Chapter 8
The gate code still worked. That was the first bad thing.
She sat at the bottom of the drive with the window down and her hand out on the keypad and did not press anything for about fifteen seconds.
Four digits. The month and year they had gotten married, which had been her idea, and which she had thought at the time was sweet and now understood had been the security of a woman who had never once been afraid.
She punched it in and the gate rolled back.
The house looked the way houses look when nobody has done anything to them.
Somebody was still cutting the grass. The gate light was on down at the end even at nine in the morning, because it was on a bad timer and always had been, and there had been a note in her phone to call about it since the spring of two years ago.
There was a rented box truck in the turnaround with its ramp down.
Laura parked behind it and sat there with both hands on the wheel and made herself do the thing she did before a hard treatment: name the objective, out loud, once.
"Calendar history and the photo albums," she said. "Then I go home."
She let herself in the side door.
And the smell got her — instantly, chemically, before she had gotten a full step in.
Not perfume. The house itself: that particular cold stone-and-lemon smell of a place that gets cleaned by people who are paid to clean it, and under that the wood polish, and under that nothing.
She had lived inside that smell for ten years.
Her body remembered it faster than she did. Something in her shoulders came down and something in her stomach went up, and she stood in her own kitchen with her keys in her fist, furious at herself.
The green folder had come out of that drawer, right there, four months ago.
She went and looked at the counter by the sink. No white bowl, of course. It had gone in the trash back in September. A woman she had never met had probably carried the pieces out.
"Okay," Laura said to nobody, and went to work.
The closet off the kitchen had the panel and the server and the router and a decade of cables, and she knelt down on the floor with the legal pad beside her and started.
It took her forty minutes to remember what she was doing, and then it went faster.
She was not a stupid woman and this was not sorcery — it was a settings page with an admin login and a share history.
Jake's login was still saved. His password was the same password it had been since 2015, which she knew, which was a whole essay on the state of that household all by itself.
She found the calendar's permissions log.
She read it kneeling on the floor of a closet with her coat still on.
There it was, in a column of gray text: every share, every revoke, every re-share, going back four years, each one stamped with a date and an account.
Dozens of lines. And the account that appeared over and over, adding itself, removing itself, adding itself again — a rhythm, a pulse, once every three or four weeks for two years, always on or near a Thursday — was d.mills.
The shared one keeps un-sharing itself. It's a permissions thing.
Laura sat back on her heels.
He had been un-sharing it on purpose. That was what she was looking at. He un-shared it so that it would break, so that she would need it fixed, so that on Thursday he could stand at her counter with her phone in his hand and be thanked for it.
For two years.
She was still sitting there when she heard the garage door go up at the far end of the house.
She had known he was there. She had prepared a whole speech about it and everything, and none of that mattered at all, because the sound of the garage door meant Jake and her body was up off the floor and halfway to standing before she had decided anything.
She made herself finish. She got the album directory, all of it, ten years, forty-one gigabytes, and started it copying onto the drive she'd brought from the clinic, and it said the better part of an hour, and she went and stood in the kitchen because kneeling in a closet was not a position she was willing to be found in.
He came through at twenty past ten with a box.
He stopped dead in the doorway.
"I thought you'd be — " He looked at the counter, the closet door, her coat. "Susan said afternoon."
"She said morning."
"Then that's on me." He shifted the box. He was wearing an old shirt with a paint mark on it that she had watched him get, in a kitchen in a rental in Kansas City, nine years ago. "I'll get out. I've got — the garage is the last of it. I'll be out there."
"Jake."
He stopped.
"It's your house too. For another six weeks. Don't stand in the yard."
He looked at her, and for a second she saw him actually take the sentence apart and check it for a trap, which was fair, and then he nodded once.
"Okay."
He was thinner. That was the thing she could not stop clocking.
Fifteen pounds, maybe eighteen — off a man who had spent his whole adult life being weighed by other people, so it read on him like a diagnosis.
Gray under the eyes. And when he moved through the doorway he turned his whole torso to get around the frame, the way he'd done since the fusion, except now the turn had a hitch in it on the left, a little catch, and her hands knew what that was before her head did.
Facet joint, above the fusion. He's compensating higher up. He's not doing the exercises.
She hated it. She hated it so much she had to look away.
They worked in the same house for two hours.
That was the strangest part of a strange day: it was not dramatic.
He went to the garage. She sat at the kitchen island with her laptop and the drive filling and watched a progress bar and drank water out of a glass she had picked out.
Twice she heard the ramp of the truck. Once she heard him drop something and say a word she had heard him say on television and get fined for.
And her whole body stayed at a low hum the entire time, the way you cannot relax in a house with a wasp in it.
Once, late in the morning, she went down the hall for no reason she could have defended.
The bedroom door was open. The bed was made — badly, by a man, the way he had made a bed for ten years while insisting he was good at it.
Her side of the closet was exactly as she had left it in October.
The long dresses in their bags. The shoes in their boxes with the tissue in the toes. Four coats.
Nobody had touched any of it. Four months, and not one hanger had been moved, and it sat there like a room in a house where somebody had died.
On the dresser, in the ring dish, was his wedding band.
Laura stood in the doorway.
He had taken it off. Of course he had taken it off — the entire country had spent a month looking at a photograph of it lit up by a flash on the small of somebody else's back, and he could not walk into a gas station wearing it. She understood that completely and it did not help at all.
It was sitting in the dish where hers used to sit next to it, and hers was in an envelope in a drawer on Quarry Road, and the two of them had come out at almost the same time and neither had told the other.
She went back to the kitchen and did not mention it.
At eleven-forty he came in for water and stopped at the sink and said, without turning around, "The Bakers' boy died."
Laura looked up. "What?"
"On the corner. The house with the flag.
" He was looking out the window over the sink.
"Two weeks ago. Car thing, out past Franklin.
He was nineteen." He turned the tap off.
"I only know because Carol told me, and I thought — you always sent things.
To people. And I didn't know if anybody had told you, and I didn't know who else would. "
She sat with that.
He had not asked her for anything. He had not attached it to anything. It was a piece of information a person in this neighborhood would want to have, and he had given it to her flat and then stopped talking.
"Thank you," she said. "I'll write his mother."
"Okay." He drank the water and rinsed the glass and put it in the rack, which was new. Then he said, "Do you need help with whatever's in the closet?"
"No."
"Because that's the old backup and the drives in it are ten years old and if you're pulling forty gigs off it, it'll cook. There's a fan in the—"
"Jake."
"Yeah."
"No."
"Okay," he said, and went back to the garage.
The transfer failed at forty minutes with the drive too hot to hold, exactly the way he had said it would.
Laura put her forehead against the doorframe of that closet and stood there and had a very small, very private ninety seconds of despair.
Then she went out to the garage.
He was on a step stool with a box over his head. There were boxes everywhere and a whole life in that garage: cleats, a kayak, a rack of framed things face-down against the wall, a wine fridge unplugged with the door propped open.
"It cooked," she said.
He got down off the stool. He did not say anything at all, which she noticed, and which cost him something, and which she also noticed.
"There's a fan," he said. "It's in the—"
"Show me."
They spent the next hour on the floor of a closet, and she would think about that hour for a long time afterward.
He got the fan. He rigged it on a paint can with the cover off the case, and got the transfer going in blocks instead of all at once, and it worked.
He did not ask her one time what she was copying.
That was the thing. He sat cross-legged on the floor of a coat closet with a fan in his hand and a bad neck and watched a progress bar for the better part of an hour and did not ask.
At some point she said, "Hand me the—" and did not finish it, and he handed her the short cable, which was the one she wanted.
Neither of them said anything about that.
Around one o'clock the bar hit sixty percent and stuck for a while, and they sat with their backs against opposite sides of the closet doorway, and Jake said, "I found your notes in the kayak."
"What notes?"