Chapter 4
Bear
Church runs ninety minutes and forty of them are about a gate.
"We need a man on it," Tor says.
"We had a man on it."
"We had Rurik on it."
"Rurik was on it."
"Rurik was inside, eating a sandwich, with the gate open," Tor says. "That's not a man on a gate. That's a man near a gate."
"In fairness," Verse says, "it was a good sandwich."
"I'm going to need everyone to focus," says Hal.
The vote goes through. Gate stays shut, two men on rotation, cameras on the back fence where they came over. Ghost volunteers for the first week because Ghost volunteers for everything that involves not talking to anybody.
Then Hal says, "Last thing," and everybody knows what the last thing is.
"The nurse," Tor says.
"Marisol Reyes," says Hal.
"Right. The nurse."
"Her name's Marisol," I say.
Tor puts his hands up. "Nobody's saying anything about her, brother. I'm saying she was in the lot and she saw the whole thing and she hasn't called it in, and I would like to know what that costs us."
"Nothing."
"Nothing's not a number."
"It's not a transaction."
"Everything's a transaction—"
"Tor," Hal says.
"I'm just saying that if a civilian—"
"She splinted your prospect's arm with a copy of Hemmings Motor News," Ghost says, from the end. Nine words. Everyone stops.
"Thank you, Kjell," says Hal.
"I hate when you do that," says Ghost.
The vote there is no vote. Hal just says, "Nobody talks to her about it. Nobody thanks her about it. Nobody goes near it," and that's the end, and eleven men go out for beer.
Hal says, "Bear. Stay."
The chapel's still half-finished. Bare studs, insulation showing on the north side, one hanging bulb over the table and the stone in the wall at chest height.
Hal doesn't sit. He goes and stands at the stone with his back to me.
"When did it come back?" he says.
"What?"
"Sten."
"Say it plainer."
"All right." He turns around. "You didn't get it in pieces."
I don't say anything.
"The rest of us got it in pieces," Hal says. "I got two years of the same dream and then a beach. Tor got his mother in a hardware store and had to go sit in his truck. Verse gets three words at a time and writes them on his arm. That's how it comes. Pieces."
"So?"
"So you got the whole thing," he says. "In one go.
Standing up. And it was before the stone came out of the ground, and it was probably before the chapel came down, and you've been walking around this club for a month with a thousand years in your head and you haven't said one word about it to anyone. "
The bulb swings a little. Somebody's opened the outside door.
"How do you figure that," I say.
"Because I know what your face looks like when you're carrying something. I've known it since you were nineteen." He folds his arms. "And because on the boat you never once shut up, Sten. You talked the whole way across. You made a joke while the sail was on fire."
"That's not a memory. That's you guessing."
"Then tell me I'm wrong."
I look at the studs.
"You're not wrong," I say.
I don't tell him the six.
I want that on the record too, since I'm apparently keeping one. I tell him a version. I tell him it came back in one piece on a Tuesday in February and it was the fight and the arrow and the beach and the woman, and all of that is true, and every word of it is a wall built in front of a door.
Hal listens all the way through without moving.
"And the rest of it," he says.
"That's it."
"Sten."
"That's it, Hal."
He looks at me for a long time and then he does the thing he has always done, which is the single hardest thing about being loved by Halvard Reidar: he lets me have it. He believes me on purpose. He hands me the lie back with both hands and says thank you.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay."
"You know that if it was anything," he says, "anything at all — this room takes it. That's what the room's for."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Sure," I say.
And I think about a half-step back on a deck.
Not far. None of them went far.
Here's what I know about myself that I have never said out loud to another living person.
There are eleven men in this club and I would die for every one of them and I have, in fact, already died in the general vicinity of doing so. And the thing between me and them is not that I'm dangerous. Everybody in a cut is dangerous; that's practically the dress code.
The thing is that they can't help me.
If I go, the only thing eleven brothers can do is get their hands on me, and if they get their hands on me the thing in the cellar reads that as a fight, and then it's not eleven brothers anymore, it's eleven shapes at the end of a hallway.
I have done the arithmetic on that at three in the morning more times than I'd like to admit.
So the safest thing I can do for a five-foot-three woman who parks in that lot on purpose is very simple, and I work it out on the ride home from church on a Thursday night in March with the fog coming in off the water:
Nothing.
Do nothing. Say nothing. Fix nothing. Don't call, don't show up, don't sit on a stool six feet from her and let her ask questions until the good part of the afternoon is gone.
It's clean. It's the correct answer. I get all the way home and put the bike up and stand in my own kitchen with the light off and feel almost peaceful about it.
I make it nine hours.
What breaks it is a door.
She said it in the shop, in the middle of something else, the way people say things they don't think anyone's listening to: my door sticks. And then something about how the guy comes on Tuesdays and it's been three Tuesdays.
And I lie in bed from midnight to five thinking about a woman who works nights coming home at seven forty in the morning to a door that won't open, standing in a stairwell in scrubs putting her shoulder into it, in a town where three men went over a fence last week.
At five I get up.
At five-forty I'm at the hardware store on Ninth waiting for it to open, which it does at six, and Dale behind the counter says, "You look like a man with a project."
"I've got a door."
"What's it doing?"
"Sticking."
"Top corner or the latch side?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know," Dale says. "You haven't seen the door."
"Not recently."
Dale looks at me for a second and then starts putting things on the counter, and one of the things is a doorstop shaped like a duck, and I say, "What's that."
"That's a duck."
"Why."
"Everybody needs a duck," says Dale.
She lives in a six-unit building off Alder with a lemon tree in a pot on the landing that has never produced a lemon and never will, because this is Oregon.
I knock at eight-fifteen, which I have calculated is after she gets home and before she goes down.
There's a long pause. Then the door opens about four inches and stops with a bang, because it sticks, and one brown eye looks out at me through the gap.
"Oh, you have got to be joking," Marisol says.
"Morning."
"It's eight in the morning."
"Fifteen past."
"Is that a toolbox?"
"It's a toolbox."
"Bear."
"You said the door sticks."
The eye disappears. The door bangs twice more, gets dragged over the high spot with a sound like a chair being moved, and there she is in a T-shirt and pajama pants with a print of small cartoon avocados on them, hair up, no makeup, holding the doorknob like a weapon.
"It's a rental," she says.
"Uh huh."
"There's a guy."
"Is there."
"There's a guy who does this. He comes on Tuesdays."
"How many Tuesdays?"
Silence.
"How many Tuesdays, Marisol?"
"Some," she says.
"That's my line."
"I know it's your line, I'm using it against you, it's called rhetoric—"
"Move," I say, and she moves.
It takes forty minutes. The hinge screws have pulled out of the jamb — old wood, stripped holes — so the whole door has dropped a quarter inch and is riding the sill.
I glue and plug the holes, drive longer screws into the framing, plane about a credit card off the bottom corner, and the door swings shut on its own with a click for probably the first time since the Bush administration.
She stands in the kitchen doorway the whole time with a cup of coffee, drinking it, watching me, saying nothing, which for her is a stunt.
Then: "The tap drips."
"Does it."
"I didn't say fix it."
"Okay."
"...It drips at night. When it's quiet. It's like living inside a metronome."
I fix the tap.
There's a shelf in the hall with three books on it and a lean, and I fix that too, and while I'm doing it she says, from behind me, "So what is this?"
"It's a shelf."
"Bear."
"The bracket was in the drywall. There's no anchor in it. Whoever put this up hated you personally."
"Bear."
I put the screwdriver down.
I don't turn around. I want it noted that I don't turn around, because forty-one years of experience says that when a man turns around at this exact moment things happen that he has decided are not allowed to happen.
"There's a duck in the bag," I say. "For the door."
"...Why is there a duck in the bag?"
"Dale says everybody needs a duck."
"Who's Dale?"
"Hardware."
"Bear."
"I've got to be somewhere," I say, and pick up the toolbox, and go.
I do it three more times.
Wednesday: the smoke detector she's been ignoring, which is chirping, which she has been solving by putting a pillow over her head.
Saturday: the storm window in the bedroom, which does not close, in March, in a coastal town, which I think about for two entire days beforehand.
The Tuesday after: her mother's car, out in the lot at the good hip appointment, a battery terminal so corroded it's practically geology, while Alma Reyes sits on a folding chair with her cane and interrogates me about my cholesterol.
"You eat vegetables?"
"Sometimes."
"What's sometimes?"
"That's my line," Marisol says.
"He's grey in the face," says Alma. "Look at him. He's grey."
"I'm Slovenian."
"You're grey," says Alma. "Marisol, he's coming to dinner."
And on the fourth visit, on the landing, next to a lemon tree that has never produced a lemon, with the toolbox in my hand and nothing left in the entire apartment that is broken —
She leans on the doorframe and says, "So we're going to keep doing this."
"Doing what."
"The thing where you come over," Marisol says, "and fix an object."
"...Yeah."
"Bear. There's nothing left."
"There's the—"
"There is nothing left. You fixed the drawer that wasn't broken. You looked at my toaster."
"The cord's frayed."
"The cord is fine, and you know what, that's not even the point—" She stops. Takes a breath. Starts again, quieter, and this is the part I'll keep. "You're not here about the door."
The fog's coming up the street the way it does at seven in the evening.
"No," I say.
"Okay," she says. "Good. That's all I wanted. Now go home."
"Marisol—"
"Go home," she says, "and think about whether you're going to say the next part, because I'm not going to say it for you, and I'm not going to keep breaking things."
She goes inside.
The door swings shut behind her, easy, smooth, and clicks.
I did that.
I stand on the landing next to the lemon tree for longer than a man should stand on a landing.
Then I go down the stairs and put the toolbox on the bike and don't start it, and sit there in the dark on Alder Street with my hands on the tank, doing arithmetic I've done four hundred times and keep getting the same answer to.
Here's the arithmetic.
If I say the next part, then one day there is a night where something goes wrong in a room she's in.
Not a fence. Not a prospect. Something small — a man in a parking lot, a car that comes too close, a sound like a green branch — and the cellar door comes off its hinges and there's a hallway, and she's in it.
And the only thing standing between Marisol Reyes and the worst thing I have ever done is a door I have never once been able to lock from the inside.
That's the whole equation. It's not complicated. It's not even close.
And I sit on Alder Street for eleven minutes and work it all the way through, carefully, honestly, the way you'd work a leak, and I arrive at exactly the same clean, correct, unarguable answer I arrived at on a Thursday night in March.
Then I start the bike and ride home and don't do it.
Because there's a second column in that arithmetic that I have been refusing to write down, and it goes like this:
I have been alive forty-one years in this life and about thirty-one in the last one, and in all of that, across two centuries and two continents, exactly one person has ever stood four feet away from me while it was happening and waited.
Not grabbed. Not shouted. Not gone for a phone.
Waited, with her hand out flat, and let me be the one who moved.
Hal loves me and would put himself in front of a truck for me and if I go, Hal grabs, because Hal has grabbed since he was nine years old and that's who he is.
Tor grabs. Verse grabs and gets hurt. Ghost — Ghost would probably do the right thing, but Ghost would do it at a distance of forty feet with his keys already in his hand.
She's the only one.
And there is something extremely ugly in the middle of that, which I look at for the first time somewhere around Ninth and Cedar, which is:
Am I doing this because I want her, or because she's the handrail?
I don't have an answer at Ninth and Cedar.
I don't have one at home, either, standing in a dark kitchen at eight in the evening eating cold rice out of a container over the sink like a bachelor in a joke about bachelors.
What I have instead is a thing she said in the shop with a screwdriver in her hand and no idea what it was going to do to me.
I'd rather come back.
Six days later I'm standing in a clubhouse kitchen with a coffee machine I have learned, on purpose, for reasons I have not disclosed to eleven men who have all worked it out anyway, and there's a knock at the front and Elin's voice going up half an octave, and I put down the pot and go out and there she is with bread.
But that's Tuesday.
Tonight it's Alder Street and a lemon tree and a door that shuts on its own for the first time in twenty years, and a man on a bike in the fog running the numbers again from the top, hoping for a different result.