CHAPTER 12
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The gate is shut and the truck is on the other side of it.
I've come down the drive with my coat buttoned and my sleeves pulled past the wrist, and I've stopped six feet short of the line where the gravel ends and Fernhollow Road begins. Julian is in the city until evening. Nora doesn't come on Tuesdays.
Cole is leaning on the front wing of a gray Ford, holding a folded sheet of paper up between two fingers.
“I've got a job number and everything,” he says. “You can look at it if you like, though I'd advise against it, because it's the most boring piece of paper in this county, and I say that as a man who reads warranty cards for fun.”
“What's the job supposed to be?”
“Perimeter sensor calibration. I invented that phrase about four years ago and nobody has ever questioned it once. What it means is that I walk a fence line writing numbers on a clipboard, and then somebody pays me for the walking.”
“And the numbers are invented as well?”
“Every number on that page is true, and that's the whole trick of it. If I made one up, somebody would check it eventually, and nobody in the history of this county has ever checked anything that dull.”
Behind him the road runs down the hill and out of sight. There's a tractor working somewhere past the Ferris place, and it's the first sound I've heard in a long while that didn't come out of a speaker in a ceiling.
“He'll know,” I say. “If I get in that truck, he'll know inside an hour. Somebody will mention it to him kindly, the way people do here, and it'll reach him before the plates are cleared.”
“Yeah.”
“You could try telling me otherwise.”
“I could, but you'd know I was making it up, and then you'd stop believing the rest of what I say, and I've got two or three things saved that I'd very much like you to believe.” He straightens off the wing.
“It's your afternoon. Say the word and I'll write my boring numbers down and drive off, and we'll both agree I came about the fence.”
I put my hand flat on the top rail of the gate. It's warm on the south side and cold on the other, and I've stood here before and gone back up the hill every time.
“Then let's not be quick about it,” I say.
He gets in and rolls the truck forward, and the gate wakes up and slides back along its track with nobody near a keypad, and I'm standing three feet from where the nose of it stopped.
Eighty-five days since they drove me home from the hospital, and I haven't been past this line in a single one of them.
I take the step. My legs know how to do it and my stomach doesn't. The asphalt comes up through my heels harder than gravel, like a stair one riser lower than the one my body planned for, and I put a hand out and touch nothing and take another step anyway.
The sky opens over the road and there is far too much of it.
Sound arrives from further off than it should — the tractor, a jay somewhere down the slope, the truck ticking over — and none of it stops at a wall.
I stand on the road with one hand on the warm wing and wait to be told to come back in.
A leaf comes down the hill on its edge, goes past my shoe and keeps going, and that is the entire event.
Then I open the door and climb up into a truck.
The bench seat has a dog blanket thrown over a split in the vinyl, and underneath the blanket there's a spring that finds my right thigh and keeps it company all the way to town.
Bramwell arranges himself in the middle, decides against it, and puts his head down on my leg with the folded ear underneath, which can't be comfortable for either of us.
“He'll move if you tell him,” Cole says. “He won't, actually. That was optimistic of me. I'd like to apologize in advance for this vehicle, by the way.”
“It's a perfectly good truck.”
“It isn't, and I'd rather you heard it from me.
The seat's got a spring in it that I've been meaning to deal with since spring, which is a joke I've made about forty times and it hasn't improved.
That window goes down but it doesn't come back up without two people.
And the radio picks up one station and it's a man talking about hay.”
“Leave the hay man on.”
“You say that now.”
We come off the gravel and onto the patched stretch, and the trees close over the road and open again, and he keeps apologizing the whole way — for the smell, which is dog, and for the heater, which he says is a matter of some pride.
“You want the heater? It's got two settings. Off, and Portugal.”
“Portugal.”
“That's the spirit.” He pulls a knob out to its stop, and hot air comes up around my ankles like a held-open oven, and I sit in it and don't say anything for half a mile because my eyes have gone stupid.
In the door mirror, the gate is closing behind us on its own, unhurried, the way it does everything.
“It opened for you,” I say. “I was standing right there and it never once opened for me. I've walked down to it more mornings than I can count, and it has never moved a hand's width for me.”
He drops his speed for the frost heaves.
“Right. Okay. So it's an inductive loop, which is a loop of wire in a saw cut with a frequency running across it, and when a mass of metal sits over the top of it the inductance falls off and the controller reads that as a presence, and the presence is what the gate is actually listening for, so what you've got is an oscillator that —”
“Try that again for a woman with a head injury.”
“Yes. Sorry. Give me a second.” He taps the wheel twice with his thumb. “There's a wire loop buried under that gravel, and it counts mass. Two tons of Ford, yes. One woman, never.”
“And somebody chose that.”
“Somebody chose the gate. There's no setting anywhere in that system that turns it into the other thing, and I've looked twice, because I wondered about it the first time and then I wondered about it again.”
My hand is on the door handle. I've spent every one of those mornings believing I was being kept, and keeping is a thing a person does to you — it has a face, and a reason, and somewhere inside it a way of being argued with. A wire under gravel has none of that.
I was being sorted. I press my thumb into the chrome until the knuckle goes white, and then I let go and put both hands in my lap where I can see them.
The Wren has eleven tables and eight stools at the counter, and I count them from the doorway the way I'd count bearings on a span. Four people at the counter. Two by the window. A man reading a folded newspaper who looks up and then looks up again.
I take the corner booth with my back to the wall, and I'm sitting before I've decided to, and I notice myself doing it and file it somewhere to be frightened about later.
The menu is laminated and tacky along one edge where the seal has failed, and my thumb keeps finding the sticky part.
A woman I don't know puts two cups down in front of us without being asked, because that's the arrangement in this room, and fills them from the pot of coffee she was already carrying.
My hands start when I reach for mine. They do this. They've done it since the hospital and nobody has ever asked me about it — Aldred writes it in a file without looking up, and Julian puts his hand over mine at dinner and says the word tremor in a voice for saying gentle things.
So I count. Eight stools. Eleven tables. Six panes in the window and a seventh with a chip out of the corner. Four tines on the fork, twelve letters in the word on the salt shaker, and by then my hands have decided to be hands again.
Cole is turning his cup a quarter turn on the table and looking at the square through the glass.
He never once looks at my hands. He doesn't ask, and he doesn't do the thing where a person carefully doesn't ask, and he lets the whole thing pass the way you'd let a bird go by. Six years, and that is the most romantic thing anybody has done in front of me.
“What were you doing?” he says. “For work, I mean. Before.”
Nobody has asked me that. The doctors ask what I remember. The people at the gala ask how I'm getting on and then tell me about their knees.
“Bridges,” I say. “Small ones. Footbridges, service crossings, the ones nobody photographs. I had a bad one, once, and it's the only story I tell.”
“Then you're obliged to tell it now. That's a rule.”
“There was a footbridge over a rail cut, and it was a beautiful thing — very shallow, very light, four hundred feet of it, and everything checked out on paper twice. They opened it at eleven in the morning and by noon it was moving sideways under people. It was an inch, maybe an inch and a half.”
“That doesn't sound like an inch and a half of problem.”
“It's enough that people stop walking and grab the rail.
And here's the part I love. The bridge wasn't wrong.
The bridge was doing exactly what the drawings said it would.
The problem was that when a deck moves under a crowd, everybody adjusts their feet at the same time to stay upright, and then they're all pushing in step, and the more it moves the better they get at pushing. It feeds itself. Eight hundred people accidentally learned to march.”
He's stopped with the cup halfway. “So how do you argue with eight hundred people?”
“You don't. You hang weights underneath it.
Tuned masses on springs, set to move against the deck instead of with it, so the energy goes into the weights and the deck stays still.
It took us four months and it looked like plumbing, and it worked, and afterward nobody who walked over it ever knew there'd been anything wrong.”
“That's twice today,” he says.
“Twice what?”
“Weight being the answer to something.” He sets the cup down. “Can I tell you a thing you're going to be annoyed about?”
“Now I'm obliged to hear it.”
“The day I came out to look at your cameras, I didn't have a work order.
I didn't have a job number, or a call, or any business at all being on that property, and if anybody had asked me a second question I'd have had no answer, and a contractor on a bonded system who invents a reason to be inside a client's fence can lose his licence for it. I knew that in the truck on the way up.”
“Then why did you come up that drive at all?”
“Because you said the doors generally open from the inside.” He turns the cup again. “Generally is a word people only use when they've been told to.”
The sugar is on his side, behind the napkin holder. I reach for it as he moves his cup out of the way, and the backs of our fingers come to rest against each other on the laminate.
Two seconds, perhaps. Neither of us moves. Neither of us says one word about it.
Then I take the sugar and he takes his cup, and the woman comes past with the pot, and the square goes on being the square out the window.
“Go on, then,” I say. “Tell me about the dog's ear.”
“Nothing wrong with it. I had it looked at, because I'm that sort of man, and I was told it's a design feature and to stop wasting everyone's afternoon.”
“He seems untroubled by it.”
“He's untroubled by everything except bins. A bin at the end of a driveway is, to him, a personal insult that's been left out overnight. He's forty pounds of lurcher and he'll cross the road to avoid one.”
“And what's his position on hares?”
“Hares he'd die for. He's never caught one and he never will, and I think on some level he knows that and has decided it isn't the point.”
We stay another twenty minutes, and I eat half a slice of pie I didn't order, and I tell him three things in the flattest voice I own: that the study door is on a different system to every other door in the house, that on the night of the crash there are forty-one minutes with no footage, and that there is a petition with my name on it and a hearing date.
He doesn't say anything comforting. He asks who signs the maintenance contract, which is the only useful question anybody has asked me since the crash.
Then we're back in the truck with the heater on Portugal and the hay man saying his piece, and Route 12 unrolls two lanes wide with no shoulder along the ridge.
Mile Marker 9 sits four miles out, where the road takes its long left with the drop on the outside and the water eighty feet down through the trees. That's where they found me. Everything I know about that night, I know because somebody told me.
There's guardrail through the whole curve, and one span of it is newer than the others — galvanised bright between two lengths gone dull gray. You can pick it out from a quarter of a mile away.
I watch it come and I wait for my body to hand me something. It kept the smell of that hospital corridor. It kept the exact sound the study door makes.
“You want me to slow down?” he asks, when the marker comes up.
I tell him no. We go past it at fifty-five, past the one bright piece of railing in four miles of dull ones, and there is nothing in me at all — not a flicker, not a flinch, not one single thing my body has kept. So I start counting fence posts instead, and I don't stop until Calder Ridge.