Chapter 6
She avoided him for two days and the house made avoidance look like a game she was losing.
Sunday she stayed in the library until the lights blinked.
Monday she took the dawn bus and ate bread on the bench and walked a museum with her phone out so she would have pictures that were only bridges and stone.
Tomas received the bridges. He sent back a heart.
He did not ask about the basement. She did not put the basement in the frame.
Mark was gentle in doorways.
That was worse than the washer.
He did not grab. He stood aside to let her pass and his fingers brushed her sleeve as if guiding traffic. He asked about class in a soft voice. He refilled her water before she asked. Each kindness sat on the memory of his mouth on her breast until kindness felt like a receipt.
“Sleep all right?” he said Monday evening in the hall.
“Yes.”
“Good.” His eyes held hers one extra beat. “If you need the machines, use them when the house is awake. Less lonely.”
Lina said thank you and hated the lid.
The twins felt the new air the way dogs feel weather.
Cole got louder. Ryan’s jokes got shorter and meaner at the edges. They offered rides she refused. They offered the bar she refused. Cole found her cardigan on the back of a chair and held it up like a flag.
“Nun uniform is in the kitchen,” he called.
She took it from him without touching his hand.
Diane watched all of it over the rim of a glass and asked, at dinner, if Lina was homesick.
“I am tired,” Lina said.
“Homesick looks like tired,” Diane said. “You can say it.”
“The city is interesting. I took pictures of the bridge.”
Mark smiled at the bridge as if he had built it. “She’s settling. I told the coordinator the fit is good.”
Lina’s fork paused. Coordinator. Simple stories.
Cole’s foot found hers under the table.
She moved her foot.
He found it again, slower.
She pulled both feet under her chair and Ryan mouthed *nun* into his napkin.
Diane said, “Boys.”
Mark said nothing about feet. He passed the bread to Lina and his thumb stroked the plate’s edge, a small motion she felt in her ribs.
After dishes she went upstairs without coffee.
The guest room. The hook. No bolt.
She did not drag the chair at first. She sat on the bed and opened the laptop like a church door, both hands, careful.
Tomas was not online.
She stared at the green dot that wasn’t there and typed a message about the bridge and deleted the sentence that began *the father*.
Downstairs the twins laughed. A game. Something broke softly—plastic, not glass—and Mark’s voice rose, still pleasant, telling them to give it a rest.
Lina put on socks.
The house had two temperatures now: the library cold she could survive, and the hallway warmth that followed her into the guest room even when no one did.
She wrote in the notebook.
*Two days. I rode the bus. I sent bridges.*
*He is kind in doors. Kind is worse.*
*Cole’s foot. Ryan’s mouth. Diane said homesick.*
*He told the coordinator the fit is good.*
*Tomas is offline. I almost wrote the basement and I didn’t.*
She listened.
No footsteps stopped outside.
That should have helped.
It felt like the Saturday pause before his hands had found her waist: the house drawing a breath.
Lina closed the laptop.
She would try Tomas later, when the twins’ noise died, when Mark’s door clicked, when she could put the cardigan on camera and look like a girl who only missed a river.
Later was a kind of lock.
The house did not do locks.
She sat in the socked dark and waited for a green light four thousand miles away.
Tomas came online after ten.
Lina sat far from the camera. Cardigan buttoned. Hair neat. The guest room behind her looked like nothing: pale wall, closed closet, a girl who sent pictures of bridges.
They spoke Lithuanian and her mouth worked better.
“You disappeared yesterday,” he said.
“The museum. Then I slept.”
“You look like you didn’t.”
“The house is loud at night.”
True enough. She did not add whose mouth had been loud in her head.
Tomas talked about his job, a cousin’s wedding, the river going gray.
Lina nodded. She asked questions so she would not have to offer stories.
When he said he missed her body, simple, boyfriend-honest, she felt the washer against her back and said she missed him too, and the sentence split in half inside her.
After the call she washed her face until the water ran cold.
Tuesday she walked the city on purpose.
Not the bar street. The old brick. A gallery with free hours. She photographed a statue for Tomas and a door painted blue for herself. She bought tea she did not finish. She sat on a low wall and wrote *I am only looking* in the notebook and stared at the words until they thinned.
Cole texted.
Cole: nun missing. dinner 7. dad’s cooking.
Dad’s cooking. Mark at the stove. Lina rode the bus back because not arriving would become a coordinator story.
The kitchen was steam and onions. Mark wore the weekend shirt. He pointed her to a cutting board.
“Can you slice? Family dinner. You’re on the team.”
She sliced. He moved behind her to stir and did not touch her. The not-touching was a sound. Diane came home late and kissed Mark’s cheek and looked at Lina’s pile of onions as if checking a temperature.
Ryan stole a piece of bread. “She walks the city like a tour group of one.”
“I like walking.”
“You like running,” Cole said. “Different sport.”
Mark set a lid on a pan. “Leave her. She’s doing what the program wants. Explore. Study. Independence.”
Independence with his voice on it.
At the table Cole’s foot did not find her. Ryan did not mouth nun. That was worse too—the twins watching Mark and Lina like a subtitle they were beginning to read.
Diane asked if Lina needed anything from the store.
“Soap,” Lina said. “Please.”
“There’s soap in the basement,” Mark said, easy. “Laundry room.”
Lina looked at her plate.
“Store soap,” Diane said, after a beat. “I’ll get it.”
Small mercy. Lina filed it.
After dinner the twins went out. Diane took a call in the bedroom. Mark and Lina were alone with the dishes again.
He washed. She dried. Their hands did not meet on a plate.
“You can look at me,” he said.
She looked at the window over the sink. Her own face. His shoulder.
“I told Tomas the house is loud.”
“That’s one word for it.” He shut the water off. “I’m not going to chase you around campus. That’s not who I am. Saturday happened because the house was empty and you didn’t walk away.”
Lina’s throat closed.
“I said stop.”
“And I stopped.” He dried his hands. “I also remember the part before stop. So do you. That’s all I’m saying.”
He left her with the stack of plates.
Upstairs she put the chair at the door.
She opened Skype and closed it.
She wrote *store soap* in the notebook like a prayer that Diane would keep.
The twins came home loud at eleven. A key. A laugh. Someone said her name and was shushed.
Lina turned off the lamp.
The basement was under her, machines quiet, Saturday still in the concrete if she let herself hear it.
She did not let herself hear it.
She heard it anyway.
Wednesday Diane took the twins to a cousin’s for the evening.
Mark had a late meeting. He said so at breakfast, looking at Lina while he said it, and then he looked away first.
“You’ll have the house,” Diane said. “Eat the leftover pasta. Text if you burn it.”
Lina said she would not burn it.
She meant she would not come home until the lights were on and the noise was back. She lasted until the library closed. The bus was thin. The street of big houses was dark except for porch lamps.
Their porch lamp was on. The driveway was empty.
The key they had given her turned.
“Hello?” she called, English-bright, like brightness could fill rooms.
No answer.
Pasta in the fridge. She ate it cold from the container standing at the counter so the kitchen would not become a table for two that was one. She washed the fork. She went upstairs.
The guest room. The hook. The chair she did not use yet.
She opened the laptop the way she had opened church doors at home: both hands, a breath, a request to be made better than she was.
Tomas appeared. Rain on his window. The river poster darkened.
Lithuanian. Her real mouth.
“You’re in the room,” he said. “Good. I like when I can see the wall behind you. It means you stopped walking.”
“The family is out. I am eating leftovers.”
“You look like you’re in a hotel.”
“There is no lock. I told you.”
His face sharpened. “Still?”
“Family house.” She tried a smile. “I have a chair.”
“A chair is not a lock, Lina.”
“I know.”
They talked around it. His cousin’s wedding. A grade she had posted. The bridge photo he had set as his screen. She let him speak. When he asked if anyone had been strange, she said the sons were children and the father was busy and the mother bought her soap.
Not basement soap.
Store soap.
A small honest piece.
“I miss you,” Tomas said. “Not only the talking. I miss knowing where you are at night.”
“I am here.”
“That is not the same.”
She almost told him Saturday.
The sentence lined up: washer, waist, mouth, shirt, stop.
She said, “I should sleep. The house will come back loud.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
His thumb on the lens.
The screen went black.
Lina sat in the glow-death of it and heard the empty.
Pipes. Fridge. A branch on the window.
She should have dragged the chair.
She sat on the bed in her socks and cardigan and let the call be a church she had left before communion.
Downstairs a car door.
No.
Not yet. She had imagined it.
Then: a second sound. Key. Not Mark’s heavy set. The twins’ jingle.
Diane’s cousin. They were supposed to be late.
Lina stood.
Laugh in the entry. Cole’s voice. Ryan shushing him, not well.
“She’s home. Lights.”
“Nun’s in the chapel.”
Footsteps on the stairs, not trying to be quiet.
Lina looked at the chair in the corner.
She looked at the laptop, Tomas already gone into rain.
She looked at the door that did not lock.
The footsteps stopped outside.
A knock that was already a joke.
“Lina,” Cole said. “You decent? Family’s out. We’re bored.”
Ryan laughed.
Lina’s hand found the knob from the inside and did not turn it.
The house was not empty.
The church of the laptop was over.
Whatever the twins had come to play, it was already in the hall, waiting for a girl who had said the father was busy and the sons were children, and who still had no bolt to prove either sentence true.