Chapter 11
EDEN
Islept less than an hour before I woke reaching for Ryder, and this time I didn’t pull my hand back.
I left it on his side of the mattress and let the dark show me what five years of habit had built.
My fingers went straight to the dip his weight made, the way they found the third stair that creaked.
Ryder wasn’t in it. The man sleeping in the bunkhouse had spent yesterday afternoon asking another woman whether she was bleeding.
Aris’s treatment had left my hands unsteady, and every breath came up carrying the clubhouse floor and Leah shouting my name while I worked for enough air to answer.
I had woken in the hospital wanting him.
By the time I came home he had put his jacket around Jess.
Leah had fallen asleep on the couch with the lamp on and the discharge pages across her stomach.
My medication pouch sat on the coffee table where I could reach it, a glass of water beside it, and she had carried neither of them up to my room.
That restraint was worth more than everything Ryder had done since the ambulance.
He had changed filters, assigned men, cleared paths, waited outside doors. Leah had asked me first.
I carried the water up, took the controller at the bathroom sink, and opened the cabinet beneath it. The empty storage bin from the linen closet took his razor first, then the black comb he swore he had never owned, three teeth gone on the left side and the handle still damp at six in the morning.
The hearing-aid batteries were behind the washcloths in a sandwich bag, because the packets tore and he lost the loose ones in the drawer.
I had bought them in bulk for six years, and I knew the sound of the bathroom at five in the morning when he changed one with the light off so he wouldn’t wake me, the little adhesive circle going toward the wastebasket and missing.
I held the bag until the plastic went warm.
Then I put it in with the razor and pulled the tape across the lid, because he needed them, and because I wanted the sound of the tape to be the part he thought about.
The closet gave up his dress boots and the dark jacket he wore to funerals when a cut would have insulted the family.
I folded nothing. From the desk downstairs I took only the documents carrying his name alone, and the joint papers went back into the fire box with the burner, because I had learned what happened when Ryder was the one holding the evidence.
The chessboard stayed on the table by the bedroom window with the game we hadn’t finished.
His knight stood two squares from a fork he must have seen Saturday night and decided not to take.
I put a clean dish towel over the board and touched neither side.
He didn’t get to finish that game, and I wasn’t ready to put it away as if I had known our last ordinary night was ending.
The second bin was where my body sent the bill.
I had a belt in each hand when my vision stretched and the floor tipped toward the stairs.
I reached the third step and sat down. Thirty-six hours before, I had been on the clubhouse floor with a mask on my face.
I had emptied one cabinet and half a closet, and my lungs had nothing left for the day.
Leah woke when the tape tore. She caught the discharge pages before they slid and looked from me on the stairs to the open closet and the belts still in my fists. The woman who had watched me stop breathing wanted to order me back to bed. She put the pages down.
“Tell me what you need carried,” she said.
“I’m not finished.”
“I know.” Leah came as far as the newel post. “Tell me what you need carried.”
I gave her the belts. It took me longer than it should have to open my hands.
June came at six with coffee and never once used the voice people keep for the sick.
The two of them emptied the rest of the closet while I sat on the third stair with the marker, and they brought each lid to me before sealing it so the writing would be mine.
BATHROOM. HOUSE PAPERS. I pressed hard enough to bleed the letters, and twice I stopped with the cap in my teeth and waited for a breath that would carry a word, and I hated the stairs and the bins and my own lungs most of all, which had picked this week to quit.
“A prospect takes them to Ryder’s bunk,” I said. “Not Gage. I won’t have Ryder telling himself this came from a man protecting me.”
“I’ll find somebody who can follow two sentences without turning it into club business.” June wrote it on the back of her hand. “You’re sitting while he loads.”
“I’m standing on my own porch.”
Outside, the sky had come up gray and men were replacing boards along the north clubhouse wall, the nail gun going off in threes. Ryder stood near the inner road with Bear and Jax, a radio at his right ear. He saw the bin before he saw me, and the radio came down while Jax kept talking.
“Against the rail,” I said, loud enough to carry. “Nothing blocks the steps if we need the ambulance route again.”
Ryder started across the road. Bear caught his arm, said something I couldn’t hear, and let go only after Ryder answered.
He stopped below the bottom step. The gash near his hairline had dried dark, and the shirt under his cut was the one he had worn at the hospital.
I knew how he smelled after a night in it, how the fabric pulled across his shoulders when he reached overhead.
One look could put Saturday back in my hands while my mind held the picture of him laying leather around another woman.
“I can move those,” he said. “Tell me where you want them.”
“Wherever you sleep.” I kept one hand on the doorframe and hated that he noticed. “A prospect brings the rest. You don’t come in the house, you don’t come on the porch, you don’t open anything here. The bin with papers has copies that belong to you. Mine stay inside.”
He shifted the radio to his left hand. He could have said the house belonged to the club, that half those papers were his. “Is there anything in the bathroom you need me to leave here?”
“You don’t know what I need anymore.” My voice went to gravel, and Leah moved the water within reach and let me pick it up.
I drank, waited out the cough, and watched him take half a step and catch himself.
“The last time you planned for my health you put an inhaler in a car and pointed me at men shooting at the gate. You don’t get private reports on my lungs because guilt made you curious. ”
His attention dropped to the hospital bracelet I hadn’t cut off yet. “I won’t ask Leah.”
“You won’t ask Aris, Bear, June, Tessa, a prospect, or the hospital. If I’m dying in front of you, call for help. Otherwise my body is none of your business.” I pointed at the bin. “Take that one. The rest come after the briefing.”
He lifted it from beside the rail and never set a foot on the step. Watching five years of ordinary pieces of him go up the road in his arms gave me something mean and clean that lasted until he turned the corner of the bunkhouse. Then the house behind me smelled like my own soap and nothing else.
The common hall had been turned around for the last lockdown briefing, chairs facing a folding map table, plywood over the windows on the damaged side.
My pouch stayed on my lap and Leah sat near enough to reach it if I asked.
Tessa took the aisle seat, where she could block Ryder or reach him first.
Jess came in through the infirmary hall with Ryder behind her.
She carried his jacket folded over one forearm, held out from her body the way you carry a thing you have already tried twice to give back.
Ryder put her in a chair near the front and took the place on her left, which set her beside his right ear and turned his good side toward every answer she gave.
I had made the same adjustment at bars, family tables, and one terrible movie theater until neither of us noticed doing it.
The first time, I changed seats in a loud restaurant and let him think it was his idea.
His right side had been mine ever since.
Bear opened with the gate. The outer road had held overnight, county units were running the perimeter, and the inspector had cleared every occupied house.
A controlled opening could happen tomorrow at noon if the west route stayed quiet.
I listened until Bear turned a page and looked at Ryder rather than me.
“Eden’s house stays on the clean-air list after the gates open,” Bear said. “Ryder, coordinate the prospects. Nobody starts a bike near her intake.”
“No.” I didn’t raise my voice. I waited until Bear looked at me and held the room there. “June has the inspector’s report. Leah knows what I take. I live in the house. Questions about it come to one of them or to me.”
“It’s two minutes of a man’s time,” Bear said. “He knows where the intake sits. I’m not teaching that to a prospect during a gate transition.”
“Teach it to June.”
“June has forty civilians and a food schedule. Ryder runs the no-idling order to the men, June holds the report, you approve the list. That’s the compromise and it costs you nothing.”
“It costs me the only thing I came here to say.” The cough wanted in.
I used the breath it left me. “Under that arrangement every man on this property finds out when my windows are open by asking my husband. He’d have a reason to know which room I sleep in and what the air in it is doing.
He built a month of my life out of reasons like that. ”
Bear took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked at June, then at the floor between his boots, and the room waited longer than was comfortable.
“That’s the argument,” he said. “The man who has to be told when a window opens can’t be the man telling everybody else. Eden. Who manages the list when you aren’t available?”