CHAPTER 19
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The dress is deep green and it weighs almost nothing, and I've forgotten what that does to a person. Cloth that gets around a corner before I do and then catches up. Ninety-odd days of jersey and a dressing gown, and now this.
The car smells of leather and the cold coming off the vents. Fernhollow Road is patched for the first mile and my hands read every seam of it through the door.
“You look extraordinary,” Julian says. “I'm going to say that once and then stop, because you'll be tired of hearing it long before the evening is.”
“Say it twice. The dressing gown and I have been very close lately and it never once complimented me.”
“Then it's a poor garment and I'll have it quietly replaced.” He signals for a turn nobody is waiting at. “You don't have to do anything tonight except be somewhere. Everyone's going to be very glad to see you.”
Be somewhere. That's a load applied at a point, and I file it where I file everything now.
“Who am I going to have to be charming at?” I ask.
“The hospital board, the fire chief, the woman who runs the after-school program, and about ninety people who will tell you they prayed for you.”
“Ninety people is a great deal of praying for one car.”
“It's a small county with good intentions and nothing much on television.
It's a Thursday in October and they'll still fill the room, which tells you everything about how much else there is to do here.” He looks over, pleased with me.
“You'll be marvellous. You always were, and I don't think you ever noticed it happening.”
The bag on my lap is small and stiff and holds one folded tissue, one lipstick and the organizer, which usually lives in my coat.
I moved it tonight and I knew exactly what I was accepting when I did.
My hands are steady enough to have made the swap without rattling it, which they weren't ten days ago, and I've woken at four in the morning three nights running and stayed awake remembering things in order.
This is the second time I've been past that gate since the hospital, and I counted the fence posts on the way down the drive, because counting is what I have instead of a phone.
The function room in Calder Ridge has a coffered ceiling somebody paid too much for and a floor that gives half a millimetre underfoot.
I feel it through the shoes at the first step and I can't stop calculating it.
Joists at sixteen inches, a span too long for the load, four hundred people who have no idea they're standing on a diving board.
The noise hits like weather. Glass and hairspray and warm bodies, and then a cold seam of October every time somebody props the fire door.
People look at me and I let them. That's the part I wasn't ready for — how good it is to be a thing in a room again instead of a situation in a house. The green moves when I move. Somebody's grandmother tells me the color is criminal and I want to be told it twice.
Three exits. I count them going in and I count them again from the middle of the room, and I'm honest with myself about why: because I want to know how a thing empties, and because I want to know how long it would take one man to reach me from anywhere in it.
“Mrs. Vance.” A woman from the hospital board takes my hand in both of hers. “You look so well. Doesn't she look well?”
“That's very kind. It's mostly the shoes, and the shoes were a committee decision.”
She laughs longer than the joke deserves and tells me about her hip.
Julian holds the room from a spot near the bandstand end without ever standing on anything. He's telling the story about the ambulance bay and I've heard it twice and I still watch him do it.
“I had the cheque in my hand,” he says. “An actual cheque, an actual amount, and a young man in a green jacket knocks on the window and tells me that if I don't move, he'll have the car towed with me still in it.”
Somebody at the back calls out a name and the room turns.
“He was completely right,” Julian says, over the noise. “He's here tonight, he's been promoted twice since, and he still won't let me park anywhere on that property. I've given a great deal of money to a building I'm not allowed to stop outside.”
They love him. I stand in the warm middle of it holding a glass of champagne I don't intend to drink, and here is the thing I've stopped arguing with: he's good company. He'd be good company if I'd never met him. The county isn't stupid for liking him. That's what makes it hopeless.
“You look so well,” says the pharmacist, and means it.
“You look so well,” says a man from the co-op, twenty minutes later, and by then it isn't kindness any more. It's a chorus somebody handed out at the door.
Julian brings me over to a couple by the window with his hand not quite at my back.
“You'll know my wife,” he says warmly. “She's recovering, and she's doing beautifully at it.”
The woman starts talking to me more slowly after that. Shorter words. Little pauses to let me keep up. She's not unkind, and it takes eleven minutes to get away from her, and I hold the champagne the whole time without lifting it.
Marguerite Ferris finds me by the coats with her silver bob cut to the millimetre and a grip like garden wire. She takes my forearm and keeps it.
“I heard you were coming and I said I'd believe it when I saw it,” she says. “And here you are and you've gone and worn green, which is right for you, whatever anybody says about redheads.”
“Nobody's said anything about redheads to me in years.”
“They wouldn't, to your face.” She's still holding on. “How are the mornings? The mornings are the test.”
“The mornings are getting longer, which I'm told is progress.”
Then her hand comes off my arm and she looks at the door instead of at me.
“I don't come down that road any more, dear. I go the long way round now.”
Six months ago she'd have told me the time she saw the lights and what she was cooking. Something has been said to this woman, or near her, and she's decided the extra four miles are worth it.
“That's a long way in the dark,” I say.
“It is. But it's flat, and there's nothing on it.”
Cole has been in this room for an hour and we have not spoken once.
He's in a jacket that fits him worse than the room does, and he's got his hands behind his back most of the time because they're scrubbed and still not clean, which is what happens to hands like that.
The thin white scar through his right eyebrow catches when he laughs.
He's being funny for strangers by the drinks table, and every one of them is having a better night for it.
Thirty feet. Four hundred people. The loneliest place I have been since the hospital.
At some point I end up in the doorway to the corridor because the air there is cold and honest, and he ends up there because he's going the other way, and we are both very careless about how long that takes.
“You've got your engineering face on,” he says.
“I'm surveying.”
“I know. It's a really unhelpful thing for me to find attractive.”
“Then look at the ceiling. There's a great deal wrong with it.”
He looks at the ceiling. He does not move, and I do not move, and his hand is near my elbow on the door frame and neither of us closes six inches, and I can feel the whole county not looking at us.
Then somebody laughs behind him and he's gone, and it took eleven seconds, and I'm going to have that eleven seconds for the rest of the week.
At nine Julian arrives at my shoulder with a glass of water and the evening tablet in his palm, and he does it so gently that the woman beside us smiles at him for it.
I take it with the water. It goes under my tongue and then into the tissue in the bag, and the tenth one is in the organizer before I've finished thanking him.
Then I go to work.
I've been watching the bar because there's a woman at the end of it in a good jacket with no drink taken out of her glass.
She holds it the way you hold a prop. Ash-blonde crop, a nose that's been flattened at least once, and she's been standing in the same six inches for forty minutes with a clear view of both doors.
I take the place beside her and set my champagne down.
“You're not drinking that,” I say.
“Neither are you, and you've been not drinking it since half seven.” She doesn't turn her head. “It's the best trick there is. You hold a glass, nobody hands you another one, nobody asks you why, and you get an hour of looking sociable for the price of standing still.”
“I've been doing it badly. Mine's gone warm.”
“Then swap it at the end and start again. That's the whole system.” Now she turns, a little. “Roz Pike. I'd say off-duty, but the sheriff's office doesn't really believe in that word.”
“Evelyn Vance.”
“I know who you are. Everyone in this room knows who you are, and about half of them have practiced what they're going to say to you.” She tips the glass an inch. “For what it's worth, I hate parties where people practice.”
“Somebody told me tonight that I look so well. Three somebodies.”
“That's the county being fond of you, which is nicer than the alternative and still no fun to stand in.” She rubs the side of her nose with a knuckle.
“You've been looking at this, so I'll get it over with. Broke it twice. First time was a boxing club two counties over, second time was a filing cabinet drawer that I opened at speed while I was arguing with a fax machine. Only one of those is a story, so I tell people both were boxing.”
“Which one hurt?”
“The cabinet. By a distance that isn't close.” She almost smiles. “Ask me the thing you came over here to ask me. You've been building it since you put the glass down.”
The floor gives its half millimetre. Four hundred people, and a woman who has not once looked directly at my face.
“If a person wanted a copy of their own accident report,” I say, “and their own name happened to be on a court petition, would your office hand it over or would it go to the petitioner?”
She doesn't turn her head.
“That'd depend who asked, and how loud.” She lets the room go by. “Both of those are choices you get to make, Mrs. Vance.”
Everything I have wants to say the next sentence. I've had it drafted for two days and it would take nine seconds and it would be the most expensive nine seconds of my life.
“Thank you for the nose,” I say instead.
“It's the only part of me with an anecdote.”
Julian is at my elbow in eighty-eight seconds. I count them, and I'm counting the whole time he's crossing, and he doesn't hurry once.
“Deputy Pike,” he says. “I'm told the new radios are behaving.”
“They behave beautifully right up until the ridge, and then they behave like the ridge,” she says. “It's not the radios' fault. It's geology, and geology doesn't take a foundation cheque.”
“You'd be astonished what geology takes.” He laughs, and she laughs, and nothing whatsoever is said.
The coats are going out at eleven and the fire door is propped again, cold cutting through the warm glass-and-hairspray air in a clean line.
Cole hands a woman her coat because he's standing nearest the rail, then he's beside me for as long as it takes to lift one sleeve off a hanger.
“Friday,” he says. “I've got a camera to fix.”
“Nothing's broken.”
“Nothing's broken yet.”
The back of my hand comes within an inch of his sleeve and stays there, an inch, and then I have my coat and he's holding the door for somebody's mother.
The radio in the car gives a frost warning for the upland county, first of the season, twenty-nine degrees before dawn. Julian turns it down without turning it off.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” he asks.
“I did.”
He says he's glad. Neither of us believes a word of it, and it's the most peaceable thing we've said to each other in a month.
“You were talking to the deputy a long time,” Julian says, watching the gate slide.
“She was telling me about her nose,” I say, and he laughs, and the gravel goes on for four tenths of a mile, and neither of us says anything else all the way to the house.