There is a moment every night that I have never once managed to skip ahead of, no matter how I position myself beforehand. It happens after she puts the book down. The book goes on the little table on her side, spine cracked open to whatever page she stopped on, always face-down, which I’ve come to understand is a way of holding her place without actually marking it properly, the way I’d do it, which would be to simply remember.
Then the lamp clicks off. I know the click. I could pick it out of a room full of clicks. It’s a small, decisive sound, slightly different from the switch on the hallway light, lower and a little duller, like it’s tired too. The second that sound happens, something in me assumes the evening has ended and the settling can begin. I have, on more nights than I’d like to admit, already started arranging myself against her side in anticipation, only to have the whole plan interrupted.
Because the lamp going off is not actually the end of anything. It’s the beginning of what I’ve come to think of as the two minutes, though I have no way of knowing if it’s really two minutes or seven or forty seconds that feel long because I’m annoyed. What happens is this: the room goes dark, and then almost immediately a much smaller light appears, pale and rectangular, held close to her face, and she is somewhere else entirely for a while. Her thumb moves. Occasionally she makes a small sound, not quite a laugh, more like she’s agreeing with something. Sometimes she sighs in a way that means whatever she’s looking at is not agreeing with her.
I used to find this genuinely distressing, back when I didn’t understand it was a phase and not a change of heart. I would sit very still at the edge of the mattress and wait, the way you wait for someone to notice you’re waiting, which is a specific kind of waiting that gets less patient the longer it goes on. Now I mostly just get on with it. I climb up anyway. I’ve decided the two minutes aren’t actually about me, and being ignored by something that isn’t personally directed at you is a different, more bearable thing than being ignored on purpose.
What I do instead, now, is press myself against her ribs before she’s finished, so that when she does finally set the little light face-down on the table and the room goes properly, fully dark, I’m already exactly where I want to be and she doesn’t have room to reconsider the arrangement. It’s not subtle. I don’t think it’s meant to be. She usually laughs, just a short breath of one, and says something like “okay, okay,” in the specific voice she uses for things she’s not actually annoyed about, and then her arm comes over, and that’s the part I’ve been waiting for since the book went down.
Some nights the two minutes stretch longer than others and I genuinely can’t tell why. Maybe there’s more to look at those nights. I don’t know what’s in the little light. I’ve looked directly at it a few times, right up close, and it’s just brightness with shapes moving through it too fast to mean anything to me, gone before I can decide if they’re worth caring about. I’ve never seen her actually look happy while she’s in it. Interested, sometimes. Occasionally faintly irritated. Never as happy as she looks about ten seconds after she puts it away, when the dark settles and she exhales in that specific way that means the day is actually, finally, over.
That exhale is the real signal. Not the lamp. Not the book going down. The lamp is just the warning that the real ending is coming. I’ve adjusted my whole approach around this, though it took an embarrassing number of nights to work out, and if I’m honest there was one stretch a while back where I kept jumping down off the bed the moment the lamp clicked off, thinking that was my cue to go do a final check of the hallway, only to come back and find the little light already glowing and have to start my approach all over again from a worse position. I don’t do that anymore. I’ve learned to just wait it out from where I already am.
Once the arm comes over and the exhale happens, everything settles into something I don’t have any complaints about at all. Her hand finds the spot behind my ear without looking, like it already knows the way, and I do the low sound I do, and for a while neither of us is doing anything in particular except being there, which I’ve come to think might be the entire point of the whole day, the part everything else was just getting us to.
I don’t love the two minutes. I want to be honest about that. But I’ve stopped resenting them, mostly, because I’ve noticed that whatever she was looking at in the little light, whatever kept her thumb moving, seems to matter less to her than the moment right after she puts it down. And if it has to happen before I get the part I actually want, I suppose I can allow it. I’m not going anywhere. I never am, at that hour. Where would I even go.