Chapter 6
Bear
The ladder is bolted to the north wall of St. Brigid's between a dumpster and a stand of bad rhododendrons, and it is not designed for a man my size.
I know this within four rungs. I know it with total confidence by eight, when my shoulder catches the rail, and by twelve I have made peace with the fact that if I fall from here I will land in an emergency room and be treated by a woman who will never let it go.
I'm carrying two coffees from the vending machine in the lobby.
That's the other logistical failure. Vending machine coffee comes in a paper cup with a lid that does not commit, and I have one hand for the ladder and one hand for two cups, and I have solved this by holding them in a way that is not solving it.
I come up over the parapet at four minutes past four.
And she's sitting there.
Flat gravel roof. Air handlers humming. The red glow of the ambulance bay sign coming up over the edge and the whole harbor laid out past it under fog — not thick fog, the good kind, the kind that takes the town's lights and softens them until Ash Harbor looks like somewhere you'd want to be from.
She's on an air conditioner housing with her knees up and a blanket around her shoulders. Navy, fleece, with a hospital laundry stamp on the corner.
She doesn't hear me for a second. And I get to see her face before she knows anybody's looking at it, which is a thing I'll never tell her about, and which is when it stops being a question for me at all.
She looks tired. Not the way people say it. Tired all the way through, down in the bones, the way you look when you've been holding something up for a long time and it's four in the morning and there's nobody to hold it up in front of.
Then she turns her head.
And her whole face changes.
"You have got to be joking," Marisol says.
"Morning."
"How did you—" She's already laughing. "That ladder is forty feet."
"It's twenty-two."
"You counted?"
"I counted going up," I say. "I'm going to count harder going down."
The coffee is terrible. It's a different kind of terrible from mine, which she notes immediately and at length.
"This is worse than yours."
"Thank you."
"That's not — I didn't mean that as—"
"Too late. Took it as a compliment. Living off it."
"It tastes like a nickel."
"It's got a picture of a bean on the button."
"So does the machine at the clubhouse," she says. "You know what that means? Somewhere there's one bean, and every coffee machine on this coast is being made to look at it."
She's slap-happy. Twelve hours in, and there's a thing that happens to people at the end of a night shift where everything is either hysterically funny or a war crime and there's no in-between, and I know because I've hit that state myself, just usually with a wrench in my hand.
"How long have you had this spot?"
"Nine years."
"Nine."
"Since about my third month. There was a bad night — first one that really got me, a drowning, kid off the jetty — and I came out the north stair to cry where nobody could see and there was a ladder." She shrugs inside the blanket. "So I went up it."
"Who else knows?"
"Robin. Two of the medics. Old guy in facilities who's been leaving the hatch unlocked for nine years and has never once said a word to me about it."
"That's a good man."
"That's a great man," Marisol says. "His name's Ted. He puts salt on that ladder in January. I've never thanked him because if I thank him it becomes an arrangement and then someone has to write it down and then it's gone."
"Yeah."
"You get that."
"Marisol, I'm in a club with eleven guys and a written constitution about a gate," I say. "I understand the difference between a thing that works and a thing that's official."
"Bad one?" I ask.
"Middling." She wraps both hands around the cup.
"Kid came in at midnight with his arm. Fourteen.
Fell off something he shouldn't have been on.
He was so brave, and then his mom got there and he completely fell apart, which is exactly how it should go, and I had to go stand in a closet for a minute. "
"Do you do that a lot?"
"The closet? It's a whole department." She looks sideways at me. "Why are you here?"
"You said this is where you go."
"That's — yeah, that's not an answer, that's just repeating what I said in a lower voice."
"Works most times."
"Bear."
I set the cup down on the gravel.
"Because it's the only place you don't have to be good at anything," I say. "And I wanted to see it."
She's quiet.
Out on the water a crab boat is going out early with its deck lights on, dragging a wake through the harbor lights, and the fog takes it about halfway across.
"Come here," she says.
The blanket is not big enough for both of us. It is not close. She gets it over one of my shoulders and one of hers with her under my arm and about eleven inches of me sticking out into the weather in every direction, and she laughs into my chest about it, and I don't care even slightly.
She smells like the hospital, which should not be a good smell and is. Under it, something else — some soap, something warm off her neck.
"You're very warm," she says.
"Yeah."
"That's not fair. That's an unfair advantage."
"You want the coat too?"
"Obviously I want the coat."
I put the coat on her. It goes to her knees. She holds up one arm and the sleeve hangs eight inches past her hand and she looks up at me from inside all that leather with her hair coming down out of its clip and something in me goes very quiet and very sure.
"Say the next part," she says.
"What?"
"You keep almost saying a thing. On the landing.
In the kitchen. Twice on that ladder just now, probably, to yourself.
" Her voice is soft; she's not teasing. "Say it, Bear, because it's four in the morning and I have to be a competent adult again in three hours and this is the only part of my week that's mine, and I'd like to spend it on something true. "
So I say it.
"I've been careful with you since the first night," I tell her. "In the bay. I kept my hand on the rail where you could see it."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"Bear, I clocked it in the first ninety seconds," she says. "I've been sitting on it for a month."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"Because you'd have stopped," she says.
And that's it. That's the whole thing about her, right there, in one sentence, at four a.m., and I put my hand under her jaw and she comes up onto her knees on the air conditioner housing to get level with me, and neither of us says anything else for a while.
I've been told I'm careful.
Verse says it like an insult. Hal says it like a diagnosis. What neither of them has ever understood is that careful isn't restraint against wanting. Careful is the wanting, held in both hands, with the shape of it left intact.
I kiss her the first time barely at all. Once, and then again, and she makes a small impatient sound against my mouth like a woman being handed a menu she didn't order from, and gets both hands in the front of my shirt and pulls, and I let her think she's the one who moved me.
The blanket goes somewhere. The coat stays on her — I get that far and no further and it turns out to be the best decision I've ever made, because after that everything about her comes to me out of the inside of my own jacket, warm, half-hidden, hers now.
"Hands," she says, at some point.
"What about them."
"They're shaking."
"Yeah."
"Yours are shaking," she says, wondering, and takes one of them off her waist and holds it up between us in the red light off the sign, this thing the size of a dinner plate with a scar across the third knuckle, and looks at it like it's an artifact.
Then she puts it flat against her throat.
"There," she says. "Where I can see it."
I don't have words for that. I've never had words for anything.
She undoes the top three buttons of her scrub top and takes my hand down under the collar and says, "There," again, quieter, and after that it's the sound of the air handlers and her breath going ragged against my ear and the gravel under one of my knees, and a woman who has spent nine years being the competent one at four in the morning coming apart very slowly, in stages, with somebody watching who she trusts.
I keep it slow because slow is the only thing I have to give her that nobody else does.
She tells me so. Not in those words. She says my name twice, the second time like she's asking a question, and I say "I'm here," and she says "I know, that's — that's the problem—" and then she laughs, breathless, and then she doesn't laugh, and her forehead comes down on my shoulder and her hand closes in the back of my shirt hard enough to pull the seam.
Afterward she stays exactly there for a long minute, breathing, inside my jacket, with the harbor going grey behind her.
"Okay," she says, into my collarbone.
"Yeah."
"That's — okay. Yes. I have some notes but broadly, yes."
"You have notes."
"I have one note," she says. "The gravel. There's gravel involved, Bear, and I want you to know I'm going to be finding it for days and I'm going to think of you every time, and I don't know how to feel about that as a foundation for a relationship."
"Is that what this is?"
She lifts her head.
"Don't," she says.
"Don't what?"
"Don't get clever about it at four twenty in the morning. I don't have the reserves."
"Okay," I say. "Yeah. That's what it is."
The radio on her hip squawks at four thirty-one.
It's the charge nurse, and it's about a bay, and it is the single most unwelcome sound I have ever heard in either of my lives.
"Oh, I hate that," Marisol says, with feeling.
"I hate that so much. Right in the—" She's already up.
Already doing buttons. Already reaching back and getting the clip in her hair with two movements, one, two, and she's a professional again, and I get to watch it happen, which is its own thing entirely. "Okay. Okay. I have to—"
"Go."
"There's a guy, apparently, who—"
"Marisol. Go."
She stops at the top of the service ladder.
Then she comes back four steps, fast, and takes my face in both hands and kisses me upside down over the top of my head — my chin in her palms, her mouth landing crooked on mine, both of us immediately laughing so hard it stops working entirely.
"That was bad," she says. "That was a bad kiss. That was a technically failed kiss."
"Best one I've had."
"You need to raise your standards."
"I did," I say. "That's the whole thing that's happening to me."
She looks at me for a second. Something in her face gives.
"Sunday," she says. "My mother's. Bring the duck story, she'll like it."
"There's no duck story."
"Then make one up. Six-thirty. Don't be grey."
And she's over the parapet and gone down the ladder in about nine seconds, because she's five-three and it was never a problem for her.
I sit on the roof of St. Brigid's until five with a cold cup of the worst coffee on the Oregon coast, watching the crab boat come back in.
Here's what I do up there, since I've got nothing else to do and no one to lie to.
I put my hands out in front of me, palms down, in the light off the ambulance sign, and I look at them.
Same two hands. There's the third knuckle with the shiny scar on it.
There's the finger I broke on a gate hinge in 2011 that sets a little crooked.
There's the callus off a wrench and the one off a throttle and a nick across the back of the left one where a man in a parking lot in 1997 had a knife and got exactly one good idea with it.
Thirty seconds ago these were on a woman's throat with her permission, and she watched them shake and called it out loud and did not move away.
A thousand years ago they were on an oar.
Same two hands. That's the whole problem with being a person; you only ever get the one set, and everything you've ever done with them is still in there somewhere, in the tendons, in the muscle memory, waiting to be asked.
I heard him say it.
That's the thing that comes up on the roof at ten to five with the fog going grey. Not the five. Not the arrow. A boy against the mast-fish and the fact that I heard.
And I sit there and I make myself say the next part, quietly, out loud, on the roof of a hospital, because it's the truest thing I've got and it needs saying somewhere before I say it to her:
"You have to tell her."
The crab boat comes in past the breakwater. Somebody on the deck raises a hand at somebody on the dock.
"Not tonight," I say. "But you have to tell her."
Then I climb down. Twenty-two rungs.
I count every one.