Their life afterwards is filled with normalities. The stretched waistbands of their dirty underwear, the long loops of her handwriting in the checkbook ledger, the way days start fading into one another like they are really a fabric that keeps rolling out in front of him. Sometimes he thinks he can see the seams if he looks close enough, squints hard enough. However, when he is awake at night listening to the empty stillness of evening he thinks that's when the world starts separating into neat little containers, dividing up his life into sections: a childhood that is blurry and golden-tinged, the school on the hill still unruined, a smile and a pair of crooked glasses, the moment that he realized love and death are so close to one another it aches inside of him. But then he blinks sleepily, and it all blends together again, turning into the mundane of their life together.
She sleeps with her spine curled against his ribcage. All her claims say that she sleeps fine, well even. Her lips turn into thin lines when he asks and she says, "Don't be dense, Ron. If I wasn't sleeping well, I'd fix it."
But at night her breathing is always uneven and sometimes she makes little noises that sound like words (failure… failure… Harry… not leaving). He knows that the war has written on the both of them, but he sees the different ways it has hurt them. They don't mention these sorts of things, because that's not what they talk about: he lets the boy who lived talk about the pain. Shetalks to him about that, the boy with the crooked glasses and the world inside his chest that aches like cancer. He knows that his place isn't to talk about these sorts of things with her, it's not like that with the two of them. The boy who lived pulls her in the way that gravity does; it's natural and there's nothing he should worry about, nothing that he can do about it. He loves that boy, too, like one might love the air in their lungs. He can't help it either, and so he doesn't blame her, not in the slightest. Especially since their love is so different. She loves him in a way that is clean as soap.
And the fact is that he knows her, knows her so well it's like she has woven herself into him. But there's oddness to their relationship; when she walks through the house in her slippered feet, he turns towards the noise, expecting a poltergeist or the ghost of the room to show up, and it's only her in her messy hair and terry-clothed robe. He finds that this doesn't surprise him, and she does not shock him when she rounds the corner and stands small against the doorframe.
It's because he knows that feeling, wandering between the walls of a house, so small and so alone. He knows the feeling of disappearing into the fabric of your family. The chaos of his was the coolness of hers, the Dentists' daughter. He imagines her, ten, right before the letter came, tiny and moving about her house like no one could ever notice. Like her footsteps would be absorbed into the floorboards. He knows it well, the youngest boy, his sweaters all having the wrong initials and too big and feeling too handed down. Always like he's dissolved into the other people in his family, the hand of his mother, the meekness of his father. He sees it in her eyes when she wonders into a room and finds him there, that moment when she realizes that two ghosts have happened to stumble unto each other. Like she has wondered the abyss, the abandoned valley of her youth, and finally found something in her journey. The pull on the other side of the line, a ghost that lives in the dark opaque sea, coming up for the hook, the flesh caught. Painless, unlike fate. There's nothing fated here, just the constant reach and pull, Lutheran in its theology. "You make your own fate, your my fate, my poltergeist." He's told her all these things, holding her head in his hands like he's afraid she might fall through it, like the fog of a morning dissolving into the dawn.
The night outside their bedroom is full of the scratchy sound of crickets and the hum of the electric muggle world. She breathes hard against him, her lungs engine-strong. She has unbraided her hair and it is splayed across the startling white of her pillow. Her knees are almost curled up to her chin, and she looks so small and fetal. He thinks that she is a ghost of geography to be born, her abdomen curved away to form the small hills of her breasts and hips.
The night is cool and the sheets rustle as he draws himself closer and closer to her. Her breathy noises in the current nightmare he finds as directions, like pointers on a roadmap, and soon he finds himself flush against her: his knees against the back of hers, his arms around the shallow of her stomach, his face pressed into the loam of her hair. He pulls closer and tighter until he realizes that he doesn't know where she begins and where he ends. He feels her sleep come as his eyelids close and he fades into her until they are only a comma of people, like a physical version of: and ,and ,and. Before sleep, it becomes clear, the fabric of them, a long spool unwound, and.
And.