“You have to check the damper,” she said.
“The what?”
“Here, let me.” She maneuvered him aside and dropped to her knees, poking her head up the chimney and reaching inside to adjust something. “If it’s closed, the smoke all billows into the room. Should be good now.”
Frank was struck, again, by the breadth of things he did not know she knew. She sat back on her heels and rolled balls of newspaper from the pile in the basket to stick into the grate, then stacked the kindling in a crisscross pattern on top.
“You’re good at this,” he said uneasily.
It was emasculating, just hovering there behind her. He picked up a large log from the basket and made to put it on top of the kindling, but she intercepted him and grabbed two others, arranging them in a tepee shape. In one deft movement, she lit several matches at once and placed them in the nest of newspaper balls.
“We had a working fireplace when I was growing up,” she said, blowing on the flames that emerged. “My mum taught me.”
This mention of her mother surprised Frank. He could not have known that, though Cleo had been assigned roommates at the hospital （a compulsive skin picker followed by a bipolar bulimic）， her real living companion that week had been her mother. Her mother had sat with her during the long, leaden hours, waiting for the day’s scant activities, either group therapy or art class, to start. Her mother had leaned against the sink as she scrubbed her teeth until her gums bled each night, an act of rebellion against the numbness taking over her body. Her mother had wedged herself between Cleo and Frank on each visit, leaving Cleo to peer round her to catch a glimpse of him. Worst of all, when Cleo looked in the mirror, it was her mother who now stared back. She was fighting to think of them both, her mother and herself, as something other than broken and suicidal. They were women, at least, who could make fires.
She kept blowing until the flames began to crackle, then wiped her hands on her jeans and looked up at him. Even in winter, her eyebrows were barely visible, almost white. She raised them now as if to say, Don’t look so surprised. Her sternness was offset by a black stain of soot on the end of her nose. Frank thought she looked like some adorable chimney sweep. Very gently, he touched the tip of his finger to the smudge. Cleo recoiled as though he had held a lit match to her skin.
“You have some soot,” he said, raising his palms in surrender.
Cleo scrubbed her nose roughly with the sleeve of her jacket.
“It looks cute,” he said.
“It’s terrible for your skin.”
“Right.” He turned away from her to conceal the hurt on his face. She would not even let him touch her. “Are you hungry?”
Frank had been to Dean & Deluca earlier that morning to get groceries before picking Cleo up at the hospital. Without either of them saying it, they both seemed to understand that it was too soon to return to their apartment together, to the place where he had found her, so Frank had suggested that they head directly to the train station and spend a few nights upstate. He wasn’t sure what Cleo would feel like eating, so he had haphazardly grabbed a variety of foods not particularly suited to each other: sushi, crackers, pasta salad, curried chicken, salmon filets, a ball of buffalo mozzarella, fruit salad, a single lemon, and a large slice of buttercream cake. And of course he had stopped by the liquor store afterwards too.
“Still no.” To appease him, Cleo attempted a smile. “But I’ll let you know when I am.”
“You have to eat.”
“I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”
“You didn’t have breakfast or lunch.”
“The medications they gave me make me nauseous.”
“It’s still good to try.”
“I’ll try when I’m hungry.”
“Okay.”
They both turned to look at the fire again. Cleo raised her hands toward it and turned them front to back in an elegant twisting gesture. Her sleeve pulled down to reveal the top of her bandage. Frank looked at it and saw soil wet with blood. The skin of her arm sliced neatly open like a gutted fish. She caught his stare and dropped her hands.
“It’s a little warmer at least,” she said.
“Have you thought any more about what they said at the hospital?” Frank asked. “About seeing a therapist?”
“I only just got out,” she said.
“It’s just, the doctor said—”
“I don’t want to talk about what the doctor said.”
Frank exhaled. “I’m only trying to help.”