EPILOGUE
Avery
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The tile in the Observation Gallery was cold under a bare foot even in June, and I had come down without my shoes on purpose. The boards in the corridor outside the Sable Wing give a man away at any hour. I wanted the room to myself for a quarter of an hour before anybody else was awake.
Somebody had swept the grate in the west wall. The iron was black and dry and honest about being empty, and above it the tiers went up in nine bare rows to the clerestory light, which stood open and let in the smell of cut grass off the quad.
The chapel bell started at six and finished four seconds behind the clock in the hall, the way it had done since September.
This room was built to hold sound inside it.
The bell came in and had nowhere to go. It sat under the ceiling until it thinned out.
I had been meaning to come down here since the morning the thing went on, and I had found something else to do every morning since, which is its own piece of information about me.
The chair at the head of the oak was the spindle-backed armchair it had always been, older than the table and darker, with a rush seat somebody replaced badly in the last century.
Screwed to the back of it, at about the height of a shoulder blade, was a plate of brass, two inches by six.
It had not been there at Christmas. The screws were new, and their slots had all been lined up vertical, one after another, the work of a man with no words for it.
I went down the four steps, around the near end of the table, and read it standing up, with my shoes in my hand.
Flat north daylight came off the brass and swallowed the letters.
I moved a foot to the left and read it again.
My name first, and under my name the title, in a serif cut deep and holding a shadow. Nobody had put a thumb on it yet.
There were two names the plate did not carry, and I stood there long enough to say both of them under my breath. The plate did not say that the seat had been empty since 1911, or that the man who emptied it left ninety-eight leaves of paper behind him and a rust ring where a clip had been.
It did not say that a woman read those same pages in 1998 and told the man who offered her this chair no, in front of the whole table.
She went home and raised two children and never mentioned it in the house.
My mother’s name is on nothing in this building.
She raised a girl who was not afraid of ninety-eight pieces of paper, and the girl is on the brass, and my throat did something I had not authorized.
Along the north wall the card index kept its forty oak drawers.
I had pulled a fair number of them that week and I knew what the room holds now.
Forty drawer fronts with nothing behind them.
The roster in the case by the door has two names struck through in ink, and that ink is a different black from the rest of the page, because the page was made in 1908 and the line through Malachi Thorne was drawn this year.
In March I read one surviving case file out loud to the man whose name was on it, and the reading gave him the name of what had been done to him. I used the seat’s authority once, to release him from the last instrument tied to that file, and once is where the number stays.
I put a hand on the top rail and did not sit down.
The oak was cool and a little rough along the grain where a hand would rest, and there was no shine on it anywhere.
The seat is held at will, which is the whole of the arrangement.
I have held it since December by choosing it again each time somebody asks me to, and the asking is the part that took me longest to believe.
I went back up the four steps with my shoes in my hand, pulled the door to behind me, and let the day start.
The storm came over the ridge a little after six that evening and put itself against the solarium glass all at once. Five of us were in the Sable Wing kitchen with every window open. The rain crossed the quad and hit that glass roof two rooms away, and nobody bothered to talk through it.
Rook stopped with the pan in his right hand.
Teddy turned all the way around on his stool to watch the water come down the far windows, mouth open, nineteen years old and entirely happy about weather.
Then it went east and took the noise with it.
We could hear the gutters, and then we could hear each other.
The kitchen in the Sable Wing has one long counter and a window at the end of it that holds the last of the light until nine.
In June the four of us move around that room without touching each other and without stopping, and it took most of the winter to learn the pattern.
None of us has ever said out loud that we learned it.
Rook was at the stove burning eggs with total confidence, and nobody at that table had ever had the nerve to mention it.
“There is a man in this kitchen cooking eggs like they owe him money and none of you are stopping him,” Teddy said.
“We tried that in November,” Julian said, without lifting his eyes off the board.
“They are not burned,” Rook said. “They have a crust on them. There is a difference, and one of these days one of you is going to learn it.”
“There is a difference,” Alistair said. “You are standing on the wrong side of it.”
“You are all eating them,” Rook said.
“I am nineteen and I will eat anything that is hot,” Teddy said. “That is a fact about me and it is a long way from a review.”
At the far end Alistair had the board out and was losing to Julian, which was the standing result of that week and of most of the weeks before it.
He put his left hand down on the board to hold it while he reached across for the far rank.
The wax under it let the whole thing slide, and the wrong-ivory bishop went over on its side and rolled.
That palm is a shiny scar now and it does not grip anything.
He lost eleven moves later, and he blamed the hand out loud, in a complete sentence, with his face arranged like a man reporting the weather.
Every person in that kitchen knew he was lying and every person let him have it for four seconds.
“You played that bishop as if it moved in straight lines, and it is the wrong ivory, and you have been losing to it since October,” Rook said, pointing at the board with the spatula.
“You are completely right about the bishop, and the ivory, and October, and the hand is still why I lost,” Alistair said.
Teddy put his head down on the counter and laughed until he had to hold his own ribs with one arm.
“Where did the wrong bishop even come from?” he said.
“A set that was broken up before any of us was born,” Alistair said. “Somebody put the survivor in the wrong box and nobody since has had the nerve to correct it.”
“You could buy a bishop,” Teddy said.
“I could,” Alistair said. “I lose to that one on principle now, and a man should keep one principle he cannot defend in public.”
“He concedes and then he takes the concession back,” Julian said. “He has done that since he was twenty and nobody has found the counter to it.”
“I concede the substance and I reserve the excuse,” Alistair said. “Any attorney would tell you that is ordinary practice, and any attorney would be lying at the volume I am.”
I got up for the coffee and put my hand on Rook’s back on the way past, high on the left side. He shifted the weight off that arm before I had finished asking.
I carried three cups back and set Alistair’s down on his right side, because that left hand comes up slow and he will lift a hot cup with it out of pride and scald himself twice in a week.
He did not thank me for the placement. He thanked me for the coffee, and that is how that man tells you he saw what you did.
“How bad was it before the rain came in?” I said.
“Left shoulder. It goes before rain, it went at four, and that is how I knew about the storm,” Rook said.
“That is when it went. I asked how bad,” I said.
“Bad enough that I shaved with the wrong hand this morning, and not bad enough that I was going to bring it up before you put your hand on it,” he said.
“He told me at four,” Julian said. “He said the shoulder said rain, and I carried the chairs in off the lawn while the sky was clear, and every one of them is dry.”
Teddy had grease worked down into the beds of his fingernails and had given up on getting it out. I know that because he kept turning his hands over on the counter to show me without saying he was showing me.
“I fix mufflers now. I am the only person in this family with a marketable skill,” Teddy said.
“You are the only person in this family with a time card, which is a different brag,” I said.
“I have a locker with my name on a strip of tape over somebody else’s name,” he said. “I make thirteen dollars an hour, and I finished my second semester with two B’s and a C, and I am taking the calculus over in the fall because I want the C off my own record.”
“What do you like about the garage?” I said.
“A car comes in broken and goes out not broken, and a man hands you money for the difference,” Teddy said. “That is the whole job. I do not understand why nobody ever told me a person could do that for a living.”
He ate the way a person eats who has stopped doing arithmetic at the table about what a thing costs. I had been waiting a long time to watch somebody do that in front of me. I made myself watch all of it instead of looking out the window.
“Nine months since the stairwell,” I said.
“Yeah. I was going to say something about that and then I decided not to,” Teddy said.
“You do not have to say anything about it, tonight or any other night,” I said.
“I know. That is the new part,” he said, and took more of the eggs, which was the bravest act anybody committed all evening.
Then he leaned over the counter and pointed at my cheekbone with his fork, which our mother would have taken his hand off for.