Chapter 4 Julian
I go outside to collect my overnight bag from the car. We have had a new arrival since my own. A dog, a lean brown mutt with one torn ear, watches me from a patch of shade under the porch without bothering to lift its head.
Behind me, the yard is quiet. Wyatt has walked off again. I think he went toward the barn but I can’t be sure.
I should be annoyed about it. By most social standards, he is being very bad-mannered, but then I am a total stranger who has turned up at his house and insisted that he put me up for two weeks.
So I suppose I can’t complain.
I hear footsteps on the boards. The kid comes out onto the porch and stops at the top of the steps, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans.
He is maybe sixteen or seventeen, lanky in the way boys are when they have shot up and not yet filled out.
His hair is the same brown as his brother’s and his eyes are a similar shade of hazel.
This kid’s eyes are watching everything with a steady amusement I do not enjoy being the subject of.
“Caleb,” he says, and offers a hand. “Caleb Briggs.”
I take the hand. “Julian Duffield.”
“Yeah.” His mouth curves up in a smile. “I caught that.”
He nods at the suitcase. “You want a hand with that?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Suit yourself.”
He turns and goes back inside without waiting to see if I follow. I lift the suitcase up the three porch steps, bumping each one, and carry it through the open front door into the house.
The hallway is narrow and dim after the hard light of the yard. The floorboards are worn soft in the middle. A row of hooks on the wall holds three oilcloth coats, the third far too small for either Wyatt or Caleb.
A pair of little muddy sneakers sits under it. The house smells of coffee and of a stew of some kind simmering low, and under both of those, cleanly and inescapably, it smells of Wyatt.
I had not anticipated how comprehensive his scent would be. The scent is in the walls.
It is in the fabric of the coat on the hook and the rag rug at the door and the wood of the floor.
It is not strong. It does not have to be.
It is simply the scent of every room in this house.
Everywhere. My body has been responding to it since I stepped out of the rental car and will apparently continue to respond to it for the foreseeable future.
I can feel the prime match. Wyatt Briggs is strange, but he is also the most attractive thing I have ever come across. Something about him makes me desperate to reach over and touch him, skin to skin and never let go.
I’ve never had that kind of visceral reaction to anyone. Still, he is strange. And he clearly does not want me here. It’ll make the two-week cohabitation period easy, if so.
Caleb is halfway down the hall already. “This way.”
I follow. He takes me past an open doorway that shows a bathroom with a chipped clawfoot tub, past a couple of closed doors, and stops at the last door on the left. He opens it and steps back to let me through.
“Here you go,” he says.
I step inside.
The first thing that registers is that no one has been in this room in a long time.
It’s not dusty. Someone keeps it clean. But every object in it is arranged as if the person who used it last is going to come back in an hour and resume her day.
A dressing gown is draped over the arm of a chair in the corner. A brush sits on the dresser with a few long, dark hairs caught in the bristles. On the nightstand, there’s a paperback with a bookmark around a third of the way.
The bed is made.
I stand in the doorway and do not step any further in.
Caleb has not come in. He stands in the hallway with one shoulder against the jamb and watches me take it in. His face is unreadable in a way that is, I am beginning to understand, the house default.
“Bathroom’s next door on the right,” he says. “Hot water’s slow. You’ve got to let it run a minute before it gets hot. Wyatt’ll be back in at supper. If you need something in the meantime, the kitchen’s where you came in. Help yourself.”
“Thank you.”
He makes a small sound, and then he is gone down the hall. The back door opens and closes and I hear his boots on the porch and then on the drive. He has gone out to the barn. He has gone, I suspect strongly, to join his brother.
What am I even doing here? The surrealness hits me suddenly. I’m in what I suspect is Wyatt Briggs’s dead mother’s bedroom on a ranch in the middle of nowhere because I am supposed to be matched to a man who appears to primarily communicate in grunts.
Eli would be loving this.
I close the bedroom door behind me. It closes heavily. Nothing in this house moves without its weight.
I set the suitcase on the floor and look at the room.
There are three windows. One faces the yard where my rental car sits parked, the other two face the pasture beyond.
I do not open the wardrobe. I don’t need to look to see that it will be filled with clothes. I am not going to be here that long. I can live out of the suitcase.
I lay the suitcase flat on the rag rug at the foot of the bed and unzip it. I had packed efficiently for what I had expected to be a single night in a motel and a quiet flight home.
I have a single change of clothes, my toiletry bag, and my laptop.
The rest of the suitcase is filled with designs.
If I am going to be stuck here, I am going to need clothes.
I presume the co-habitation order will allow me to leave here long enough to go into town and buy whatever passes for fashion around here.
My mouth is dry. I get up, walk to the window, look out at the yard. Beyond the yard, the land opens out in low, dry grass with patches of sage and juniper and, somewhere past that, the dark line of a ridge.
I have never stood in a room that has such a long view out of it. My apartment has a view, but my view is of other buildings, which is a different thing entirely.
There’s a truck coming up the long drive. It’s white and battered, snaking back and forth over the ruts in a way that indicates the driver knows the road very well.
The truck pulls up outside and a boy of around eight gets out, waves at the driver and runs into the house. The truck turns around and starts meandering back over the ranch road.
I hear a voice call out, “I’m home!”
The voice continues, cheerful and matter-of-fact, telling someone who does not answer about a math test and a snake at recess and a boy called Owen who threw a sandwich.
The voice is not speaking to anyone who is in the room with it.
The voice is narrating its day into the empty house as a matter of habit.
Boots come off. Something is dropped. The fridge opens. Closes. A tap runs. The voice, getting closer, says, “Wyatt? Caleb? Hello?”
A pause.
“There’s a car. Whose car is that?”
I hesitate, then call out. “Hello! It’s mine.”
Moments later, there is a small, polite knock at the door. I cross the room and open it.
The boy has the hazel eyes of his brothers and a spray of light freckles across his nose and cheeks. He is wearing a too-big hoodie that has seen a lot of washes and a pair of jeans with a grass stain at the knee. He is holding an apple in one hand.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“I’m Matthew.” He extends the hand not holding the apple. It is a little sticky. I shake it anyway.
“Julian.”
“Are you visiting?”
“For a while.”
He tilts his head. “How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“You’re in Mom’s room,” he says.
“Caleb put me in here.”
“Mm.” Matthew nods slowly, as if he is considering the decision and has elected to approve it. “Yeah, it’s the guest room now. Sort of. We don’t have a proper one.” He looks up at me. “She wouldn’t mind. You can use it. She liked people. She would’ve wanted someone to sleep in the bed.”
He takes a bite of his apple.
“Thank you,” I say, when I can say something.
“What’s your job?”
“I’m an architect. I design buildings.”
His eyes widen. “Like houses?”
“Sometimes. Mostly bigger. Office buildings, apartment towers. I work in the city.”
“Which city?”
I hesitate a fraction. It is a long way from here and the name will mean nothing to him. I tell him anyway. He thinks about this for a moment and then nods, as if filing it.
“Why are you here?”
This is the question I was hoping not to have to answer to an eight-year-old. I think, briefly, about how to answer it.
“I’ve been matched with your brother,” I say. “By the Bureau. It’s a process we have to do. That’s why the car is here.”
“Oh.” He considers. “Okay. I’m going to go read, then maybe I’ll do my homework. We don’t have a TV if you want to watch something. Sorry.”
“Thank you. I have some work to do.”
He nods, satisfied, and disappears down the hall. I hear his feet on the boards.
I close the door, stand with my back to it, and breathe out.
The bed is still behind me. The quilt still folded at the corner. The paperback still on the nightstand. She liked people. She would not mind.
I sit back down on the bed and I pull the laptop out of the suitcase.
I open it on my knees and press the power button and watch it wake up. I have emails to answer. I have a client call scheduled for tomorrow morning that I need to move. I have the project file for the waterfront building open, and a redline from an engineer I was supposed to look at last night.
I forgot to ask for the Wi-Fi password, but it would not surprise me entirely if they haven’t got one and I can just connect directly.
No networks found.
I click the little icon and refresh again. A clean, empty list. Not a locked neighbor’s network I might finesse. Not a weak signal I might improve by walking toward a window. Nothing. Wyatt Briggs doesn’t have damned Wi-Fi.
Who doesn’t have Wi-Fi in this day and age?
I reach for my cellphone and check for the signal. I’d had to call Sun from the landline because the signal was poor but maybe I was in the wrong place.
Maybe there’s a sweet spot.
I take my phone with me and walk the length of the house with it held up at different heights like a dowsing rod, but I already know what I’m seeing.
I trot up and down the hallway, then outside onto the porch.
I stalk the yard until a voice at my elbow says, “We don’t have internet. Or much signal.”
I look down. Matthew is beside me. He has followed me out. His face is pitched a little apologetically, as if this is information he has had to break to other visitors and knows the reaction.
“Not at all?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
He trails off.
I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t. “And the cell service is...”
“Up the ridge’s better,” he offers. “You can drive up if you want to. Or walk. Walking’s nice.” He considers. “The ridge is pretty. You can see the road from up there. And the highway.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I lower the phone and put it back in my pocket. I’m going to have to use the landline again to call work and tell them I’m not going to have my presentation ready for tomorrow. Or at least, I’m not going to be able to deliver it.
The yard is quiet. The cattle in the middle pasture are lowing and the dog has come out from under the porch and is sitting in a patch of sun with its tongue hanging out. Somewhere behind the barn, a gate rattles.
And underneath all of it, low and constant and mechanical, I hear the pumps.
I did not notice them before. I was too occupied with trying to talk to Wyatt.
But now I have stood for a full minute in the middle of a yard that is otherwise quiet.
I know that sound. It is the low, sustained, mechanical hum of industrial dewatering. I’ve heard its rhythm on multiple sites in my life. I turn my head toward it.
The ranch sits in a shallow bowl of land and the view out beyond the far pasture lifts up to the ridge Matthew mentioned.
Closer, on the middle distance, a pale line of dust sits above the horizon, and above that, plumes of dust. The hum is from the site.
I had not known it was this close.
The hum does not stop. That is the thing about dewatering. It does not stop. It runs for the duration of the build and it is running now and it will run tomorrow when I wake up and the morning after that.
I hear boots on the dirt, coming from the direction of the barn.
Wyatt walks past me carrying a hay bale on his shoulder.
The bale is big. His arm is braced across the top of it.
His shirt is streaked with dust and chaff and sweat has darkened the collar, and he smells, in the second he is close enough to smell, of sun and hay.
My body lifts toward him before my brain issues the order to be still. I hold still anyway. He does not turn his head. He does not acknowledge me. He walks past me and on toward the far gate of the middle pasture, and the cattle come up to meet him.
He does not look back.
I don’t know what his opinion is of the Linden Group but I have worked for the company for long enough to know that they are not always popular with locals living around their development sites.
I’ve already told Matthew I am an architect and Wyatt clearly didn’t bother reading my profile.
It’s probably best if I keep the name of my employer to myself for the next two weeks.