3. Emilia #2
The kitchen counter runs along the back wall beneath a window shuttered from the outside.
On a rack above the counter, between a colander and a set of copper-bottomed pans, a rifle.
Not displayed. Not decorative. Positioned for access.
My eyes travel. A handgun on a high shelf by the door, next to a box of ammunition and a first aid kit.
A shotgun mounted above the fireplace I missed earlier because of the dim light and my own hysteria.
By the front door, which I can see from this angle, a deadbolt and a secondary bar lock, the kind you see on medieval doors in movies, a thick beam of timber that drops into iron brackets.
The windows. Every single one has interior shutters made from solid wood, hinged and latched with steel hardware that looks handmade.
Not for storms. These shutters are for stopping bullets.
Or at least slowing them. The glass behind them is thick, and in the kitchen window I can see the faint crosshatch pattern of wire mesh embedded in the pane.
This isn't a cabin. This is a bunker dressed in pine.
I should be frightened. A strange man with an arsenal of firearms and a fortified home on a mountain that doesn't appear on any map I saw during my drive.
But fear requires the belief that things could get worse, and I've just driven three days from a mansion with Italian marble floors and security cameras in every hallway and a panic room that my father used not for his protection but for mine.
His version of mine. The kind of protection that locks from the outside.
Justice slides a plate across the counter toward me without turning around.
"Eat."
I eat standing up because sitting down feels too permanent.
Too settled. Sitting means staying and staying means being found and being found means the hands again.
So I stand at the counter and I eat scrambled eggs with onions and butter from a chipped ceramic plate with a fork that's heavier than any fork I've ever held, and I eat so fast I barely chew because my stomach has taken over negotiations and my brain has been voted out.
He turns back to the stove and scrapes the skillet with a spatula and moves the pan to a cold burner and wipes the counter with a rag.
Giving me the dignity of not being observed while I shovel food into my mouth like a feral thing.
I finish the plate in under two minutes and my stomach cramps with the shock of sudden fullness after days of nothing and I hold the counter until it passes.
He takes the plate. Rinses it. Sets it in a drying rack made from welded steel rods that he probably built himself. None of this requires conversation and he doesn't offer any.
I stand in the kitchen wearing his clothes and smelling his soap from the bathroom where I washed my face and hands, and the silence isn't hostile.
It's just the silence of someone who doesn't fill air with words.
I'm used to silence, but not this kind. The silence in my father's house was loaded.
Pressurized. You could hear the things people weren't saying.
This silence is just quiet. Wind outside.
Fire popping. The tick of cooling metal from the stove.
I need to do something. The thought arrives with the force of a physical compulsion, hardwired into me by years of training.
Never be idle. Never be useless. Useless things get discarded or locked away.
I need to earn the plate of food and the warm clothes and the couch and the locked gate between me and the road.
I need to demonstrate value because value is the only currency that buys safety in the economy I come from.
My ruined clothes sit in a heap on the bathroom floor where I left them.
I fetch them. The silk blouse weighs almost nothing, stiff now with dried sweat and road grime and a greenish stain near the collar that I think is radiator coolant.
The skirt has a six-inch tear along the hem.
The loafers are unsalvageable, the leather warped and cracked, but the blouse and skirt can be washed.
I can wash them. I can hang them to dry.
I can make myself less of a disaster. Less of a liability.
The kitchen sink is deep and industrial, a single basin of pitted stainless steel with a hand-pump faucet beside a standard tap.
I turn the tap and wait for warm water and run the basin half full.
There's a bar of soap on the ledge, amber-colored, rough-cut, the kind you buy at a farm supply store or make yourself.
I pick it up and it immediately squirts from my fingers and clatters into the sink, sending a splash of water across the counter and onto the floor.
I grab for it. Miss. My hands won't cooperate.
The shaking that started on the road hasn't stopped, not really, it just receded to a low vibration that I could ignore while eating because the fork was heavy enough to provide ballast. But the soap is slick and my fingers are trembling and I chase it around the bottom of the basin like a child trying to catch a fish in a bucket.
Water splashes up my forearms, soaking the rolled cuffs of his flannel, and I get both hands on the bar and press it against the silk and start rubbing and the soap shoots free again and this time it hits the edge of the sink and bounces onto the floor.
I stare at it on the rough planks. My vision blurs.
Not tears. I don't have tears left. Just the blurring that comes from holding yourself together so tightly for so long that the edges of the world start to soften and slip.
I bend to grab the soap and my hands are vibrating now, not shaking, vibrating, like something mechanical with a broken governor, and I get the bar between my palms and stand up and it slides free again immediately, bouncing off the counter this time.