CHAPTER 20
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That's funny. I'd like it on the record that I know it's funny, and that I drove out here anyway.
Bramwell rides with his chin on my leg the whole way, which is his standing opinion of any drive over ten minutes. Last night I stood in the yard and told him we were finished going out to Ardenwood. I said it in full sentences, twice, like a man who means it. He ate part of a boot while I said it.
“I know what I told you,” I say at the turn off Fernhollow Road. “You can stop looking at me about it.”
The gate opens for a scheduled service call the way gates do, because a work order is a fact and nobody in that house argues with a fact. The dash clock reads 5:48 when I park at the top of the orchard track. I leave the window down two inches for the dog. I take the ladder off the rack.
Forty-one trees in this block. I've counted them from the top of that ladder more times than a grown man ought to admit to.
There's nothing wrong with Camera 17. I know there's nothing wrong with it.
I pulled its log three days ago and it's been clean nine weeks running.
I take the housing off anyway. Blow out the seal.
Reseat a connector I already reseated in August, wipe a lens that doesn't need wiping, and over the ridge the sky goes the color of a bruise coming up under skin.
Friday afternoon, and I've got two jobs waiting in Calder Ridge that are actually broken. I'm up a ladder in a stranger's apple trees instead, doing maintenance on my own excuse.
The air has that flat green smell it gets before the first real rain of a season. Cut grass gone sour at the edges. Windfalls trodden into the row until the whole block smells like a cider press.
She comes down the fourth row while I'm pretending to check a bracket.
Green coat two sizes too big for her, boots she hasn't laced past the third hook, dark auburn hair stuck along one cheek where the wind put it.
She walks like the ground owes her an answer.
Her left hand is in her pocket and her right is doing what it always does when she's about to say a true thing, which is turning a leaf over and over by the stem until she's ready.
“There's nothing wrong with that camera,” she says.
I come down two rungs so I'm not talking to her from a height. “Nothing's wrong with a lot of things out here, and I keep driving out to look at them. I've got a whole folder of nothing wrong.”
“You wrote yourself the work order.”
“I did. I signed it, too, which I want you to know I felt bad about for nearly a minute and a half.”
Her mouth moves. It's the closest she gets to laughing lately and I'll take it, and I hate that I'll take it, and I'd stand here another hour for the next one.
Then she stops in front of me and looks at the ladder instead of my face, and I know we're not going to get to be funny for long.
“You told Nora at the start of the week that you weren't coming back out,” she says. “She repeated it to me twice, in case I hadn't understood it the first time.”
“That was true when I said it.” I fold the cloth and put it away, because my hands need somewhere to be.
“Evelyn, listen. I've been trying to work out how to say this without it sounding like I'm leaving, and there isn't a way, so I'm going to say the ugly version.
A man who keeps driving out here is a fact.
Somebody writes that fact on a page. A judge in Calder Ridge reads the page, and the page doesn't say I came to fix a camera.
It says a married woman had a man in her orchard at dusk, and every single thing you've built since September gets read backward through that one line.”
“I know what it says.”
“Then you know why I've spent two weeks driving the other direction and getting here anyway.”
She turns the leaf over. Once, twice. “Do you want to hear the part you haven't thought about?”
“I'd like to think I've thought about all of it, but go on.”
“Six years.” She says it flat, the way she says numbers.
“For six years the people in my life have decided in advance what I can survive, and then handed me the version they thought I could carry.
Julian did it about money, and then about my sister, and then about a night I can't remember.
Dr. Aldred does it professionally and sends an invoice.
Nora does it out of kindness, which is worse, because I can't even be angry at her properly.” She looks up.
“And now you're standing in my orchard doing the arithmetic on my behalf and calling it protection.”
“That's not fair, and you know it's not.”
“It's completely fair. You've decided what the courtroom will do to me and you've decided it without me in the room, which is exactly the thing that has been done to me every day since the crash.” Her voice doesn't rise.
It goes quieter and more exact, which is worse.
“You're allowed to be right about the risk.
You're not allowed to be right about it in private and then hand me the result.”
“And if I stay and it costs you the hearing? What do I do with that, Evelyn? Where do I put it?”
“You put it where I put everything. In a notebook, with the date on it, and you carry it.” She takes half a step and doesn't take the second one. “Don't you dare protect me by leaving. He's already done that one.”
I open my mouth with something light in it. Something about how I'm mostly useful for ladders anyway, and it's right there, fully formed, and it dies about a third of the way out.
“I'm not scared of him,” I say. “I'm scared of being the reason a judge says you're not reliable.”
She takes that. She stands there in the wind and takes it, and her right hand comes out of the leaf and goes still at her side, and that stillness costs her something.
“All right,” she says. “Then I'm going to give you the thing I came down here to give you, and you can decide afterward.”
“Evelyn—”
“Let me do it in order. I do better in order.”
So she tells it in order, and the order is what takes the floor out from under me.
There's a book in the study, she says. Third shelf, the tall one about the cathedrals, the one Julian has never once opened.
She was checking the endpapers of everything on that shelf because paper is the only thing in that house that doesn't report to anybody.
Under the endpaper of the back cover, flat, someone had put two folded sheets.
Letterhead, she says. Two men's names in raised type, an address in Calder Ridge, a phone number she doesn't recognise. A petition for dissolution of marriage with her name typed in three places and signed in her own handwriting in the fourth. A retainer receipt.
“Dated nine days before the crash,” she says.
“Nine. I counted it twice on the calendar and then a third time because I didn't trust the first two.” She holds my eyes.
“And I remember none of it — the office, the drive, the phone call to make the appointment, the deciding.
There's a woman who walked in there and signed that, and I've got her hands, and I can't find her anywhere in my head.”
She gives me the whole thing the way you'd read out a site report. Item, condition, date. Her voice never once goes up, and I want to put my hands over both of hers and I don't.
“Okay,” I say, when I can. “Now mine, and mine is short.”
I get the folded photocopy out of my jacket, where it's been since I lifted it out of the truck door before I climbed down. The paper's soft at the creases from being handled.
“That's a court order,” I say. “Signed in Calder County. It's the reason my service contract at Ardenwood exists, and it's dated before the crash, which nobody has ever mentioned to me, and there's a line on the second page. It names you. It calls you the protected person.”
She reads it in the failing light with her thumb moving along under each line, and I watch her hands, and I don't watch anything else in the world.
“Before,” she says.
“Before.”
The first drop hits the leaves over us, and then a dozen more, that flat wet tapping rain makes on unpicked fruit, which is a different sound entirely from rain on a leaf. Then it's in the grass. Then it's on us, and the top rung of the ladder starts ringing, one small bright note at a time.
Neither of us moves toward the truck.
She folds the photocopy along its own creases, hands it back, and then she steps in and puts the flat of her hand against my collarbone. She isn't pushing. She's deciding, and I can feel her deciding through my shirt.
“Tell me to go home,” I say, low.
“No.”
“Then I'm going to kiss you, and I've been going to for two weeks.”
My right hand goes to her jaw, thumb along the line of it, rain already on her skin there.
My left finds her waist through all that terrible enormous coat.
Her hands close on my wrists first — both of them, quick, the way you'd catch something you didn't want dropped — and then they slide up and take hold of my shoulders.
Her mouth. Slow at the start, careful, both of us being careful, and then not slow at all. Rain in her hair and in mine, running cold at my collar, and everywhere our skin actually meets there's heat, and the heat is the only thing in the county that makes sense.
Her back finds a trunk and my weight follows it, and she takes the weight and pulls a little more of it toward her.
My hand slides from her waist down to her hip and stops there, deliberately, flat, and stays.
Her mouth goes to the corner of mine and then along my jaw, and my breath is at her throat, and she says something into my skin that isn't a word.
Then her palm comes up flat against the front of my shirt and she turns her face away, and I stop, and the rain keeps on going in the branches like nothing happened.
“If we do this now,” she says, “I'll be doing it because I'm drowning. I want to do it because I picked you.”
“Then pick me later. I'm not going anywhere and I'm extremely easy to find.”
She laughs at that, wrecked and dry at once, her hand still flat where she put it. “You're wet through.”
“Yeah, well. It's raining, in case you missed that.”
We stand there. Her hand comes off my shirt and goes to my hair, pushing it back off my forehead, and she frowns like she's found a fault.
“Somebody has been at this with the wrong scissors,” she says.
“That somebody was me, in a bathroom, with a mirror I don't trust. It's a system and it mostly works.”
“It does not mostly work.” Her thumb goes over the scar through my right eyebrow, once, and stops there. “Where's the dog? I heard him barking down at the gate the other evening and I stood outside in the cold for a while, just listening to it.”
“He's up in the truck being a coward about the weather. He'd come down here and lean his whole weight on your leg and then he'd want feeding, and I'd have nothing for him, because there's nothing in my house. I burn eggs. I've burned eggs in three separate counties.”
“You can't cook.”
“I can heat things. Heating is not cooking. I've made my peace with the difference and so has he.”
She's smiling with her whole face, in the rain, in an orchard, holding my sleeve, and I'm thinking that she reported a divorce filing to me like a bridge inspection and then put her hand on my collarbone, and that I would sign a hundred false work orders for another minute of this.
That's the thought. That's the whole thought, and I don't dress it up.
Then her hand tightens on my sleeve and her head comes round toward the drive.
“Cole,” she says. “Headlights.”
Four tenths of a mile of gravel, and I count it out loud like counting will slow it down — “Forty seconds, maybe fifty” — and she's already walking away down the row with her chin up and the rain coming straight down between us.