not sound good.
I’m okay, she tried.
He exhaled again.
Then he said her name the way he had when she was small, the full one, careful and soft at the edges. The way he had not said it in years. It made her eyes burn.
Come, he said.
Just that. Come. He didn’t say come home, because Melbourne wasn’t home to her. She hadn’t grown up there. She didn’t belong to it. But he was there, and for him that was enough. A place was where you put your body and paid rent and boiled water for tea. It didn’t have to love you back. He didn’t see what she saw, which was that New York had imprinted itself on her like a bruise and Melbourne felt like a waiting room. He didn’t understand that she was already being swallowed by the word ‘Come’.
She tried to explain the only part that mattered.
I can’t leave them, she said, almost whispering.
He didn’t say anything at first.
He had tried to understand the cats once, in a practical way. He’d said, Bring them with you. As if it were a matter of weight limits and paperwork. As if she could walk onto a plane with two carriers and climb off in Melbourne and everything else would follow. When she told him it wasn’t that simple, he’d said, Then someone else can take them for now. He had been trying to solve the problem. He didn’t realise the problem was that there was no version of the future in which she could hand over those bowls and still feel like herself.
He stayed quiet long enough she thought the call had dropped.
Then he said, You are not safe there.
That was what undid her. Her father was not a poetic man.
I have them, she managed. They need me.
Silence again.
He finally said, I am asking you.
The way he said it was almost a plea. He would never beg her. He would carry her on his back across ice before he begged. But it was close. He had run out of steps to list for her. He had reached the part of love that is just ‘Please’.
After they hung up, she went and sat on the floor of the sunroom. The tile felt cold through her thin pants. Both cats came to her like they always did. Chicken first, clumsy and eager, pushing his warm body into her thigh and buzzing like a small machine. Leo after, slow and deliberate, his eyes already darker than usual. He studied her face like he could see the conversation there.
I’m so sorry, she told them.
Her voice broke. She had to swallow between each word.
I’m so, so sorry.
Chicken pressed his forehead against her knee and purred louder. Leo leaned his weight fully into her shin, settled, and looked at the window like a sentry.
People imagine it turned dramatic, but the truth was slower.
Leaving happened in inches. It happened when she started folding clothes she couldn’t bear to lose, stacking them in piles. It happened when she pulled an old suitcase from under the bed, wiped dust off the zipper, then sat on the floor and cried because taking it out felt like a betrayal. It happened when she counted cash in the bathroom with the door shut because she didn’t want Leo to see her panic. It happened the first time she bought a pack of cigarettes from the corner bodega even though she’d never smoked in her life.
Ried came by one night and lay on her mattress like he lived there, which he didn’t. He watched her fold a shirt and unfold it and fold it again, and said, You always do this when you’re scared.
She didn’t answer.
He said, You could stay. His voice had that soft lazy pull that made people believe him. She had believed it once too. He could make the whole city feel like it hinged on whether he looked at you.
As soon as he was gone, she sat on the floor between the bowls, smoked one of his leftover cigarettes down to the filter, and thought, I’m leaving you too. She felt nothing but a tired sort of relief.
She packed in circles for two more days. Chicken followed her from room to room. Whenever she made a new pile, he climbed into it and sat like, Look, I’m helping. Leo went quiet. He watched from doorways. He tracked her with his eyes.
You will be okay, she told them.
You will be okay, she whispered again.
That was the first lie.
The woman came on Sunday. A name passed to her through someone who knew someone. Not a friend. Not even a friend of a friend. Just a person who had replied in full sentences and had not said anything that made her stomach twist. A woman in her forties with calm eyes and a practical coat.
The woman walked in and didn’t wrinkle her nose at the smell of litter and fur. She didn't comment on the mattress on the floor. She didn’t suggest anything better. She didn’t make her feel like an animal herself for living like this. She sat on the rug without being asked and crossed her legs. She said hello to Chicken, then to Leo. She let them choose her. Chicken went to her right away, big and shameless, pressing his head into her palm, purring so loud the room buzzed. Leo circled once, twice, then finally touched his nose to her knuckles and allowed her to stroke his head. The woman smiled without showing her teeth. Such a good boy, she whispered.
It should have been a relief. It was the worst thing she had ever seen.
She had wanted to hate this woman. She had prayed for a reason. A smell, a twitch, a careless phrase. Something so she could say, No, I’m sorry, I can’t leave them with you. I’ll just stay, it’s fine. I’ll stay. I choose them, I choose ruin, I choose hunger. I choose whatever comes after.
She had wanted chaos so she could say she had done everything she could.
Instead, she got kindness.
They went over food. Litter. Routines. Chicken likes to bite my head at four in the morning, she said. He thinks it’s funny. He thinks he’s in charge. Let him think that. Leo needs quiet when he eats. He won’t eat if someone watches. Please don’t look at him while he’s eating. Pretend you’re not looking. He’ll know if you’re lying.
When it was time, the woman picked up Chicken first. He let himself be held without protest. He draped himself over her arm and blinked slow and trusting. He had no idea. He had no idea at all.
Leo was harder. The woman scooped him slow, close to her body, and he went tense for a second. His eyes flashed that deep almost black look he got when he wasn’t sure. He made a small sound in his throat. Not anger. Just concern. Then he settled. He pressed his face into the thick collar of the woman’s coat like he was already tired.
That was when she broke.
She held Leo’s face between her hands and pressed her forehead to his. She breathed him in. He always smelled like dust and toast and old sunlight. Warm and plain and his. She whispered into the soft place between his ears. My sweet boy. My good boy. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. He blinked at her and didn’t fight.
She kissed Chicken on the head and whispered, My backup heart. My loud little man. My alarm clock. Her voice cracked so hard the words were crooked. He purred louder, pleased with himself. He thought this was a new kind of game.
She pressed the bowls into the woman’s hands. Please keep these, she said.
Of course, the woman said.
The door closed.
People like to say, You did what you had to do. She hates that more than anything. It’s tidy. It lets you off the hook. It turns betrayal into sacrifice and calls you brave. No. She did what she could live with in that second. That’s all. It’s not the same thing. But she still tells herself that sometimes as a way of not admitting it feels like failure. She didn’t choose Melbourne. She was called to it.
She arrived with a backpack and an old suitcase and a stomach that would not stop twisting. Her father met her at arrivals wearing his heavy coat with the broken zipper and carrying a thermos of tea. He handed her the thermos without comment. Pu-erh. Strong. Almost bitter. The steam hit her face and smelled like his kitchen.
That night, when everything else was quiet, she lay in his guest room and listened. Out past the balcony, cars whispered along wet asphalt. Somewhere far off, a tram hummed its patient electric hum. The building shifted and clicked softly, and she could hear her father moving quietly in the flat. It should have felt safe.
* * *
Her father pretends not to hover. He’s a gentle man and a rigid man at the same time. He won’t ask, Are you sad? He won’t ask, Are you crying? He’ll stand in the doorway of the guest room with his mug of tea in both hands and say, You should rest. You look tired. He’ll say, I bought more rice. He’ll say, If you want congee tomorrow, tell me before I sleep. His voice is careful, like he’s trying not to spook her.
You should eat, he tells her. Sit. I will make something.
I’m fine, she lies.
He nods like he believes her. He never believes her. He will quietly leave a bowl on the counter anyway. Rice, egg, a drizzle of soy, a few leaves of something green he blanched just right. He won’t watch her eat it. He’ll pretend he’s busy with something on the other side of the room so she can eat without feeling observed.
It is his version of ‘I love you’. She sees this now. She hadn’t seen it before. She wonders if love in their language has always been something you serve in a bowl.
She wakes up at four every morning. Her body does it before her mind understands why. Her eyes open in the dark and her hand goes up, without thinking, toward her hair, bracing for the small, neat pressure of teeth on her scalp. For a moment, in that soft dark, she doesn’t understand what’s missing. Then she does and the pain is instant, sharp behind the eyes. It feels like someone has reached into her chest and squeezed once, clean and hard.
Daytimes, she walks. The air in Melbourne feels wide and salt-clean. Even the cold smells faintly of eucalyptus. Sometimes she thinks the sky itself hums like the trams.
This is how she starts to learn Melbourne. She pulls on a coat and one of her father’s scarves and goes out into the pale cold. She walks down Swanston Street past bubble tea shops and money transfer stores. She stands in small Asian bakeries where the glass cases glow under warm yellow light and stares at pineapple buns she can’t afford. She rides the tram south, the soft bell almost apologetic. She misses how New York trains insulted you just by showing up. She imagines Leo sitting in a Melbourne window somewhere, watching the trams pass, eyes half-closed, pretending he’s above it. She imagines Chicken pressed to the glass, leaving little nose marks, making that soft chirping sound he used to make at pigeons.
She almost tells her father that. She almost says, I keep seeing them here.
She doesn’t.
But once, in the kitchen, she tries.
Baba, she says.
He looks up from a stack of forms on the dining table. He never uses the table to eat. It’s his office. Papers in neat piles. Dates in pen. He keeps everything that might ever matter – receipts, letters, notices. He calls it proof. He doesn’t say proof of what. He just knows you should keep it.
Sometimes I still hear them, she says.
He waits. Hearing, to him, is a good verb. You hear, then you act. He thinks she is talking about memory.
She has to force herself to say it.
I mean the cats.
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then he nods once. He thinks, she realises, that she is telling him she misses them. He thinks he understands. He doesn’t understand that she means she actually hears them. She hears the rattle of dry food hitting a metal bowl in a kitchen that isn’t this kitchen. She hears a soft questioning meow from another room when she’s been alone too long. She feels the warm, familiar weight press against her shin when she sits on the floor to fold laundry, and for a second she looks down to make room.
That is normal, he says carefully. You will heal.
She nods, because this is his version of comfort and she won’t take it away from him.
She goes to the small bathroom and shuts the door and sits on the closed toilet with her elbows on her knees and lets herself cry in that ugly open-mouthed shaking way she never lets herself do when anyone could hear it. She doesn’t let sound out. She leans forward and presses her forehead to her wrists and feels like she might actually come apart along the centre line of her body.
There are words for certain kinds of lost people. Widow. Orphan. Immigrant. Exile. Some of those sit close to her skin but none of them describe the way she wakes in a flat in Melbourne and still feels like she is sitting on the tile floor in New York with her back against a rattling window frame, her knees pulled up and two bowls in front of her. There should be a word for the kind of grief that isn’t respected in public because it embarrasses people to witness it.
She tries, sometimes, to tell people the truth. She tells them about the cats, and she watches their faces tilt. They soften. They smile. They tell her, That’s sweet. She wants to grab them and shake them and say, This isn’t sweet. This is bone.
So most of the time she lets people think the break was Ried.
They like that story more. Ried is easier for them. People understand a man who kissed her in a bathroom in a bar that already smelled like closing time and said, You are trouble, with a smile like a compliment. They understand a man who lay on her mattress smoking out the window and said, You always get like this, when she cried quietly into her sleeve. They understand a man who left in a way he thought would wound her. They can nod and say, Ah. Heartbreak. They can pour wine and say, You’ll meet someone else.
She lets them.
The truth is that some nights in Melbourne, she walks down the block to the drugstore and stands in the pet aisle just to look at the rows of cans. She runs her fingers over the pull tabs. Chicken and sweet potato. Tuna in gravy. Indoor hairball formula. Senior blend. She looks at them and feels her throat close. One time, she puts two cans in her basket and carries them around the store for fifteen minutes like she’s going to buy them and take them home. The weight of them in her hand feels good. Solid. Honest. When she reaches the register, she freezes. She can’t explain them. She can’t bring them to the flat and open them and listen to that small wet sound and not lose her mind. She sets them down by a display of gum and walks out.
Grief, she has learned, has a physical shape. It sits behind the sternum like a bruise you keep pressing. It rises in the throat at four in the morning like something caught there that you can’t swallow or spit out. It makes your hands stupid and your jaw tight. It makes you lightheaded in grocery stores. It makes you bend over the sink and breathe like someone old.
It also keeps time.
She’s aging away from them.
The thought hits her one afternoon when she’s in the bathroom. She looks up and catches her reflection in that bad white light, and there’s a small change she can’t deny. Nothing dramatic. Just a line she didn’t see last month. A kind of tiredness under her eyes that’s set in for real. The face in the mirror is hers but slightly older. She thinks, Leo doesn’t know this face; Chicken never saw it. It feels like betrayal. No one tells you that you’ll feel guilty simply for continuing to have a body.
At night, when she finally sleeps, she goes back.
In the dream, she always ends up on the floor of the sunroom. Cross legged at first, then with legs stretched out and her back against the wall. The radiator hissing like it is alive in the pipe. The windows rattling in their frames. The light on the tile is winter light, pale and tired and already thinning, even though it’s only three in the afternoon.
She waits.
Sometimes they come.
Not in a movie way. They don’t leap into her arms and lick her face and purr, I missed you. Her brain isn’t kind like that. When they come, it’s almost ordinary.
Leo is simply there, sitting in his spot in the stripe of light like he never left. Calm and watchful. He blinks at her, slow and considering, like he’s evaluating her condition. Then he leans against her shin, full weight, no hesitation. The feeling of it is so real she starts to cry inside the dream.
Chicken appears the way he always did. Almost tripping over his own paws with enthusiasm. He climbs onto a pile of laundry that doesn’t exist anymore and rolls onto his back, showing his stomach like an offering. He squints at her with that entitled look that always said, You’re late, where’s dinner. She laughs then. It hurts. She reaches for him, and he head butts her hand and purrs and purrs and purrs.
Sometimes they don’t come.
Sometimes she sits and watches the light move across the tile. The bowls stay empty. The radiator hisses. That’s all.
But when they come, she talks to them. She tells them about Melbourne. She tells them about the way the rain falls slanted and quiet, and the sound of the trams that hum along St Kilda Road with that patient green glide. She tells them about the wide cool air that smells faintly of wet eucalyptus, and how different that cold is from the New York cold that always tasted like trash. She tells them she’s eating. She tells them Baba makes tea and how it smells like warmth. She tells them she’s trying. She tells them she is sorry again and again, until the word sorry stops feeling like a word and turns into a shape in her mouth. She tells them, I’m still yours.
She stayed in New York for them. Not for Ried. Not for some idea of herself in a leather jacket on a fire escape. Not for the story she used to tell people about herself that sounded good in her mouth. She stayed as long as she did because leaving meant handing those two small lives to a stranger and walking away from two bowls and still calling herself human. She stayed because she couldn’t figure out how to keep breathing if she broke that trust.
She thinks, I’m sorry I didn’t.
Then she wakes in Melbourne with her face wet and her hand in the air, reaching behind her head, waiting for the small, neat bite that isn’t coming. Every morning she wakes in Melbourne and keeps leaving them again.
But somewhere, on the other side of the world, two small lives are sleeping by a window, and the night air is kind.
Angela Edward is a Chinese New Zealand writer based in Sydney. Her work has appeared in Brevity and Meniscus and has been recognised by the Stockholm Writers Festival and The Florida Review. She is currently writing Two Keys, a memoir about migration, class, family, and the strange distances between the lives we leave and the lives we make. You can read more about her at angelaedward.net.