CHAPTER 14
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I go into his study at ten in the morning, through the front hall, in daylight, with my shoes on.
Sneaking is what a person does when she still believes she might be wrong.
I've run the numbers on being careful. Six years of it, every door closed softly, every question asked in the voice you'd use on a horse.
Careful has bought me nothing. Sixteen hours ago he held my ledger over the kitchen sink and lit the corner of it and asked whether I wanted the window open for the smell.
So I don't lower my voice and I don't check the hall behind me. I cross the rug and I put both hands flat on his desk and I look at it the way I'd look at a beam somebody else designed.
The ceiling greets me the way it does every morning, warm as a woman leaning in a doorway.
“Good morning, Evelyn. The study's at sixty-eight degrees this morning. Would you like me to open the terrace door for you?”
“Leave it shut, thank you. I'd rather have the room exactly the way he keeps it.”
The lower drawer on the right is locked. It has been locked for six years and I have never once asked him what's in it, which is its own kind of answer about me.
I don't pick it. I've never picked a lock in my life and I'm not going to learn one today. I pull the drawer above it, the unlocked one, all the way out until it clears its runners, and I set it on the rug with the pens still rolling in it.
Then I lie down on the floor and reach into the gap and over the back of the lower drawer, which has no back panel, because almost nothing does. Cabinetmakers save the plywood. Locks are a promise about the front of a thing.
My hand finds paper.
It comes up in one brick, banded twice with a brown rubber band gone soft and sticky. Envelopes. The top one has my name on it in a round, fat, cheerful hand that presses too hard on the downstroke, and the ache in my left forearm goes somewhere far away.
Rachel writes like she talks. She writes like she's already halfway through the sentence before the pen touches down.
I sit on the floor of my husband's study with my back against the desk and I count them.
Twenty-two letters.
I count them again, laying them out in rows of five and a row of two, because rows of five don't lie to you the way a stack does.
I say it out loud, to nobody, in an empty room with the sun on the floor.
“Twenty-two. She wrote twenty-two. Every one of these got as far as this house.”
Every one of them is open. None of them has been torn, because he'd never tear anything. Each flap has been lifted along the seam with something thin and warm, and then afterward it has been put back down with a glue stick.
You can see it. The glue sits in a ridge along the edge where it was pressed too hard at one end and not at all at the other.
It's waxy under my thumbnail and it lifts in a little gray worm when I scrape it.
He did it twenty-two times and he never got better at it, because a man who has always had people to do the small work has no hands for the small work.
He read them. He read all of them, and then he decided.
The ceiling offers it kindly, the way it offers everything, with no more weight on it than a weather report.
“Would you like the study lights brought up, Evelyn? You're reading in a dim room.”
“No. Leave everything exactly how it was.”
I put the upper drawer back on its runners and I seat it flush. I leave the rubber band on the rug where it fell, on purpose, because an empty drawer with a tidy band beside it reads as tidiness, and tidiness is the last thing in this house anybody investigates.
Then I take twenty-two letters out of his study and up the stairs, and I don't hurry, and I don't look at the corner of the ceiling on the landing where the small black eye sits.
The east reading nook faces the orchard, and at two in the afternoon the light in it is good enough to work by. I sit on the floor with my spine against the window seat, which is where I slept last night, because the door released at 6:04 and I would not get into a bed Nora had made.
I only let myself read four. First, seventh, fourteenth, last. Sample the span, sample the middle, sample the failure. Anything else and I'll be sitting here at midnight with my hands shaking too hard to be useful, and I need my hands tonight.
The first one is four years old and it is so loud I can hear the room she wrote it in.
Evvie — okay, so I have now left four messages and I am starting to feel like a woman leaving messages for a man who has very obviously blocked her, which is not a good look on a sister.
I've decided the house has eaten you. Big houses do that.
You go in to hang up a coat and they keep you, and eleven months later somebody finds your car keys in a hedge.
Work is a circus. We had a Great Dane in this week who'd swallowed a sock, and the owner cried harder than the dog did, and in the end I was holding both of them while the surgeon told a joke nobody wanted.
Come down for a weekend. I'll cook the one thing I can cook and you can sit at my terrible table and tell me I'm living my life wrong, which is your favourite hobby and I have genuinely missed it.
Write back or I'll turn up. You know I'll turn up. R.
The seventh has a stamp stuck on crooked and a coffee ring on the back like a signature.
Ev — right, I've done the math, and you're the one who's good at math, so you'll appreciate the effort.
Six letters. No answers. One very polite telephone call from a man who told me that you were resting.
I asked him when you'd be finished resting and he laughed, and I have never in my life wanted to bite somebody so badly, and I work with animals that bite.
I'm not going to be dramatic about this.
I'm going to be mildly dramatic about it, which is my legal right as the younger one.
I miss you in the ordinary way, not the greeting-card way.
I miss having somebody to tell when a client names a ferret after her ex-husband.
If I've done something, tell me and I'll apologize for it, and I'll apologize even if I didn't do it, because that is how much I would like a telephone call. R.
The fourteenth I have to read twice, because the first time my eyes go over it without letting it in.
Evvie — I got a letter from lawyers. Some firm in the city with two men's names on it, on paper thick enough to roof a shed with, informing me that further unsolicited contact would be regarded as harassment.
Harassment. I'm your sister. I have a scar on my chin because you told me a shed roof would hold my weight and it did not, and I have never once made you pay for that, and now I have a letter from a firm I've never heard of telling me I'm a nuisance.
I read it in the car park at work and then I went back inside and clipped a spaniel's nails and my hands were completely steady, and that frightened me more than the letter did.
Here's the thing. I'm not going to keep doing this, Evvie.
I'm going to keep doing this. That's the problem with me.
Our mother used to say I don't know when a door is shut.
She meant it as a criticism. I've decided to take it as instructions. R.
The last one is dated six days before the morning I stopped being able to trust my own calendar, and it is short, and it is quiet, and quiet is not her.
Ev. They told me at the hospital that you'd been discharged and then they told me they weren't able to tell me anything else, and the woman who said it looked at me like she was sorry, which is how I knew.
I drove up again. That's four times now.
Four times I've sat at the bottom of that drive with the engine running, talking to a little gray box on a post, and four times the little gray box has told me in a very kind voice that you aren't receiving visitors.
I want to tell you I'm angry. Mostly I'm tired, and I'm frightened in a way I don't have a word for, and I keep thinking about you asleep in that enormous house with nobody in it who knew you before him.
So here's what I've decided. I'm coming back and I'm parking there until somebody moves me.
You don't have to write. You don't have to shout.
Just blink at the gate camera and I'll know. R.
I don't cry into them. Tears make paper cockle and cockled paper is a thing a lawyer gets to say something about.
I square the edges the way you square a stack of drawings, tap tap on the floorboards, and I slide all twenty-two into a zippered pillow protector out of the linen cupboard, because that's what they are now.
They're documents. My sister spent four years writing me letters and what I'm going to do with them is file them.
By six the light over the orchard has gone the color of weak cider and the air off the grass smells sweet and just beginning to turn — windfalls going soft, wasps still working them, that thick brown-sugar smell that means something is a day away from being wrong.
Forty-one trees. I've counted them from the window enough times to be sure.
The crates are stacked under the far row where they've been since before I came here. I go along the stack with my hand out, tipping each one, listening.
The fourth from the bottom has a split batten on the near end. I pull it out and turn it over.
I turn it over and I talk to it, because there's nobody else out here to talk to.
“There you are. Nobody ever lifts you by that end, do they.”
That's the whole reason. A crate with a bad batten gets carried from the good end for the rest of its life, and nothing on this property is ever inspected, only used. I've spent twenty years learning that people trust a thing until it drops something on their foot.
The paint scraper from the garden room goes in under the false slat in the bottom, and I lean on it, and the batten lets go with a dry crack, more of a tearing than a snap. A splinter goes into the heel of my left palm, deep enough to argue with later.
I wedge the space open with the flat half of the pencil, and then I use the flat half to lever the slat back down until it sits proud by nothing at all.
Inside goes the pillow protector.
Inside goes a red site notebook out of the box of them in the garden room, under the seed trays, where nobody has looked since the year I stopped working.
I kneel in the wet grass with the notebook on my knee and I open it and I turn past the first page. And the second. And the third.
Three pages blank on purpose. If somebody finds this, the newest thing in it won't be the first thing he reads. He'll flick, and see nothing, and put it down, because people quit at the third empty page. Everybody does.
Entry one, with the broken half of the pencil, which is too short to hold properly and skips on the graph rule and lays down a line like a bad weld.
I keep using it.
The first thing I write is a list, headed with the only question that matters: who could stand up and say any part of this is true.
There is one name on the list.
I look at it in the last of the light, one line of red on a page ruled for load calculations, and my throat does something I'm not going to describe to myself.
I say it out loud to the trees and the wasps and the crate, in the only language I've ever been fluent in.
“One member carrying the whole load. That's not a design, that's a countdown.”
It isn't a strategy. I'd like to be honest about that for one minute of my life.
I want him standing there. I want him in the room when it happens, saying my name the ordinary way, and I think about his hand on the bench seat of the truck between us and how neither of us moved it, and then I stop thinking about it, because there is work.
I put my hand flat on the lid before I stand up, and I tell it the truth, because it's the only thing here I haven't lied to.
“Sorry. This is going to be heavier than apples.”
I get up with apple dust and rot smell on my hands and I start back across the grass, and the porch light comes up to meet me. Nobody asked it to. It knows my walk now.
Then headlights swing across the gravel at the top of the drive and settle, and an engine ticks itself quiet, and a car door shuts with that expensive sound.
He won't ask me where I've been. That took me a long time to understand as a fact about him rather than a kindness. A man asks because he needs the answer.
I'm still holding the last envelope. I never put it in with the others.
Four times. She came four times and stood at that gate and somebody told her I didn't want to see her.
I put the flat of the pencil against the last envelope and press until the paper takes the line, because I want one mark on it that he didn't make.