16. Delphine #2
Heath listened and nodded and asked questions, and none of them were polite questions, which was the trouble. He asked good ones. He asked the ones an engineer asks. And I felt warmth spreading through my chest despite my best efforts to keep it contained.
Miranda had the plans out on a trestle table in the half-built lobby, weighted at the corners with rocks, and four people standing around them looking unhappy.
“Everything on paper is right,” she said. “That’s the problem. I’ve had two people check it and it’s all right and the wall is still wrong.”
The wall was wrong. You could see it from the doorway if you knew how to look, and everyone in that room knew how to look, which is why they were unhappy.
It leaned. Just barely, just a hand’s width, not enough to fall down, but enough that every door in it would stick and every floor would run downhill for fifty years, and nobody could say why.
They had spent two days bent over the drawings, indoors, where it was warm, because that’s where the answer usually is.
“When did it rain?” I asked.
Miranda looked up. “What?”
“You laid this the week of the eleventh,” I said. “When did it rain?”
Somebody got out a phone.
I went outside.
Here I want to be accurate about what happened next, because I’ve been told a version of it since, at a dinner, by a man who was not there, and in his version I was brilliant.
I was not brilliant. I was the only person who walked around the back.
It was February and I was fourteen weeks pregnant and I had my mother’s rain boots on, two sizes wrong, and I went down the slope at the back of that building where nobody goes because there’s nothing to see.
And there was nothing to see. That’s the point.
There was nothing back there except an old ditch somebody had dug a year ago, before any of us, before the drawings I was holding even existed, and it had been quietly carrying rainwater along the back of the wall the whole time.
Right under the wall.
For eleven months.
The ground had been soaking up water on one side and staying dry on the other since before we turned a single shovel, so it had settled uneven, and every careful sum anyone had done indoors was right, and every one of them was right about a piece of ground that was no longer there.
I crouched down. It’s not a graceful thing at fourteen weeks. I put my hand flat in the mud where the wall was sinking and it went in to the second knuckle, soft as cake, and then I did the same six feet up the slope where the ground was dry and it barely took a fingernail.
I stayed down there for a while.
And I’m not going to pretend it was about the building. I knelt in the cold mud behind a half-built lodge in the woods with my hand in the ground and I felt a switch come back on in my chest that had been off since I was twenty-two years old.
It was not joy. It was worse than joy. It was recognition.
Hello, I thought. There you are. Where have you been?
When I stood up and turned around, my husband was at the top of the slope.
I don’t know how long he had been there. Long enough. He had his hands in his coat pockets and he was not smiling, and he was not doing the puppy thing he had been doing for a month, the hopeful thing, the please thing. He was just looking at me.
And I watched my husband’s face come apart very quietly, in a wood, in February, twenty feet away from me.
He did not say a word. He turned around and walked back to the parking lot.
I went back inside with mud to my elbow and told them, and Miranda said a word I’ll not repeat in front of the drawings, and then she said, “Eleven months. It’s not even on the survey. How did you...”
“I went around the back.”
“We’ve all been around the back.”
“You’ve all walked around the back,” I said. “I put my hand in it.”
It took forty minutes to work out what it meant and about four seconds to know what to do, which is usually the ratio. Shore up the low side, move the ditch, lose six weeks. Six weeks is cheap. Fifty years of doors that never shut properly is not.
I signed it off in my own name. First time in nine years I had put my name on a piece of paper that could fall down.
D. Roux. Not Fairchild. I did not decide to do that either. My hand just did it, and I looked at it sitting there in the box in wet ink, and I did not cross it out.
I was gathering my things when I noticed the sky through the window. It had gone dark, the clouds thick and heavy and ominous.
“That doesn’t look good,” Miranda said, frowning. “Did you check the weather this morning?”
I had, actually. I remembered seeing an alert about a storm system moving through the area. I had dismissed it, assuming I would be home long before it arrived.
“I need to go,” I said, suddenly anxious. “Thank you for meeting with me.”
I found Heath in the parking area, leaning against his car, his face turned up toward the sky.
“Del.” His voice was grim. “We have a problem.”
“I know. The storm.”
“I’ve been checking the road conditions online. The highway is already a mess. They’re closing sections of it because of the ice.” He looked at me, his expression troubled. “We can’t drive back tonight.”
“What do you mean we can’t drive back?”
“I mean the roads are too dangerous. The storm is moving faster than they predicted. If we try to leave now, we’ll end up stuck somewhere worse than here.”
I looked around at the empty parking lot, the dense forest, the construction site where a building was slowly taking shape.
“So what do we do?”
“The lodge.” Heath nodded toward a small building about a quarter mile down the road. “I saw it when we drove in. It looks like some kind of bed and breakfast. We can try to get a room there, wait out the storm, and head back in the morning when the roads are clear.”
A room. One room, probably, given how small the lodge looked.
“Fine,” I said, because I didn’t have any better ideas. “Let’s go.”
The lodge was charming in a rustic way, all exposed beams and stone fireplaces and the smell of wood smoke drifting through the air. The woman at the front desk smiled apologetically when we asked about rooms.
“I only have one left, I’m afraid. Most of our guests saw the storm coming and decided to stay an extra night. But it’s a lovely room, and it has a fireplace.”
Heath looked at me. I looked at Heath.
“We’ll take it,” I said.